The book of Proverbs provides the perfect illustration of this. In it we find not only programmatic statements of value like “Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues with injustice” (16:8 ESV), but also observations about human nature like “A worker’s appetite works for him; his mouth urges him on” (16:26). As we explained last time, these are truthful opinions worthy of being shared with the young to help them learn to understand the world around them and to value things rightly. 

Early education should be packed with content of this sort, both directly from the mouths of teachers, but across all the subjects of study. Reading and writing instruction should not merely train in skills but should be rich in moral wisdom. In this way, we can sow the seeds of virtue and wisdom in the young. We have already had occasion to remark on the intimate connection between the moral virtues and practical wisdom. They are two sides of the same coin. As Aristotle says, “the function of man is achieved only in accordance with practical wisdom as well as with moral excellence; for excellence makes the aim right, and practical wisdom the things leading to it” (Nicomachean Ethics VI.12; rev. Oxford trans., 1807). And again, “it is not possible to be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral excellence” (VI.13, 1808). 

We had to go somewhat far afield, with both John Amos Comenius, the great Czech educational reformer of the 17th century, and Aristotle as our guides, during the last article, in order to establish the necessity of laying this foundation of virtue and prudence in early education. In this article, we will put some flesh on the bones of this “good instruction” by teachers of the young through delineating the role of principles and practice, examples and discipline. 

Principles and Practice

First of all, we can pick up again and dust off the analogy between artistry and morality that we explored while introducing our series on Apprenticeship in the Arts. “Excellences we get by first exercising them,” Aristotle asserts, speaking of the moral virtues which are inextricably tied to prudence, “as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts” (Nicomachean Ethics II.1, 1743). Practice, in line with the correct principles, will form a person toward either artistry or morality. 

As in apprenticeship in the arts then, laying the appropriate foundation for prudence involves both moral practice and principles. John Amos Comenius emphasized the preliminary role of practice in craftsmanship, and he does the same for each of the other cardinal virtues. Regarding temperance, he says, in his Great Didactic,

“Boys should be taught to observe temperance in eating and in drinking, in sleeping and in waking, in work and in play, in talking and in keeping silence, throughout the whole period of their instruction.

“In this relation the golden rule, ‘Nothing in excess,’ should be dinned into their ears, that they may learn on all occasions to leave off before satiety sets in.” (212)

Temperance constitutes a guiding principle for the ordering of students’ days that parents and teachers should heed. Notice how Comenius draws from traditional wisdom for a principle that should be actively, rather than passively “dinned into their ears.” 

As modernists and postmodernists we are apt to recoil at such tough love, but we would do well to question our assumptions. Either we order their days, emotions, and minds with an open door to intemperance (e.g., playing video games all day, eating unhealthy foods, staying up late into the night, etc.), or we hold the line and cause them to practice temperance day in and day out. Intemperate habituation is no small issue to worry about; as Aristotle said, “It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather, all the difference” (Nic Ethics II.1, 1743). 

Apparently moral subtlety is not a virtue for an early education in prudence. Instead Comenius envisions a type of moral catechism with answers drawn from scripture and wise men to provide rules for life (answering questions like “Why should we strive against envy?” “With what arms should we fortify ourselves against the sorrows and chances of life?” “How should we observe moderation in joy?” “How should anger be controlled?” “How should illicit love be driven out?”; 216). These provide the guiding principles to accompany the practice of daily life.

Comenius goes on to delineate the reason for this habituation according to the cardinal virtues. It lies in the rational nature of a human being and therefore develops the proper connection between moral habits and the principled deliberation of prudence:

The principle which underlies this is that we should accustom boys to do everything by reason, and nothing under the guidance of impulse. For man is a rational animal, and should therefore be led by reason, and, before action, ought to deliberate how each operation should be performed, so that he may really be master of his own actions. Now since boys are not quite capable of such a deliberate and rational mode of procedure, it will be a great advance towards teaching them fortitude and self-control if they be forced to acquire the habit of performing the will of another in preference to their own, that is to say, to obey their superiors promptly in everything. (212-213)

For Comenius, obedience to a prudent parent or teacher acts as a preliminary stage in a person’s development of prudential wisdom. Since children cannot be entirely rational in consulting about which operation or act to perform, they should obey their elders, who at the same time explain to them the reasons for why one course of action should be preferred to another. 

Children thus act as moral apprentices through the habit of prompt obedience, practicing the very thing that they will do in later life when they must subordinate the impulsive and emotional part of them to their rational and deliberate mind. Again it must be reiterated that this is not the possession of prudence itself, but it is, in Comenius’ mind, “a great advance” toward it. A development of his playful analogy, sowing the seeds of virtue, helps him explain why:

“Virtue must be inculcated at a very early stage before vice gets possession of the mind.

“For if you do not sow a field with good seed it will produce nothing but weeds of the worst kind. But if you wish to subdue it, you will do so more easily and with a better hope of success if you plough it, sow it, and harrow it in early spring. Indeed, it is of the greatest importance that children be well trained in early youth, since a jar preserves for a long time the odour with which it has been imbued when new.” (215)

For this reason, we can see as injurious the inclination of many parents and teachers, to say of some vice a young child is displaying, “Oh, he’ll grow out of it.” Weeds do not disappear of their own accord but grow and infest the field. The diligent labor of bringing up children involves, first, sowing well the field, but then, harrowing it, as well, breaking up the ground and tearing up the weeds through proper discipline. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Examples and Discipline

So far we have explained the importance of providing principles alongside practice to prepare the hearts and minds of students for moral virtue and intellectual prudence. In his Great Didactic Comenius reiterates this Aristotelian emphasis on ‘practice, practice, practice’ as he transitions to a discussion of examples: 

We have seen in chaps. xx. and xxi. that it is by learning that we find out what we ought to learn, and by acting that we learn to act as we should. So then, as boys easily learn to walk by walking, to talk by talking, and to write by writing, in the same way they will learn obedience by obeying, abstinence by abstaining, truth by speaking the truth, and constancy by being constant. But it is necessary that the child be helped by advice and example at the same time. (215)

Just as in other skills and arts, practice according to good principles provides the foundation for prudence. In a similar way to training in artistry, where theory should not crowd out the importance of examples and models, so also in prudence moral exemplars hold a crucial role.

When the classicists among us think of moral exemplars, we might imagine Plutarch’s Lives or Aesop’s fables, the well-known figures of history and literature who demonstrate for us right and wrong behavior in the vivid color of a narrative. And this is right, but Comenius reminds us of the even more living curriculum of the lives of people in the school community: “Examples of well-ordered lives, in the persons of their parents, nurses, tutors, and school-fellows, must continually be set before children” (215). Comenius seems to suggest highlighting virtuous and wise individuals in the community through public praise and story-telling. We could imagine this being done in the classroom or assembly-hall, formally and informally. 

Comenius’ reason for valuing living examples resonates with modern research on mirror neurons and our imitative nature as human beings: 

For boys are like apes, and love to imitate whatever they see, whether good or bad, even though not bidden to do so; and on this account they learn to imitate before they learn to use their minds. By ‘examples,’ I mean living ones as well as those taken from books; in fact, living ones are the more important because they make a stronger impression. And therefore, if parents are worthy and careful guardians of domestic discipline, and if tutors are chosen with the greatest possible care, and are men of exceptional virtue, a great advance will have been made towards the proper training of the young in morals. (215)

We might supplement Comenius statement about children “learning to imitate before they learn to use their minds” with reference to the recent research that links imitation to the foundational emotional and artistic skills, say in mirroring the emotions of another through facial expressions or the hand-grasping movements of another simply by observing (see Patrick’s article The Imitation Brain). This monkey-see, monkey-do (or monkey-feel) may be less than the fully blossomed rationality of prudence, but it is a fundamental and therefore necessary step along the way. 

Parents and teachers must remember that their example and influence will have a real and overarching effect on the moral development of the children under their care. This is not an area where “Do as I say, not as I do” is going to be effective (if there is any domain where that works…). Ironically, it is this personal lack of prudence that contributes to parents’ lack of perseverance in discipline. Did you notice how in the block quote above Comenius transitioned immediately from living examples to the necessity of parents as “worthy and careful guardians of domestic discipline”? In his mind these are connected, because the faithful administration of discipline in the little things of the home functions as an overflow of a prudent and godly life.

In our modern cultural imagination we picture the pickiness of a hot-tempered and unpredictable parent when we think of domestic discipline: e.g., the surly father who corrects his son’s eating habits or messy room when he himself is in a bad mood from work. But for Comenius and the Christian tradition (“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” -Ephesians 6:4), “domestic discipline” involves consistency, emotional warmth, and a sensitivity to the child’s needs and abilities. In another counter cultural move (for us anyway), Comenius agrees with Charlotte Mason that children should “be very carefully guarded from bad society, lest they be infected by it” (216). Apparently, the idea that “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with” has a deeper moral point to it. Comenius also believes that ‘idleness is the devil’s playground’ for the young, who are apt to “be led to evil deeds or contract a tendency to indolence” through it (216). They should therefore “be kept continually employed either with work or with play” (216). 

It is important to note the Christian coloring that Comenius has given discipline in its role in developing prudence, at the same time as we consider the tradition’s questioning of corporal punishment in school. Quintilian, the famous Roman rhetorical teacher, for instance, had ruled against the use of corporal punishment in his Education of an Orator as tending toward a slavish disposition in students and abusiveness on the part of the tutor (I.3.14). Comenius, likewise, seems to have a lighter approach, remarking famously on the natural curiosity of children and the easiness of the way he recommends. However, when it comes to moral and spiritual matters he has a Christian seriousness that we must reckon with. He begins by noting the inevitability of discipline: “Since it is impossible for us to be so watchful that nothing evil can find an entrance, stern discipline is necessary to keep evil tendencies in check” (216). 

The whole work of sowing the seeds of prudence is for Comenius elevated to the spiritual plane of reference, when we view it from a Christian worldview–a fact that increases the need for watchfulness and careful treatment of moral maladies through timely discipline:

For our enemy Satan is on the watch not only while we sleep, but also while we wake, and as we sow good seed into the minds of our pupils he contrives to plant his own weeds there as well, and sometimes a corrupt nature brings forth weeds of its own accord, so that these evil dispositions must be kept in check by force. We must therefore strive against them by means of discipline, that is to say, by using blame or punishment, words or blows, as the occasion demands. This punishment should always be administered on the spot, that the vice may be choked as soon as it shows itself, or may be, as far as is possible, torn up by the roots. Discipline, therefore, should ever be watchful, not with the view of enforcing application to study (for learning is always attractive to the mind, if it be treated by the right method), but to ensure cleanly morals. (216-217)

Comenius’ measured approach stands between the extreme positions of our time and his, where the sterner forms of punishment (and even the name of punishment) is either neglected or over-used. His little phrase, “as the occasion demands,” endorses the prudential use of varied types of rebuke or consequence in a way that fits the students’ moral misstep.

If we are to recover the Aristotelian goal of prudence, we must reconsider the details of discipline as a part of a moral education. Principles and practice, examples and discipline form the appropriate web of “good instruction” that functions as a preliminary training in prudence, with the ultimate goal that students internalize right and wrong and a true sense of the value of things in the moral and spiritual universe from a God’s-eye perspective.

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So far in this series we have had occasion to develop the Christian underpinnings for prudence. “Be wise [phronemoi, prudent] as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt 10:16), Jesus tells his disciples, utilizing the same word for prudence that Aristotle had named among his five intellectual virtues hundreds of years before. And while the New Testament does not consistently endorse this linguistic distinction between practical and philosophic wisdom (phronesis vs sophia), still the emphasis of the Bible lands squarely on the practical ability to discern the difference between good and evil, to see through the deceitfulness of sin and value goods rightly. Augustine’s ordo amoris, or the proper ordering of loves, provides an important theological development of the Greek philosophical vision of the prudent man. 

Practical wisdom is thus necessarily contrasted with philosophic wisdom (sophia), which for Aristotle involved perception (nous) of first principles and scientific knowledge (episteme) about invariable things, things that never change. We might call these invariable things eternal truths and think more readily of mathematics and metaphysics, than history and literature. What is best for human beings differs with different particulars. Christians might likewise contrast abstract or theoretical knowledge about the divine being, that He is eternal, immortal, impassible, etc., with knowing God himself in a saving relationship. As James writes in his letter, “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe–and shudder!” (James 2:19 ESV). In the same way, prudence has the heart of action in a way that other intellectual virtues do not. 

Adopting a prudential perspective thus has the potential to transform our classical Christian educational paradigm by pumping the lifeblood of practicality back into it. To do that we must now begin to answer in earnest the question of how. What are the proper methods of instructing the conscience and instilling moral wisdom? We must begin with the preliminary stages of instilling prudence in the young, before delineating a pedagogy of prudence for our older students. The full dawning of prudence requires the later stages of reflection and rationality that await higher intellectual development in high school and college years. 

Can We Even Teach Prudence? 

At first, in consulting Aristotle we might be tempted to despair of a pedagogy for prudence. After all, the main requirement for developing prudence in Aristotle seems to be experience, a notion that is illustrated by the fact that scientific knowledge (episteme), while technically of a higher rank among the intellectual virtues, is attainable much earlier than prudence (phronesis):

What has been said is confirmed by the fact that while young men become geometricians and mathematicians and wise in matters like these, it is thought that a young man of practical wisdom cannot be found. The cause is that such wisdom is concerned not only with universals but with particulars, which become familiar from experience, but a young man has no experience, for it is length of time that gives experience; indeed one might ask this question too, why a boy may become a mathematician, but not a wise man or a natural scientist. Is it because the objects of mathematics exist by abstraction, while the first principles of these other subjects come from experience, and because young men have no conviction about the latter but merely use the proper language, while the essence of mathematical objects is plain enough to them? (Nicomachean Ethics VI.8, p. 1803 in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2)

In modern teaching circles we are inclined to believe that it is abstractions and universals that stymie the young mind. Aristotle provides a good counter to our inclinations here, as does the documented Flynn effect: “the increase in correct IQ test answers with each new generation in the twentieth century.” In his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein explains the increasing understanding of abstractions for children in the modern world:

A child today who scores average on similarities would be in the 94th percentile of her grandparents’ generation. When a group of Estonian researchers used national test scores to compare word understandings of schoolkids in the 1930s to those in 2006, they saw that improvement came very specifically on the most abstract words. The more abstract the word, the bigger the improvement. The kids barely bested their grandparents on words for directly observable objects or phenomena (“hen,” “eating,” “illness”), but they improved massively on imperceptible concepts (“law,” “pledge,” “citizen”). (39)

It turns out that abstractions are not as impenetrable to the young as we had thought. The linguistic environment of modern societies, which is rich in such abstractions (if deficient in other ways…), has provided for a steady advance in this sort of thinking. 

It has not, we can assert anecdotally, seemed to afford any meaningful advance in the particulars of prudence. Experience, we are tempted to believe, may not be the best teacher, but perhaps it is the only teacher of practical wisdom. We might forgive Gary Hartenburg, the author of Aristotle: Education for Virtue and Leisure (from the Giants in the History of Education series from Classical Academic Press), for claiming that the development of prudence must wait for after the conclusion of formal education (53-54).

I think that this pessimistic conclusion, however, is incorrect. Even if we must go beyond Aristotle’s admittedly incomplete writings on education (the section of his Politics which concerns education is corrupt and ends abruptly before its actual conclusion), we have reason to hope that we can influence the development of prudence in the young. In addition to a host of classical and Christian resources that answer the question, “Can virtue be taught?”, in the affirmative, as David Hicks memorably put it in Norms and Nobility (Buy through the EdRen Bookstore!), we need look no further than the great Christian educational reformer John Amos Comenius. 

