But it should not be thought that I plan wholly to neglect moral and spiritual virtues in the rest of this series on Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues. After all, a main point of my previous article was that the moral, intellectual and spiritual categories are overlapping and interpenetrating categories, at least for the apostle Paul. For Aristotle as well, the moral and intellectual categories interact and intermingle in unique ways. This in fact is what makes Aristotle the proper antidote to Bloom and his cognitive taxonomy: breaking down the rigid separation between the heart and the head, let alone the hands.

In this article we continue laying the foundation for a taxonomy of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues by exploring the unique relationship between Aristotle’s conception of moral virtues and one particular intellectual virtue, techne, which I prefer to translate as artistry or craftsmanship, though many translators use the English term ‘art’. Modern English speakers will find this confusing and unhelpful, because the term ‘art’ is almost exclusively used nowadays to refer to particular fine arts, like drawing, painting and sculpture. But the Latin root had a similar range and meaning to the Greek techne, which could refer to any craft or productive skill. (In a similar way the modern English term ‘science’ was narrowed to refer to only natural science, or the knowledge that we have discovered about the natural world, when it had previously referred to knowledge in general, as in the Latin scientia or Greek episteme. See the article “The Classical Distinction between the Liberal Arts and Sciences”.)

According to Aristotle, moral virtue and artistry are allies and analogues to one another, because they both are cultivated by means of habit or custom. It will therefore be helpful to our broader purpose to explore this relationship between the body, the heart and the mind, summed up in what we call habits, in order to pave the way for a full explication of the educational goal of techne or craftsmanship in a classical Christian paradigm. Our primary text for this exploration comes from book II of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, though we will bring Charlotte Mason’s thought and modern neuroscience into the dialogue as well.

Excellence Comes by Habit… or At Least Some Excellences

The well-known quotation from Aristotle, “Excellence comes by habit…” is at least partially a misquotation, since arete, virtue or excellence, in Aristotle is divided into two types, moral and intellectual. To only one of these does the power of habit apply as the main method of cultivating virtue. The full quotation from the opening of Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics reads as follows:

Excellence, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual excellence in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral excellence comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name [ethike for “moral”] is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word for ‘habit’ [ethos].

Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a.14-19, rev. Oxford trans. vol. II (Princeton, 1984), p. 1742

The word translated ‘teaching’, didaskalia, is the common term for ‘instruction’ used in the New Testament as well, and means exactly what we would think: the work of an instructor in teaching truths and skills, whether in a formal or informal setting. It will not do its work in a moment, but will involve time and a host of experiences in which the student’s mind is formed for whatever intellectual virtue is being cultivated. 

This bare statement puts the lie to some extreme modern versions of Rousseau, like unschooling, that deny the need for a teacher or instructor, and posit that a child has enough resources in himself to cultivate his own intellect and grow and develop the intellectual virtues needed for life. It is true that books can serve as teachers to the disciplined and curious mind, and so the supposed exceptions to this—the self-taught geniuses of the world—are really the exceptions that prove the rule, since they invariably relied on the instruction of others, even though through more independent means like books. On the other hand, people certainly can learn things through their own experience. Otherwise how would the human race have ever learned anything? But learning from personal experience is in general a horribly inefficient process; therefore, the systematic and thoughtful instruction of a teacher is the regular and normal route to intellectual excellence.

It is also worth noting here that the cultivation of habits is not the primary method for the development of intellectual virtue, but only of moral virtue for Aristotle. We will see later that techne or artistry is an exception to that, in a way. But for the time being it is worth sitting with this idea and comparing it with other thinkers like Charlotte Mason or Maria Montessori. In emphasizing the personhood of the child, Mason, for one, is sometimes heard by moderns as endorsing the unschooling extreme just mentioned. In reality, she regularly called attention to the primacy of God-given authority and children’s need for intellectual food, primarily in the form of the best books of the best minds. Like most moderns, she makes a firmer distinction between curriculum and instruction than Aristotle, in order to claim that teachers should use living books, rather than provide their own worked-up lectures. This idea might have been lost on Aristotle because of his different context. In the ancient world books were not regularly read silently, and were not easily and cheaply procured. But it is this book-based process of instruction that allows Mason to endorse what she calls “self-education” as the only true education, and not a Rousseauian anti-civilization, anti-authority stance on human development. 

