The Brain as a Learning Machine

During the high school years, or even earlier in the middle school years, students should gain an understanding of the human body, whether that be in biology, life science, human anatomy or otherwise. As with anything we learn, the objectives for learning systems in the body should not simply be for achieving good scores on tests, but to gain highly practical and actionable understanding for living well. For instance, a student learning how the Krebs cycle is the way the body generates energy at a cellular level through a series of chemical reactions that release energy from the oxidation of acetate that comes from carbohydrates, fats and proteins. The Krebs cycle is way more complex than the sentence I just wrote. But even in this sentence, one can hear highly practical insights a student can gain about nutrition (understanding macronutrients), breathing (injecting oxygen into the system), and exercise (aerobic efficiency).

When it comes to the brain, a student learning how neurons send electrical information along axons within systems of circuits can begin to understand that the human brain hungers to gather as much of this electrical information as possible in order to reason, plan and solve problems. Feeding our brains good “food” enables it to process this electrical information more efficiently and in more reliable ways. In other words, the brain is a learning machine. A student who conceptualizes this has actually captured the central idea of lifelong learning.

Delving deeper into the intricate workings of the human brain can shed light on the mechanisms that underpin the learning process. As we’ve already seen, neural activity consists of specialized cells transmitting electrical signals throughout the body. Learning occurs as neurons fire together, forming the circuits where information gets stored. The authors of Make It Stick describe how neurocircuitry develops in humans:

“Our neural circuitry does not mature as early as our physical development and instead continues to change and grow through our forties, fifties and sixties. Part of the maturation of these connections is the gradual thickening of the myelin coating of the axons. Myelination generally starts at the backs of our brains and moves towards the front, reaching the frontal lobes as we grow into adulthood.”

Peter Brown, Henry Roediger & Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Belknap, 2014), 170.

This means that the insulation provided by myelin sheaths surrounding neurons plays a crucial role in the learning process not only for students in their teens, but throughout their lives. They mention the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for higher-order cognitive functions, including problem-solving, decision-making, and the ability to adapt to novel situations. This area of the brain is still in development throughout the teen years. This goes some way towards explaining why the adolescent years are associated with a lack of impulse control and, at times, poor decision making.

The hippocampus, often referred to as the “memory center” of the brain, is instrumental in the formation of new memories and the consolidation of learned information. Again, the authors of Make It Stick give us wonderful news about this brain center:

“The hippocampus, where we consolidate learning and memory, is able to generate new neurons throughout life. The phenomenon, called neurogenesis, is thought to play a central role in the brain’s ability to recover from physical injury and in humans’ lifelong ability to learn. . . . Already scientists have shown that the activity of associative learning (that is, of learning and remembering the relationship between unrelated items, such as names and faces) stimulates an increase in the creation of new neurons in the hippocampus.”

Make it Stick, 172.

Neurogenesis, or the creation of new neurons, is still an emerging area of brain study in human subjects. But there is evidence that the hippocampus produces new neurons throughout the lifespan of healthy adults. These new neurons enable learners to continue to maintain and create neural connections, supporting the notion that we can and do learn throughout our lives. These new neuros contribute to what is known as neuroplasticity, the brain’s remarkable capacity to reorganize and form new connections between neurons. This dynamic process allows the brain to continuously adapt and evolve in response to new experiences and environmental stimuli, facilitating the acquisition of knowledge and the development of new skills.

Understanding the neuroscience behind learning can inform educational practices and help individuals optimize their cognitive abilities, ultimately empowering learners to reach their full potential. Here we’ll explore a few practical objectives that should become part of how all high schoolers are coached. These are the key skills that should be learned before leaving for college.

Three Essential Skills for College-Bound High Schoolers

From the first semester of freshman year and throughout their high school career, both teachers and students should talk about and highlight strategies related to three key skills that should operate in all subject areas. Too often we focus on content knowledge, grade-point average, or meeting college entrance requirements. While these are necessary and in some ways decent measures of core competencies, they don’t actually get at the transferable skills that enable students to manage their learning and take stock of themselves along the way as learners. In other words, these skills provide a feedback loop for students to learn how to manage their learning and eventually set goals in their learning.

The first skill is deliberate practice. This is a systematic approach to learning that has been shown to promote significant improvements in performance across a wide range of domains. At its core, deliberate practice involves focused, effortful activities designed to target specific weaknesses and push the limits of one’s current abilities.

From a neurological perspective, deliberate practice triggers key changes in the brain that facilitate learning. Repeated engagement in challenging tasks leads to the strengthening of neural pathways and the formation of new connections between neurons. This process allows the brain to adapt and improve performance over time.