Sowing the Seeds of All the Virtues

You might recall that John Amos Comenius, the brilliant Czech educational celebrity of the late Reformation era, came to our aid earlier in this series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. His reflections helped to establish the ultimate goal of Christian education as the cultivation of all the moral, intellectual and spiritual virtues. In this way we were able to effectively replace Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives in the cognitive domain with a more holistic Christian paradigm focused on the virtues. Prudence uniquely ties together the moral and spiritual virtues at the rational center of human thought. It has therefore rightly been regarded as a hinge virtue, one of the cardinal (from the Latin cardo for hinge) virtues of classical and medieval tradition. 

Comenius, also, provided us a pedagogy of artistry through his method of the arts, laid out first in his Great Didactic, then refined and developed in the Analytical Didactic, which he published much later in life. The first of these developed analogies from nature to detail a thrilling and vibrant (if at times startling) educational vision. The second delighted in the bracing air of analytical logic and method, rather than continuing the playful analogies of his first great educational work. 

In a chapter of The Great Didactic entitled, “The Method of Morals” he begins by stating programmatically, “All the virtues, without exception, should be implanted in the young. For in morality nothing can be admitted without leaving a gap.” We can pause to note the natural metaphor of implanting, sowing the seeds of virtue we might say. (I explored this idea for the benefit of parents on Coram Deo Academy’s website: intro, memory, habits, ideas.) For Comenius, like Aristotle, the virtues do not “exist in separation from each other…, for with the presence of the one quality, practical wisdom, will be given all the excellences” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.13, Rev. Oxford Trans., 1808). 

Comenius goes on, drawing from medieval and classical tradition, to endorse the cardinal virtues explicitly, as the hinges on which the door of virtue is swung open:

Those virtues which are called cardinal should be first instilled; these are prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. In this way we may ensure that the structure shall not be built up without a foundation, and that the various parts shall form a harmonious whole. (211-212)

Comenius’ ordering of these virtues seems deliberate, as he continues through them in the order named, delineating certain “fundamental rules” for “shaping the morals” and “instilling true virtue and piety” in schools (211). It is refreshing to see Comenius’ clear endorsement of the classical tradition’s call to teach virtue and establish a bedrock of piety in our students (on which we might reference Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s chapter on piety in The Liberal Arts Tradition). 

But why does Comenius list prudence first? Most of the time the cardinal virtues are enumerated with prudence last as the crowning achievement after the preliminary moral virtues. Surely our awareness of Aristotle’s categorization of prudence as an intellectual virtue would cause us to place it after the moral virtues of temperance, justice and fortitude. We must read on to see that Comenius’s practical advice on how to instill these virtues requires the seeds of prudence to be sowed alongside every virtue. We cannot really train in virtuous habits, unless we are at the same time laying the foundation of prudence in the hearts and minds of the young. 

The Method of Instruction in Prudence

Charlotte Mason distinguished her method of habit training from mere behaviorism by her insistence on going back further than simply “sowing a habit” to “reap a character”. We must sow the idea that makes the habit valuable and good. In the same way, Comenius regards prudential instruction as the basis for the development of the moral virtues. He begins by stating, “Prudence must be acquired by receiving good instruction, and by learning the real differences that exist between things, and the relative value of those things.” Surprisingly, perhaps to our postmodern ears, Comenius asserts that “good instruction” on values is not only possible, but is grounded in objective reality. 

In our contemporary culture ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ are sharply distinguished, and opinions and value judgments are classed as unimportant because they are contested in the public square. But practical wisdom is precisely concerned with, in Aristotle’s words, “that part [of the soul] which forms opinions” (Nic. Ethics, VI.5, 1801), and “correctness of opinion is truth” (VI.9, 1804). Understanding the “good instruction” of a teacher on the “real differences… between things” and the “relative value of those things” is therefore a preliminary to prudence. As Aristotle explains, 

Now understanding [nous] is neither the having nor the acquiring of practical wisdom; but as learning is called understanding when it means the exercise of the faculty of opinion for the purpose of judging of what some one else says about matters with which practical wisdom is concerned–and of judging soundly. (VI.10, 1805)

The key point for our purposes is that, while understanding a teacher’s “good instruction” is not prudence itself, it does exercise the faculty of opining and judging soundly. It therefore constitutes sowing the proper seeds for prudence, or laying the right foundation, to continue with Comenius’ vivid metaphors. 

Comenius elaborates on this preliminary instruction in prudence quoting from John Ludovic Vives, one of the great educators of the sixteenth century:

A sound judgment on matters of fact is the true foundation of all virtue. Well does Vives say: “True wisdom consists in having a sound judgment, and in thus arriving at the truth. Thus are we prevented from following worthless things as if they were of value, or from rejecting what is of value as if it were worthless; from blaming what should be praised, and from praising what should be blamed. This is the source from which all error arises in the human mind, and there is nothing in the life of man that is more disastrous than the lack of judgment through which a false estimate of facts is made. Sound judgment,” he proceeds, “should be practiced in early youth, and will thus be developed by the time manhood is reached. A boy should seek that which is right and avoid that which is worthless, for thus the practice of judging correctly will become second nature with him.” (212)

We can pause here to note that this sort of instruction cannot be given by a man or woman without sound judgment and some measure of prudence herself. You cannot give what you do not have. In matters of prudence, John Milton Gregory’s Law of the Teacher could not be truer: a teacher must know that which he would teach. We should also fix in our minds clearly that our modern dichotomy between fact and opinion has been entirely done away with (at least in this translation…). The fact is that riches are less valuable than friendship; you can call this an opinion or judgment if you want, but it does not reduce the importance or truth of such a fact. 

Proverbs provide a collected store of such judgments or estimates of the facts of a case, which can provide a preliminary to prudence for the young. Even where the reasoning of moral sayings and aphorisms is not spelled out, they are of immense value to the young in averting prudential error in valuing things rightly. As Aristotle claims, “Therefore we ought to attend to the undemonstrated sayings and opinions of experienced and older people or of people of practical wisdom not less than to demonstrations; for because experience has given them an eye they see aright” (Nic. Ethics VI.11, 1806). 

It is in the realm of prudence, then, that we must question Charlotte Mason’s outlaw of opining before children:

One of our presumptuous sins in this connection is that we venture to offer opinions to children (and to older persons) instead of ideas. We believe that an opinion expresses thought and therefore embodies an idea. Even if it did so once the very act of crystallization into opinion destroys any vitality it may have had…. (Toward a Philosophy of Education, vol. 6; Wilder, 2008; 87)

If by “opinions” we are talking primarily about personal views on contemporary issues or debatable matters of history or literary criticism where solid evidence is lacking, Mason’s point is well-taken. The precious class time should not be concerned with such trivialities and the accidence of their teacher’s preferred opinions. 

But if instead we are talking about matters related to living a good life and the general human condition, with what is truly valuable in life and what dead ends and roadblocks have prevented many people for making virtuous choices, then Charlotte Mason’s opinion about opinions must be soundly discarded. If a teacher’s hard-won opinions about such matters are not worth passing on to the young, the teacher should not be employed to give care to the young. In fact, we might go so far as to state that the most important quality of a teacher or tutor of the young is that he or she be a man or woman of prudence, with the ability to give instruction in the form of good opinions about life in the midst of all the studies. As John Locke openly declares in Some Thoughts Concerning Education:

The great work of a governor is to fashion the carriage and form the mind, to settle in his pupil good habits and the principles of virtue and wisdom, to give him by little and little a view of mankind, and work him into a love and imitation of what is excellent and praiseworthy, and in the prosecution of it to give him vigor, activity, and industry. The studies which he sets him upon are but as it were the exercises of his faculties and employment of his time to keep him from sauntering and idleness, to teach him application, and accustom him to take pains, and to give him some little taste of what his own industry must perfect. (70)

The studies themselves pale in comparison to the training in “good habits” and the teacher’s instruction in “the principles of virtue and wisdom.” 

So, our conclusion, for the moment, is that the teacher of the young should not muzzle herself when it comes to opining on matters of wisdom and virtue. She should proactively and deliberately seek to share all the accumulated wisdom on living a good life that she has available to her, from proverbs and sayings, passages of scripture, lessons of life from history, literature, and modern examples. It is the job of a teacher of the young to thus opine. In the next article we’ll continue to explore the methods of instilling prudence in the young through not only “good instruction” but the use of examples, rules and discipline.

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With this groundwork laid in Aristotle and modern research, we proceeded to articulate an understanding of the arts as situated in history and culture, as familial and traditional in nature. The upshot of this view is that we must apprentice students into specific traditions of artistry. We are not training abstract intellectual skills that can be transferred to new contexts, as Bloom’s taxonomy and the faculty theory of education supposed. When we train students in arithmetic or grammar, just like painting or gymnastics, we are inducting them into something both old and new. The ancient insights, styles and methods in these domains have been continuously adjusted and updated since their inception. This does not mean we must accept modern methods or assumptions in various arts (see A Pedagogy of Craft), but it does entail that some traditional artistic abilities and practices have little relevance in our contemporary context. Few schools teach horseback riding or ancient sailing and navigation techniques, and for good reason.

The Limitations of Artistic Divisions

In a similar way, there is no sacrosanct set of divisions between the arts handed down as if from on high. What we see in the classical tradition is a variety of distinctions between the branches of various artistic traditions as they developed over time. Many of the things that we regard as grammar (e.g., distinctions between singular and plural, parts of speech, types of sentences) are discussed by Augustine of Hippo in his treatise On Dialectic (de Dialectica). We should not be surprised at this fact. Since the arts are living traditions, human descriptions of their boundaries and nature are like mapping a flood plain. So, as much as we may nerd out about the Seven Liberal Arts (I am speaking to myself as much as to others…) we should not be disturbed when Hugh of St Victor, for instance, refuses to follow the early medieval divisions. 

(In the Didascalicon Hugh advocates for four branches of knowledge or wisdom: the theoretical [disciplines like mathematics, physics and theology], the practical [ethics and politics], the mechanical [architecture, medicine, agriculture, etc.], and logic, or the science which ensures proper reasoning and clarity in the other sciences.)

While we are, in this series, developing Aristotle’s divisions of the intellectual virtues, therefore, we should not prejudge the idea that his is the best or the only proper mapping of the intellectual virtues, the educational project or the distinctions between categories of knowledge. This series should be viewed as the opening of a conversation about rethinking our educational goals within Aristotelian terms, as more philosophically sound and helpful than Bloom’s Taxonomy. In the same way, though I have often referred to the classical distinction between the arts and sciences, it would be more accurate to reference the Aristotelian distinction between artistry (techne) and scientific knowledge (episteme), which had the effect in the tradition at varying times and places of issuing in a similar distinction between the branches of knowledge and of arts. 

Likewise, with arts in particular, I have proposed a fivefold division of the arts as in my view the most helpful for gesturing toward wholeness in our current renewal movement, and not because I dismiss the elegance of the threefold vision of common, liberal and fine arts, endorsed by Chris Hall, Ravi Jain and Kevin Clark. 

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

1. Athletics, games and sports
2. Common and domestic arts
3. Professions and trades
4. Fine and performing arts
5. The liberal arts of language and number

The main reason to do so lies in the realization that athletics, games and sports are indeed forms of techne, but they are not easily captured under the headings of common, liberal or fine. This is a problem if, as I contend, athletics, games and sports rightly play an important role within education. Separating out professions and trades from the common and domestic arts, secondarily, gestures towards modern cultural realities post-industrialization. Tending a garden in your backyard represents a different stream of craftsmanship than managing a commercial greenhouse. We risk a high degree of unhelpful equivocation by attempting to use medieval categories in the modern world. 

Of course, the fact that these are arts does not entail that we are obliged to train students in all of them—an impossibility in any case! What I have said is that we should structure the academy optimally to cultivate the arts and that we should aim at a universality, not a comprehensiveness, of artistic training in our K-12 educational programs. It is possible to train students in representatives from each of the five categories, with the liberal arts occupying a central role for the production of the other intellectual virtues (see later section in this article). As I discussed in an earlier article, the choice of which arts to cultivate constitutes a cultural judgment based on the calling and opportunities of a particular school. 

If all this talk of the culturally situated nature of the arts lands me in controversy, at least I can claim that I am not anti-tradition, but I am in fact restoring a proper understanding of artistic traditions against the modernist pretensions about objectivity. As Aristotle articulated so clearly, techne concerns itself with the ultimate particular facts, with what may or may not be, with contingent things and not with necessary being. Knowledge of how to make something does not constitute knowledge of the essences of things or philosophic wisdom. These truths are part and parcel of the natural limitations of artistry. 

The Transcendence of Artistry into Morality

However, it is also worth recognizing how artistry can in fact transcend itself. If craftsmanship can be figuratively represented by skillful hands, then as we already explained those same hands are hardwired to the heart and head, and even the spirit. In a way we have already noted this fact at length in the prelude to Apprenticeship in the Arts. Aristotle himself recognized the similarities between morality and artistry. But we have not as yet duly noted the extent to which the training of the hands also conditions the heart. As Comenius recognized, the arts require their own sort of prudence, by which the artisan foresees what will turn out for the best with his artistic production. 

Likewise, a hard and painful practice regimen enables the production of good and beautiful things. In this way, apprenticeship in the arts participates in the nature of the moral training that enables a person to delay instant gratification for the sake of a greater reward later. By thus disciplining the desires, artistic training acts as a natural prelude and arena for the development of self-control and this not only in athletics and sports, but in all the various arts. In both artistry and morality, one must aim at a target and pursue it through reasoned use of contingent means. Techne transcends itself through its natural participation in all the moral virtues and in the intellectual virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom. 

After all, the sphere of human production has a natural affinity with the sphere of human action and goods. Producing something beautiful and valuable is itself a prudent action for a human being. Even more, developing some form of artistry is necessary for living a good life and enjoying the good things of life. Adopting a craftsman mindset in one’s work and getting into the flow of deliberate or purposeful practice constitutes a chief element of a prudent, and therefore happy, life. One must at times display the moral virtues of courage, temperance and justice in the serious work of artistic excellence. Jordan Peterson, for one, has discussed the importance of fair play and reciprocity in games as an emergent ethic. 

Artistry’s Moral and Spiritual Limitations

All this said, we can note again the limits of this blending of artistry into prudence. After all, the super star performer and artistic genius are also liable to moral dissolution and depravity, as we have daily witness in the tabloids. As in the case of the traditions of artistry themselves, it seems that self-control and moral foresight are not necessarily transferred from one sphere of life to another. The devoted Olympic athlete has his impeccable diet and training regimen, but he might be notoriously licentious or proud.

This limitation even shows itself in the spiritual sphere where transformations of artistry can mask, for a time, the impurities of the heart. As Jesus stated explicitly in the Sermon on the Mount,

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” (Matt 7:21-23 ESV)

Spiritual gifts, or what we might call spiritual forms of artistry (since they are productive acts in the world), do not ensure that such artisans are morally sound. They might outwardly perform spiritual works, but in the eyes of God they remain still “workers of lawlessness.” In the same way, our liberal arts educated students may become nothing more than “clever devils,” to borrow C.S. Lewis’ phrase from The Abolition of Man. 

Among other things, this is why we must go on from artistry, which, for all its possibilities for transcendence, is properly basic and preparatory to the other intellectual virtues, rather than constituting them in itself. As Saint Paul claims, “I will show you a still more excellent way” (1 Cor 12:31b ESV), while he transitions from the gifts of spiritual artistry to the transcendent value of love, over and above all the intellectual and moral virtues on display in their full extravagance and grandiosity. Not just tongues of men, but of angels—what a statement to put the trivium arts to shame! “Prophetic powers” and understanding “all mysteries and all knowledge”—what phrases to humble the prophet, scholar and philosopher alike! 

