Toward Whole-Person Discernment: Classical Education in Conversation with the Highlands Ability Battery
I recently listened to a podcast where a classical leader boldly declared, “We’re not here to prepare students just for college or just for a career. We are here to turn the students’ gaze to something more noble, something better.” I wonder why some classical schools bifurcate the aims between the pursuit of transcendental goods and the practical next steps students must take in life.
Classical, liberal arts is expansive, therefore, it makes logical sense to extend student conversations to “the next thing”, whether that be college, gap year, trade, or direct workforce entry. Pursuing the right things in the right order is a tenet of classical education, and perhaps this is what this classical leader was implying – that the classical movement is rightly ordered and has a clear telos – flourishing (Eudaimonia). Eudaimonia is a complex process requiring the development of the virtues (arete), the acquisition of knowledge (techne), exercising practical wisdom (phronesis), and putting all of this into action (praxis). Therefore, students grow into the overarching goal of eudaimonia or whole-person integrated flourishing, created by a particular pedagogy.
Why Classical College and Career Guidance Must be Different
A classical education seeks to cultivate wisdom, virtue, and eloquence. It forms students who can ask essential questions, engage great ideas, and live lives rooted in truth, goodness, and beauty. While classical education develops character and intellect, families and educators alike often wrestle with an urgent and sensible question: How will this educational formation translate into a meaningful life and sustainable work?
Classical institutions should apply the same pedagogical seriousness to the realm of vocational discernment as they do in curricular choices. They must bridge the conceptual space (sophia) in the classroom with the embodied space outside of the classroom (phronesis and praxis), providing the whole-person pedagogy the movement claims to offer. If not, there arises a disjunction between a robust formation in the classroom and a vague sense of direction beyond it. For example, how is eudaimonia lived out and not just talked about?
Questions and axioms such as: Know thyself, The unexamined life is not worth living, What is the good life? What is my civic responsibility? What does it mean to be human? are embedded into the liberal arts course of study. Socratic discussions happen, essays ensue, and the life of the mind is stimulated. Students are invited into the Great Conversation, and as they mature, they develop a level of sophia or wisdom. Classical teachers are excellent at exploring great texts and extracting wise axioms. This is classical education to some people, but of course, there is exceedingly more. Students also need to be invited into the Great Experiment where these perennial questions and deep understandings from the Great Conversation become a part of their own vocational discernment.
Understanding the Difference Between Vocation and Occupation
Vocational discernment is the reflective process by which students explore these timeless questions: Who am I? What is my nature? What is the good in the world I’m meant to do, both now and in the future? What are actionable steps I can take to be my true, best self? And, it is a dynamic experiment, the steppingstones of eudaimonia. It provides space to exercise prudence. Vocational discernment transcends concepts of career or occupation (while these are explored). Occupation, on the other hand, is the type of work that one does, paid or unpaid. Vocational direction informs occupational choices. Vocation is connected to being; occupation is connected to doing. This is deep work, done over time, in community.
A key figure in community is the college and career counselor. Advisors in classical settings are not merely placement coordinators—they are mentors, guides, and shepherds of souls. They are teachers in a different kind of classroom. Like Athena guiding Telemachus, they help students interpret the signs of their identity and vocation.
Yet, how can a college and career counselor offer vocational direction without the proper tools?
Introducing the Highlands Ability Battery to Classical Schools
This is precisely where the Highlands Ability Battery (HAB) enters as an invaluable tool that invites the student into integrated, wise exploration and action under the direction of a certified HAB counselor. Ideally, the college and career advisor and the certified consultant would be on and the same.
Based on Johnson O’Connor’s research, the HAB, a pioneer in online aptitude evaluation, offers an objective, performance-based assessment that evaluates 19 distinct abilities across three categories:
Personal Style: How do you relate to people? How are you energized? What is your time frame orientation?
Driving Abilities: How do you solve problems or generate ideas? How is your brained naturally wired? How do you make decisions?
Specialized Abilities: What are your cognitive strengths? How do you learn?
The HAB does not measure preference; it measures potential. Unlike personality inventories or interest surveys, the HAB draws on decades of cognitive science to identify innate abilities – those strengths that remain relatively stable over time and often form the contours of one’s vocational calling.
Connecting Aptitudes to Career and Life Direction
By recognizing how individual aptitudes come together to form ability patterns, it provides a language for students to understand how they best learn, solve problems, communicate, and contribute. For classical schools committed to the cultivation of the whole person, this is a necessary resource that also connects students to career exploration tools, including what major or apprenticeship to pursue, what training programs are available near the family, and how to go about pursuing an occupation.
Anchored in its Whole Person Model, the HAB offers a framework to weave that self knowledge directly into the fabric of a classical curriculum — turning “Know Thyself” from lofty ideal into lived reality. The Whole Person Model maps eight interdependent dimensions — Abilities, Skills, Interests, Personal Style, Family Influence, Values, Vision & Goals, and the Career DevelopmentCycle/ Personal Growth Stage — into a single dynamic. This model upholds the classical commitment of full human integration. HAB invites students to see their God-given talents, moral convictions, and communal contexts as inseparable threads in the tapestry of their calling.
Certified consultants affiliated with Life Architects, can ask better questions and offer more informed counsel. For example, could a student’s strong spatial reasoning suggest a path in architecture, design, or engineering? Might a student with musical aptitude and low timeframe preference benefit from a gap year before college? Can a student with limited idea productivity and concept organization be asset to a fast-paced, overly distracted team by being offered a more thoughtful, measured approach? This kind of Socratic questioning honors the uniqueness of each individual.
A deeper understanding of how students are made enhance not only the goals of a classical education but also help launch students to engage the world, meet its needs, and find joy in purposeful work. Indeed, if we believe that education is the formation of free human beings capable of wise and courageous engagement in the world, then we must extend our vision beyond the four walls of the classroom. Classical schools can no longer afford to ignore the territory of vocational direction. The HAB offers a way to reframe career exploration not as a departure from liberal learning, but as its natural consequence. It reveals the unity between contemplation and action, between being and doing.
Moreover, it offers a powerful response to the real concerns of stakeholders. Students are searching for vocational direction, relevant experiences and a meaningful way to contribute. Parents want assurance that the formation their children receive will equip them for both citizenship and purposeful, sustainable work. Schools, caught between the transcendent aims of liberal learning and the pragmatic demands of the college-and-career discourse, are looking for ways to preserve their philosophical integrity while addressing contemporary challenges.
Back to the original question: How will classical educational formation translate into a meaningful life and sustainable work? By incorporating modern ability science, the HAB serves as a necessary bridge demonstrating that classical education can not only form thinkers but launch agents of renewal, rooted in identity, guided by purpose, and prepared for both, vocation and occupation.