Importantly, deliberate practice is distinguished from mere repetition or passive learning. It requires a high degree of concentration, feedback from a skilled coach, and a willingness to make mistakes and learn from them. By embracing this approach, individuals can systematically enhance their skills and expertise in a given area, ultimately achieving a level of mastery that would be difficult to attain through more casual or unfocused learning methods.

One of the leading voices advocating deliberate practice is Cal Newport. His thesis that “the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable” is founded on the notion that one learns how to perform deep work through deliberate practice. The core components of deliberate practice consist of:

“(1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.”

Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Grand Central, 2016), 35.

Consider how a student in math or writing can be coached in specific skills and given feedback to improve their competency. This entails an atmosphere of intentional effort while also celebrating mistakes and errors so that there is ample materials with which to coach students.

The next skill is metacognition. This consists in the ability to think about one’s own learning. By monitoring their own cognitive activities, individuals can develop a deeper understanding of how they learn best and make adjustments to their study strategies accordingly. When individuals actively reflect on their learning, they are able to identify their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement, allowing them to allocate their cognitive resources more efficiently.

Metacognition is actually a bundle of skills. These include planning, self-monitoring, and reflection, among others. With planning, students approach a problem – a math problem or an essay prompt – by formulating a plan for how to solve the problem. Notice that this is a shift in focus away from the specific answer towards the approach that is most appropriate for the kind of problem it is. In other words, students will often get fixated on producing correct answers, but not step back to consider strategies that help them think about their thinking. With self-monitoring, students can ask themselves questions like, “Do I understand what I have just read?” Then, they can answer this question by providing a narration or producing information from the reading. This moves a student away from reading a text and then assuming that by reading it, they understand it. Finally, by reflecting, students can consider whether they grew in skill during an exercise set, or they can evaluate sticking points in their writing process, or they can articulate skills that helped them complete the assignment.

Metacognitive practices get students to think about what they are learning. They need practice shifting into a mode where they become active learners, instead of passively taking in information. These practices can lead to enhanced long-term retention and the ability to transfer knowledge to new contexts. By cultivating metacognitive skills, learners can become more self-directed, adaptable, and ultimately, more successful in their academic and professional pursuits.

The last skill is self-advocacy. This skill promotes deeper learning and skill development through the process of actively identifying one’s needs and communicating them effectively. Most often this occurs by the student connecting with the teacher to address an area where there’s a lack of understanding or the need for support in project management. For example, a student might struggle to recall formulas in a physics class. They know how to do the math work. They simply never remember which formula goes with which problem. This student could approach the teacher to ask for help in knowing better the best way to remember how to associate formulas with problems. In a different scenario, a student has to manage a long-term essay assignment. They are struggling to break it down into manageable steps. So this student emails her teacher to schedule an appointment during office hours to map out the project in logical steps. In both of these examples, the student is advocating for themselves by articulating the issue they are facing and drawing upon the teacher to assist them in solving the issue.

When we advocate for ourselves, we activate executive function skills like planning, organization, and self-monitoring. This skills goes hand in hand with metacognition. A student who is grasping their self-understanding as a learner can begin to equip themselves by reaching out to others for help. The effort required to self-advocate cultivates a growth mindset. Individuals who take responsibility for their learning demonstrate an understanding that improvement requires sustained work. This perspective enables them to persist through challenges and maximize the benefits of educational opportunities. Ironically, by getting help from a parent or teacher, the student actually finds that effort can be matched by support. They receive the coaching and encouragement to continue on an effortful pathway.

High schoolers need practice self-advocating. It does not come naturally to most students to seek out help. So, one policy you can put in place is to require every student to ask a self-advocacy question. Or you can require a certain number of office visits per semester. By making self-advocacy an assignment, you give students the practice they need to learn how to formulate a question and how to approach a grown up for help. It can be intimidating to reach out to a teacher, so by making it an assignment, you are forcing the student to overcome their barriers to accessing help.

Imagine how a student equipped with these skills will feel when stepping onto a college campus after graduating from high school. A student who has learned what it takes to engage in deliberate practice will be able to tackle their coursework with diligence. A student who has learned to think about their thinking will be able to assess the kinds of study skills that will most effectively work in different kinds of courses. A student who has learned to self-advocate with their high school teachers will be better prepared to approach their college professors with their questions and issues.

The post Three Key Skills to Develop during High School appeared first on .

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

The post Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship appeared first on .