It may be that we can ascribe the term ‘wisdom’ even to the greatest exponents of the arts, as Aristotle mentions in Book VI, ch. 4 of the Nicomachean Ethics. But by this we do not mean either that practical wisdom for life or philosophical wisdom of the highest mysteries.

Artistry as a Prelude to the Other Four Intellectual Virtues

And yet again, the arts can by their very nature transcend toward philosophical wisdom just like toward moral prudence. In the fine arts, for instance, it is not only their beauty that we prize but the messages that our great artists have embodied in shape and form. These insights into the nature of life and reality are valuable in so far as they are true. Or to put it another way, great artists rely on their intuition (nous) or understanding of reality (both in universals and in particulars) for the messages they have skillfully conveyed in artistic form. This intuition about life can, fortunately and unfortunately, coexist with poor habits and a personal lack of prudence. The artist may be our muse, whether or not she herself practices what she preaches!

Not all artistic productions convey a high degree of knowledge about the world, but the higher fine and performing arts, as well as the liberal arts do. In fact, it is these traditional productions of genius—paintings and sculptures, poems and novels, histories and plays, speeches and debates—that act as the forerunners of intuition and scientific knowledge in the student. It is through attention to these Great Works that defy easy categorization that the perceptive and reasoning abilities of the student are honed and developed. They provide a form of enriched second-hand experience enabling students’ thought to grow and mature. By imitating them throughout their training in the arts, students are given more than simply artistry itself. They are given the forerunners of the other intellectual virtues: the opinions of authorities, “the words of the wise and their riddles” (Prov 1:6b ESV).

While experiencing artistic productions can lead to artistry in the student when combined with imitation and coached practice, it is through reflection on the authorities, especially in the liberal arts, that prudence, intuition, scientific knowledge and ultimately philosophical wisdom are developed. In this way, while artistry is not enough, it is by nature a prelude to the other intellectual virtues. For this reason, the tradition recognized training in the liberal arts as preparatory to the sciences. In particular, the traditional productions of artistic wisdom are meant to provide fodder for reflection on the nature of human goods, thus developing prudence. From our Aristotelian vantage point, we can see the late medieval vision of moral philosophy as informing the individual’s development of phronesis. 

In a similar fashion, the arts help us see in a way that we would not on our own, forming our intuition or nous, those starting points for reasoning, whether in human, mathematical or natural spheres. At the same time, training in the liberal arts of language and number enable us to demonstrate propositions to be the case, establishing a statement as true or false. In this way, artistry with words and numbers constitutes the necessary prerequisite for scientific knowledge in what the later tradition would have called metaphysics and natural science. Both deliberation (for affairs of human choice regarding goods) and inquiry (for universal and particular truths regardless of human desire), then, require use, if not mastery, of the liberal arts for their practice. And so, these other intellectual virtues are dependent upon the liberal arts.

So, we are for this reason justified in seeing the liberal arts tradition as in a unique way indebted to the Aristotelian paradigm of intellectual virtues. Although not everyone in the tradition articulated this distinction between the liberal arts and sciences in the same way, the insight about the liberal arts’ central role as the pathways to moral virtue and wisdom owes a great deal to Aristotle. 

It is important to conclude by stating clearly that training in the liberal arts, like other forms of artistry, does not always and necessarily lead to the other intellectual virtues. As Clark and Jain have contended in The Liberal Arts Tradition, the liberal arts are not enough. We need only look to Plato’s Gorgias to see Socrates demolishing this supposition before Aristotle came along. Rhetoric could be a mere knack or craftiness that makes the worse appear to be the better cause. All the arts have their forms of trickery that are out of step with moral or spiritual reality. Artistry, particularly liberal artistry, can transcend itself as the doorway into deeper things, but it need not and therein lies the danger of relying or focusing on it alone. Which is why we must go on from artistry, entering the realms of prudence next….

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

2. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s

3. Breaking Down the Bad of Bloom’s: The False Objectivity of Education as a Modern Social Scienc

4. When Bloom’s Gets Ugly: Cutting the Heart Out of Education

5. What Bloom’s Left Out: A Comparison with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues

6. Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education

7. Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship

8. Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued

9. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions

10. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 2: A Pedagogy of Craft

11. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 3: Crafting Lessons in Artistry

12. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World

13. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry

Next subseries in Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues:

The Counsels of the Wise, Part 1: Foundations of Christian Prudence

The post Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 6: The Transcendence and Limitations of Artistry appeared first on .

Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of artistry (Greek: techne) is by its very nature creative and productive. In order for it to flourish in a school culture, it must draw some of its lifeblood from the natural creative and productive impulse of children as human beings. When they see the products and beautiful creations of the masters of these living traditions, then they will naturally want to imitate them (see Comenius, The Great Didactic, 195-196). Drawing from this natural desire will make unnecessary the carrots and sticks of modern education’s manipulative motivational techniques. 

The Example of the Renaissance Guilds

We might be tempted to think that the structure of a system, like a school, has nothing to do with the cultivation of high levels of artistry or genius. We are tempted to think primarily in terms of in-born talent as a fixed entity (see Aristotle and the Growth Mindset • Educational Renaissance), but research on geniuses and elite performers points in another direction. In his book, The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle notes that geniuses “are not scattered uniformly through time and space” but “tend to appear in clusters” (61-62): 

Athens from 440 B.C. to 380 B.C., Florence from 1440 to 1490, and London from 1570-1640. Of these three none is so dazzling or well documented as Florence. In the space of a few generations a city with a population slightly less than that of present day Stillwater, Oklahoma, produced the greatest outpouring of artistic achievement the world has ever known. A solitary genius is easy to understand, but dozens of them, in the space of two generations? How could it happen? (62)

The scholar David Banks proposes a number of possible explanations that we might expect: the prosperity of Florence, its relative peace and freedom, etc. Unfortunately, each one of these is disproved by the historical record. Instead, the flurry of genius-level work is best explained by a social structure and educational process relentlessly focused on deep practice: the craft guilds:

As it turns out, Florence was an epicenter for the rise of a powerful social invention called craft guilds. Guilds (the word means “gold”) were associations of weavers, painters, goldsmiths, and the like who organized themselves to regulate competition and control quality. They had management, dues, and tight policies dictating who could work in the craft. What they did best, however, was grow talent. Guilds were built on the apprenticeship system, in which boys around seven years of age were sent to live with masters for fixed terms of five to ten years. (64)

The apprenticeship process that we have discussed throughout this series, it seems, can have better and worse cultural structures for training students in artistry. On a side note, the hierarchy of excellence seems to foster artistic genius more readily than the democracy of talent. In addition, the experience of apprentices at the bottom of the hierarchy mirrors the recommendations of Comenius for students to begin with the most basic and practical skills of the craft, and not with elaborate theory. As Coyle further explains,

An apprentice worked directly under the tutelage and supervision of the master, who frequently assumed rights as the child’s legal guardian. Apprentices learned the craft from the bottom up, not through lecture or theory but through action: mixing paint, preparing canvases, sharpening chisels. They cooperated and competed within a hierarchy, rising after some years to the status of journeyman and eventually, if they were skilled enough, master. This system created a chain of mentoring: da Vinci studied under Verrocchio, Verrocchio studied under Donatello, Donatello studied under Ghiberti; Michelangelo studied under Ghirlandaio, Ghirlandaio studied under Baldovinetti, and so on, all of them frequently visiting one another’s studios in a cooperative-competitive arrangement that today would be called social networking. (64)

This apprenticeship system can be thrown in stark relief with our common vision of what a “liberal arts education” should look like. Are our teachers masters of the liberal arts? Are our students cooperating and competing within a culture focused on rewarding excellence? Or are they simply hearing lectures on knowledge, taking notes and taking tests? Is their educational experience properly artistic in nature, focused on production in the common, liberal and fine arts? Are they systematically and structurally encouraged to try to solve problems of a production, even if they fail again and again along the way? Or are they motivated by grades, and jumping through the hoops of a rigid system?

In short, apprentices spent thousands of hours solving problems, trying and failing and trying again, within the confines of a world build on the systematic production of excellence. Their life was roughly akin to that of a twelve-year-old intern who spends a decade under the direct supervision of Steven Spielberg, painting sets, sketching storyboards, setting cameras. The notion that such a kid might one day become a great film director would hardly be a surprise: it would be closer to unavoidable (see Ron Howard). (64-65)

The Renaissance Guilds offer us a compelling vision of how the academy could be structured for artistry in a way that transcends the conventions of the modern school.

Adopting an Apprenticeship Model of Grading

This leads us to a first implication for the academy of our better understanding of Apprenticeship in the Arts. Students should be induced to create and produce with excellence, not by the overuse of fear or love, grades, punishments or rewards, but by their natural desire for imitation, creativity and production. Charlotte Mason put it this way: 

These principles are limited by the respect due to the personality [i.e. personhood] of children, which must not be encroached upon whether by the direct use of fear or love, suggestions or influence, or by undue play upon any one natural desire. (vol. 6, p. 80)

For this reason, and to avoid the grade inflation so typical of schools today, at the school where I serve as principal we have adopted an apprenticeship model of grading for our younger students and in artistic subjects for older students . 

This Apprenticeship model attempts to assign accurately a student’s level of mastery of grade-level artistic expectations. Since, as we discussed before, so much of K-12 education consists of training in the arts (if we include all the skill development of the liberal arts as well as the fine and performing arts!), it makes the most sense to assess students’ progression through the traditional vision of apprenticeship. When learning an art, every student begins at the level of novice, where the entire nature of the art and its practice is still new and unknown to the student. Through introduction to the art and early experiences in beginning to imitate a master, the student proceeds to the status of apprentice. At this point the student must still be watched closely by the master as he or she is producing, since the apprentice is liable to make mistakes and therefore still in need of some hand-holding and regular demonstration or correction to help the student practice the art correctly. After the student has gained some facility and can work mostly on his or her own, he has attained the status of journeyman, being able to produce the goods of the art dependably and with a measure of both autonomy and excellence. Finally, when a student displays a high level of artistry, excellence and a seasoned understanding that implies the ability to teach or train others in the craft, he or she has become a master, at least of that subskill. 

Apprenticeship Model Grade Levels

• Novice — a student who is new to the art and unacquainted with the processes that lead to proper production
• Apprentice — a student who is imitating the processes with some measure of success, but is also in need of frequent support and correction by the master
• Journeyman — a student who can produce the beautiful goods of the art with some autonomy and creative artistry
• Master — a student who consistently displays artistry and independent creativity, as well as the mastery that implies the ability to train others in the art

Adopting this sort of grading philosophy and system in a school can help clarify for teachers, students, and parents the actual nature of much of the educational project. When traditional grades are used it is often unclear whether or not students should be graded mainly on the completion of assignments or their effort, as opposed to their understanding and mastery. While no doubt students who work hard should be recognized in some way, when artistry is being judged it can actually be demotivating to students to adopt an A for effort standard. Objective grading honors the facts that students’ consciences are sensitive to and can observe quite clearly in front of their faces: some students produce more excellent and beautiful work than others. 

At the same time, this apprenticeship model avoids the judgmental approach of a traditional, objective grading system, because it creates a story arc of progression from the lower levels. Everyone starts out as a novice in any area of artistry. Very few students will attain mastery of any art or subskill in a given year in which it is introduced. When this expectation is introduced and normalized in a school culture, the rare situations of student mastery can be appropriately recognized and celebrated in a way that encourages all other students to continue to strive for excellence. 

That said, overemphasizing the judgment of grades can also be detrimental and ineffective. So even though it is important to retain the assessment of students’ mastery levels, perhaps the more effective assessments are cultural. When students are being trained to produce in a craft, their work should be displayed before their peers, their parents and the school community. This inspires the natural motivation to do their best and involves the natural judgment process of the community for what artistry looks like. Because of this, academic events, performances and competitions provide the natural clearinghouse for developing a culture of artistry. 

Many of these school events almost go without saying in the school calendar, but their value is often overlooked and neglected. Why do students work so hard for artistry in sports, when they might not for other school activities? Because their artistry is clearly on display and being judged through the natural cooperative-competitive environment of the game or tournament, with spectators watching for their success. In the same way, a classical Christian school can make much of liberal arts through academic events like a Spelling Bee, Speech Meet, or public debate, with rules strictly followed and mandatory participation, and with audiences and judges in attendance. In the same way, when classes perform recitations (i.e. memorized passages of scripture, poems or historical speeches) in front of the entire school and teachers are encouraged to impart a dramatic flair, the training of the rote memory turns into the artistry of rhetoric. 

Viewed in this light, school concerts and plays, competitions and games, art galleries, and displays of student work at events are not nice extras at a school. Instead, these school community activities become earnest teaching and learning moments that apprentice students in the arts and create a culture of craftsmanship in the academy. Academic events should be chosen with care and conducted with reverence for the mission and beating heart of the school. Although a school calendar can become overscheduled, we should remember that such performances, whether high or low stakes, are opportunities for cultivating the natural motivation of students to excel in artistry. Such opportunities are potentially transformative educational experiences and should be viewed as a crucial piece of the curriculum or course of study. 

Understanding the motivational value of proper grading in an apprenticeship model as well as the role of academic events, competitions and performances can go a long way toward creating a culture of artistry and excellence at a school. But we should not be unaware of the deeper spiritual ramifications of this process. 

Apprenticeship in Christian Perspective

First, we need to remember that the creation of beautiful and good things is innately human. God created mankind in his image as the stewards of creation and he commissioned human beings with the cultural mandate: the call to fill the earth and subdue it. This is rightly interpreted as an invitation to all the creative arts, or techne which use the stuff of earth as the raw material for the creating beautiful and good artifacts. (Read Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education.) That is precisely what we see happening in Genesis 4. In spite of sin and its disastrous effects displayed in Cain and Abel, we see the progenitors of various common, liberal and fine arts:

Adah gave birth to Jabal; he was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all who play stringed instruments and pipes. Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. (Gen 4:22 ESV)

Thus the apprenticeship model was born. We might note that it was initially passed down in families; apprenticeship and the father-son, mother-daughter relationship went hand in hand. 

So apprenticeship in true, good and beautiful arts is human and therefore part and parcel of a redeemed Christian life. As human beings created in the image of God, our lives are most whole and fruitful when they fulfill the creation mandate through some type of artistry, through culture-making to borrow Andy Crouch’s term.

But secondly, we can note from the traditional and familial nature of apprenticeship, that it often carries with it, by nature, the lifestyle of the master craftsman. All the arts are embodied by their master craftsmen in a way of life, involving their beautiful creation and practice of the art, ideally alongside a full and good life. But let me be clear, this very fact means that apprenticeship in the arts as a means of bringing up children in the discipline and nurture of the Lord (see Eph 6:4) must be embodied as part and parcel of a whole Christian life. 

So if Christian parents apprentice their child to a pagan man who is a master of rhetoric, they should not be surprised if their child eventually takes on the moral and spiritual faults of this man, even if they also gain some of his rhetorical skill. That is how human beings work. In the same way if a young girl is apprenticed to an immoral dance or music teacher, who is immersed in a pluralistic world with its values, it is not impossible that over time the influence of that world will be transferred to her alongside the art. 

This is one of the forgotten premises by which our Christian classical schools attempt to operate. In the modern factory model of education we have forgotten what Jesus said: “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40 ESV). Disciple – apprentice – student. We have forgotten that these are roughly equivalent terms

Of course, when we follow Quintilian’s lead and partially apprentice children to many different arts (see On the Education of the Orator I.12), we minimize the potentially negative influence of any one teacher, but we do not really depart from this principle. In fact, we might say that at an ideal classical Christian school, a university or wholeness of the arts and sciences, this apprenticeship process under the leadership of a head master, a head magister or teacher, or else a principal or chief teacher (this is what these words original meant), the whole school of teachers pass on a communal way of life together. The culture of the school with all its teachers, curriculum, classes and traditions, apprentices the individual students.

