Freedom for Excellence

Why freedom for our students means much more than just giving them choices

David Burns

If you have spent any time as a teacher or working in education, chances are you’ve heard the phrase student-centered learning—a popular slogan whose meaning is broad and often varies depending on whom you ask. Yet one consistent feature of student-centered approaches is a commitment to increasing students' freedom to make choices. And who could possibly argue against freedom—a concept so tightly woven into the fabric of our modern ethos? But what if our modern conception of freedom is severely lacking? The purpose of this article is to explore a fundamentally different conception of freedom—one that is considerably more difficult to attain but, in the long run, far more transformative.

Two Kinds of Freedom

The type of freedom most commonly emphasized in student-centered approaches to learning is freedom of choice, broadly understood as the ability to choose among alternatives. Whether it is a first grader choosing where to sit in the classroom, a fifth grader deciding whether to work independently or in a group, or a high school student electing to create a video instead of writing an essay, freedom is often understood in terms of providing students with different options from which to choose. Interestingly, defining freedom primarily as the ability to choose among alternatives is a relatively modern development. Its roots can be traced to the late Middle Ages in the work of thinkers such as William of Ockham, before coming to full fruition during the Enlightenment with philosophers such as Immanuel Kant. Yet an altogether different conception of freedom prevailed throughout much of the history of Western philosophical thought.

The classical conception of freedom, articulated by ancient thinkers such as Aristotle and later developed by medieval philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, may sound somewhat paradoxical to modern ears. Rather than centering on the autonomy to choose among alternatives, it emphasizes the capacity to do what is good—in other words, the freedom to achieve excellence. To illustrate the difference between these two conceptions of freedom, a simple example goes a long way.

Consider someone learning to play the piano. Since my own daughter fits this description, I will use her as our case study. Once a week, we take her to a wonderful piano teacher who is helping her master the fundamentals. At this early stage, however, she plays slowly and hesitantly, second-guessing herself with nearly every note. She is often visibly frustrated because she is not yet capable of playing well. In this sense, we may rightly say that my daughter is not yet very free at the piano.

We have all experienced this feeling when learning something new. Perhaps it’s the frustration of playing a sport you have never tried before, trying to carry on a conversation in a language you have only begun to learn, or feeling at a complete loss while attempting to repair something that has broken in your car. In these moments, we feel, in a sense, shackled by our own lack of knowledge and skill—a slave to our own limitations.

Our students also experience the limitations of being novice learners. Whether they are in first grade learning to read or in high school learning calculus, their initial attempts are often slow and labored. They make frequent mistakes that must be corrected and from which they must learn. They are often overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the task before them. Yet it is precisely during this stage of development that many advocates of student-centered learning emphasize the importance of increasing student choice. This is often the point at which novice learners need the opposite: a clearly delineated and carefully curated path forward.[1] In short, for novice learners, choices often need to be constrained rather than expanded.

Let’s see how this works in the piano example. My daughter’s excellent piano teacher carefully prescribes the lessons she receives, the pieces she practices, and the amount of time she spends practicing them. When viewed through the lens of freedom as choice, her piano lessons might seem restrictive, monotonous, or even boring. She spends much of her time memorizing musical notes and repeatedly practicing the same scales and exercises. At first glance, one might even argue that her freedom is being limited because she is not free to place her hands wherever she wishes or play whichever notes she finds most appealing.

Over time, however, through disciplined instruction and deliberate practice, she begins to master the rules and fundamentals of playing. She can now play many pieces with a grace and fluidity that feel as natural as breathing. She is able to add her own style and expression to the music and even improvise while playing pieces she knows well. With continued study and practice, she may one day compose beautiful sonatas that capture the essence of the art form. This is true freedom—not freedom of choice, but what the classical tradition calls libertas ad excellentiam, or freedom for excellence.[2]

As we can see in this example, freedom for excellence doesn’t come cheap. There are rarely any shortcuts to achieving it. Freedom for excellence often requires countless hours of instruction and practice, ultimately leading to the formation of new internal dispositions—a stable state Aristotle called hexis[3] and that Aquinas, following the Latin Aristotelian tradition, developed under the concept of habitus. [4] This is how my daughter gradually transforms from someone who plays the piano into a true pianist. Playing the piano becomes a genuine part of her identity, of who she is. Certainly, her piano teacher could have allowed more choice early in her training, but that freedom of choice would have been superficial and would almost certainly have come at the cost of inhibiting or at least delaying her progression toward mastering the piano—toward true freedom for excellence.

In the same way, success in the classroom is often hard earned. It is predicated on a commitment to excellence that begins with even the simplest and most routine of tasks. Consider, for example, a first-grade teacher who, from the very first day of school, clearly explains, models, and has students consistently practice classroom routines and procedures. Students practice transitioning from one activity to another until it becomes second nature. When beginning a new assignment, they retrieve their pencils from the classroom pencil tray, write their names and the date on their papers, and wait patiently in a ready-to-work position until further instructions are given. They are not allowed to sit how and where they wish. They are not permitted to choose whatever writing utensil they want or to put their name on their papers whenever they feel like it. Instead, they are habituated into a set of structured and consistent routines that may on the surface seem overly restrictive. Yet in reality, these routines free students to devote more of their cognitive energy to the learning task itself rather than to ancillary procedural or logistical decisions that needlessly consume attention and mental effort.[5]

The same principle extends beyond classroom routines to academic knowledge and skills. Just as my daughter needed to internalize the fundamentals of reading music before she could play fluently, students must likewise internalize critical foundational knowledge and skills to the point of automaticity before they can successfully engage in more complex learning.