Mason also believes that the formation of habits, both intellectual and moral, is a third part of education. We should note that, for Mason, habits are intellectual as well as moral. Outward customs have moved inward to cover what we can call today habitual “trains of thought”, an idiom that evokes Mason’s favorite metaphor for habits as the railways of life. Is this then, perhaps, an area of disagreement between Charlotte Mason and the great philosopher Aristotle? That, for her, habits are intellectual as well as moral? Let’s look closer at what she says in her discussion of education as a discipline from her 6th volume:

By this formula we mean the discipline of habits formed definitely and thoughtfully whether habits of mind or of body. Physiologists tell us of the adaptation of brain structure to habitual lines of thought, i.e., to our habits.

Education is not after all to either teacher or child the fine careless rapture we appear to have figured it. We who teach and they who learn are alike constrained; there is always effort to be made in certain directions; yet we face our tasks from a new point of view. We need not labour to get children to learn their lessons; that, if we would believe it, is a matter which nature takes care of. Let the lessons be of the right sort and children will learn them with delight. The call for strenuousness comes with the necessity of forming habits; but here again we are relieved. The intellectual habits of the good life form themselves in the following out of the due curriculum in the right way. As we have already urged, there is but one right way, that is, children must do the work for themselves. They must read the given pages and tell what they have read, they must perform, that is, what we may call the act of knowing. We are all aware, alas, what a monstrous quantity of printed matter has gone into the dustbin of our memories, because we have failed to perform that quite natural and spontaneous ‘act of knowing,’ as easy to a child as breathing and, if we would believe it, comparatively easy to ourselves. The reward is two-fold: no intellectual habit is so valuable as that of attention; it is a mere habit but it is also the hall-mark of an educated person. Use is second nature, we are told; it is not too much to say that ‘habit is ten natures,’ and we can all imagine how our work would be eased if our subordinates listened to instructions with the full attention which implies recollection––Attention is not the only habit that follows due self-education. The habits of fitting and ready expression, of obedience, of good-will, and of an impersonal outlook are spontaneous bye-products of education in this sort. So, too, are the habits of right thinking and right judging; while physical habits of neatness and order attend upon the self-respect which follows an education which respects the personality of children. (vol. 6, pp. 99-100)

Interestingly, Mason makes a distinction between “habits of mind and habits of body”. Of course, she knows very well that all habits make a “mark upon the brain substance” from the latest science of her day (vol. 6 p. 100). And so, in a way it is redundant to call any habit a habit of mind or of body, since a habit is in its very essence, bodily, or physical, as well as mental, i.e. registering in the brain. These reflections challenge again the simplistic divisions made by Bloom and his colleagues in proposing a division of educational goals into a cognitive domain, an affective domain and a psychomotor domain. If the brain registers in all of these, and they all have outward bodily expressions, then we have perhaps hit up against the limits of our traditional metaphors for the nature of the human person. Head, heart and hands are irreducibly intertwined through the human nervous system. Aristotle was most certainly not aware of these insights about the brain and other vital organs, even if he did more than his fair share to advance science and human physiology in his time.

On the other hand, Charlotte Mason does seem to share with Aristotle this conception that “intellectual habits” come from instruction, if we view curriculum and proper teaching methods as a specification of Aristotle’s didaskalia or instruction. As she says, the “intellectual habits of the good life form themselves in the following out of the due curriculum in the right way.” She cites attention and the act of knowing, perhaps chiefly embodied in her teaching method of narration, as “the right way”. Mason’s “self-education”, then, does not resolve itself into a call for unschooling, but for a more rigorous adherence to the right books and the right methods by which a child’s own intellectual powers will grow and find their full development.

Her concern coheres broadly with Aristotle’s focus on intellectual virtues generally, since arete involves the active engagement of the individual in means and ends. It may owe “its birth and growth to teaching,” but it has a life of its own; it is not something that a teacher can mechanistically instill in a person, as a waitress pours water into a glass. The organic metaphors used by Mason find their expression in Aristotle as well. 

