I recently read Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport, which was fascinating for its practical application of this principle to the pseudo-productivity so common in our working world today. Emails, app channels, meetings, and looking busy dominate the landscape of office work, to the detriment, all too often, of not only true productivity, but also appropriate margin and work-life balance. While I found the book personally helpful and encouraging for school administration, I was also struck by the phrase “slow productivity” and its helpfulness for conveying the classical approach to our students’ work in school. 

In this series of short articles, I want to unpack Cal Newport’s principles for slow productivity and apply them, instead, to pedagogy at a K-12 classical school. My thesis is that teachers should guide students in the kind of slow productivity in school that optimizes durable learning and cultivates the intellectual virtues. But first we should uncover the analogous problem to our modern office woes. 

Like the office, too often modern educators are fooled by various types of pseudo-productivity that end up undercutting the goals of our educational programs. Time is filled up with “busywork” for students, we race through books regardless of their value for deep learning, and plan “learning activities” that actually undercut the development of genuine intellectual virtues while favoring ease of implementation for student and teacher alike. Minutes and hours crammed with edutainment (I can’t believe that’s even a word…) mirror the hustle and bustle of the office, with little to show for all this supposed productivity. 

What is going wrong here in educational terms? We are focused less on the quality of student work, than on the quantity of filling time with easy-to-apply learning activities. Worksheets, coloring sheets, entertaining educational videos, and flashy, lowest-common-denominator “literature” are filling up the precious educational hours of our students. The inevitable outcome of such fast and easy productivity is low quality and low expectations. What is lost on many modern educators is how all this twaddle and twaddling activities (I am borrowing and reapplying Charlotte Mason’s preferred term for poor quality, childish reading material…) is harming the development of our children. 

When we compare the educational value of, say, a student writing a paragraph or two in cursive of their own volition and drawn from their own memory of a rich text they have read, with any of the aforementioned activities, which are so common in modern education, we can see how much of modern education is best classified as pseudo-productivity. Considered from the vantage point of student attainment, filling out single word answers in a pre-packaged worksheet doesn’t hold a candle to the intellectual virtues honed and developed by, for instance, a written narration. Why is it that we settle for pseudo productivity at school? 

There are likely multiple culprits, but one of them has a similar origin to the historical backdrop of knowledge work pseudo-productivity that Newport describes in his book: the factory mindset. The idea of “productivity” itself rings of the revolution in efficiency brought about in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. As Newport explains, 

There was, of course, a well-known human cost to this emphasis on measurable improvement. Working on an assembly line is repetitive and boring, and the push for individuals to be more efficient in every action creates conditions that promote injury and exhaustion. But the ability for productivity to generate astonishing economic growth in these sectors swept aside most such concerns. (17-18)

Efficiency experts like Frederick Winslow Taylor applied this science in factory settings to great effect. Such gains captured the imagination of the world, including managers of knowledge workers and educational leaders and curriculum designers. The problem is that assessing or judging quality ended up being so much trickier in the knowledge and learning sectors.

This lure of efficiency is part of why Bloom’s Taxonomy often ends up backfiring in a management-centered approach to education. The efficiency of systems of grading, quick completion of “assignments” and tying “learning activities” to standards crowd out the need for careful judgment and high standards. Even if Bloom’s Taxonomy was intended to push educators toward more complex cognitive skills on the hierarchy, it is nevertheless possible to make students perform an easy or shallow “synthesis” task, as it is a knowledge task. Narration as a complex and multifaceted “learning activity” might seem to rank as merely a knowledge task, but it engages the creativity, memory and artistry of the student, while solidifying their understanding of the new story or history they encountered. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy has tried to treat knowledge work in school, just like steps in an assembly line. One part at a time, building up to higher levels of complexity. The only problem is that the brain and knowledge work, simply do not work best like that; isolating bits of information and steps in tasks to their lowest or most basic level (except at the very beginning of something new) can tend to stereotype and bore the minds of our students. They race through “material” without really learning or understanding it, and quickly forget the little that they have learned. Slow productivity in school is the only real productivity.

Cal Newport defines the solution to pseudo-productvity as slow productivity, explaining it as 

“A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:

1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.” (41)

In the following articles of this series, we’ll unpack each of these three principles and see how they might apply to student work in school. In the meantime, share in the comments section how you have seen pseudo-productivity invading modern schooling, as well as any ideas or proven methods for ensuring student work is deep and of high quality.

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When we compare these bite-sized pieces of “analysis” and “comprehension” to the artistry of grammar and rhetoric, for instance, we can see that Bloom’s Taxonomy has dwarfed the beauty and complexity of the educational enterprise in an effort to make it scientific and measurable. Through our exploration of Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of artistry or craftsmanship (techne in Greek), we’ve rediscovered the traditional nature of the arts and their situatedness in human culture and civilization. Treating this educational goal like a machine part that can be installed the same way in any number of factories around the world doesn’t quite do it justice. 

There is, however, a general method for training an apprentice in an art, but for competent training to occur, all the specifics of the art itself must be in view, and the teacher must be a competent craftsman himself to apprentice a student. We should not be surprised at the minimal attainments in intellectual complexity, speaking and writing ability, or piercing scientific inquiry of our students, when our teachers’ colleges are not aimed at developing paragons of intellectual virtue. After all, the student will become like his teacher. 

Of course, not everything is about intellectual attainment as it is conventionally understood. As we have seen, within the Aristotelian understanding of artistry are included athletics and sports, common and domestic arts, the professions and trades, fine and performing arts, as well the traditional liberal arts of language and number. All of these traditions have been developed in different ways over the centuries and it is the skills and sub-skills of these traditions of expertise that we are training students in, whether through deliberate or purposeful practice.

Apprenticeship in artistry ties together the heart, head and body in a unique way that will take us some way to restoring a truly Christian and classical vision for the goals of education. But artistry is not enough. In fact, what we are aiming for must necessarily take us further up and further in. As the tradition expressed in various ways, even the liberal arts themselves are preparatory. They are not the final end, but in themselves transcend toward something higher. Although as an intellectual virtue artistry involves the heart and head, it is best symbolized by the training of the hand. In the classical hierarchy of value, the heart must direct the skills of the hand as merely a part of the life well lived. 

The Intellectual Virtue of the Heart: Prudence

We must now move upward and enter the realm of the heart. Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of phronesis is often translated as practical wisdom or prudence. He defines it as “a reasoned and true state of capacity to act with regard to human goods” (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, ch. 5; rev. Oxford trans., 1801). If the intellectual virtue of artistry is concerned with our human ability to make things in the world, prudence refers to our ability to act, and to choose how we will act. In this connection we can return to Mortimer Adler’s helpful explanation of Aristotle in Aristotle for Everybody. He breaks down Aristotle’s conceptions of human beings into three categories: Man the Maker, Man the Doer and Man the Knower (16-17). Adler clarifies that these are more like dimensions than rigidly separated parts of the human being. Just as “a dimension is a direction in which I can move,” (16) human beings can make, act, and know. It is important to clarify that each of these dimensions is intellectual; as Adler explains,

Aristotle was very much concerned with the differences that distinguish these three kinds of thinking. He used the term ‘productive thinking’ to describe the kind of thinking that man engages in as a maker; ‘practical thinking’ to describe the kind that he engages in as a doer; and ‘speculative’ or ‘theoretical thinking’ to describe the kind he engages in as a knower. (17-18)

Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues fall neatly into these three dimensions of thinking. Artistry falls under our creative ability to make things in and of the world; prudence under our ability to deliberate about how we shall act, make choices and intentionally act to attain some good in the world; intuition, scientific knowledge and philosophic wisdom under our ability to know. In laying this out so neatly, Aristotle is attentive to the overlapping and interpenetrating character of these dimensions of our thinking. In regaining his terminology, we rediscover forgotten goals of education that we have been unable to correctly name for generations.