This insight about apprenticeship as resonating with the nature of true Christian classical education is well-summed up in a statement of the school where I serve as Principal, Coram Deo Academy. We say that we apprentice students into the Great Conversation for the purpose of the Great Commission and the Great Commandment. 

To sum up, so far I have indicated by two statements the way in which apprenticeship in artistry, i.e. various arts, established traditions of craftsmanship, whether liberal, common or fine, contributes to the spiritual development of children. Those two ways are, first, through the fulfillment of our human calling in the creation mandate to act as sub-creators of good and beautiful things. This is what it means to fulfill our purpose as human beings, and therefore artistry is part of how we experience the redeemed Christian life. But second is through Christian apprenticeship into the life of good works established for us by Christ the true Master’s life, death and resurrection, the life of those apprenticed to him and characteristic of the family of God. And we should recall again the warning attached to this point, that non-Christian masters, teachers, artisans are by nature liabilities as well as potential sources of the blessing of artistry. 

Entwining the Spiritual and Artistic Goals of the Academy

Because of this, the classical Christian school rightly has a high bar of qualifications for its faculty based on spiritual maturity. The character of the teachers will inevitably have a long term influence on the character of the students. Structurally, then, the leadership of a school should not only develop careful recruiting and hiring processes that are intended to ensure the Christian maturity of its teachers, they should bake into the life of the school some measure of the spiritual practices of the church that aim at developing spiritual maturity. It is not that classical Christian academies should attempt to replace the worship and community of the local church, but by involving the faculty and staff in the rhythm of prayer, worship, and scripture reading, characteristic of the universal church, the discipleship—or, should I say, apprenticeship—of the Christian life become evident in the school culture. 

It is important, in this connection, to fuse our goals for training in artistry through assessment and artistic events, with discipleship in an appropriate and not an artificial way. The cross country coach can lead students in prayer before a race. The Spring Concert can feature the famous poems, spirituals and hymns of Christian worship, artfully performed. Academic events can include brief homiletical exhortation and instruction as part of the program, alongside the competition or performance itself. Assessments, awards and recognition of artistry can be publicly relativized to higher spiritual ends. Excellence in artistry can be deliberately and intentionally pursued soli Deo gloria, with glory to God alone, as J.S. Bach signed his masterful musical compositions. 

Further, the leadership of a school must be careful not to compromise core spiritual commitments for artistic ends, whether in hiring faculty or staff or in the nature of the content or practices. It can be so easy to tolerate that borderline coach or drama teacher, or to skate the line of acceptability in some way. Because, after all, the sports team or play is so important to the kids and their families…. Often this is a false dichotomy, but even when not, we should be willing to sacrifice high quality artistry for gospel purity whenever necessary, remembering Jesus’ words: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36 KJV) The value of intellectual virtues can never outweigh that of spiritual virtues. As Paul says, “For while bodily training is of some value, godliness [i.e. piety] is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come” (1 Tim 4:8 ESV). That said, artistry can be used in support of higher ends; prime examples are musical worship and preaching (derived from two of the traditional liberal arts, music and rhetoric). 

The classical Christian school is the ideal place for this beautiful fusion to occur and be actively trained. Such considerations should color an academy’s vision of their school’s or their students’ future greatness. Kolby Atchison has discussed the application of the Hedgehog Concept from Jim Collins Good to Great to classical Christian schools. Decisions about which arts to pursue and prioritize, when the list of possible arts seems endless, would benefit from careful thought about a school’s Hedgehog Concept: what the school can be the best in the world at will involve the culture, events and arts that are emphasized in the curricular and extracurricular programs. Innovations in a school will often occur here as leaders capitalize on local opportunities and the community’s unique giftings.

After all, we can become like the Renaissance Guilds in every area of artistic excellence possible. Greatness requires focused effort on particular arts. And true Christian artistry focuses us even more narrowly on what will serve Christ in our generational moment. As C.T. Studd wrote in his famous poem, “Only one life, ’twill soon be past, / Only what’s done for Christ will last.”

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

2. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s

3. Breaking Down the Bad of Bloom’s: The False Objectivity of Education as a Modern Social Science

4. When Bloom’s Gets Ugly: Cutting the Heart Out of Education

5. What Bloom’s Left Out: A Comparison with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues

6. Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education

7. Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship

8. Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued

9. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions

10. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 2: A Pedagogy of Craft

11. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 3: Crafting Lessons in Artistry

12. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World

Final article in this series:

14. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 6: The Transcendence and Limitations of Artistry

The post Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry appeared first on .

“You’ve got to find what you love….[T]he only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle.” (as qtd in Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, 3) 

There are few premises more ubiquitous in our career counseling world than this passion mindset; and, as Cal Newport demonstrates, there are few ideas more misleading and damaging. Stories of people who quit their day-job to pursue their dreams often end in financial ruin, as well as the dashing of those same dreams. Interviews of people like Jobs who have ‘found their passion’ actually reveal that “compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion” (13). This is because passion for a career often coexists with quite a bit of drudgery and comes as the result of a great deal of effort expended in developing rare and valuable skills or what we might call arts. In fact, it is the “craftsman mindset,” Newport explains, that is the surest route to work you love.

What is the craftsman mindset? It is to focus on a job as an apprenticeship in a tradition of artistry as a means to offer some valuable good or service to the world at a high degree of excellence or mastery. Perhaps you can see how his insight connects with the apprenticeship process that leads to Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of craftsmanship or artistry (in Greek techne). Newport contrasts the craftsman mindset with the passion mindset this way:

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you…. When you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy—these come later…. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions [like]…. “Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?” (38, 39)

Ironically the advice to pursue your passion in work ends up resulting in a hyper-critical and self-focused spirit that makes it almost impossible to enjoy your work. Instead, if a person allows their consciousness to get lost in the hard work of creating value through deliberate practice of their craft, they are more likely to experience flow and over time earn the career capital needed to negotiate the details of their work to their own liking. Newport draws on the research of Anders Ericsson on deliberate practice and applies it to the professional world of not-so-deliberate pathways to excellence. 

This excursus on career counseling paradigms has a purpose in our overall evaluation of apprenticeship in the arts. Newports’ compelling case for the craftsman mindset sets in stark relief the modern school’s marginalization of artistry and craftsmanship, for all our elite stadiums and flashing performing arts centers. One of the major effects of Bloom’s Taxonomy’s abstraction of intellectual skills is that it has severed the life of the academy from the artistry of the professional career world. In addition, the passion hypothesis is one of the plagues of the postmodern buffet of potential selves that students are being subtly and not so subtly indoctrinated into in our contemporary schools.

In this article we will explore how to restore this link through a recovery of artistry in our schools without embracing either utilitarian pragmatism on the one hand, or the ivory tower separation characteristic of many modern and postmodern schools, whether they call themselves classical, progressive or otherwise.

The Liberal Arts as Pathways of Professional Preparation

In endorsing Newport’s craftsman mindset, I am very aware that I will sound like a utilitarian pragmatist to many classical educators. What, after all, hath Career to do with the Academy? Isn’t the entire purpose of the classical education movement to throw off the tyranny of the urgent and the capitalistic reduction of education to career preparation? The Academy should focus on the timeless and perennial things, not STEM and training for the jobs of tomorrow. 

While I understand and acknowledge the importance of this type of polemic against K-12 education as mere college and career preparation (in fact, we have engaged in it on EdRen from time to time, even or especially at the opening of this series countering Bloom’s Taxonomy), this argument in its bare form ultimately resolves itself into a false dichotomy. It is not either the case that education is all career preparation or that it involves no career preparation at all. In actual fact, a proper education ought to prepare a student for many different careers: as John Milton said in his tractate,

“I call therefore a compleat and generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publick of Peace and War.” (see “Of Education” in the John Milton Reading Room managed by Dartmouth College)

Just performance might correspond to Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis), while magnanimous might gesture toward the enlargement of mind or soul characteristic of a person who has attained some measure of philosophic wisdom (sophia) through the long cultivation of intuition (nous) and scientific knowledge (episteme). But skillful performance corresponds to apprenticeship in those arts which undergird all the professions. 

While training in artistry is, then, not the whole of a “compleat and generous Education,” it constitutes a fundamental core of training in productive intellectual virtue. This can be illustrated further through recovering the liberal arts themselves as pathways of professional preparation. In our zeal for the ivory towers of the Middle Ages and Classical Era, we too often forget the origins of the liberal arts themselves as professional arts. It may be true that the liberal arts are used to discover and justify knowledge (see e.g. Clark and Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition 3.0, 39-43), yet they began their traditional life as practical skills for prominent professions. 

• Grammatical training prepared the scribes of the ancient world in using the technology of writing to assist in marketplaces or business transactions, the religious affairs of a temple complex or the administration of a royal bureaucracy. 

• Rhetoric came to prominence in classical Greece largely because of a democratic city-state polity which relied on public speakers and trial lawyers to decide the city’s political strategies and legal cases. 

• Dialectic might be Socrates’ own invention, but his art of discussion arose in a rich context of traveling public intellectuals and built on the tradition of wise men and sages who functioned as professional teachers and purveyors of wisdom, developing into the tool or art of the philosopher.

• Arithmetic is the characteristic art of the household manager, the merchant and the treasury official. The earliest written documents in many societies are more than likely numerical records and calculations of goods and services.

• Geometry is the architect’s and the general’s art, because both building and war require the exact mathematical calculations involved in creating sturdy and dependable use of resources, whether wood, metal or stone, or else in coordinating the movements of regiments of armed men, cavalry or assault weaponry. 

• Astronomy, likewise, concerned the military general, as well as the merchant or ship captain, since charting the stars enabled one to travel from place to place reliably.

• And finally, the art of music was practiced by musicians who provided entertainment and the cultural transference of stories and values through soothing sounds and melodies, along with the poetic words that often accompanied the playing of an instrument. 

Apprenticeship in these liberal arts, just like the common and domestic arts, or other professions and trades, functioned as pathways of preparation for a life of service to the community. Even if they could be contrasted with servile arts as more fitting to a free man in ancient cultures, they nevertheless performed important functions for society that were remunerated, in one way or another. Therefore, drawing too strong a dividing wall of hostility between the Academy and the working world strikes me as historically inaccurate. Students today may choose between a technical college (remember that techne is Aristotle’s term for artistry) and a liberal arts college, but that does not mean the liberal arts are unconnected to the professions. 

This argument may be complicated by the fact that few modern professions require a person to practice only one art anymore. The modern equivalent of a blacksmith (i.e. a member of a company that forges metallic tools) might engage in several arts in a given day: computer programming (a development of grammar and arithmetic?), project management (rhetoric and dialectic), engineering and design (arithmetic and geometry), and checking and responding to email (grammar and dialectic). Of course, there are the specific sub-skills of using particular computer programs, machine maintenance, etc., that might be unique to a specific profession or company. But the point stands that the liberal arts, like all other arts, are not absent from the working world of production but are deliberately preparatory to its tasks. 

Artistic Training in the Academy

All this follows naturally from what we have said in earlier articles on Apprenticeship in the Arts. Since arts are living traditions with an originator, they are constantly being updated and adjusted to new contexts and technologies. Navigation is not now what it once was. The arts are culturally and historically situated; they may carry with them the memory of their traditions, as painters now must reckon with the styles and movements of the past. But the traditional nature of the arts entails their vital connection to their contemporary expressions in many professions or by their elite performers. Apprenticeship in the arts is one of the ways that the Academy draws its lifeblood from the working world. 

As such, the Academy is most likely to excel at cultivating the virtue of techne in various arts when it draws some of its strength from the professions of the surrounding community. This is part of the brilliance of John Milton’s call for connecting what Chris Hall calls the common arts with the mathematical arts in his “Of Education”:

To set forward all these proceedings in Nature and Mathematicks, what hinders, but that they may procure, as oft as shal be needful, the helpful experiences of Hunters, Fowlers, Fishermen, Shepherds, Gardeners, Apothecaries; and in the other sciences, Architects, Engineers, Mariners, Anatomists; who doubtless would be ready some for reward, and some to favour such a hopeful Seminary. And this will give them such a real tincture of natural knowledge, as they shall never forget, but daily augment with delight. (see “Of Education” in the John Milton Reading Room)

The idea that it is unclassical to share with students the experiences of the working world with all its goods, services and products is a pernicious one. We should be wary of falling into the trap of trying to prove that our education is unpractical to distinguish it from modern pragmatism and utilitarianism. Ironically, we will have to subvert the nature of the liberal arts themselves, as well as other arts to truly accomplish such an ivory tower task. It is all well and good to argue for schole or leisure as the basis of culture (see Josef Pieper’s book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, or Chris Hall’s reference in Common Arts Education, 41), but it is not quite accurate to blame the modern white collar and blue collar divide for a utilitarian view of the liberal arts, as Hall does: “these liberal arts were harnessed less for their ancient purposes, and more for their utilitarian ends” (41).

Leisure may have more to do with the philosophical act of contemplation, or the cultivation of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues of intuition, scientific knowledge and philosophic wisdom, than it does with the liberal arts. After all, this would seem to do better justice to the context of Pieper’s work. The liberal arts, like all other arts, are productive and savor more of the workaday world, even if they can be pursued for their own sake or as ends in themselves, as I have argued at length in The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow through Classical Education.

I absolutely concede the danger on the other side of reducing education to mere career preparation. This, however, is easily avoided by making the other intellectual virtues of Aristotle major ends or objectives of education as well. Prudence is not developed by time spent drawing a painting, nor is philosophic wisdom attained through an internship at a local company. But time spent being well coached by practitioners of various arts, in athletics, games and sports, common and domestic arts, fine and performing arts, the professions and trades, and the ever-present liberal arts themselves, will prepare students for the working world. 

By showing them how these arts are currently practiced and drawing inspiration from these contemporary contexts, students will look out at their future selves as producers and will be inspired and ignited with the passion necessary for deliberate practice. This is why Comenius places as the first step for training in artistry that the instructor “take them into the workshop and bid them look at the work that has been produced, and then, when they wish to imitate this (for man is an imitative animal), they place tools in their hands and show them how they should be held and used” (The Great Didactic, 195-196). Human beings by nature desire to create; we are imitative culture makers!

Comenius’ vision of turning schools into “workshops humming with work” has this outcome as one of its goals: the invigoration of the learning environment through a proper overlap with the working world. Creative production has a power in it that can be harnessed for educational purposes. Then at the end of a productive apprenticeship session, “students whose efforts prove successful will experience the truth of the proverb: ‘We give form to ourselves and to our materials at the same time’” (195). Students are internalizing the craftsman mindset focused on honing their craft in productive service to the world.

This is not a carrots and sticks based motivational method, but the second level motivation of what Daniel Pink calls “mastery” in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He quotes Teresa Mabile, a professor of Harvard University, as saying, “The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it’s in the arts, sciences or business” (116). Pink goes on to associate this level of intrinsic motivation with Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow, the enjoyable experience of appropriate challenge in a meaningful pursuit of mastery. Connecting students organically to the real-world mastery of the working world, not trying to motivate them to perform well through grades and the threat of a menial career, is the real way to engage them delightfully in their studies. It also cultivates the craftsman mindset now that will help them experience work they love later. 

It is worth pausing to consider what percentage of an ideal school day would involve training students in arts. When you add up art class, music and PE, the language arts, math, and the training aspects of science, Bible, and the humanities, not to mention the sports, extracurriculars and other artistic lessons that students have after school, along with the practice regimen of both homework and these side pursuits, we might see the majority of a student’s day as engaged in some part of the apprenticeship process. It is imperative that we get this aspect of the Academy right. It is not just the training of students’ metaphorical hands that is at stake. 