In addition, it is the nature of the human person that habit training and teaching are meant to develop. As he goes on to say at the beginning of Book II following the passage quoted above:

From this it is also plain that none of the moral excellences arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do excellences arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit. 

Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a.19-25, pp. 1742-1743

Modern science might cause us to stumble over Aristotle’s examples here, because the discovery of gravity and chemical reactions like combustion throw a wrench in his system. But for Aristotle, things move downward because it is in their nature to do so; they have an internal telos or goal toward which they head of their own accord. For stones this telos is down, but for fire it is up. The point of the examples is that human beings too have a telos and this is excellence, but we do not have excellence “by nature”, otherwise no training would be necessary or even possible. You can’t habituate a stone to fly upwards of its own accord. But you can habituate a human person to act justly or eat temperately. 

But I ask again, is this only true of moral virtues and not also of intellectual ones? Can’t we be habituated to think in a certain way?

The Analogy between Morality and Artistry

For Aristotle it is important to distinguish between abilities we have by nature and those that are developed by practice. In a way, this devolves into the age-old debate between the relative importance of nature and nurture. As he says,

Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them); but excellences we get by first exercising them, 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. (p. 1743)

Aristotle’s point is that sight is an ability we have by nature. The potential to see is formed in the very nature of a human person (from pupil and retina to optic nerve and brain structure); seeing, therefore, comes without any practice. The first time a baby opens its eyes it sees. (Perhaps we shouldn’t rabbit-trail into how distinguishing between objects and developing facial recognition, for instance, are extremely complex skills that the brain is practically hardwired to develop on its own, for which it nevertheless requires significant time, experience and practice, and which is influenced by the development of habits….) 

Both morality and artistry, however, do not come by nature but by exercise or practice. As the saying goes, “One swallow does not a summer make.” One just act does not make a man just. Nor does constructing one building make a man an architect. Through deliberate or purposeful practice of particular activities, the habit of doing them is elevated to the level of excellence. Excellence in morality and artistry then comes by habit… but not by a habit that is thoughtless. As my gymnastic coach drilled into me as a youth, “Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.” Aristotle further details the point in his ongoing analogy between moral excellence and craftsmanship:

Again, it is from the same causes and by the same means that every excellence is both produced and destroyed, and similarly every art; for it is from playing the lyre that both good and bad lyre-players are produced. And the corresponding statement is true of builders and of all the rest; men will be good or bad builders as a result of building well or badly. For if this were not so, there would have been no need of a teacher, but all men would have been born good or bad at their craft. This, then, is the case with the excellences also; by doing the acts that we do in our transactions with other men we become just or unjust, and by doing the acts that we do in the presence of danger, and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we become brave or cowardly. The same is true of appetites and feelings of anger; some men become temperate and good-tempered, others self-indulgent and irascible, by behaving in one way or the other in the appropriate circumstances. Thus, in one word, states arise out of like activities. This is why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind; it is because the states correspond to the differences between these. It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a great difference, or rather all the difference. (p. 1743)

In this passage Aristotle comes full circle and justifies the need of a teacher for artistry (even though he hasn’t yet listed it among his five intellectual virtues). It is possible to build many buildings, and only confirm the builder in mediocrity, or worse, poor quality or shoddy building. In the same way, I needed a coach to become a gymnast, to correct my poor form on various exercises, to instruct me to point my toes, keep my legs straight and tuck my head in during handstands. Otherwise, I would develop bad habits early on that would make advancement in good gymnastics impossible. 

Notice how coaching in artistry requires a competent teacher who is sufficiently advanced in the craft to pass along the basic principles of proper form or good quality, along with the judgment to correct errors and mistakes. As I advanced in gymnastics, I could practice more and more on my own, because I had developed the mental architecture for quality gymnastics and had internalized the basic principles of the craft. Watching and imitating Olympic gymnasts as they demonstrate exquisite form might also spur my growth and development of excellence. 

Aristotle argues that it is much the same with moral virtues. While he doesn’t explicitly mention parents and tutors, his final appeal that it makes all the difference what habits we form from our youth seems targeted to raise the bar for those who have charge of the young. Early habit training is the determining factor in the later development of moral character. But this should not be construed in such a way as to remove the value of thinking and deliberating over moral choices. For Aristotle one cannot have the moral virtues without also attaining the intellectual virtue of phronesis, practical wisdom or prudence. And we dare not undervalue the importance of artistry or craftsmanship of all types, which involves the development of cultivated habits as well as a true course of reasoning. 