Prudence is one such forgotten gem. Adler goes on to describe the dimension of Man as Doer: 

In the second of these dimensions, doing, we have man the moral and social being—someone who can do right or wrong, someone who, by what he or she does or does not do, either achieves happiness or fails to achieve it, someone who finds it necessary to associate with other human beings in order to do what, as a human being, he or she feels impelled to do. (17)

If, as we contested (in Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education), the ultimate purpose of Christian education is the eternal happiness of human beings through the manifestation of all the moral, intellectual and spiritual virtues to the glory of God in salvation, then prudence too cannot be left out of our educational paradigm. 

Foundations of a Christian Prudence

As an intellectual virtue, prudence sits at the center of a human being, tying a person’s enacted choices in the body to their mind. It represents the seat of a person’s will or ability to choose, and the locus of their affections and desires. The heart is the wellspring of life. As Jesus makes clear, it is not the beautiful things a person makes that show the character and ultimate destiny of an individual, but how the person lives; it is not what he knows, but what he does that shows the nature of a man. False prophets, those who presumptuously claim special knowledge from on high, will be recognized by their fruits:

Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. (Matt 7:16b-20 ESV)

That Jesus is not referring to people’s acts of production by the analogy of fruit is clear enough from the context. He goes on (7:21-23) to envision how even the most spiritual products of artistry—prophecy and exorcism and “mighty works”—are not reliable signs of a person’s genuineness, but only their actions: whether or not they are “workers of lawlessness” (7:23). 

Even if the New Testament does not retain Aristotle’s exact lexical distinction between practical wisdom and philosophic wisdom (phronesis and sophia), we can discern its prioritization of a practical wisdom for life that joins hands and head in a pure heart. For instance, consider how James challenges the believer who boasts in the wisdom of the mind:

Who is wise [Greek: sophos] and understanding [epistemon, scientifically knowledgeable?] among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom [sophia] that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual [Greek: soulish], demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom [sophia] from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. (James 3:13-17)

What sort of wisdom should the Christian be primarily concerned with? Not the soulish wisdom of the world, typical even of the wisest pagans like Aristotle. It is a relational wisdom, characterized by humility and good conduct, rather than self-aggrandizement. While James uses the term sophia, he undoubtedly has something akin to practical wisdom in view. Notice how every instance of it has to do with actions in the world and relationships with others, not the comprehension and demonstration of universals in the highest subjects, as Aristotle had defined sophia.

We might pause here to note that even in Aristotle’s day, his proposed distinctions between these intellectual virtues were not followed well or strictly. He notes in Book VI, ch. 7 that in his day sophia was used of the “most finished exponents [of the arts], e.g. to Phidias as a sculptor and to Polyclitus as a maker of statues, and here we mean nothing by wisdom except excellence in art” (1801). In no age or culture can we trust the words and categories that are commonly used as the best or wisest way to map reality. This again is why Bloom’s Taxonomy was doomed from the start to simply reaffirm the modernist assumptions of its own day. Taking teachers’ own terms for their goals as the starting point for a taxonomy of educational objectives is an anti-philosophical move, savoring of pragmatism. It assumes the average Joe or Mary has the truth without inquiry or instruction. Aristotle, on the other hand, is a leading proponent of beginning with the common language conceptions, but then challenging them and attempting to explain them from within a broader philosophical frame of reference.

But returning to our foundations for a Christian prudence, we could go on to enumerate a host of passages which demonstrate the Bible’s emphasis on this lost virtue. St Paul’s claim that “knowledge puffs up but love builds up” (1 Cor 8:1) points the way to a Gospel-shaped prudence that sacrifices for others, rather than holding up my own individual happiness as the final end. It is this agape way of choosing and acting in the world that transcends Aristotle’s earthly goods with a spiritual frame of reference and an imperishable wreath (1 Cor 9:25). In case this seems too far-fetched an endorsement of Christian prudence, we could cite our Lord’s direct command to his disciples, “Behold I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; be therefore wise [phronemoi, prudent] as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt 10:16), which likewise baptizes a worldly prudence with a spiritual purity.

“Every scriptural text,” according to Paul, “is God-breathed and profitable for instruction, for rebuke, for correction, for an education [paideia, discipline or enculturation process] that is in righteousness, that the person devoted to God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17). The Bible itself aims at the moral and intellectual instruction in prudence that will enable the believer to live well. I can’t think of any higher endorsement of a prudence-focused form of education than that.

The major concern of the biblical book of Proverbs is manifestly analogous to Aristotle’s prudence, concerning more how a man lives than what he knows abstractly. While there are occasional glimmers of how the Hebrew term hokhma (wisdom) includes knowledge of the natural world and its innerworkings (see e.g. 8:22-31 and compare Solomon’s wisdom in 1 Kings 4:29-34), the predominant focus of a Proverbs education is the practical wisdom to live a flourishing life in submission to God’s moral instruction. That after all is the tenor of the whole book, it is an education in prudence that the proverbs themselves aim at. (This has far-reaching implications for a pedagogy of prudence, by the way, which we will explore in a subsequent article.) The book of Ecclesiastes, likewise, pushes the boundaries of prudence “under the sun,” in order to establish a God-centered, immanent frame of reference for a life well lived: 

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil. (12:13-14)

Both the awareness of future judgment and the love of God displayed on the cross must color the Christian educational vision of prudence. But they do not eliminate it. 

We have already had occasion to cite the author of Hebrews, who calls for Christian maturity: “But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (5:14). The term ‘discernment’ helps bring out the critical relationship between prudence and the ability to deliberate correctly in Aristotle. Similarly to how we must discern between good and evil in biblical terminology, deliberation is different from inquiry into truth, for Aristotle, but instead names when a person thinks correctly about human goods and the courses of action that he might choose. 

The Moral Virtues and Prudence

We already discussed this passage from Hebrews while exploring the analogy between artistry and morality. We noted that “constant practice” is involved as the foundation of a developed discernment. Moral habits and virtues enable the flowering of prudence as a youth’s reason develops. The heart of prudence must have a bodily foundation in the nerves even as it transcends into the rational nature of a human being. As C.S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man, with which we critiqued Bloom’s Taxonomy near the start of this series,

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism… about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man rust rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. (24-25)

While the moral virtues are strictly speaking outside the purview of our study on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, they are intricately tied to the acquisition of prudence. In fact, for Aristotle, each one is impossible without the other. As he puts it, “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” (VI.12; 1807). 

A man in battle who is cowardly aims incorrectly at his own preservation, since his nerves and emotions are not trained to endure the possibility of his own death. The proper habit training and implantation of ideas (“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,”; “How sweet and honorable it is to die for one’s country,” from Horace’s Odes, III.2.13; see Lewis, Abolition of Man, 21-22) would have provided him with the right aim: what we would call his moral duty. Practical wisdom would guide him in thinking rationally about the choices he must make on the way to the set of aims his gut and chest have attuned him to. Only those who have been trained by “constant practice” can discern or deliberate correctly regarding what is good and right. 

Perhaps the best way to understand this as moderns is through the idea of conscience. It is not quite right for Jiminy Cricket to say, “Always let your conscience be your guide.” In actual fact, the conscience itself is precisely what must be trained and renewed, if we are to discern correctly. As Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2). The mind or conscience—Paul uses the term nous (“intution”), but it seems to have the nuance here of a person’s frame of reference for moral decision-making specifically—must be transformed. In addition, continual testing or deliberating is required if a person is to discern God’s will. The conscience is key, but not as an infallible guide.

Charlotte Mason, the late 19th and early 20th century British Christian educator, understood this well. In her fourth volume entitled Ourselves, Mason discusses a series of what she calls “Instructors of Conscience”: Poetry, Novels, Essays, History, Philosophy, Theology, Nature, Science, Art, Sociology and Self-Knowledge (Book II, pp. 71-104). This list puts the lie to the supposition that we can do nothing as educators to influence the moral formation of our students. If we only consider for a moment why many Great Works on these subjects were written in the first place, we can quel the nagging modern fallacy that education should have nothing to do with a child’s “personal” moral values. 