In the next article, I will discuss the spiritual implications of how to capture students’ hearts through the apprenticeship model by creating a culture of craftsmanship. Building on our understanding of the importance of apprenticeship in artistry to connect the life of the Academy organically with the working world, we will delve into the example of the Renaissance guilds. This will help us consider macro-implications for the organizational structure of our schools, including the role of curriculum, academic events, and programs for specific arts in the Academy’s broader apprenticeship process.

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

2. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s

3. Breaking Down the Bad of Bloom’s: The False Objectivity of Education as a Modern Social Science

4. When Bloom’s Gets Ugly: Cutting the Heart Out of Education

5. What Bloom’s Left Out: A Comparison with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues

6. Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education

7. Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship

8. Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued

9. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions

10. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 2: A Pedagogy of Craft

11. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 3: Crafting Lessons in Artistry

Later articles in this series:

13. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry

14. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 6: The Transcendence and Limitations of Artistry

The post Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World appeared first on .

In addition, my five fold division of the arts is careful to situate various forms of artistry in time and place, their historical traditions, so that we can avoid modernism’s totalizing fallacy. 

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

1. Athletics, games and sports
2. Common and domestic arts
3. Professions and trades
4. Fine and performing arts
5. The liberal arts of language and number

The important takeaway here is the need to train students in embodied and culturally situated skills, rather than reducing the liberal arts, for instance, to general studies. Students should be able to produce something in the world because of their training in artistry, not just know random facts.

This led me to propose a pedagogy or training method for artistry, drawing primarily from John Amos Comenius, the famous Reformation educator. We distilled from Comenius a set of basic steps that all arts have in common:

1. Students are given a general acquaintance with the works produced, the end-products of the art.
2. Students respond with a natural desire to imitate through producing works of their own.
3. The master provides the students with the proper tools and models their use, showing them examples of the techniques.
4. The master corrects the students through both examples and advice, sharing the theories and precepts while correcting students.

These steps follow the classical principle of mimesis or imitation that the CiRCE Institute has popularized among classical educators. In many cases, however, the focus among CiRCE folk sometimes edges toward knowledge to be learned or understood rather than a complex skill to be mastered. Aristotle’s terminology helps us to make a crisper distinction between these two teaching tasks. Knowing a truth is different from know-how. Artistry, for Aristotle, is clearly know-how, while nous, or intuition, would correspond with the understanding of ideas or first principles. 

To be sure, the student must understand several things in order to develop in artistry: the purpose of the art he is learning, how to use the tools, how to avoid common mistakes, etc. So a student of an art does develop a certain intuition about quality artistry through an art, but that is not the primary goal. His understanding serves his practice and not the other way around. (Were the budding artist to shift gears and become a critic of the art, as retired football players sometimes become sportscasters or former politicians become political commentators, then the artist’s developed intuition would come to the fore as the intellectual virtue on which he would depend for his new rhetorical product.)

Developing a Lesson in Craft

The basic process outlined above can serve as the springboard for a more fully articulated lesson in artistry. In other contexts, I have advocated for a Narration-Trivium lesson structure aimed at training students in the Trivium arts, while teaching them the sciences, what we might call general content knowledge in various areas. In laying out an alternative lesson structure for training a student in the arts, I am not abandoning this earlier approach, but adding a very necessary complement to it. Let me explain.

One way of viewing the nature of good teaching is to isolate the main goal that such an act of teaching has, as in its own way Bloom’s Taxonomy is careful to do. John Milton Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching highlights the act of teaching as one of conveying knowledge or some truth. This sees teaching as primarily focused on content that a student absorbs into herself and makes her own. On the other hand, Gregory is careful to note in his introduction that there is another branch of the educational art, which he calls training and describes as “the systematic development and cultivation of the powers of mind and body” (10). Gregory even goes so far as to say, 

These two great branches of educational art–training and teaching–though separable in thought, are not separable in practice. We can only train by teaching, and we teach best when we train best. Training implies the exercise of the powers to be trained; but the proper exercise of the intellectual powers is found in the acquisition, the elaboration, and the application of knowledge. (11)

Gregory’s insight here is profound, but it does not quite make up for the fact that he has neglected the art of training by centering his whole work on the act of teaching.

In my view, the problem with Gregory’s attempt to merge training and teaching is one and the same with the totalizing impulse of modernism (in which Gregory participated). At some times, we are focused on training students in a skill, while at others we are endeavoring to teach them content knowledge. To operate as teachers with only one type of lesson, despite the differences between the intellectual virtues we are aiming to cultivate, is to court disaster at worst, and to confuse the issue at best. 

Thoughtful teachers do, in fact, operate very differently when they are training vs teaching. Aristotle’s distinctions between the intellectual virtues of artistry and scientific knowledge, intuition or prudence would have kept us more in line with common sense, if we had retained them. In Gregory’s favor I do think that we can maximize our content-based lessons, by also affording our students with practice in the trivium arts (see Narration-Trivium Lesson). In the same way, I believe that the Apprenticeship Lesson that I am proposing now can and should help students gain general knowledge. But I believe it is more helpful to teachers to set a primary goal for a lesson, and then allow subsidiary goals to fall in line to support. The Apprenticeship Lesson recognizes the development of artistry or skill as the primary goal, thus avoiding the knowledge-transfer default of much modern education.

The Apprenticeship Movement (I-We-You)

In his book Teach Like a Champion 2.0 Doug Lemov coined the phrase I-We-You to convey the movement in a practice-based lesson from modeling a new skill or process, to involving students together in the process, before releasing students to work on their own. In his most recent update (3.0) he uses the terms Direct Instruction/Knowledge Assimilation, Guided Practice/Guided Questioning, and Independent Practice (241-245). We can see the dichotomy even here between a focus on content and skills. ‘Practice’ seems to accord better with training in skills, while ‘instruction,’ ‘knowledge’ and ‘questioning’ gesture toward teaching content.

(Wondering how Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion can be appropriated by classical Christian educators? Check out Kolby Atchison’s free eBook, “The Craft of Teaching for Classical Educators.”)

In any case, the movement from modeling with examples (I), to holding the hands of students as they work (We), to releasing them to accountable independent practice (You) provides a handy application of Comenius’ steps. Its flexibility for artistic skills as different as proper form when shooting a basket or solving an algebraic equation make it a promising foundation for our Apprenticeship Lesson format. 

Do Now is another valuable teaching technique for an Apprenticeship Lesson that is described by Doug Lemov in Teach Like a Champion (see 3.0 p. 187ff.). The reason for this is the importance of immediately engaging students in productive activity when we are training them in an art. A key danger for trainers is to hinder a student’s progress by over-explanation of rules and precepts, when action should be the name of the game. As Comenius says in his Analytical Didactic, 

Doing cannot be learned except by doing. Hence the saying, ‘We create by creating.’ One becomes a writer by writing, a painter by painting, a singer by singing, a speaker by speaking; and so it is with all external acts. (155)

Therefore he goes on to express it as a principle that “in every art there should be more practice than theory” (157). 

Lemov describes the cultural rationale that supports starting a lesson with a “quality task” that students can practice independently:

We want students to engage in productive and high-quality work that interests and challenges them right away, and over time we want to make a habit of this, so they expect to be actively and meaningfully engaged any time they enter our classrooms. We want them to know we are prepared and value their learning. They will not be passive; there will be very little downtime. (187)

We can imagine starting an Apprenticeship Lesson in a sport with a consistent drill that rehearses a set of core or fundamental skills; in a musical instrument, with scales or warm up exercises; in liberal art, with practice problems, exercises or a short writing task. The Do Now step of an Apprenticeship Lesson may not be strictly required, based on classical principles, but it remains a valuable default to be departed from only with good reason. 

Lastly, Lemov also articulates the value of checking for understanding (see ch. 3 of 3.0, pp. 75ff.; see also Kolby’s article on the topic). I have placed this as a step following guided practice (We) in the Apprenticeship Lesson, because of the danger of setting students’ free to independent practice too soon. Classical educators have long recognized the need to hasten slowly (festina lente) by ensuring the foundation is well laid, before building upon it. Comenius reflects on this fact for a pedagogy of artistry in The Great Didactic through the classical example of Timotheus the musician:

For this reason Timotheus the musician used to demand twice as large a fee from those pupils who had learned the rudiments of their art elsewhere, saying that his labour was twofold, as he had first to get them out of the bad habits that they had acquired, and then to teach them correctly. Those, therefore, who are learning any art should take care to make themselves masters of the rudiments by imitating their copies accurately. This difficulty once overcome, the rest follows of itself, just as a city lies at the mercy of foes when its gates are broken in. All haste should be avoided, lest we proceed to advanced work before the elementary stages have been mastered. He goes fast enough who never quits the road, and a delay which is caused by obtaining a thorough grip of first principles is really no delay, but an advance toward mastering what follows with ease, speed, and accuracy. (200)

Therefore it is prudent for the trainer of an art to check for students’ understanding before letting them practice independently, and then during independent practice, to circulate and actively correct students’ errors, as Comenius also states in his 9th canon, “Errors must be corrected by the master on the spot; but precepts, that is to say the rules, and the exceptions to the rules, must be given at the same time.” (200)

The Inspirational Coach

The various pieces of the puzzle for an Apprenticeship Lesson are almost interlocked. One final contribution comes from Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, which we have drawn from before to discuss the role of myelin (the white fatty substance that wraps around neural networks to increase speed and accuracy of firing) in the development of complex skill. Drawing from the research of Anders Ericsson, who coined the terms deliberate and purposeful practice, Coyle has painted a stunning picture of the “coaches” behind the training of world class athletes and performers. 

Aside from the core skill-set of providing the targeted feedback day in and day out, “like farmers: careful, deliberate cultivators of myelin” (Coyle, The Talent Code, 165), these Talent Whisperers, as Coyle calls them, are actually coaching their students to love the art. As he explains, 

They succeed because they are tapping into the second element of the talent code: ignition. They are creating and sustaining motivation; they are teaching love. As Bloom’s study [of world class performers’ first teachers] summed up, ‘The effect of this first phase of learning seemed to be to get the learner involved, captivated, hooked, and to get the learner to need and want more information and expertise.’ (175)

There must be a place for joy and inspiration, meaningfully conveyed from the coach to the artist-in-training. That is why I have placed an Inspirational Idea as a step in the Apprenticeship Lesson, even if this feature might not always be very long or strictly necessary. Speaking warmly about the beauty of the end product or the value of discipline, even for only 30 seconds, can help the average teacher pause long enough to consider the cultivation of her students’ motivation and love for the art, as opposed to just getting down to work and possibly losing them in drudgery.

The Apprenticeship Lesson

At this point I would invite you to visit a new webpage on Educational Renaissance that offers the Apprenticeship Lesson as a free downloadable resource. By sharing your email, you’ll receive our weekly blog in your inbox. If you haven’t already, I’d also encourage you to access my free resource on “Charlotte Mason and the Trivium” that details how to plan lessons with the Narration-Trivium Lesson structure. 

These two types of lessons complement one another by focusing either on training in artistry or skill (Apprenticeship) or on teaching new content knowledge (Narration-Trivium). In other words, the primary aim of the teacher is either for the student to acquire particular content knowledge in an inspirational subject area (Bible, history, literature, etc.), or the primary aim is for the student to acquire and hone particular skills in a discipline (writing, grammar, art, music, etc.). Actual lessons fall on a spectrum, with some focus placed on new knowledge and some focus placed on the students’ performance of a complex activity or creation of some product. The question of which lesson structure to use depends not on the subject, but the focus of this particular lesson within a broader unit plan. Is the main purpose of this lesson for students to assimilate content or develop and hone new skills?

When you download the Apprenticeship Lesson, you’ll be able to copy and paste a template with instructions that you can then use for planning lessons that train students in an art. Between the Apprenticeship Lesson and the Narration-Trivium Lesson, you should have all that you need to plan lessons that embody a classical pedagogy in any subject, with only minor modifications. I believe the process of lesson planning should be inspiring and enriching because of how it assists teachers in embodying classical principles in their teaching. In addition to preparing the teacher with the knowledge and materials necessary to help students learn most effectively, lesson planning should contribute to teachers’ long-term development.

Please reach out to me with questions as you try out the Apprenticeship Lesson, so that I can continue to refine and improve it for teachers!

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

2. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s

3. Breaking Down the Bad of Bloom’s: The False Objectivity of Education as a Modern Social Science

4. When Bloom’s Gets Ugly: Cutting the Heart Out of Education

5. What Bloom’s Left Out: A Comparison with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues

6. Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education

7. Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship

8. Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued

9. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions

10. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 2: A Pedagogy of Craft

Later articles in this series:

12. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World

13. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry

14. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 6: The Transcendence and Limitations of Artistry

The post Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 3: Crafting Lessons in Artistry appeared first on .

If a person desires to cultivate their ability to sing or paint beautifully, they rarely do so by reading a book or attending lectures. Instead, they attach themselves to a teacher or coach, who has attained sufficient mastery of the skills to arrange a series of exercises for them, a practice regimen, and to give them regular feedback on their progress. This, in essence, is the pedagogy of apprenticeship that we will discuss more in this article. 

Avoiding the Totalizing Effect of Modernism on the Arts

But before we do, let’s remember that there are many different types of craftsmanship or artistry that have been developed by human beings throughout time. Arts may have an originator, as Jabal was the original keeper of livestock, Jubal the player on the lyre and pipe, or Tubal-cain bronze- and ironworking (see Gen 4:20-22), but they also have traditions that grow and change with new circumstances. The arts are not interchangeable, whether among each other or between different cultural circumstances. If one is trained in navigation, that hardly makes a person a qualified practitioner of medicine. A painter is not equipped to design buildings, nor a business owner to make furniture. In the same way, an ancient sailor cannot operate a nuclear submarine. The traditions of various arts are affected by the tools and technologies, the goals and circumstances of their application. Arts are not one size-fits all.

Perhaps these considerations are enough to counter the totalizing instinct of the modern era, which is well illustrated by Bloom’s Taxonomy. By abstracting six orders of educational objectives in the cognitive domain, Bloom and his colleagues assumed that the main thing in education was transferable intellectual skills. But a proper recognition of the arts (at least) as situated in time and place would help us to understand that a substantial amount of what we are seeking to pass on to our children consists in particular skills and abilities that were invented at a particular time and are judged to be of continuing relevance to life in the world.

Now I know very well that what I am saying now may sound like modern educational pragmatism, but allow me to counter this concern. When applied to the liberal ‘arts’, the traditional nature of the arts is another way of arguing for the Western tradition of grammar, logic and rhetoric; mathematics, science and music. These ‘disciplines’ were discovered in time and place, and mastery of them involves us necessarily in the tradition that each one birthed. So this supposed pragmatism or subjectivity ends up grounding us in the historical realities and the objectivity of an enlightened and practical tradition. It is modernism’s abstractions and pretensions to god-like knowledge that have left us moorless on a sea of preferential postmodernism, grasping about for anything that might be considered “useful”.

When applied to the arts in general, this recognition of the arts’ traditional nature led me to propose a fivefold division of the arts as a help to classical Christian educators. 

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

1. Athletics, games and sports
2. Common and domestic arts
3. Professions and trades
4. Fine and performing arts
5. The liberal arts of language and number

While I argued for the inclusion of athletics, games and sports as well as the professions and trades, I sympathize with Chris Hall, Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s three-fold division of common, liberal and fine arts. Perhaps it is simply because I like fives rather than threes… but in all seriousness, this division represents a judgment call on the best way to indicate to educators the proper types of artistry or craftsmanship that they should aim at in their various programs. 

