Book Review: Thoroughness and Charm
Cultivating Habits of a Classical Classroom by Mandi Gerth
Gerth, Mandi. Thoroughness and Charm: Cultivating Habits of a Classical Classroom. Kannapolis, NC: CiRCE Press, 2025. $18.99
“The telos of classical education is not to produce a graduate who will one day earn a six-figure salary or run for Congress. Our goal is much harder to obtain:” writes Mandi Gerth in her book, Thoroughness and Charm. Gerth’s claim is that classical educators “are aiming to produce students characterized by virtue” (11), but this cannot be accomplished if teachers don’t know how to manage their classrooms effectively—that is, with thoroughness and charm.
The central thrust of Gerth’s message, then, is to “dramatically change the classroom culture,” a task, she argues, that will “foster habits of thinking, doing, and being, which form our students and order their loves” (7).
Gerth touches a nerve that many educators in the classical Christian renewal seem to sense but, perhaps, struggle to do anything about. Those of us who did not receive a classical education when we were growing up are ecstatic about recovering these lost tools of learning, but are often stuck at thirty-thousand feet in the air. Of course, we read Great Books, attend conferences, and discuss the pedagogical theories of cultivating wisdom and virtue ad nauseum, but how to land the plane, put boots on the ground, and effect real change where it matters seems to be one of the biggest challenges at present. Gerth writes,
Sadly, there seems to be a real reluctance in classical circles to discuss the nuts and bolts of classroom management. We prefer to attend workshops on Socratic seminars or listen to lectures on Abolition of Man. But the cold, hard truth of teaching is that we are completely ineffective, no matter how passionate we are, if we can’t manage the classroom.(5)
Gerth’s book attempts to solve that dilemma and close the gap between theory and practice by offering some tried and true experiential techniques. As the publisher’s website suggests: Thoroughness and Charm “gives specific examples on how shared experiences—not activities—build culture, support the curriculum, and pass on the classical tradition while habituating the students to what is true and good for their souls.”
Notably, Thoroughness and Charm takes its title from St. Thomas Aquinas’s Oratio Ante Studium, a prayer he habitually invoked before his daily studies and writing. Translated for the book’s epigraph, Aquinas’s prayer reads:
Creator of all things,
true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being,
graciously let a ray of your light
penetrate the darkness of my understanding.
Take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance.
Give me a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally.
Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm.
Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion.
I ask this through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
The epigraphical prayer is worth mentioning because Gerth’s book is not merely a skills-based teacher training manual. It’s a spiritually thoughtful syllabus for cultivating teachers who can “embody noble ideas and biblical values” and also know how to manage “the transitions and procedures of the actual class day” (7).
Some readers may be surprised to discover Gerth advocates for real authority in the classroom where the teacher is not the students’ egalitarian friend or babysitter, but one who inspires respect and awe, like a monarch. Gerth asserts,
Our problem is not one of teachers abusing their authority; ours is a problem of teachers having no authority at all. I’m encouraging us to think hard about how the rise of snowplow parents who refuse to let their children struggle has put teachers and the classroom in the crosshairs, demanding the school should be a safe and happy place where every child does that which is right in his own eyes (15).
In Gerth’s estimation, the right kind of “meanness” is a virtue. Lest a reader recoil at this classical perspective of proper authority in the classroom, perhaps a cursory look at today’s public schools might provide some better perspective on where we are in comparison. In modern schools where therapeutics and electronic devices are the guiding principles, teachers are regularly assaulted and often feel accomplished if, as one public school teacher told me, “we can keep these kids from dealing drugs, assaulting each other, or having sex in the quad before the school day is over.”
But make no mistake; Gerth is not authoritarian about authority in the classroom. Teachers aren’t despots with carte blanche privilege. Classical teachers must embody the tradition they are attempting to transmit to their students. Their job in the classroom is to win respect and inspire love by setting limits, establishing boundaries, and implementing order conducive for student learning. And, just like the parents and the church to which the student belongs, the teacher cannot shirk his or her role or responsibilities. “Not one of the three gets to abdicate their role. Not one of the three gets to overstep” (25).
While this review has so far focused primarily on the important role of establishing proper authority for reclaiming classical learning, it’s obviously not the full story. It is, however, the foundation for the rest of the classical recovery enterprise. Gerth’s remaining chapters focus on the nuts and bolts of forming the students’ imaginations, raising the perennial human questions, building foundational culture, and creating liturgical classrooms.
In each of these chapters, Gerth brings the pedagogical conversation down from the aether of theoria to the soil of praxis, offering meaningful guidance and helpful illustrations for achieving the task. Further, it’s in the final couple of chapters where her insights are really brilliant. Here she argues for and explains how to build up and steward a common and ennobled culture in the classroom—instead of just “getting through the material” (69).
Building and stewarding common culture is how educators can ennoble students out of their pettiness and into a worthy “community committed to goodness, truth, and beauty” (71). And there are a number of pedagogical tools readily available in the classical teacher’s toolbox for accomplishing this task, all of which Gerth shows teachers how to use: “Liturgies, reciting historical prayers, singing hymns, reading and memorizing poetry, reading aloud, and reciting catechisms” (72). The appendices alone are arguably worth the price of the book.
I recommend Thoroughness and Charm to school teachers and homeschooling families alike, and without reservation. It’s a thoughtfully written and needful work that will help teachers of every grade level fulfill their noble calling of producing students characterized by virtue; and do so as the title suggests, with thoroughness and charm.