The subjects of study named by Charlotte Mason are all worthy of fuller consideration when we explore how in fact we can educate our children for prudence: the great answer being that we are to open our students’ minds and hearts to the counsels of the wise, as the name for this mini-series suggests. But for now we can note the dangers of the uninstructed conscience in Mason’s words:

There is no end to the vagaries of the uninstructed conscience. It is continually straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel. The most hardened criminal has his conscience; and he justifies that which he does by specious reasons. ‘Society is against’ him, he says; he ‘has never had a fair chance.’ Why should he ‘go about ragged and hungry when another man rides in his carriage and eats and drinks his fill?’ ‘If that man has so much, let him keep it if he can; if cleverer wits than his contrive to ease him of a little, that is only fair play.’ Thus do reason and inclination support one another in the mind of the Ishmael whose hand is against every man; and, if every man’s hand is against him, that is all the more reason, he urges, that he should get what he can take out of life. (vol. 4 p. 60)

Moral reasoning is natural to all human beings. But the uninstructed conscience cannot be trusted to deliberate or reason correctly regarding what is good for itself or for human beings generally. All the humanities at least, are aimed to one extent or another at passing down some of humanity’s hard-won wisdom about how best to act and live as a human being. 

One of the most damning sins of Bloom’s taxonomy in this regard is that it directs a teacher’s focus away from the beating heart of the subjects she is teaching. Instead of drawing moral wisdom from the heart of a novel or history book, we drain the life out of it through a host of analytical exercises and comprehension questions, thus literally trivializing the counsels of the wise. (I have discussed this problem before in The Flow of Thought, Part 8: Restoring the School of Philosophers.) In this mini-series on educating for prudence through the counsels of the wise, I hope to lay out a rationale and method for instructing the consciences of our students through the subjects that we teach. In addition to training our students’ hands, we must educate their hearts.

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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 .

On the other hand, this extended digression, which took its cue from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book II, has provided an opportunity for us to lay the foundations of Aristotle’s distinctive vision in ways that we could not easily do without. For instance, the fact that Aristotle can refer off-handedly to arts as diverse as building, lyre-playing, navigation, medical practice, grammar and music helps to illustrate the breadth of the category of techne for him. Before the canonization of the liberal arts as “academic subjects”, there is a helpful clarity with which Plato and Aristotle understand them as productive arts, alongside other forms of craftsmanship.

But perhaps more important considerations even than this are the power of habit, the place of instruction, and the essential role of exercise, training and focused practice in the acquisition of both character and craftsmanship. Since time immemorial, it has been tempting to over-emphasize the knowledge-transfer approach to education instead of the more practice-oriented apprenticeship in the arts. While we could blame such a phenomenon on the Enlightenment, the Sophists of Socrates’s day arguably made the same error, as did medieval and Renaissance educators of all sorts. The universal human tendency to take short-cuts, even to our detriment, can probably account for our neglect of a fully orbed apprenticeship. If we could simply pass on a few memorable aphorisms or a book of “information”, rather than the considerable personal and temporal investment of apprenticing a learner through the stages of novice, apprentice, and journeyman, then why wouldn’t we simply do the former? 

In this article we will explore the apprenticeship model of training in the arts by situating the arts in time and place, and defending our five fold division of the arts, which adds two categories and slightly reframes the divisions of Chris Hall’s and Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s three fold paradigm. To their liberal, fine and common arts, we add athletics, games and sports, and the professions and trades. But before we can explain why, we must situate the arts as traditions in place and time.

Situating Techne as Traditions in Place and Time

One of the benefits of viewing the arts from the perspective of apprenticeship, rather than information-transfer, is that it draws attention to the traditional status of all arts. Human beings develop traditions of making things, and the arts are nothing more nor less than these traditions of productive skill that we have developed in various times and places and for various purposes. Aristotle’s way of talking about this involves his philosophical distinction between things that are variable and things that exist of necessity:

In the variable are included both things made and things done; making and acting are different (for their nature we treat even the discussions outside our school as reliable); so that the reasoned state of capacity to act is different from the reasoned state of capacity to make. Hence too they are not included one in the other; for neither is acting making nor is making acting. Now since architecture is an art and is essentially a reasoned state of capacity to make, and there is neither any art that is not such a state nor any such state that is not an art, art is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning. All art is concerned with coming into being, i.e. with contriving and considering how something may come into being which is capable of either being or not being, and whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing made; for art is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being, by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature (since these have their origin in themselves). Making and acting being different, art must be a matter of making, not of acting. And in a sense chance and art are concerned with the same objects; as Agathon says, ‘art loves chance and chance loves art’. Art, then, as has been said, is a state concerned with making, involving a true course of reasoning, and lack of art on the contrary is a state concerned with making, involving a false course of reasoning; both are concerned with the variable. (Nicomachean Ethics Book VI, ch. 4)

This passage provides Aristotle’s definition of techne, distinguishing it particularly from phronesis which is concerned with human action rather than production. But it also illuminates the idea that arts have their originators, and their traditions, their schools of thought, if you will, that are very much situated in time and place. 

This understanding of arts is well embodied in the Renaissance fresco painting on the Spanish chapel of Santa Maria Novella, which depicts the captain figures of various arts and theological sciences, as well as an angelic representation of the art to replace a pagan god or goddess. Charlotte Mason found inspiration from this fresco (and John Ruskin’s exposition of it) for her Great Recognition that the Holy Spirit is the ultimate source of all that is true, good and beautiful in these man-made traditions. For our purposes, the significance of the “captain figure” is that he is the originator of a tradition. Even if others in the tradition added new insights and methods—as of course Euclid did not perfect for all time the art of geometry—nevertheless the originator or master proponent of the art stands at the fountainhead of a tradition of artistic wisdom. 

In a similar way, the end of Genesis chapter 4 tells of Jabal, the originator of the art of keeping livestock, of Jubal, the originator of the arts of lyre- and pipe-playing and of Tubal-cain, the originator of the arts of bronze- and iron-working (see Gen 4:20-22). These human arts had a beginning, an originator, and a tradition of proper artistry associated with them. The apprenticeship process regularly occurred in families or clans that passed on this tradition of craftsmanship in the bonded relationship of father to son, mother to daughter. That is why these figures in Genesis 4 are called the father of all who practice those arts. The goal of such apprenticeship was mastery of the traditional skills, rules, and creative processes, embodied as a holistic way of life passed on from one’s ancestors. 

For Aristotle then, artistry as an educational goal is not an abstract intellectual skill, like the objectives of analysis, synthesis, application or evaluation from Bloom’s Taxonomy. Instead, artistry must always have a qualifying area or ‘subject’ that is traditional in nature. Mastering the art of navigation, for instance, constitutes a situated set of complex skills that experienced navigators had charted out over the course of generations, using what knowledge and tools were available to them to accomplish the desired goal of sailing from one place to another. The art of navigation is thus necessarily historically and culturally situated. When a pilot in the navy learns navigation today, he learns a very different set of sub-skills than that of a sailor in the ancient Mediterranean. 

As new technologies are developed, new techne adapt to the new circumstances. Traditions of craftsmanship are continually being updated, honed and passed on to the next generation (or else abandoned entirely), but they are not fixed entities. The tradition of navigation is fluid, changing with the winds of societal structures, goals and technologies. It might seem obvious, but landlocked people groups do not develop a rich tradition of craftsmanship in navigation.  

The upshot of this insight is to call into question the objectivism of Bloom’s taxonomy. A student cannot become a master of analysis; he must learn to analyze a particular thing, within a tradition of insight about that thing, in a way that suits the goals of a broader human project. An apprentice navigator can learn to analyze the clouds and the feeling of the wind, can become sensitive to a drop in barometric pressure that anticipates the coming of a storm, so that he can direct the sailors in taking preparatory measures to safely weather the onslaught. But this ability, this artistry of his, if you will, is unlikely to transfer to the analysis of a farmer deciding when to plant or harvest his crops. We cannot train a student to have general craftsmanship, like we can teach him general knowledge (that is, not unless we mean apprenticing him in the basics of a host of common crafts, which might in fact be desirable…). We can only train a student in a particular artistic tradition. 

