Joy Is Not Optional
The Pedagogy of Radical Generosity in the Classroom
Teaching is a radical act of generosity—it is the immersive art of self-giving that requires joyful surrender and humble service. It is also a countercultural practice—a subversive art of faithful defiance against the mindset that dogmatizes a culture of scarcity.
As the West and the rest of world has succumbed to the spell of Darwinism, it is no wonder that all of life has been reduced to a jungle where the fittest survive. We have also been indoctrinated by the pedagogy of the oppressed where human existence is truncated into a tug of perpetual power struggles between the oppressor and oppressed. In the end, education becomes a zero-sum game where winner takes all.
In this cultural moment, The Society for Classical Learning’s 2026 Summer Conference,“ Overflowing Generosity: Embracing God’s Abundance in Classical Christian Education”, which took place on June 16-18, in Grapevine, Texas, resists the survivalist spirit of our age and calls upon thought-leaders in the classical Christian movement to reflect and reimagine generosity and gratitude as critical pedagogical distinctives of Classical Christian education.
This clarion call was both deeply philosophical and practical. Re-centering joy in Classical Christian pedagogy presents a new challenge to the broader classical Christian movement. The challenge to deliberately expand the horizons of the threshold concepts that are shaping the broader narrative of this movement. Yet it is also a paradigm shift that subverts the notion that education is a rat-race that merely produces cogs in the machine. And it also presents a compelling and bold vision that sees education as a garden of abundance instead of a wilderness of scarcity.
Last year when I attended SCL’s 2025 Summer Conference I was deeply moved by a strong and palpable sense that the Classical Christian movement is not simply a sprawling movement but a joyful community defined by the ethos of sharing and faithful stewardship rooted in overflowing divine generosity and human gratitude.
This year I did not merely attend this event as a Conference Producer for the SCL, but as a speaker. My talk, The Abolition of Learning: Cheerfully Teaching in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, was an invitation to think deeply about the pedagogical implications of the philosophical reflections of C.S. Lewis in the Abolition of Man.
My objective was less ambitious and aimed at encouraging educators, administrators, leaders, and parents to cultivate a joyful and hopeful disposition in an age where machine learning is overtaking human learning (You can watch it here).
The working definition for my talk was simple and straightforward:
Joyful teaching is rooted in the overflowing radical generosity of God through Jesus Christ and results in overwhelming radical gratitude—a God-centered gladness that magnifies the riches of the glory of Christ as preeminent in all things, in all disciplines of learning and vocational callings.
The thrust of this definition was to intentionally frame the discourse on AI in the broader Classical Christian tradition, and also tie it to Lewis’s broader philosophy of education and joy. Therefore, this definition provided us with the guardrails to resist either the myopic anxiety or misguided awe as legitimate dispositions towards AI.
The invitation was to embrace a happy middle—a hopeful and joyful Christian pedagogy that teaches from rest because “all authority in heaven or on earth” has been given to Christ so that in all things he might be preeminent, exalted above all disciplines of learning for the glory of his Father and the joy of all peoples.
Therefore, the vocational task of teaching is grounded in the supremacy of Christ and the overflowing generosity fleshed out through his incarnation and now embodied through His bride—the church.
And education becomes the task of disciple-making which aims at the holistic transformation of humanity under the authority of Christ. And joy becomes non-optional. Take time to watch it here—and let me know what you think.
NB: The paper presented at the conference is still being edited for final publication—and will be made available when it has been published. Thank you for your patience.