Resolving the Nature-Nurture Debate: Myelin, Habits and Skill

From the perspective of modern research the nature-nurture debate for both skill and moral action seems to have been substantively resolved. The key is not exactly neurons and synapses, but myelin, a white fatty substance that is wrapped around neural networks after they are repeatedly fired. As Dr. George Bartzokis, professor of neurobiology at UCLA said, myelin is “the key to talking, reading, learning skills, being human” (As quoted in Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code [Bantam, 2009], 32). Neuroscientists claim that “the traditional neuron-centric worldview is being fundamentally altered by a Copernican-style revolution” based on three basic facts:

1. Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. 
2. Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. 
3. The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster and more fluent our movements and thoughts become. (Coyle, The Talent Code, 32)

Notice that what we call body, heart and head are equally susceptible to the neural network process. In addition, the repetition of particular acts, thoughts or feelings in a certain context creates what we call a ‘habit’, a propensity for or ease of repeating that same act, thought or feeling again. Deep or focused practice tends to wrap myelin more quickly and efficiently. 

As Aristotle claimed more than 2,000 years ago, “Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do excellences arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.” We cannot make a habit or skill of doing something physically impossible. But if we have the ability to do something, we can get better and better and better at it through practice, until even our original abilities have been fundamentally altered and developed. Nature provides the hardware for the myelin wrapping process, while nurture (including all our choices, actions, thoughts and feelings) actually wraps the myelin. As Daniel Coyle explains, 

Instead of prewiring for specific skills, what if the genes dealt with the skill issue by building millions of tiny broadband installers [i.e. myelin-wrapping oligodendrocytes] and distributing them throughout the circuits of the brain? The broadband installers wouldn’t be particularly complicated—in fact, they’d all be identical, wrapping wires with insulation to make the circuits work faster and smoother. They would work according to a single rule: whatever circuits are fired most, and most urgently, are the ones where the installers will go. Skill circuits that are fired often will receive more broadband; skills that are fired less often, with less urgency, will receive less broadband.

Coyle, The Talent Code, 71-72.

Memory, habits, skill development, all of human educational goals, in fact, seem to have this process at their root, even if they cannot ultimately be reduced to it.

As Christians, we may get nervous at all this talk of the brain and neurons, because of the real and present danger of reducing the mind or spirit to the matter and electrical signals of the brain. So we would do well to put a stake in the ground with Charlotte Mason on this point and clarify that we believe the mind is more than the brain. We are not evolutionary materialists. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Shakespeare’s Hamlet I.5). But having clarified our spiritual frame of reference, perhaps these findings of neuroscience are precisely what we should have expected: God has made us as trifold beings, body, soul and spirit, situated between heaven and earth:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

The moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

What is man that you are mindful of him,

And the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings

And crowned him with glory and honor.

You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;

You have put all things under his feet…. (Psalm 8:3-6 ESV)

Our glory as human beings is our middle placement, our intertwined nature, participating in the intellectual nature of the angels and the physical nature of beasts. Flesh and spirit intermingle and interact, and the nervous system gives us a glimmer of insight into how. Our habits, practice and skill development involve fleshly acquirements in body and brain, but they are nonetheless spiritual. Moral and intellectual virtues can be trained by practice. As the author of Hebrews says, “But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Heb 5:14 ESV). Discernment is an important Christian intellectual virtue mentioned frequently in the New Testament. And according to Hebrews it, too, is “trained by practice”.

In the next article we will explore the differences between moral training and training in techne or craftsmanship, introducing the modern concepts of deliberate practice, coaching and the apprenticeship model.

Earlier Articles in this series:

Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education

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To summarize the distinction, Aristotle defined the intellectual virtue of ‘art’ as a “state of capacity to make [something], involving a true course of reasoning” (Nichomachean Ethics VI.4, 1140^a). The painter makes paintings, the musician creates music, the architect designs buildings. And all of them do so with a reasoned awareness of the constraints of the world and the proper steps necessary to bring what they imagine into being.