I should not be heard, however, as endorsing a postmodern relativism that drops all standards of excellence or measures of conformity to truth. Rather, it is in recognizing the situatedness of the arts that we can consistently affirm the transcendence of truth, goodness and beauty themselves. Human artistry points toward but never encompasses transcendental wisdom. Moreover, the arts must always interact productively with the world as it is, which is why Aristotle’s definition of artistry as “a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning” is so brilliant. As an intellectual virtue, craftsmanship must involve a conformity of the mind to truth, to the way things really are, in the making of whatever product is intended. It cannot be a wish-fulfillment, but must actually produce the intended result in the world, given the constraints of the materials and processes. The artist’s intention must come to birth in the product. Arts are both traditional and truthful.

But human beings do not always like to make the same sorts of things. Styles of buildings change, just as do styles of speeches, poems, and the like. Of course, each area of human craftsmanship can also develop a better awareness of the nature of reality (the corresponding science), such that medical practitioners today can diagnose and treat ailments much more effectively (or should we say excellently…) than the ancients. This is why the distinction between purposeful and deliberate practice is so helpful, because we should know the nature of the pathway we are trying to lead our students on. Is this a paved road or a jungle trek that we are embarking upon? The answer may depend on the time and place, as well as the exact art we are trying to cultivate excellence in. Artistry and craftsmanship are culturally and historically situated.

A Fivefold Division of the Arts

The situatedness of the arts lays a crucial foundation for the classical Christian renewal movement. And that is because it will be very easy for those who turn back to forget to look forward. What I mean is that looking back at the historical traditions, whether of the liberal arts, the fine arts or the common arts, does not provide us with the answers we need for developing these traditions in the modern era. Recovering the traditions of the past necessarily involves updating and developing them in accordance with our new cultural and historical situation. 

Up to this point, the classical renewal movement has focused its attention on the recovery of various arts: the trivium as stages (Wilson via Sayers), then language arts sub-skills and the quadrivium (Littlejohn and Evans), then the liberal arts tradition culminating in philosophy and theology as well as early training in piety, gymnastic and music (Clark and Jain), and now the common arts (see Chris Hall’s recent Common Arts Education). Of course, classical Christian schools have always valued the fine and performing arts, as well as athletics and sports, to the extent possible in their growing schools. The recovery of historical traditions in the arts have arguably been the first steps in restoring the intellectual virtue of artistry or craftsmanship to our list of educational objectives. And these steps backward have been valuable indeed. 

But in and of themselves these backward steps do not answer the question of exactly what types of artistry to aim at in our schools. And while I cannot answer this question for individual schools, as it is a matter of culture and calling, raising the issue will help to justify offering my own five fold division of the arts, when others have proposed only three. 

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 Liberal Arts Tradition and the Status of Athletics, Games and Sports

In their description of the liberal arts, Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain distinguish between arts and sciences in a way that accords with the Aristotelian tradition of intellectual virtues, even if they focus more on objectified ‘subjects’, rather than the subjective and traditionally defined artistry of Aristotle. Their comments on an art as imitation joined with reason are spot on for all the later followers of an artistic tradition (even if not for the originator who discovered it):

The ancients and medievals had clear distinctions between imitation, art, and science. All things, whether poems, statues, or swords, were made by either imitation or art. A science, on the other hand, was a body of knowledge organized by the principles of demonstrative reason, requiring a knowledge of causes but producing nothing on its own—the knowledge was enough. A science could thus describe any such body of knowledge. Subjects as diverse as ethics and mechanics could be described as sciences. The arts were different. One of the ancient patterns in education was that imitation precedes art. An art could only be attained from an extensive foundation in action and imitation forming cultivated habits. Thus, to learn the art of the blacksmith, one would have to imitate a blacksmith for a time. To learn the art of the lyre, one had to practice it imitatively. But an art required more than simply imitation. An art arose only when imitation was joined with reason. In De Musica, Augustine clarifies that a songbird can sing beautifully through imitation and instinct, but because it has no reason, it cannot sing by art…. It is particularly an art that joins imitation with reason in order to produce something. An art is the nexus between imitation and science, the former being only in the body and the latter being only in the mind. (LAT 40)

This passage is foundational for explaining to modern educators the classical distinction between an art and a science. However, one Aristotelian distinction that Clark and Jain do not maintain is between the types of reasoning engaged by man as maker, doer and knower. Because of this, their line between artistry and scientific knowledge is not as clear and bold as it is for Aristotle. The challenge with their treatment is that it blurs the boundary in a way that arguably still privileges knowledge over practice, when for Aristotle only a “bare knowledge” is necessary for artistry (see Nic. Ethics II.4). The reasoning of craftsmanship must be true, but it is not therefore a possession of scientific knowledge, which would be a separate intellectual virtue for Aristotle. 

The only reason why I would hesitantly venture to criticize such brilliant friends and luminaries of our movement is the importance of placing the liberal arts firmly back in the category of artistry or craftsmanship, when they have been watered down into ‘subjects’ of general knowledge for so long. I also deliberately do not limit them to seven in number following the canonical mode, because the divisions and natural developments of the tradition are matters that should be up for discussion as we recover them for the modern era. Should algebra and calculus be added to the quadrivium? Would grammar be better subdivided into Phonics, Spelling, Reading and Grammar? While it is handy to maintain 3s and 7s for symbolic and numerological reasons, there may be downsides to this division for modern proponents of the tradition that outweigh the benefits. We can still speak and act in a way that is continuous with the tradition, while accounting for appropriate developments of the tradition. 

In Clark and Jain’s liberal arts tradition paradigm, they account for athletics and sports under the ancient title of gymnastic education, and the fine and performing arts under the rubric of musical education. In their 2nd edition, they account for the common and fine arts briefly in their discussion of curriculum near the end of the book, no doubt in dialogue with Chris Hall: “To the arts that produce knowledge of the truth (liberal arts), and those that serve the common good of embodied life (common arts), it is necessary to name a third category, namely the arts that produce works of beauty” (LAT 251). Admittedly their three fold paradigm of liberal, common and fine arts is incredibly attractive for how it gestures toward the transcendental triad of truth, goodness and beauty:

As we consider these three categories of arts in their relation to the classical triad of the true, the good, and the beautiful, a wonderful picture of their mutual relevance and interdependence opens before our eyes. As the body derives life from the soul, the common arts flourish through application of the liberal arts of mathematics and language. Because wisdom is gained in service, the common arts provide the context for transforming the knowledge gained through the liberal arts into wisdom. Work and wisdom go hand in hand. Similarly, the liberal and the common arts provide the material for the arts of the beautiful—the language for poetry, the brushes and pigments for painting, the mathematical proportions for singing—but they are subsequently transformed by them. By being placed in the service of beauty, the linguistic subtleties honed by the arts of grammar and rhetoric transform into a sonnet, while the principles of architecture and geometry become the flying buttresses and vaulted ceilings of the cathedral. Beauty becomes the splendor of truth and the radiance of the good. Like the art of the winemaker transforms the juice of grapes to a fine wine, the arts of the beautiful transform the knowledge of the truth and service of the good into captivating and glorious works of art. (LAT 253)

The intertwined nature of the arts is peculiarly beautiful here; nevertheless, it is worth pressing the bounds of these categories. For instance, what is to prevent various forms of athletic feats and sporting events from qualifying as arts of the beautiful, or providing us with the good things of life? Does Roger Bannister’s four minute mile or the performance of an elite gymnast not merit the title of artistry? Certainly elite athletic performances can both gesture toward the beautiful and the good, through the illustration of exquisite teamwork or simply the fact of hitting a target with precision. After all, many sports and games derived from skills needed for common arts like hunting and armament. These sports, therefore, rehearse and celebrate the excellence of human ability in providing for the goods of life with such splendor as to rise to the level of beauty and glory. 