Perhaps it goes without saying that no educational institution can train its students in every possible area of artistry. And if, as I have said, mastery in particular arts does not transfer to others, then every educational institution must engage in some level of discernment as they plot the curricular sequence and develop offerings in extracurriculars. Those schools that aim, to a lesser or greater extent, at the Christian, classical ideal of a university (from the Latin ‘universitas’ meaning ‘totality’ or ‘wholeness’; see Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University) will want to develop some level of mastery in each of these five directions, alongside the other intellectual virtues. But the particulars will of course be culturally situated, as are the arts themselves. (This does not, I might add, argue against the revival of an ancient art that has been lost, which may from time to time be absolutely crucial.) We must make these decisions boldly in our cities and communities with an awareness of the context and the availability of masters in the crafts to apprentice our young students.

Toward a General Pedagogy of Apprenticeship

In addition to avoiding the totalizing instinct in our artistic divisions, we must also avoid the temptation to think of training in the arts as essentially the same in each area. It is absolutely a different thing to train a student in geometric proofs, than it is to train him as a soccer goalie. According to Aristotle’s definitions, both are intellectual virtues that are rightly called ‘artistry’, but that does not mean they are the same or that the training should look similar. However, types of ‘artistry’ are sufficiently similar in some core essentials, such that Aristotle and the tradition have rightly distinguished them from the other intellectual virtues. So, while it doesn’t look the same to coach a student to excellence in singing or painting, I can call both these activities ‘coaching’ and certain types of teaching activities immediately come to mind as being more appropriate than others. Training activities in different types of artistry have more in common with one another, than they do with cultivating practical wisdom, scientific knowledge, intuition or philosophic wisdom. 

The key point is that while each art is distinct, the intellectual virtues themselves are taught in fundamentally different ways, because of their radically different nature. So we can generalize some aspects of proper training in an art in a way that will help us develop a pedagogy of apprenticeship. Far from contributing to the problem of treating everything alike, developing a pedagogy for each intellectual virtue will contribute greatly toward our ability to make proper distinctions between different types of teaching as educators. 

Happily I am not the first person to follow the Aristotelian tradition by seeking to develop a pedagogy of techne, Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of ‘artistry’ or ‘craftsmanship’. The great Christian Reformation era educator John Amos Comenius developed a pedagogy of art in his Great Didactic, articulating many similar points to what I have addressed in attempting to revive the classical distinction between an art and a science. His recommendations also accord well with what we know of the value of deliberate and purposeful practice from modern research on elite performance, which I have discussed at some length before (as has Patrick Egan in this article). 

What Artistry Requires

Comenius begins his discussion of a pedagogy for art by identifying the core requirements of artistry or craftsmanship. As he says,

Art primarily requires three things: (1) A model or a conception, that is to say, an external form which the artist may examine and then try to imitate. (2) The material on which the new form is to be impressed. (3) The instruments by the aid of which the work is accomplished. (194)

The “model or conception” may look very different in the different arts: a model of a house you want to build is different than a map of where you want to sail or the imaginary ark of a penalty kick in soccer. But all arts require this mental image or plan upon which the artist operates. Art cannot be an accident, for then it would not be art, but chance in Aristotelian terminology. In the same way, the materials worked may be vastly different, from the wood, metal and straw used in building to the words, phrases and arguments used in logic and rhetoric. Finally, instruments are necessary for craftsmanship, from a voice box for singing to the gardener’s gloves and the astronomer’s telescope. 

While it may seem obvious to point out these different artistic requirements, they are of immense help to a pedagogy of craft. How often do art students work on projects without a clear model or conception to imitate? We can forget to help beginners learn the basic principles of handling tools and materials correctly, particularly in cases where the tools and materials are less obvious, like the meanings of words, grammar and syntax in the case of the language arts. This draws attention to the fact that these requirements point in the direction of three other things that are prerequisites of artistry:

But when the instruments, the materials, and the model have been provided, three more things are necessary before we can learn an art: (1) a proper use of the materials; (2) skilled guidance; (3) frequent practice. That is to say, the pupil should be taught when and how to use his materials; he should be given assistance when using them that he may not make mistakes, or that he may be corrected if he do; and he should not leave off making mistakes and being corrected until he can work correctly and quickly. (194)

Comenius’s comments illustrate the idea that one of the main problems in the teaching of arts comes from rushing the early stages of development. The teacher or coach too often assumes that the novice knows how to use the materials or will not make any more mistakes after being corrected once or twice. The training of the hands (whether literal or figurative) must be slower and more methodical than that. Bad habits can easily be acquired through insufficient attention to the basics.

We can also note positively that it is not without significance that cognitive psychologists have developed the terminology of ‘mental models’ for a student’s absorption of these models or conceptions into his intellect in order to perform some artistic activity. The writers of Make It Stick define a “mental model” as a “mental representation of some external reality”, noting that they are extending its use to “motor skills, referring to what are sometimes called motor schemas” (6; n.1 on 257). They go on to illustrate their definition through the example of artistry in a sport like baseball:

Think of a baseball batter waiting for a pitch. He has less than an instant to decipher whether it’s a curveball, a changeup, or something else. How does he do it? There are a few subtle signals that help: the way the pitcher winds up, the way he throws, the spin of the ball’s seams. A great batter winnows out all the extraneous perceptual distractions, seeing only these variations in pitches, and through practice he forms distinct mental models based on a different set of cues for each kind of pitch. (6-7)

We can notice from this example that a person does not necessarily need to be able to articulate a mental model in words to have it. In fact, in this case if the player’s conscious mind were to get involve trying to categorize and analyze the cues, the ball would have already flung past the plate. Often an artist’s mental models are like these motor skills, hard-wired in as almost an instinctual, bodily response. These models or conceptions are formed by “frequent practice” with the immediate feedback of whether he was right in his swing or wrong. It must be reality that the artist is modeling in his mind as he works with his materials according to the natural constraints of the art itself.

The Canons of Artistry

After establishing the requirements for artistry, Comenius lays out eleven canons for a pedagogy of artistry in his Great Didactic. Later in life he summarized this method of the arts more succinctly in his Analytical Didactic:

This method requires theory, prudence, and practice. Theory is necessary, so that a man, no matter what he does, will not do it like a brute, on blind impulse, but with an understanding of what he is doing. Such understanding inevitably brings with it caution and vigilance not to err in his work, and constant practice finally makes him incapable of error. (155)

The term “theory” explains the precepts and rules of his earlier discussion, and accords with Aristotle’s requirement that ‘art’ be according to reason. “Prudence” seems to draw attention to the artist’s sifting process, showing “caution” and “vigilance” to not make errors, but to act in such a way as to bring about the desired outcome. “Constant practice” completes the learning process by making him “incapable of error,” a state that we might call mastery. 

One of the main dangers, in Comenius’ mind, is that educators might overemphasize theories and precepts at the wrong stage of an artist’s development. As he notes in his first canon, “What has to be done must be learned by practice” (Great Didactic 194):

Artisans do not detain their apprentices with theories, but set them to do practical work at an early stage; thus they learn to forge by forging, to carve by carving, to paint by painting, and to dance by dancing. In schools, therefore, let the students learn to write by writing, to talk by talking, to sing by singing, and to reason by reasoning. In this way schools will become workshops humming with work, and students whose efforts prove successful will experience the truth of the proverb: ‘We give form to ourselves and to our materials at the same time.’ (195)

We can see that Comenius lends his support to the classical understanding of the liberal arts as forms of verbal craftsmanship. When we linger over the theories and rules, without giving our beginning students practice in talking, writing, singing and reasoning, we are breaking the cardinal rule of training in artistry. Comenius’ vision of schools as “workshops humming with work” sets an inspiring standard for us to judge our teaching by. It well accords with Dorothy Sayers’ interpretation of the trivium as the lost tools of learning. The upshot of her clarion call in the 1940s was that we were too focused on teaching ‘subjects’ rather that giving our students the opportunity to handle the materials of knowledge through productive and (we might add) artistic activities. 

Comenius thinks that the formation of students’ mental models for this practice should occur, not primarily through precepts or rules, abstract theories, but instead through examples (195). He cites Quintilian for classical support of his method: “It is many years since Quintilian said: ‘Through precepts the way is long and difficult, while through examples it is short and practicable.’ But alas, how little heed the ordinary schools pay to this advice” (195).

Comenius continues to look to the mechanical or common arts for fruitful analogies of how to best train students in grammar or logic:

The very beginners in grammar are so overwhelmed by precepts, rules, exceptions to the rules, and exceptions to the exceptions, that for the most part they do not know what they are doing, and are quite stupefied before they begin to understand anything. Mechanics do not begin by drumming rules into their apprentices. They take them into the workshop and bid them look at the work that has been produced, and then, when they wish to imitate this (for man is an imitative animal), they place tools in their hands and show them how they should be held and used. Then, if they make mistakes, they give them advice and correct them, often more by example than by mere words, and, as the facts show, the novices easily succeed in their imitation. (195-196)

Comenius’ description of the apprenticeship model of “mechanics” lays out a few key steps: 

1. Students are given a general acquaintance with the works produced, the end-products of the art.
2. Students respond with a natural desire to imitate through producing works of their own.
3. The master provides the students with the proper tools and models their use, showing them examples of the techniques.
4. The master corrects the students through both examples and advice, sharing the theories and precepts while correcting students.

This last point, the proper use of theory and precepts at the end rather than the beginning is detailed in his eleventh canon, where Comenius is focused on the swift correction of errors during practice:

(ix.) Errors must be corrected by the master on the spot; but precepts, that is to say the rules, and the exceptions to the rules, must be given at the same time.

Hitherto, we have urged that the arts be taught rather by example than by precept: we now add that precepts and rules must be given as well, that they may guide the operations and prevent error. That is to say, the less obvious points of the model should be clearly explained, and it should be made evident how the operation should begin, what it should aim at, and how that aim can be realised. Reasons should also be given for each rule. In this way a thorough knowledge of the art, and confidence and exactness in imitating will be attained. (200)

Comenius’ description of mistake-focused practice coheres well with what Daniel Coyle calls “deep practice” in his book The Talent Code. Practice must be purposeful or deliberate, to the extent possible, and take advantage of all the resources, in terms of rules and precepts developed by the masters in that tradition of artistry. The correction of errors and constant practice, based on examples and informed by theory, constitute the core essentials of the apprenticeship model of teaching an art. 

In the next article we’ll develop this pedagogy of artistry further by laying out an apprenticeship lesson structure to guide teachers of the arts, as we draw further insights from Comenius and modern research.

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

2. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s

3. Breaking Down the Bad of Bloom’s: The False Objectivity of Education as a Modern Social Science

4. When Bloom’s Gets Ugly: Cutting the Heart Out of Education

5. What Bloom’s Left Out: A Comparison with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues

6. Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education

7. Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship

8. Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued

9. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions

Later articles in this series:

11. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 3: Crafting Lessons in Artistry

12. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World

13. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry

14. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 6: The Transcendence and Limitations of Artistry

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While we know that Aelius Theon used written narration to train future orators in memory and invention, and that Quintilian saw it as a core practice connected to the ability to learn, it is not really until Comenius that narration is a central teaching method. Erasmus too recommended the narration of a teacher’s lecture, thus shifting the focus to knowledge of content and away from rhetorical style and fluency. But only Comenius made of narration a golden key to unlock the doors of knowledge to the student.

In my article on The Great Didactic we saw how Comenius envisioned teaching as opening founts of knowledge, and the process of students narrating to one another as part and parcel of the nature of knowledge itself: it must be shared! Developing his analogies from the natural world, Comenius advocated for narration under the analogy of intellectual nourishment through collection, digestion and distribution. The teacher first collects and digests knowledge, and then distributes it to others; then, in an ironic transformation the student becomes the teacher to do the same for his fellows. Thus, Comenius recommends a process of repeated narrations of content given by the teacher (or his book) with corrections by the teacher.

In this article we will explore how Comenius developed his thinking about the teaching method of narration or the student becoming the teacher in The Analytical Didactic, which is really a section of a longer work (The Methodus) that he wrote much later in life. In The Analytical Didactic Comenius “reinterpreted the principle of nature that he had described in The Great Didactic as a principle of logic” (John E. Sadler, “John Amos Comenius” in Encyclopedia Britannica; accessed January, 2021). While his translator found in this a movement away from the fertile and imaginative quality of his first didactic (see the Introduction), my impression was of the bracing winds of truth blowing steadily through Comenius’ treatment of teaching method. Where some of Comenius’ insights seemed strained and overwrought in the analogies from nature in The Great Didactic, the crystal clarity of Comenius’ principles and applications in The Analytical Didactic leaves little that can be objected to. I encourage you to find a copy and read it yourself; it’s a book that I anticipate coming back to again and again.

Narration as Review and Examination

First of note in Comenius’ recommendations for what Charlotte Mason called narration is his focus on the importance of reviews and examinations. The whole passage that most concerns practitioners of narration comes at the end of The Analytical Didactic in a section on “how to teach rapidly, thoroughly, and agreeably” (171). His comments on review and examination reminded me of my own statements in A Classical Guide to Narration about how narration serves both as a method of assimilation and of assessment. In other words, when students narrate, they store what they are learning in long term memory, AND teachers learn what students know and don’t know.

Comenius begins by claiming that “the more anything is handled, the more familiar it becomes; consequently, if we would have our students well acquainted with anything and ready to use it, we must familiarize them with it through reviews, examinations, and frequent use” (191). He goes on to say that these “reviews and examinations” should occur “even during the process of learning”. Comenius reinforces the importance of continual review and testing through the analogy of a traveler becoming acquainted with a road through the process of going backward and forward on it, retracing his steps through narration, and then digressing along different alternate routes along the way (191-192).

Narration, Analysis and Practice

For Comenius, then, narration is not to be opposed to analytical discussion, but is complementary to it. He sums up the natural progression of learning, review and examination through three questions:

1. Has the student learned something? This will be apparent if he can repeat it.
2. Does he understand it? This will be discovered by a variety of analytical questions.
3. Does he know how to use it? This will be revealed by prescribed but unrehearsed practice. (191)

Narration is the first step in a process. This view finds expression in the Narration-Trivium lesson structure that I developed based on Charlotte Mason’s narration lesson for young children. By following up narration with dialectic or analytical discussion, teachers can help deepen students’ understanding from a bare recital to fuller comprehension. This functions like the digressions down alternate routes in Comenius’ analogy. Practice then corresponds, to some extent, to the rhetoric phase or response to the rich text.

The Student as Teacher

Comenius’ practical application of this principle involves the same ironic transformation of student into teacher that he advocated for in The Great Didactic:

We can do this by urging him not merely to pay constant heed to the demonstrations and explanations of the teacher but also to reverse the role and to demonstrate and explain the same subject to others; furthermore, he ought to see and hear others besides his teacher give these demonstrations and explanations. I must make my meaning clearer by quoting a set of verses well known in schools:

                        Often to ask, to retain what is answered, and teach what remembered,

                        These are three means that will make the disciple surpass his own master.

The third part of this advice, that about teaching what we have retained, is not sufficiently well known, nor is it commonly put into practice; yet it would be highly profitable if every student were required to teach others what he himself has just learned. Indeed, there is a great deal of truth in the saying, ‘He who teaches others educates himself,’ or, as Seneca puts it, ‘Men learn while they teach.’ This is so not merely because teaching strengthens their conceptions through repetition but also because it offers them opportunities of delving further into the subject. (See Sec. 85.) (191-192)

What Comenius adds to this discussion from his previous treatment is a new articulation of the value of teaching for deep learning. In claiming that the conceptions are strengthened through repetition, we are on the solid ground of what modern learning science calls retrieval practice. But in describing the “opportunities of delving further into the subject” we seem to add on to bare retrieval the value of elaboration or making further connections to what one already knows. Acting as the teacher doesn’t just store memories, it improves and develops insight or understanding.