On the other hand, the intellectual virtue of ‘science’ or, in common parlance, ‘knowledge’ is “a state of capacity to demonstrate” (Nich. Ethics VI.3 1139^b), meaning that in order to know something, someone should be able to prove it or give evidence that it is the case. Experts give evidence in order to prove the truthfulness of certain claims, thereby endeavoring to establish genuine knowledge about their subject.

Perhaps you can see in a glance why this is an incredibly important distinction for educators. Training a child in an art should follow a markedly different process than teaching a child a science! Artistic mastery requires a great deal of coached practice in the art, while knowledge of particular truths in a subject entails research, gathering evidence, careful thought and the weighing of arguments.

Where this comes to a head most of all is in our application of the classical liberal arts in our schools: particularly the trivium arts of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, but also the quadrivium arts of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. While we’ve continued to call them ‘arts’, it is my contention that we’ve been so caught up with modernist privileging of ‘science’ over everything else, that we’ve fallen into error in both our understanding of what these arts are in their essence, but also in our methods of teaching them… or I should say, of training students in them. We’ve treated the liberal arts as if they were sciences, and our students have been the worse for it.

In unpacking and applying this crucial distinction, let’s start first with John Milton Gregory’s distinction of training vs. teaching.

Training vs. Teaching in J M. Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching

At the school where I work we’re going through John Milton Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching as one piece of our faculty training for this year. In rereading it this last June, I came across a passage of his introduction that caught my eye because of its relationship to the classical distinction between an ‘art’ and a ‘science’.

John Milton Gregory divides the whole art of education into two “branches”:

“The one is the art of training; the other the art of teaching. Training is the systematic development and cultivation of the powers of mind and body. Teaching is the systematic inculcation of knowledge.” (p. 10, 2014 Canon Press reprint)

Here it was again articulated in a different form. Where Aristotle’s expression of it held the trappings of a work on personal ethics, and therefore focused on the subjective virtue of an individual, J. M. Gregory was expressing the distinction from the perspective of an educator. Education involves two core parts, we might say, training in the arts (i.e. any of the “powers of mind and body” that produce something in the world) and teaching of knowledge in any particular ‘science’, or subject in which things can be known.

J. M. Gregory goes on to explain the how and why of training in more detail:

“As the child is immature in all its powers, it is the first business of education, as an art, to cultivate those powers, by giving to each power regular exercise in its own proper sphere, till, through exercise and growth, they come to their full strength and skill.” (10)

This expresses well my previous article’s contention for the importance of lots of coached practice. Training students in an art requires giving them “regular exercise” and a long process for the development of “strength and skill.” I hardly need add that recent research on the importance of deliberate practice over the course of thousands of hours is confirming this traditional insight. Highly focused repeated firing of the relevant neural networks is apparently the key to the formation of myelin sheaths around those neurons, so that their firing can occur with high levels of efficiency and accuracy (see The Talent Code, or Talent Is Overrated, or Outliers or any other of the high performance literature drawing from Anders Erikson’s research).

Incidentally, J. M. Gregory also concedes that training is more primary, or that it is, as he says, “the first business of education,” because without the training of a child’s powers, they cannot even grapple with the stuff of knowledge. The arts are a basic human form of culture-making, without which knowledge is not even possible.

In contrast, J. M. Gregory describes teaching as the communication of knowledge, dropping Aristotle’s emphasis on the ability to demonstrate. Modernism and empiricism had effectively undercut Aristotle’s emphasis on deductive logic’s ability to “prove” from universals, and the promise of presenting the “results of modern science” had already come into its own and subtly influenced J. M. Gregory’s view of what it meant to teach knowledge. At least, that’s my explanation of this curious feature of his account, not to mention his decision to write his whole work focused on the rules of teaching and leave the art of training to the side.

Lastly, it is interesting to note how J. M. Gregory claims that these two aspects of education (training vs. teaching) “though separable in thought, are not separable in practice” (11). The fact that he emphasizes this so strongly–though understandable and no doubt correct—just goes to show how far the tradition has come since Plato and Aristotle. In those days the arts were viewed more concretely, almost as professions or trades, rather than academic attainments.