It might be objected that athletics, games and sports are not themselves productive arts. What after all do they produce? But this is to forget the very case of the liberal or performing arts themselves. In what way does a ballet dance differ from a gymnastic performance really? Both are ephemeral (that is, apart from the technology of video recording), but the beautiful performance in time and space for an audience is itself the ‘artifact’ created. The same can be said of every sport or game, whether competitive or not. Cannot a fireworks show be a work of art? And yet it too appears and passes in a span of seconds leading into minutes. No, athletics, games and sports deserve their own category under the intellectual virtue of techne. 

Common Arts Education and the Professions and Trades

Having established the place of athletics, games and sports, I do not perhaps need to argue for the inclusion of performing arts along with fine arts as this is a fairly standard pairing in contemporary culture and schooling in particular. What we must still discuss is the inclusion of professions and trades as separate from common and domestic arts. In his marvelous book Common Arts Education: Renewing the Classical Tradition of Training the Hands, Head, and Heart (CAP 2021), Chris Hall defines the common arts this way:

Common arts are the skills that provide for basic human needs through the creation of artifacts or the provision of services. We need to eat, drink, build shelters, defend ourselves, bargain with others, maintain our health, work raw materials into various forms, and repair artifacts that are broken. The common arts run the gamut of the skills necessary to meet those needs. (31)

He goes on to cite the lists of Hugh of Saint Victor (fabric-making, armament, commerce, agriculture, hunting, medicine, theatrics) and John Scotus Eriugena (architecture, trade, cooking, navigation) for support of this description (31). His own list, detailed throughout the book, is slightly more extensive, including agriculture, architecture, trade, tailoring and weaving, metalworking, woodworking, leatherworking, stonemasonry, navigation, medicine, cooking, armament and hunting, and animal husbandry. 

Before defending my own divisions, I would note that Hall’s method of developing the tradition regarding common arts is perfectly reasonable in its own right. The fact that he does not include theatrics fits with his own definition, and only navigation sits on the edge of his description, since it does not seem to provide for basic human needs, unless it is seen as an offshoot of trade. Hall is to be commended for putting these arts back on the map and his practical guide to restoring the training of the hands as a crucial element of the classical tradition of education, especially pre-Industrial revolution. 

In favor of further dividing his category of common arts is the fact that there are at least two ways of understanding the designation ‘common’. The first is the equivalent of ancient designation and probably Hugh of St Victor’s as well, that these arts are ‘vulgar’ or ‘common’ in the sense of having lesser status relative to the liberal and fine arts. They are non-special arts, the skill-sets of common people vs. the nobility. It thus represents the class distinctions of the ancient and medieval world. Another way of understanding the designation would be that these arts are common among the general populace of a particular culture. They are complex skills that it would be helpful for the general person to have proficiency in, whether for mere subsistence or for enjoying the finer blessings of life. In many times and places, the basic skills of hunting, agriculture, tailoring and weaving, house-building, working in metal, wood or leather, cooking and care for animals would have been common in this sense. And many of these common arts have taken us beyond “basic needs” and into the experience of luxury and abundance.

Of course, for thousands of years, most of these arts have also had their professionals and specialists, who followed a more elaborate tradition of apprenticeship and could produce higher quality and more difficult goods and services that the average person could not. Often these professions and trades would utilize more challenging skills related to the liberal arts of language and number in order to practice their craft at a high level of technical accomplishment. Typically we would use the term ‘professions and trades’ to refer to these more refined skill-sets. Common and domestic arts could then refer to skills in more general use to produce the goods commonly developed in the home or farm. 

Since we have recognized that the arts are culturally and historically situated, it becomes more helpful to differentiate between the professions and trades of a culture and the common and domestic arts, which can be cultivated without the benefit of elaborate certification. Historical professions and trades, like woodworking, metalworking and architecture, might find their place in the modern world under different names and functional descriptions, like contractor, electrician and HVAC specialist. But many of the basic subdivisions of those historical trades could feature as educational objectives in the common and domestic arts, since they could be useful to the modern household or homestead. They may no longer be common attainments in contemporary culture, but they could still be commonly useful. Likewise, craftsmanship in a modern profession or trade is a legitimate educational goal, and it is practically necessary to distinguish this from general craftsmanship in common and domestic arts.

What then is the benefit of recovering the common and domestic arts as educational goals in a world of specialization and mechanization? Chris Hall summarizes it admirably:

Similarly, the common arts appeared to suffer from distortions proportional and connected to those the liberal and fine arts seemed to endure. Because we came to outsource the meeting of our basic needs, we drifted into a utilitarian view for these as well. We earned so that we could pay for goods and services, so that we did not have to make or see to them ourselves. That freed up a lot of time, bolstered an economy, and furthered our specialization and mass production. It also left us at least one step removed from some of the skills that would allow us to meet our baseline embodied needs, and at arm’s length from the very sources of our food, clothes, defense, and other vital elements of our survival….

As the old models of apprenticeship were displaced and lost, the arts themselves suffered from the loss of traditional wisdom. Apprenticeship, let’s say in woodworking, used to involve assignments and experiments, time on task under the tutelage of a master. That experience involved hands-on practice in the proper use of tools, materials, and technique. The common arts that provide a service, like trade, involved experience in the arts of situational and material appraisal, and effective communication. (46)

In our day and age, the recovery of craftsmanship with the hands may be one of the most countercultural moves in education. Thus we find value in the five fold division of Aristotle’s techne into A) athletics, games and sports, B) common and domestic arts, C) professions and trades, D) fine and performing arts, and E) the liberal arts of language and number. But this all does not answer the pressing educational questions of which arts to train our students in at which points in their educational journey, and in what ways. 

In the next article, we will discuss a general method for training in the arts, the difference that it makes to designate artistry or craftsmanship as educational objectives in our Aristotelian taxonomy of intellectual virtues, and how we can discern which arts to cultivate in our classical Christian schools and home schools.

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

Later articles:

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

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

The post Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions appeared first on .

We closed the last article by proof-texting the importance of practice from the New Testament letter to the Hebrews: “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). We equally could have quoted from Paul’s famous encouragement to Timothy, “train yourself for the purpose of godliness…” (1 Tim 4:7). The word commonly translated as godliness (eusebeia) is the Greek word for piety, the fulfillment of one’s obligations to family, the broader community, and God himself. It is a virtual summary of all the moral and spiritual virtues. And Paul’s point is that Timothy should train himself, as a man exercises at the gymnasium to stay in prime shape for military service or the competitive games. 

The word for ‘training’ is gymnazo and had already become a standard metaphor for moral and intellectual cultivation by Paul’s day. In fact, Socrates himself had some of his famous discussions about virtues like friendship or temperance with his followers in the gymnasium. On more than one occasion he compared his method of dialogue to a wrestling match and once exclaimed that he had a furious love for that type of exercise in the pursuit of truth (Plato, Theatetus 169b-c).

In ancient Greece gymnastic training itself consisted, as we might have guessed, of physical exercises in strength, speed and dexterity, and these became the analogy for mental gymnastics of all kinds. Even today many standard textbooks contain “exercises” which attempt to “train” the mind in various skills through practicing them again and again until they become easy. In The Liberal Arts Tradition Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain restore the value of gymnastic training as fundamental element of the classical tradition. By implicitly connecting it to the quadrivium arts (see the tree illustration in the front matter), they draw on this analogy between athletic training and mathematical exercises. But on a deeper level, philosophers made a link between the moral training of the gymnasium, which fostered military virtues like courage and resourcefulness in the face of danger, and the virtue-training of the soul. For instance, Isocrates, the first great rhetorical teacher of Greece, advised one of his students,

Give careful heed to all that concerns your life, but above all train your own intellect; for the greatest thing in the smallest compass is a sound mind in a human body. Strive with your body to be a lover of toil, and with your soul to be a lover of wisdom, in order that with the one you may have the strength to carry out your resolves, and with the other the intelligence to foresee what is for your good.

