This talk will look at the Master-Disciple approach to education. What did education look like in the ancient and medieval worlds? When we consider some of the greatest minds from history—Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Michelangelo—how were they educated? And how does the educational model compare to what we see today? Should the teacher be a mentor or a sage? In this talk, we’ll consider what a mentor looked like in those worlds and what a mentor can look like in our educational renewal today. And we’ll consider why the best teachers might be those teachers who embrace the mentor model.

Workshop: “The Mentor’s Toolbox”
This workshop will share some ideas of the best tools for mentoring your children or students. Historically, we might view the best mentors as those who have fully mastered their art or craft (or philosophy), and then conclude that we cannot be mentors because we have not mastered any one art or craft ourselves. There are tools, however, that we know how to use right now that we can use to put ourselves in a mentoring position even without having mastered the art we aim to teach. What are those tools and how can we use them?

Matt Bianco is the Chief Operations Officer for the CiRCE Institute, where he also serves as a head mentor in the CiRCE apprenticeship program. A homeschooling father of three, he has graduated all three of his children, the eldest of whom graduated from St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD. His second and third both graduated from Belmont Abbey College in Charlotte, NC. He is married to his altogether lovely high school sweetheart, Patricia. Dr. Matt Bianco has a Ph.D. in Humanities from Faulkner University’s Great Books Honors College and wrote his dissertation on Plato’s Republic and education. He is the author of Letters to My Sons: A Humane Vision for Human Relationships.