The Arts as Professions in Plato’s Gorgias

Since the Fall of 2018 I have used Plato’s Gorgias with students in my role as a Senior Thesis advisor. The dialogue is a spritely example of Socrates’ witty repartee with a prominent figure, who claims so much for himself. Gorgias was a famous rhetorician with a flowery style, who travelled around Greece taking payment from students to train them in his art.

In the dialogue Socrates forces Gorgias to adopt the shorter method of discourse (i.e. Socrates’ preferred dialectical method) rather than his normal rhetorical speeches, before systematically picking apart what the art of rhetoric really is, and whether Gorgias can really train men in all he claims to. What is interesting to note for our purposes is further confirmation that even before Aristotle articulated the distinction between skill in an ‘art’ and knowledge or ‘science’, it was alive and well in Greek educational culture.

Socrates begins by discussing numerous other arts or professions, in order to illuminate what exactly Gorgias claims to be as a rhetorician. Throughout the dialogue he brings up the art of a weaver, a physician, a trainer, a business owner, an arithmetician, and a geometer, among other professions. Of course, he also mentions the art of dialectic that he himself engages in, and discusses at length the nature of Gorgias’ art of rhetoric. When Gorgias’ defines rhetoric as the art of discourse, Socrates makes the point that other arts deal with discourse as well. For instance, the physician discourses with the sick about the remedies for their condition, and the arithmetician about odd and even numbers.

In a way, Plato’s Gorgias foreshadows the later idea of the liberal arts, which would include arithmetic, geometry, dialectic and rhetoric. They are distinguished from other arts by how they use discourse in words or numbers to create their product. Unlike the products of a weaver or sculptor, a trainer or physician, their product itself is the discourse of words and numbers now present in the world. That product could be the ephemeral spoken address of an orator, or the record of it later written down; it could be the mental calculations of an arithmetician or the recorded transactions in a business ledger.

The dialogue is also interesting for how Socrates’ chief critique of Gorgias’ art of rhetoric turns on Gorgias’ claim to being able to persuade anyone of anything regardless of his lack of knowledge or expertise in that area. For example, Gorgias claims that his brother, a physician, could not get a certain patient to take his medicine, until he came along and pleaded with him. Socrates seems to almost be objecting to the art of rhetoric’s ability to persuade others of beliefs without “inculcating knowledge” or “teaching” them anything. For this reason, Socrates thinks the art of rhetoric is suspect because it can be used to convince people of false ideas just as well as true.

In other words, Socrates thinks training students in the art of rhetoric without teaching them true knowledge in the sciences leaves the world ripe for manipulation. For Socrates rhetoric is a manipulative technique like cookery (which doesn’t make food nutritious) or cosmetics (which doesn’t produce real health and beauty). All this would certainly support J. M. Gregory’s claim that training and teaching cannot (or should not) be divorced in practice, even if it is useful to distinguish between them in principle.

Two Errors in Training vs. Teaching

While I am inclined to think that our chief error today is aiming to teach students abstract knowledge and rules about the liberal arts, rather than affording them enough coached practice to develop proficiency, Plato’s Gorgias provides a unique and powerful check on the other side. Neglecting the teaching of genuine knowledge can be just as deadly an error.

We might conceive of these as classical education’s Scylla and Charybdis. On the one side is the perilous rocks of focusing so much on knowledge acquisition and testing, that students lose all active agency in their learning and come out of their rhetoric classes with a host of memorized figures of speech and rules, but no facility or confidence in speaking or writing. On the other side, is the vortex of Charybdis, where the powerful currents of worldliness draw in students whose training has given them the ability to manipulate others, regardless of truth or goodness.

Perhaps there are some debate programs, or classical schools, that so focus on mastery of rules and practice, without the heart of knowledge, that this is a live option worthy of fear. But again, my hunch is that most of our modern schools are so focused on the task of learning about rhetoric that our students left without much practice in learning how to speak, to stick with one example.

How do you keep the balance of training vs. teaching? Let us know in the comments and share this article with a friend if you found it helpful!

Check out more recent articles related to training in the arts!

Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship

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

Apprenticeship in the Arts: Traditions and Divisions

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