Discourses, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library 209, p. 29 

Unlike many in the modern world, Isocrates saw no conflict between bodily training and hard work on the one hand and the mental and spiritual training of philosophy or prudence on the other. This earlier move goes some way in explaining Aristotle’s understanding of artistry or craftsmanship as an intellectual virtue, even without an awareness of the nervous system. As another example, take Socrates, whom we might call the first philosopher. Instead of fitting the stereotype of an ivory-tower intellect, cultivating the mind but despising the body, he never neglected the compulsory military exercises, even into old age, and sharply rebuked any who did (see Xenophon’s Memorabilia). Proper cultivation of the body and mind, after all, are necessary elements of moral excellence, as well as of the intellectual excellence of prudence or phronesis, the ability to deliberate and act appropriately with regard to what is good for human beings. 

Deliberate vs Purposeful Practice in Artistry and Morality

The analogy between morality and artistry, specifically the artistry of bodily training, is thus well established in the tradition. But there are differences to be noted as well, since not all practice is the same. Some practice is deliberate, with clear goals and feedback and an agreed upon process of steps in the cultivation of excellence; however, there are practice regimens that are less clear and agreed upon, where the movement toward excellence is more cloudy and ambiguous. This second sort of practice may still aim at excellence, and therefore it has been called ‘purposeful’ in modern research on elite performance, but the pathway is less structured and clear. It is more like bushwalking than marching on the Via Appia. 

In his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Erikson describes the difference between this deliberate practice in the clarity of day and purposeful practice in the gloom and obscurity of night:

In short, we were saying that deliberate practice is different from other sorts of purposeful practice in two important ways: First, it requires a field that is already reasonably well developed—that is, a field in which the best performers have attained a level of performance that clearly sets them apart from people who are just entering the field. We’re referring to activities like musical performance (obviously), ballet and other sorts of dance, chess, and many individual and team sports, particularly the sports in which athletes are scored for their individual performance, such as gymnastics, figure skating, or diving. What areas don’t qualify? Pretty much anything in which there is little or no competition, such as gardening and other hobbies, for instance, and many of the jobs in today’s workplace—business manager, teacher, electrician, engineer, consultant, and so on. These are not areas where you’re likely to find accumulated knowledge about deliberate practice, simply because there are no objective criteria for superior performance.

Second, deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance. Of course, before there can be such teachers there must be individuals who have achieved a certain level of performance with practice methods that can be passed on to others.

With this definition we are drawing a clear distinction between purposeful practice—in which a person tries very hard to push himself or herself to improve—and a practice that is both purposeful and informed. In particular, deliberate practice is informed and guided by the best performers’ accomplishments and by an understanding of what these expert performers do to excel. Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there. (Peak 98)

Before this passage Erikson notes that he and his colleagues had identified certain fields, like musical performance, chess and athletic activities, where the “levels of performance have increased greatly over time” (Peak 97). This increase in feats of elite performance coincided with the development of “teaching methods” that assigned the student practice exercises specially designed to advance the student’s skills along the well-worn path of mastery. Since these exercises can be improved and honed as time goes on, students can advance more and more rapidly than their predecessors, and the myelin-wrapping activities of deliberate practice can enable human beings to attain greater and greater feats. 

A good example of this is 25 year old Roger Bannister breaking the 4 min mile mark in 1954. Before this time, it was thought to be physically impossible to break this barrier, but once Roger Bannister broke it several others quickly followed suit, and to date the four minute barrier has been broken by more than 1,400 male athletes, including some high school students. 

Anders Erikson highlights the need of a teacher for deliberate practice, who is qualified in that area of artistry or craftsmanship and therefore able to provide the exercises. This reaffirms our conclusion from last article, that contra the Rousseauian claims of unschooling, students learn best through the organized instruction of a teacher. However, we can note that in artistry or craftsmanship not all fields are equally susceptible to this type of deliberate practice. Erikson mentions hobbies like gardening and a number of professions, like teaching, business management and consulting, as areas that lack “objective criteria for superior performance.” He’s not claiming that practitioners of these arts cannot get better at what they do, but their path to excellence is less precise. They may practice purposefully toward improvement but there are no widely agreed upon standards (“objective criteria”?) or clearly laid out steps. In these arts, people practice in the dark. 

Identifying Subcategories of the Arts in Aristotle

It may be helpful at this point to lay out again my basic outline of Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues, including an extra layer of subcategories, in order to draw your attention to the nature of the virtue of techne which we have defined as artistry or craftsmanship.

It will be noted that under techne are included athletics, games and sports, which are rightly regarded as intellectual virtues under Aristotle’s definition, because they produce something new in the world through a true course of reasoning: the athletic performance whether in simplicity of a long jump or the complexity of a gymnastics routine. It is perhaps helpful to classify athletics and sports alongside the other arts in order to collapse the cultural false dichotomies of our day. Anyone who has seen a master athlete, say a gymnast, perform, will be hard pressed to exclude his work from the broader category that includes professional musicians and artists, as well as professions, trades, and the common and liberal arts themselves. These are all complex skills or areas of mastery, and our five part division is intended simply to gesture in the direction of the main types of craft or artistry that have been devised by human ingenuity and divine inspiration. 

Purposeful Practice in Artistry and Morality

But as we have said, not all techne have as fixed and exact a path of improvement as the others. And this is not only so in artistry, but also in matters of morality. In fact, this difference between deliberate and purposeful practice was anticipated by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics book II, where he also strikes a note reminiscent of the parable closing the Sermon on the Mount (i.e. building your house on the rock by putting his words into practice):

Since, then, the present inquiry does not aim at theoretical knowledge like the others (for we are inquiring not in order to know what excellence is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use), we must examine the nature of actions, namely how we ought to do them; for these determine also the nature of the states that are produced, as we have said. Now, that we must act according to right reason is a common principle and must be assumed—it will be discussed later, i.e. both what it is, and how it is related to the other excellences. But this must be agreed upon beforehand, that the whole account of matters of conduct must be given in outline and not precisely, as we said at the very beginning that the accounts we demand must be in accordance with the subject-matter; matters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good for us have no fixity, any more than matters of health. The general account being of this nature, the account of particular cases is yet more lacking in exactness; for they do not fall under any art or set of precepts, but the agents themselves must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion, as happens also in the art of medicine or of navigation. (Book II, ch. 2, pp. 1743-4)

Here Aristotle claims that morality is more like practicing in the dark, since “matters of conduct must be given in outline and not precisely”. This is because the man who is too rash should aim back toward cowardice if he would hit the mark of courage, yet the cowardly should turn toward being a little bit rash. Aiming at the golden mean of virtue or excellence is relative to the individual person and the situation at hand, even if it is a real and true quality. 

In the same way the arts of navigation and medicine, two important professions in Aristotle’s day, depend very much on the case at hand and all the particulars. There may be sub-skills that their practitioners can master, but the complex problems that will be faced—how to respond to an oncoming storm or what treatment to try first for a patient with a tricky set of symptoms—resist any attempt to be boiled down to a clear and simple set of practice exercises. But this does not mean people cannot become excellent navigators or physicians, simply that the way is less clear.

So then, we have seen that some arts have well-defined and clear steps to mastery through deliberate practice, but others do not. Moral actions, for Aristotle, may be trained by cultivated habit and practice, but the way is not always clear and well-defined enough to be subject to a deliberate practice regimen. Christians might initially object to this claim, citing the ten commandments and the way of discipleship as a straight and narrow path. But on reflection we must admit that temperance is not attained simply by a regimen of fasting—that was one of the Pharisees’ mistakes—nor is love of God attained by the rich young ruler obeying all the outward commandments from his youth. Jesus must prescribe a specific cure for his love of security. And so, while we cannot do away with habit training and the mentoring process, we know that diagnosing moral ailments and prescribing moral remedies is more fraught than we might sometimes imagine. If the recitation of Bible verses and specific acts of contrition and restitution were necessarily effective cures, Christendom would have advanced into the modern age and the virtues would adorn all of its members.