Reading provides a clear example. If word recognition has not become sufficiently automatic, much of a student's cognitive capacity will be devoted simply to identifying the words on the page, leaving fewer resources available for constructing meaning from the text.[6] Mathematics follows the same pattern. A middle school student learning algebra who has not automatized basic multiplication facts must continually stop to calculate simple products while solving multi-step equations. Those additional processing demands make higher-level mathematical reasoning substantially more difficult.[7] In both cases, the freedom to engage in higher forms of thinking is constrained by the degree to which learners have internalized foundational knowledge and skills to the point of automaticity.

Achieving this kind of freedom requires sustained commitment over time, which in turn requires both the disciplining of the will and the mind. The will must learn to pursue goods whose value is not immediately apparent, while the mind must devote sustained attention and effort to acquiring the knowledge and skills that make those goods attainable. These are inherently difficult tasks for adults to accomplish, even with all the advantages that age and experience afford. How much more difficult, then, must they be for students whose brains are still developing and who lack the same depth of knowledge, experience, and self-regulation? Yet many student-centered approaches assume that students can shoulder a greater share of these decisions earlier in the learning process. Some students will thrive under those conditions. Others, however, will struggle needlessly—not because they are inherently lacking in potential, but because they have been asked to exercise a kind of freedom they have not yet developed.

A Freedom Worth Pursuing

Ultimately, the classical conception of freedom has much to offer modern educators. In the realm of ethics, the freedom articulated by Aristotle and later developed by Aquinas is achieved through the disciplining of the will until the good becomes first possible and then, through habit, increasingly effortless. When translated into educational theory, we might say that freedom is the disciplining of the will and the mind so that learning first becomes possible and then, through practice, the knowledge and skills acquired as a result become increasingly automatic. It is precisely this mastery that in time enables the learner to exercise genuine choice and creativity. We see this in the example of my daughter, who is far freer while playing the piano today than she was when she first began. She attained that freedom not by being given an increasing array of choices from the outset, but through disciplined instruction and the gradual mastery of the knowledge and skills necessary to become a true pianist. This is the essence of libertas ad excellentiam—and it is the kind of freedom that our modern education system would do well to recover.

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Endnotes

[1] See Richard E. Clark, Paul A. Kirschner, and John Sweller, “Putting Students on the Path to Learning: The Case for Fully Guided Instruction,” American Educator 36, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 6–11, 16–17, for an accessible summary of how novices’ cognitive architecture differs from that of experts and what that means for teaching and learning.

[2] Libertas ad excellentiam, or freedom for excellence, is a term introduced by the Thomistic scholar and Dominican priest Servais Pinckaers. In The Sources of Christian Ethics, Pinckaers defines it as “The power to act freely with excellence and perfection. (The choice of evil is a lack of freedom.) Freedom resides in reason and will together” (375). Although Pinckaers employs the term within the realm of Christian ethics, its core insight may be just as readily applied to education and learning more generally, which is what I attempt to do in this article. Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, 3rd ed., trans. Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 375.

[3] Aristotle argues that virtues are acquired through habituation and classifies virtue as a hexis, which Bartlett and Collins translate as “characteristic.” Significantly, Aristotle explicitly compares this process to acquiring an art: just as people become builders by building, they become cithara players by playing the cithara. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2.1, 2.5 (1103a14–1103b25, 1105b19–1106a13), trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 26–27, 32–33.

[4] Aquinas develops the Aristotelian concept of habitus extensively in Summa Theologiae, I–II, qq. 49–54. See especially q. 49, a. 2, on the nature of habitus, and q. 51, a. 2, on the formation of habits through acts. Aquinas subsequently defines human virtue as a “good operative habit” in I–II, q. 55, a. 3.

[5] In cognitive load theory, unnecessary cognitive demands that do not contribute to the learning goal are referred to as extraneous cognitive load. When learning tasks involve high element interactivity, instructional design should seek to minimize extraneous load so that limited cognitive resources can be directed toward the information that must be learned. See Fred Paas, Alexander Renkl, and John Sweller, “Cognitive Load Theory and Instructional Design: Recent Developments,” Educational Psychologist 38, no. 1 (2003): 1–4.

Applied to the classroom, this principle suggests that well-established routines and procedures can reduce unnecessary procedural and logistical demands, especially for younger learners. See Mitch Weathers and Sarah Oberle, Executive Functions: For Every K–3 Classroom (Corwin Press, 2026). 

[6] See David LaBerge and S. Jay Samuels, “Toward a Theory of Automatic Information Processing in Reading,” Cognitive Psychology 6, no. 2 (1974): 293–323.

[7] See Loel N. Tronsky and James M. Royer, “Relationships Among Basic Computational Automaticity, Working Memory, and Complex Mathematical Problem Solving: What We Know and What We Need to Know,” in Mathematical Cognition, ed. James M. Royer (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2003), DOI 10.1108/978-1-60752-796-120251006.