Comenius then expresses this method as “a practical rule” to the effect that “every pupil should acquire the habit of also acting as a teacher” (193)—an idea that is both stunning in its simplicity and also revolutionary in terms of common teaching practice. Every student? Really? Acting as a teacher to the others? Adopting this practical rule would upend how most classrooms operate in terms of their daily practices. For the teacher who imagines that it can’t be done with any efficiency in time, remember that this passage is from Comenius’ section on rapidity and thoroughness in teaching and learning. He is not unaware of time constraints. His detailed method in the Analytical Didactic greatly resembles what he had previously shared in The Great Didactic:

This will happen if, after the teacher has fully demonstrated and expounded something, the pupil himself is immediately required to give a satisfactory demonstration and exposition of the same thing in the same manner. (If there are several pupils, they should do so one after another, beginning with the more talented.) Furthermore, pupils should be instructed to relate what they learn in school to their parents or servants at home or to anyone else capable of understanding such matters. (193)

Comenius again wants the students who are more likely to have understood correctly to give the first exposition, so as to avoid the wasted time and confusion likely to result from incorrection narrations. He adds the practical expediency of having students share their knowledge at home. Assigning students to narrate stories or explain concepts in detail to their parents is not an impossible homework assignment, but one that might further several purposes of the school, especially if a school has a strong vision for parental involvement and support like many classical Christian schools.

Rationale for Narration

Comenius’ reasons for this narration practice with repeated tellings of a teacher’s demonstration or explanation are more succinct than in The Great Didactic but express the same basic thoughts:

In the first place, pupils will be more attentive to every part of the teacher’s exposition if they know that presently they will have to repeat the same matter and if each one fears that perhaps he will be the first to be asked to do so. (See Sec. 86 above.)

Second, by restating exactly what he has been taught, everyone will imprint it more deeply in his understanding and memory.

Third, if it appears that something was not understood quite correctly, this practice will offer an immediate opportunity for correction (on the great value of this see Axiom XCVII).

Fourth, it will enable teachers and pupils to make certain that they have grasped what they were supposed to grasp, for the mark of knowledge is the ability to teach.

Fifth, such frequent repetition of the same material will bring it about that even the slowest pupils may finally grasp the subject. Thereby (sixth) everyone will make swifter and sounder progress in every respect.

And thus (seventh) every pupil will become a teacher, in some degree or other; consequently, the opportunities for multiplying knowledge will be mightily increased. (193-194)

Then it will be clear how apt is the playful remark of Fortius: ‘I learned much from my teachers, more from my fellow-students, but most from my pupils.’ Or, as someone else has said, ‘The more often we impart learning, the more learned we become.’ Therein lies our enduring pleasure.[1] (194)

Comenius expresses many of the same reasons for narration that have been endorsed by more recent proponents, like Charlotte Mason. Using narration as a regular practice habituates students to pay attention, because they know that they will be held accountable. It also “imprints” the content “more deeply” on the understanding or memory, thus functioning as assimilation. And then retrieval practice with immediate feedback or correction provides the most effective way to ensure true learning. While this may seem to disagree with some of Charlotte Mason’s statements, her concerns about over-correcting young children or those new to narration have probably been misunderstood. The “bracing atmosphere of sincerity and truth” that she advocated for seems in full agreement with Comenius here, even if she emphasized the infrequency of correction needed for students trained on narration over years.

Finally, Comenius’ universal vision for the increase of Christian learning spills into his pedagogical considerations, as he imagines an army of irenic students-become-teachers advancing the cause of knowledge into every sphere of life and fighting back against the ignorance and darkness of a fallen world. And this is not just a duty or a burden to be borne, it is in our learning that we experience “our enduring pleasure,” Comenius says with a wink as he ends his treatise. I cannot help but hear resonances with the flow experience and the joy of learning that I have explored at length in my book The Joy of Learning. For Comenius this method of learning through teaching is not just logical, reasonable, thoughtful and humane, it advances the cause of knowledge itself and brings delight.

[1] Comenius writes this sentence in German: “Und so bleibet man immer bey der lust.”

“Why the History of Narration Matters” series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 2: Classical Roots

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

Part 4: Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration in Historical Perspective

Expanding Narration’s History with Comenius: Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 2 – The Great Didactic

The post Expanding Narration’s History with Comenius: Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 2 – The Analytical Didactic appeared first on .

If you’ve been following Educational Renaissance for some time, you might remember my history of narration series from last year. During the third article of the series I had a short section on narration in John Amos Comenius’ work, relying primarily on Karen Glass’s brief quotations in Know and Tell. At the time I was only beginning to read Comenius’ The Great Didactic in full, and I had not yet procured his Analytical Didactic. Now I have read and digested both, coming away with more narration gems to add to the history. Even then I wrote that “more remains to be said on Comenius and narration,” and now I am excited to expand that section on Comenius into an article or two of its own.

Returning to this topic is timely for me because the week before last I trained both my own faculty at Coram Deo Academy, and the faculty of The Covenant School of Dallas (what a privilege!) using this stunning passage on narration from Comenius’ The Great Didactic. So the practical application of it in our modern classical schools is fresh on my mind.

The great Czech educational reformer, philosopher, pastor and theologian, John Amos Comenius, sometimes called the father of modern education, represents the next stage after Erasmus in the history of narration’s rebirth during the Renaissance and Reformation era. The opening statement of his stunning work on teaching methods, Didactica Magna or The Great Didactic, promises much in terms that are familiar to advocates of narration:

“Let the main object of this, our Didactic, be as follows : To seek and to find a method of instruction, by which teachers may teach less, but learners may learn more; by which schools may be the scene of less noise, aversion, and useless labour, but of more leisure, enjoyment, and solid progress; and through which the Christian community may have less darkness, perplexity, and dissension, but on the other hand more light, orderliness, peace, and rest.”

John Amos Comenius, preface to The Great Didactic

As I have noted before, activities like narration that turn students into active learners are more likely to produce flow, thereby attaining for the student both “enjoyment” and “solid progress”.

Charlotte Mason found in narration an ideal “method” for realizing Comenius’ golden key of education: teachers teaching less and learners learning more. Whether consciously or unconsciously, she likely drew some of the details of the practice itself from him (in addition to other sources like John Locke).

As well, Comenius’ profoundly irenic Christian vision of how Christian education might contribute to healing the immediate wounds of Christendom’s strife and divisions (like the Thirty Years War) accords well with Mason’s educational leadership and the classical Christian education movement’s high hopes for renewal in the church. Education is not just for the training of individual Christians, but for the benefits experienced in families, churches and communities.

Rivulets Flowing Out

Comenius’ use of narration has a number of unique features and a flexibility and philosophical completeness that is hard to find in other educational thinkers. Therefore, it is likely to him that we owe the fundamental shift from narration as a progymnasmata or preliminary training exercise for rhetoric to a central learning method or strategy. He states the principle in global terms, while at the same time practically endorsing modern techniques like partner-narration:

Whatever has been learned should be communicated by one pupil to the other, that no knowledge may remain unused. For in this sense only can we understand the saying, ‘Thy knowledge is of no avail if none other know that thou knowest.’ No source of knowledge, therefore, should be opened, unless rivulets flow from it.”

John Amos Comenius, The Great Didactic, “Thoroughness in Teaching and Learning”, 155

This entire section on thoroughness in teaching and learning is essentially a tribute to narration, or more particularly the classical principal identified by Chris Perrin of Classical Academic Press through the Latin phrase docendo discimus (“By teaching we learn”) in his course Introduction to Classical Education. (I wonder where Perrin himself derived this Latin phrase from…. Was it from Comenius or an earlier thinker in the tradition? Or is it a phrase he himself quipped to represent a traditional conception?) Similarly, I have often referred to the classical principle of self-education (see my SCL presentation from 2020), citing Charlotte Mason’s quip that there is no education but self-education and Dorothy Sayers’s remarks about students learning how to learn in “The Lost Tools of Learning”.

The imagery of a fount of knowledge, a spring, being opened up and rivulets naturally flowing out to surrounding streams is evocative. Comenius is claiming that knowledge must be shared; it is a communal inheritance passing from one mind to another. For him it is as if there were a sacred commandment inscribed into the nature of the cosmos that knowledge is no mere personal possession, but a social trust.

On its own this claim holds the teacher to a high standard with regard narration and narration-like activities. Not a single source of knowledge opened (!), Comenius says, without students at least telling one another what they have learned. And yet how much “material” is “covered” by the average teacher without an opportunity for the student to become the teacher, in this splendidly ironic transformation that Comenius envisions as part and parcel of learning.

Collection, Digestion and Distribution

Comenius solidly anticipates the modern research that supports retrieval practice, spaced practice and mixed practice, but he does so through his prevailing method throughout The Great Didactic of drawing analogical wisdom from the created order:

From this it follows that education cannot attain to thoroughness without frequent and suitable repetitions of and exercises on the subjects taught. We may learn the most suitable mode of procedure by observing the natural movements that underlie the processes of nutrition in living bodies, namely those of collection, digestion, and distribution. For in the case of an animal (and in that of a plant as well) each member seeks for digestion food which may both nurture that member (since this retains and assimilates part of the digested food) and be shared with the other members, that the well-being of the whole organism may be preserved (for each member serves the other). In the same way that teacher will greatly increase the value of his instruction who 

(i.) Seeks out and obtains intellectual food for himself.

(ii.) Assimilates and digests what he has found.

(iii.) Distributes what he has digested, and shares it with others. (156)

If we pair Comenius’ call for “frequent and suitable repetitions” of the subject matter with The Great Didactic’s opening principle of teachers teaching less and learners learning more, then it becomes clear that by repetitions he is not envisioning a simply review process where the teacher goes over the facts again before a test. Instead, it is the students who will be repeating the content back, and as becomes clear later in the passage, not just in summary, but in full detail.

At first, the analogy from nature about the collection, digestion and distribution of “intellectual food” may seem to have awkwardly shifted topics. Now we are talking about the teacher grazing for knowledge himself? But in the following paragraphs Comenius will zero in on that third part, distribution, to detail his full method of narration. In the meantime, we can note that Charlotte Mason’s favorite metaphor about the mind feeding on living ideas is not, in fact, of her own coinage. For Comenius too there is a process of assimilation of knowledge that involves narration. But he stresses it as a communal endeavor, with teachers serving as the honeybees gathering sweet pollen for the production of honey and distribution to the younger members. Charlotte Mason, by contrast, is more inclined to minimize the collection and digestion process of the teacher (though she did write a stirring appeal to her ‘bairns’ encouraging them to foster their own intellectual life through avid reading), in keeping with her own focus upon the “living books” curriculum that she herself carefully selected.

But this contrast between Mason and Comenius could be overplayed, given Comenius’ ironic twist of the student becoming the teacher. So while teachers themselves should engage in the collection, digestion and distribution of knowledge, Comenius immediately shifts this application to the student-become-teacher through recourse to a well-known Latin couplet:

44. These three elements are to be found in the well-known Latin couplet:–

To ask many questions, to retain the answers, and to teach what one retains to others;

These three enable the pupil to surpass his master.

Questioning takes place when a pupil interrogates his teachers, his companions, or his books about some subject that he does not understand. Retention follows when the information that has been obtained is committed to memory or is written down for greater security (since few are so fortunate as to possess the power of retaining everything in their minds). Teaching takes place when knowledge that has been acquired is communicated to fellow-pupils or other companions.

With the two first of these principles the schools are quite familiar, with the third but little; its introduction, however, is in the highest degree desirable. The saying, ‘He who teaches others, teaches himself,’ is very true, not only because constant repetition impresses a fact indelibly on the mind, but because the process of teaching in itself gives a deeper insight into the subject taught. Thus it was that the gifted Joachim Fortius used to say that, if he had heard or read anything once, it slipped out of his memory within a month; but that if he taught it to others it became as much a part of himself as his fingers, and that he did not believe that anything short of death could deprive him of it…. (157)

Comenius’ main point is the incredible power of teaching others as a learning tool. Where Comenius has recourse to the anecdote of Joachim Fortius for support, modern research can confirm through studies the value of retrieval practice combined with the elaboration necessary for the act of teaching. This effortful combination of research-informed strategies essentially makes for the most durable and flexible learning, such that the new knowledge has become part of oneself.

Repeated Narrations of the Teacher’s Explanations with Corrections

This brings us to Comenius’ specific recommendations for narration, which are unmistakably surprising to those who are only familiar with Charlotte Mason’s advice. Note as we go the focus on the teacher’s lecture or explanation (just as with Erasmus), but also the repetitions and corrections. (We can observe as well that Comenius does not have our modern scruples about politically correct descriptions of students who struggle….)

This would certainly be of use to many and could easily be put into practice if the teacher of each class would introduce this excellent system to his pupils. It might be done in the following way. In each lesson, after the teacher has briefly gone through the work that has been prepared, and has explained the meanings of the words, one of the pupils should be allowed to rise from his place and repeat what has just been said in the same order (just as if he were the teacher of the rest), to give his explanations in the same words, and to employ the same examples, and if he make a mistake he should be corrected. Then another can be called up and made go through the same performance while the rest listen. After him a third, a fourth, and as many as are necessary, until it is evident that all have understood the lesson and are in a position to explain it. In carrying this out great care should be taken to call up the clever boys first, in order that, after their example, stupid ones may find it easier to follow. (158)

The teacher’s explanation here becomes the rich or living text, complete with examples in a particular order. The students are transformed into teachers, endeavoring to reproduce as exactly as they can the full substance of the teacher’s explanation. To make clear that he intends this as a global practice or central learning strategy, Comenius deliberately begins his description of the method with the phrase “in each lesson”. Instead of avoiding corrections during the narration, as Mason recommended, Comenius has the teacher actively correcting and expecting other students to get all the details right in subsequent narrations. While this is clearly not a word-perfect memorization, it edges in that direction and away from Mason’s insistence on a single reading and letting the students take what they do but trusting the process over time.

Interestingly, in commending the “exercises” and “repetitions” of narration, Comenius hits upon a few of the same rationales that Mason would later borrow to commend her practice of narration (e.g., the habit of attention; supporting “dull” students, to use Mason’s term; the love of learning; and self-possession in public speaking):

46. Exercises of this kind will have a fivefold use.

(i.) The teacher is certain to have attentive pupils. For since the scholars may, at any time, be called up and asked to repeat what the teacher has said, each of them will be afraid of breaking down and appearing ridiculous before the others, and will therefore attend carefully and allow nothing to escape them. In addition to this, the habit of brisk attention, which becomes second nature if practised for several years, will fit the scholar to acquit himself well in active life.

(ii.) The teacher will be able to know with certainty if his pupils have thoroughly grasped everything that he has taught them. If he finds that they have not, he will consult his own interest as well as that of his pupils by repeating his explanation and making it clearer.

(iii.) If the same thing be frequently repeated, the dullest intelligences will grasp it at last, and will thus be able to keep pace with the others; while the brighter ones will be pleased at obtaining such a thorough grip of the subject.

(iv.) By means of such constant repetition the scholars will gain a better acquaintance with the subject than they could possibly obtain by private study, even with the greatest intelligence, and will find that, if they just read the lesson over in the morning and then again in the evening, it will remain in their memories easily and pleasantly. When, by this method of repetition, the pupil has, as it were, been admitted to the office of teacher, he will attain a peculiar keenness of disposition and love of learning; he will also acquire the habit of remaining self-possessed while explaining anything before a number of people, and this will be of the greatest use to him throughout life.” (158)

Comenius is happy to use social pressure as a motivator to improve students’ learning, especially since he has abandoned the widely accepted corporal punishment of his day. Students’ natural desire not to appear “ridiculous” before their peers is arguably a more powerful and immediate spur to the effort of learning than an abstract symbol system like a grade. And while not wanting to seem foolish may not be the highest of ideals it does go some way toward creating a culture of learning among human beings as socially embedded and embodied creatures.