Distinguishing Marks of Moral Virtue

Part of the wrinkle with practicing moral virtues is that they require certain characteristics beyond that of many arts. Aristotle introduces these extra requirements in his ethics by first explaining the apprenticeship process in the liberal arts of grammar and music:

The question might be asked, what we mean by saying that we must become just by doing just acts, and temperate by doing temperate acts; for if men do just and temperate acts, they are already just and temperate, exactly as, if they do what is grammatical or musical they are proficient in grammar and music.

Or is this not true even of the arts? It is possible to do something grammatical either by chance or under the guidance of another. A man will be proficient in grammar, then, only when he has both done something grammatical and done it grammatically; and this means doing it in accordance with the grammatical knowledge in himself. (II.4)

In both morality and the arts, it is always possible to stumble upon the right way by chance. A person can act justly and temperately on an occasion simply because the circumstances favor it. This is part of why a single just act does not make a man just. In a similar way, even a toddler can say a perfectly grammatical sentence, but this does not mean the child has mastered the art of grammar. Likewise, a child can act justly under the guidance of his parent or teacher; while this might be a necessary step in his training in moral habits, it does not mean the child is just. If a teacher holds a Kindergartener’s hand as she writes a word with her pencil, that doesn’t mean the Kindergartener has mastered penmanship. The apprenticeship process begins with guidance, but ends with self-directed mastery. 

So far so good, but in the case of moral virtues, there is a further set of requirements, making their attainment different from the arts:

Again the cases of the arts and that of the excellences are not similar; for the products of the arts have their goodness in themselves, so that it is enough that they should have a certain character, but if the acts that are in accordance with the excellences have themselves a certain character it does not follow that they are done justly or temperately. The agent also must be in a certain condition when he does them; in the first place he must have knowledge, secondly he must choose the acts, and choose them for their own sakes, and thirdly his action must proceed from a firm and unchangeable character. These are not reckoned in as conditions from the possession of the arts, except the bare knowledge; but as a condition of the possession of the excellences, knowledge has little or no weight, while the other conditions count not for a little but for everything, i.e. the very conditions which result from often doing just and temperate acts. (II.4)

The three requirements for moral virtue are 1) knowledge, i.e. the prudence or practical wisdom to know that they are acting in a way that corresponds with their ultimate good, 2) deliberate choice of the actions for their own sake, and 3) a “firm and unchangeable character”. The first requirement is necessary because if a person eats temperately without knowledge he has simply stumbled upon the right path by chance, and there is no expectation that he will persist in it, since being blind he cannot see the path he chanced upon. 

The second requirement that a person choose the act for its own sake would seem to contradict both Aristotle’s commendation of habit and his earlier discussion of happiness or eudaimonia as the only true end toward which all other choices tend. We can probably resolve these dilemmas by recalling our earlier discussion of habit as not being thoughtless. In the contemporary world the concept of ‘habit’ often has behaviorist undertones, due to the influence of modern psychology and naturalistic materialism. But it seems as if for Aristotle, a moral custom or habit should still be a result of conscious choice, even if those choices came earlier to solidify stock responses by a regimen of training. Likewise, the comment about choosing the course of action for its own sake, should not be seen as indicating a final end, but merely qualifying the act as chosen because of its goodness, rather than for an ulterior motive. For example, a person might choose to eat temperately one evening because he knows that he plans to rob a bank and wants to ensure that his body and wits are not sluggish while committing the dastardly deed. 

The third and final requirement needs little comment, since we all know that human nature is changeable and fickle; a character quality only recently adopted will not necessarily characterize the whole of a person’s life. The strength of this statement is an important correction to modern nonsense about it taking only 21 days (or 30 or 66) to build a new habit. At the very least, this is not true of the more complex moral virtues that represent a firm and unchangeable character, even if it can secure a propensity to take a multivitamin after your morning coffee. One reason for this is the fact that it is purposeful practice which we must engage in to discern between good and evil; therefore, the practice must be “constant” and have time to grow to ripeness or maturity (see Heb 5:14). If practicing morality is like bushwalking, then it takes longer to learn the route and how never to stray, than it does to drive to work on paved roads. 

Practicing virtue is not the work of a summer, a season, a semester or even all of grammar school, but of a lifetime. As Aristotle says,

Actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.

But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy. (Book II, ch. 4; pp. 1755-6)

Aristotle’s rebuke to the mass of self-proclaimed “philosophers” strikes a note that will be taken up again and again by the Stoics: the centrality of action for the cultivation of moral virtue. In this he is arguably correcting a crucial misunderstanding of Plato’s emphasis upon knowledge. Many of Plato’s dialogues go about the work of promoting moral virtue by first revealing the ignorance of Socrates’ conversation partners about the nature of true virtue, whether piety, justice, temperance or courage. This seems to imply a doctrine of salvation by knowledge, a concept that Plato certainly affirms in a number of ways throughout his works. Unfortunately, human nature makes it all to easy for us to mistake our own theoretical insight for this saving, sanctifying knowledge; on the Christian side of things, the gnostics are the prime example of this error, as they considered their special gnosis, or knowledge, as exempting them from the hard work of moral practice.

Crucial Distinctions between the Intellectual Virtues

For this reason, Aristotle is careful to distinguish episteme or scientific knowledge, the ability to demonstrate the truth of something, and moral virtue. The first concerns man as knower, to borrow the terminology from Mortimer Adler’s Aristotle for Everybody, and the second concerns man as doer. But in fact, this division goes deeper for Aristotle, since even the term ‘wisdom’ itself has a line running through it. Phronesis, prudence or practical wisdom, characterizes the wise in action, while sophia, philosophic wisdom, or the possession of both knowledge (episteme) and intuition (nous) about the highest things, concerns the wise in thought, man as knower. 

This important set of distinctions cuts the line straight through the arts as well, where two equally damaging errors pervade the educational world of Bloom’s taxonomy. First, modernism’s emphasis upon scientific knowledge (episteme) to the neglect of all other educational objectives has run ramshod over the proper training of the arts. A “bare knowledge” is necessary for developing mastery in the arts, but far more important is the apprenticeship model that embraces a regimen of deliberate or at least purposeful practice. This is because the arts primarily concern man as maker, rather than knower. The knowledge necessary is little more than a precept here or there to guide practice: always point your toes, lift your knees higher as you’re running, open your throat more and relax your tongue, hold your paintbrush this way. But in the case of the liberal arts especially, this scientific knowledge mindset has short circuited the apprenticeship process in the arts of language and number by overemphasizing knowledge to the neglect of sufficient practice and feedback. Elaborate textbooks convey a host of instructions, but teachers without the proper skill in these crafts fail to coach their students to mastery. 

At the same time, a mistaken focus upon abstract cognitive or intellectual skills, also born of Bloom’s, has replaced the traditional liberal arts themselves with half-baked acts of the mind outside of their holistic and natural process in the search for truth. Comprehension and analytical exercises isolate useless “academic skills” from the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge regarding ultimate questions. The distaste of many students for academics grows from this arid soil of academic training without any phronesis or sophia. 

The way out of this mess is to restore each of these intellectual virtues as proper goals for education throughout the school’s curriculum and pedagogy. While some ‘subjects’ may be more suited to developing a particular intellectual virtue, Aristotle’s intellectual virtues cut across traditional lines. To bring our conversation full circle, moral discussions should occur in the gymnasium. Bodily habits should be reinforced in philosophy class. Liberal arts training should follow the apprenticeship model and not simply impart knowledge. At the same time, ultimate questions and practical considerations of human action should point the student upward toward practical and philosophic wisdom. Practice in the classroom, the studio and on the field should be purposeful, if not deliberate, and we should not “take refuge in theory”. In the next article we’ll zero in on the apprenticeship model of training in the arts and what implications this has for pedagogy and structuring a school’s curriculum and classes.