It is clarifying to hear Comenius indicate “several years” as the appropriate timeline for training students in this habit of “brisk attention” that will fit them for an “active life”. Likewise, the help afforded the teacher through opportunities to clarify and re-explain accords well with the real challenges of communicating effectively to students. Comenius gives every indication of having practiced what he is preaching, discerning the ins and outs of teaching and learning through philosophical reflection and practical experience.

As with Erasmus, it may be that the teacher is here supplementing or acting as the mediator between the students and the curriculum books. We might imagine a generally older set of students than Mason envisions, but he is undeniably more focused on the teacher as the initial distributor of knowledge. The repetitions seem designed to help students understand hard truths or difficult and complex ideas that are not easily grasped on a first hearing. Corrections, then, might be justified as a necessary safeguard to prevent students from confusing one another with incorrect explanations. We might ponder as well whether Mason’s advice not to “tease [young students] with corrections” focused more upon style and grammar, i.e. not attacking the endless string of ‘and’s that children often start out with. Perhaps she would have sympathized with corrections on matters of fact, when other students might become confused by another student’s misleading explanation.

As stated, Comenius’ variant on narration embodies the golden key of his Great Didactic by turning the student into the teacher after a teacher’s “demonstration” or “exposition”. It thus follows Erasmus in focusing on a spoken lecture or explanation by the teacher rather than a text. The new development present in Comenius is to emphasize the ironic transformation of student into teacher. In a future article we will look at material from Comenius’ Analytical Didactic to see how he developed his recommendations for narration later in life.

“Why the History of Narration Matters” series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 2: Classical Roots

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

Part 4: Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration in Historical Perspective

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This has been a deliberate rhetorical and pedagogical move: an attempt to begin with what is near at hand and understood by modern educators, before exposing its weaknesses and proposing a productive solution based in ancient wisdom. Sometimes on Educational Renaissance we begin with what is new before arcing back to what is past; other times it is appropriate to begin with the wisdom of the past before connecting it to modern research. It may sound strange to some, but in this case I think that Bloom provides the perfect entree to Aristotle.

In this article I will begin situating Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as a part of his holistic philosophy of education. And since Aristotle’s viewpoints are not necessarily authoritative, however much we may revere the accomplishments of “the philosopher,” as Aquinas called him, we will have to lay out how Christians might appropriate his philosophy within a Christian worldview. After all, the early Christian apologist Tertullian’s famous question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” still needs to be answered today, even if centuries of Christian thought have done so adequately in their own cultural moment. 

We will thus first delve into Aristotle’s philosophy in the opening book of the Nicomachean Ethics. It is necessary to lay a good foundation in Aristotle’s thought generally, if we are to understand his intellectual virtues specifically. Second, we will see how his intellectual virtues fit within his broader paradigm of human happiness as the proper goals of education. Third, along the way we will make reference to the Bible and Christian theology in order to show how Aristotle’s philosophy might be appropriated within a truly Christian understanding of life and education.

The Purpose of Education as the Purpose of Life

I opened this series by remarking on one of the major themes of the classical education renewal movement: rethinking the purpose of education as much broader and more holistic than modern education has been making it out to be:

It is not merely job training or college preparation, but the formation of flourishing human beings. The cultivation of wisdom and virtue is the purpose of education. There is joy in seeking knowledge for its own sake and as an end in itself.

Each one of these statements can be traced back to Aristotle. Human flourishing is a modern cipher for the good life or the life of eudaimonia, the Greek word for happiness or blessedness, which Aristotle proclaims to be the ultimate telos, end or goal, of human beings. All other goals are simply the means to this end (see Book I, Chapter 2). And the master art that aims at this end directly and encompasses all the lesser arts is called by him politics, under which he would lump strategy, economics, rhetoric and even all the sciences. Each in its own way aims at one of the goods that contribute to human happiness collectively.

It is interesting in this connection to compare the conception of Augustine’s City of God as a contrast to this polis or city of man. Because man is a political animal the appropriate unit of happiness for human beings is not the isolated individual, but the city. After all, who could be happy without friends? Or, for that matter, without the benefits of specialization and civilization?

But given the realities of a functioning city-state with the basic specialization that Plato had earlier described in his Republic, the most secure way for an individual to achieve this happiness is by the cultivation of virtue and wisdom, understood as the moral and intellectual excellences, respectively (see chapter 10 and 13). Moral excellence, Aristotle says, is attained by the cultivation of habits, whereas intellectual excellence is born and grown by instruction or teaching, requiring much experience and time (see Book II, chapter 1). 

Since human happiness consists in an active life in accordance with perfect virtue of the soul (see Book I, chapter 13), education becomes the prime means of attaining happiness through developing habits in accordance with the moral virtues and instructing the mind or rational principal in accordance with the truth. Another way of saying this is that the contemplative life, as opposed to the pursuit of pleasure or honor (see chapter 5), is the best method of attaining to happiness in this life, even if good fortune still plays some role (see the end of chapter 8 and 10-11). Aiming either at bodily pleasure or the emotional satisfaction of honor will ultimately fall short, while the cultivation of the mind or rational principle will lead to the proper ordering of the whole human person.

In earlier articles on Educational Renaissance, I have already laid out a couple ways of reconciling many of these reflections with a Christian understanding of the purpose of life. In “Aristotle and the Growth Mindset” I traced the renaissance arc back to Aristotle starting from Carol Dweck’s popular idea of a growth mindset vs. a fixed mindset. Aristotle theorized that excellence or virtue was the main contributor to happiness—an idea that provides more of a solid philosophical foundation for Dweck’s social scientific study of “success”. As human beings, we may not be the masters of our own fate, but to confine human happiness (and therefore virtue as well) simply to chance or fortune does not seem to jive with reality. We have some level of choice and will in our own happiness, just as we can decide to pursue a life of virtue and make deliberate strides toward that end.

The Moral Virtues and Christian Salvation

From a Christian perspective, while divine gift and human responsibility may be reconciled in various ways, the participation of human beings in their ultimate good or blessing is a matter of both. True and lasting happiness comes as a result of God’s gracious action in salvation and believers “work[ing] out [their] own salvation with fear and trembling” (see Philippians 2:12). Christian sanctification and piety have traditionally been thought to involve the cultivation of all the moral virtues. Salvation involves the conversion of the heart.

In “Excellence Comes By Habit: Aristotle on Moral Virtue” I referenced the Christian idea of common grace to account for the fact that human beings can exhibit moral virtues even in an unregenerate state. For this reason, it is helpful to distinguish between moral and spiritual virtues. Medievals, in particular, adopted a sevenfold paradigm to sum up the moral virtues of Greek philosophy and the Christian virtues mentioned by Saint Paul at the end of 1st Corinthians 13. The cardinal virtues were justice, temperance, fortitude and prudence (interestingly this last was one of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues), and above them were the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. It might be possible for a noble pagan to display the cardinal virtues to some degree, but only a true believer could possess the theological virtues.

For Christians, then, true and eternal happiness involved the possession of both the theological and the moral virtues. As the writer of Hebrews said, “Without holiness, no one will see the Lord” (12:14). The purpose of life, and therefore the ultimate purpose of education as well, consists in the cultivation of moral and spiritual virtues for the enjoyment of eternal happiness. Of course, for Christians this happiness must be God-centered; it is the beatific vision of God himself that wells up in eternal joy for the everlasting life of the believer. Or as the Westminster Catechism has it, “What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” And while salvation is in some sense future, the beginning of the happiness associated with eternal life in Christ is available in part to the believer even now through the process of sanctification. Holiness leads to happiness.

For Aristotle, on the other hand, eudaimonia is attained through the godlike cultivation of excellence in this life alongside good fortune and good friends. Active pursuit of the moral and intellectual virtues, without much emphasis on piety or spiritual virtues, seems for him to sum up the happy life. This life of contemplation, fortune and friends may be godlike but it does not focus upon God. Aristotle’s conception of happiness by excellence certainly leaves something wanting, but perhaps we can see it as providing a part of which the full Christian revelation is the whole. 

Where Have All the Intellectual Virtues Gone?

While Aristotle certainly has the greater lack (the centrality of God in human happiness), perhaps I am not going too far out of bounds to suggest that the traditional Chrstian virtue paradigm is missing something. Moral and spiritual virtues have been well accounted for, but what of intellectual virtues? Do they play no part in the Christian’s happy life? Of course, there is a rich Christian theme of relativizing the intellect to the spirit. And in light of Aristotle’s neglect of the spirit, we can easily see why the apostle Paul would say things like, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor 8:1). Or why he would elaborate in detail on the folly of the cross over against the wisdom of the world in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25. On the other hand, Paul does conclude that section by stating that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men,” and he goes on to claim that he and the other apostles do indeed impart “among the mature” a “secret and hidden wisdom of God” (2:6, 7). So perhaps the Bible finds more of a place for the intellect in the happiness equation than we might think. 

In fact, it is worth asking the extent to which the spiritual, intellectual and moral are overlapping and interpenetrating categories for Paul. We might say that, rather than excluding the intellectual virtues from the equation, the introduction of the spiritual reframes the nature of the intellect just as it does the heart. As he explains,

What we are saying is not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things in spiritual words. But the soulish man [“natural” ESV, but perhaps we should think of Aristotle’s soul-focused paradigm even in the Nicomachean Ethics] does not receive the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him and he is not able to understand them, because they are spiritually evaluated. But the spiritual person evaluates all things, but he himself is evaluated by no one. For “who has known the intuition [Greek nous] of the Lord, who will teach him?” But we have the intuition of Messiah. (1 Cor 2:13-16, orig. trans.)

The spiritual frame provides an entirely new source and measure of evaluation for moral and intellectual categories. While hundreds of years and the introduction of various usages may have obscured the definitions of these words, perhaps it is not without significance that Paul is here using the words for two of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues in Greek, sophia or philosophic wisdom, and nous or the understanding of first principles that is wisdom’s necessary forerunner. Although more digging might be necessary to determine the extent to which Paul’s use of nous conforms to Aristotle’s definition of perceiving first principles, we can at least conclude from this passage that spiritual and intellectual virtues are not, for Paul, in the end contradictory.

Divine revelation and the Spirit of God may revolutionize the content of intellectual virtues even from their very starting points in perception of the world and human reasoning, but it is not as if wisdom and understanding are done away with. In fact, we might say that it is at the level of our intuition, the starting point for proper reasoning, that the greatest shifts have taken place. We have the Messiah’s new and spiritual perception of the world and so we reason from different first principles and even from different particulars. We see the world in a cross-centered way, a God-centered way, and not in a man-centered way. The Greek saying, attributed to Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things,” has been decisively demolished for the Christian as an intellectual stronghold in a way that even Plato’s transcendentalism could not match.

But the intellectual virtues themselves remain, or more properly are restored. After all, a “worthless intuition” is one of the things that God gave the Gentiles over to in Romans because of their idolatry (1:29). So Christians are “no longer to walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their intuition” (Eph 4:17), but instead should “be transformed by the renewal of the intuition” (Rom 12:2). In the New Testament, salvation involves the reclaiming of the mind, as much as the heart. And the Spirit of God is the source of this intellectual restoration.

This is no less than we would expect from the example of the Old Testament. For instance, consider the inspiration of Bezalel in his craftsmanship for constructing the holy articles of the tabernacle:

The Lord said to Moses, “See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft. (Exodus 31:1-5 ESV)

The multiplication of intellectual virtue terminology fused with the language of spiritual filling clearly points to a beautiful harmony between the intellect and the Spirit. In this passage we even have Hebrew words that evoke the whole gamut of intellectual virtues. The word translated ‘ability’ by the ESV is the well-known hokma or wisdom made famous by the book of Proverbs, followed by a word for ‘skill’ or intelligence, knowledge and craftsmanship (think of Aristotle’s techne). This biblical support for the role of intellectual virtues could, of course, be multiplied from the book of Proverbs itself, which sees wisdom as a tree of life and more valuable than any earthly good. In a developed Christian view of sanctification, then, we would do well not to neglect the intellectual virtues.

A Christian, Classical Purpose of Education

We can then propose the active cultivation of the moral, intellectual and spiritual virtues as the proper purpose of life. And therefore, education’s grand goal is itself the same as that of Christian discipleship: the preparation for eternity through the cultivation of holiness in all aspects of life. While the biblical conception of holiness may not be confined to the pursuit of moral, intellectual and spiritual virtues, it certainly includes it. After all, Peter himself instructs us to add to our faith virtue, and to virtue add knowledge (see 2 Peter 1:5), perhaps deliberately endorsing the spiritual, moral and intellectual realms. 

We can compare this trifold purpose of education with that of John Amos Comenius, the great Czech Christian educational reformer of the 17th century. In his Great Didactic he argues that this life is but a preparation for eternity, since as we have said, “the ultimate end of man is eternal happiness with God” (p. 36; trans. by Keatinge). As creatures made in the image of God, human beings are rational creatures, stewards of creation and the image and glory of their creator (p. 36):

From this it follows that man is naturally required to be: (1) acquainted with all things; (2) endowed with power over all things and over himself; (3) to refer himself and all things to God, the source of all.

Now, if we wish to express these three things by three well-known words, these will be

(i.) Erudition.

(ii.) Virtue or seemly morals.

(iii.) Religion or piety.

Under Erudition we comprehend the knowledge of all things, arts, and tongues, under Virtue, not only of external decorum, but the whole disposition of our movements, internal and external; while by Religion we understand that inner veneration by which the mind of man attaches and binds itself to the supreme Godhead. (pp. 37-38)

Comenius later sums up these three goals of Christian education, which is intended to prepare students both for this life and the life to come, under the titles of learning, virtue and piety. The first would correspond to the cultivation of intellectual virtues, the second to moral virtues, and the last to spiritual virtues. These three areas fulfill man’s nature and fit him for eternal happiness with God. 

But what of Aristotle’s concern for good fortune and good friends to constitute human happiness in this life? The role of earthly goods is relativized to the point of insignificance by the introduction of God and eternity into the equation. The excellences of the body (being born with good looks or good health… remember that the intellectual virtues would cover bodily skill and the moral virtues proper care of the body) are excluded as “extrinsic ornaments” and not ultimately necessary to eternal happiness in light of the resurrection. Learning, virtue and piety are the proper goals of Christian, classical education:

In these three things is situated the whole excellence of man, for they alone are the foundation of the present and of the future life. All other things (health, strength, beauty, riches, honour, friendship, good-fortune, long life) are as nothing, if God grant them to any, but extrinsic ornaments of life, and if a man greedily gape after them, engross himself in their pursuit, occupy and overwhelm himself with them to the neglect of those more important matters, then they become superfluous vanities and harmful obstructions. (pp. 37-38)

Comenius’ reframing of these age-old philosophical questions in Christian terms provides a solid foundation for our restoration of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as proper goals of education. The intellect is not the entire story, but it should be situated over the heart and under the superior direction of the Spirit. 

In Christian education, the ornaments of life can be relativized in a way that is impossible from the standpoint of mere classical education. Test scores and advancement, money and influence, fame and success are not the proper goals of a truly Christian education, because they are liable to becoming “superfluous vanities and harmful obstructions”; that said, they may serve as helpful sign-posts and markers along the way, as long as our true goals remain clearly in view: moral, intellectual and spiritual virtue, for the eternal enjoyment of God himself. It is in this context that we can then explore the cultivation of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as part of the purpose of a truly Christian, classical education.

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