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

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

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The rest of this series aims at a constructive development of Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues into a taxonomy of educational objectives of its own. The goal is to incorporate the value of Bloom’s project with the broader and more holistic philosophy implied in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, book VI. As mentioned in the introduction, this will involve extending Aristotle’s intellectual virtues into the later development of the liberal arts tradition of education. So this is not an Aristotle-only sort of proposal. Instead, I am proposing a taxonomy of sub-categories under the five intellectual virtues that is analogous to Bloom’s six orders of objectives in the cognitive domain. 

This article attempts to lay out the big picture of this classical taxonomy of educational goals by comparing it with Bloom’s and showing how it incorporates a number of “intellectual” categories that Bloom’s left out. In essence, then, Aristotle’s intellectual virtues combat against the reduction of the intellect caused by our modern categories. Although only five in number, the intellectual virtues are broader and incorporate more subheadings, including the professions, sports and production, among other things. Other problems caused by neglecting Aristotle’s categories include the over-abstraction or generalization of intellectual skills (implying they are transferable when they are not), siloing academic goals apart from the professions they are meant to serve, and not making distinctions between reasoning with language and with number. 

Let’s begin our comparison by unpacking Bloom’s Taxonomy in Aristotelian and liberal arts tradition terms.

Translating Bloom’s Taxonomy into Intellectual Virtues

One way of understanding the relationship between the six orders of educational objectives in the cognitive domain and Aristotle’s intellectual virtues is illustrated below. I have reproduced the list of Bloom’s hierarchy and indicated on the right in bold roughly what intellectual virtue it might correspond to in the Aristotelean framework I am proposing. For this purpose it was necessary to detail Aristotle’s virtue of techne, art or craftsmanship, as including the seven traditional liberal arts, which I have interpreted not as subjects but as the productive arts or crafts of language and number. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Six Categories of Objectives in the Cognitive Domain

1. Knowledge > The Intellectual Virtue of Nous, Intuition or Perception

1.1 Knowledge of Specifics > Of Particulars

1.2 Knowledge of Ways and Means of Dealing with Specifics 

1.3 Knowledge of the Universals and Abstractions in a Field > Of Universals

2. Comprehension > The Liberal Art (Techne) of Grammar

2.1 Translation

2.2 Interpretation

2.3 Extrapolation > Quadrivium Arts (when involving mathematical data)

3. Application > The Liberal Arts of Dialectic and Rhetoric – The Intellectual Virtue of Phronesis, Prudence or Practical Wisdom
4. Analysis > The Liberal Arts of Grammar and Dialectic and various Quadrivium Arts

4.1 Analysis of Elements

4.2 Analysis of Relationships

4.3 Analysis of Organizational Principles

5. Synthesis > The Liberal Arts of Rhetoric and Music

5.1 Production of a Unique Communication

5.2 Production of a Plan, or Proposed Set of Operations

5.3 Derivation of a Set of Abstract Relations

6. Evaluation > The Intellectual Virtues of Episteme, Scientific Knowledge, Nous, Intuition, and Phronesis, Prudence or Practical Wisdom

6.1 Judgments in Terms of Internal Evidence

6.2 Judgments in Terms of External Criteria

Bloom’s category of knowledge corresponds more or less to the intellectual virtue of nous, intuition or perception, not episteme or scientific knowledge. This is because scientific knowledge, for Aristotle, involves the ability to demonstrate or prove a truth claim, whereas the knowledge that Bloom is talking about is a traditional knowledge passed down by authorities. The basic understanding of the givens in any field or endeavor is grasped by a student’s understanding—another common translation of Aristotle’s nous—and is held in their memory as the starting point for all future thinking in this area. This sort of knowledge falls short of “justified true belief,” the philosophical tradition’s standard for ‘knowledge’ proper, and is therefore always subject to updating through the perception of new particulars or universals. 

What Bloom calls comprehension translates best as the liberal art of grammar, which involves the reading and interpretation of a text. The ability to translate what something says into one’s own words is, after all, the most basic way of demonstrating one’s understanding of a text or spoken communication. Of course, this ability is helped along by one’s general understanding or intuition of the subject matter in question (nous), but the activity of interpretation is itself a productive one, involving the student’s own communication and therefore falling under the intellectual virtue of techne, which is concerned with producing something new in the world. When Bloom’s Taxonomy discusses the interpretation or extrapolation of data, we have moved into the traditional realm of the quadrivium, the mathematical arts of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Arguably, extrapolating from mathematical data should be carefully distinguished from the interpretation of language; calling them by the same name, therefore, could be unhelpful and confusing to educators.

Application, listed as it is without any subheadings, is a particularly tricky element of Bloom’s taxonomy. Depending on the context, application could correspond to the liberal arts of dialectic or rhetoric, where the student argues for or against a particular course of action or belief. But it could also involve the students’ own judgment of how they should act in the world with regard to human goods (phronesis or practical wisdom). In fact, what Bloom means by application could be the application of moral reasoning to the content that is highlighted in a course or subject. He calls it “use of abstractions in particular and concrete situations,” but this is so general an activity that it seems to admit of almost every human activity, including all the arts and sciences, human decision-making and production. 

In a way all techne (arts, crafts or professions) involve the application of abstractions in concrete situations; this is why Aristotle requires of techne that it “involve a true course of reasoning” (see Nic. Ethics VI.4, 1140a9). All forms of artistry or craftsmanship must interact reasonably with the world as it really is, applying truths to particulars to produce something new in the world; otherwise, their proponents would not have excellence in the craft. Failures of application result in mistakes and errors in the execution of a productive plan.

Analysis corresponds to the liberal arts of grammar and dialectic, as well as various quadrivium arts, when mathematics are involved. Whether a student is analyzing grammar, terminology, circumstances and relationships, logical arguments, or the quantities, equations, data and experiments of science and math, students are utilizing subskills of the liberal arts themselves. As it turns out, this so-called analysis is a very different activity of the mind depending on what type of ‘analysis’ is being conducted. Parsing Latin verbs does not much resemble graphing equations. And knowing how to do one does not in any meaningful way help a student do any of the others. In fact, the line between analytical and synthetic activities in the liberal arts is often not very clear. So while it seems smart to distinguish between them, in practice it does not clarify the concerned educational objectives much. We would be better to aim for mastery of various liberal arts sub-skills, as they have been developed and honed by the tradition. 

Synthesis, then, is the outworking of analysis in a unique communication, and therefore the product of rhetoric or music. The traditional subdivisions of rhetoric, as well as all the genre distinctions made in a long history of composition, are more helpful for determining educational goals, than labelling something ‘synthesis’ as if it were an abstract intellectual skill. Again, it’s not that it is impossible to distinguish between our mind’s ability to put things together (synthesis) and to pick things apart (analysis). But in an actual assignment or task that we ask students to perform, doing one often requires the other right before or after it. The problem is essentially our modern attempt to dig down into the various acts of the mind, label these, and then elevate them to the place of intellectual virtues. It is the finished and complex skills with their multiple sub-steps in sequence that are properly intellectual virtues and educational goals, not the minute sub-steps in between. 

For example, putting together two equations in a system of equations, while an act of synthesis (putting two things together), is a particular sub-skill of mathematics that we have developed, which has no relationship to other synthetic acts, like taking two historical texts about the same event and synthesizing them together like a historian might. Labelling these tasks synthesis or analysis is ultimately self-defeating because they are complex intellectual skills that involve both mental acts, as well as knowledge, comprehension, application, etc. to complete. Asking educators to determine which one is their educational objective seems more likely to breed confusion and neglect of some parts of the complex skill, than the clarity for educators that Bloom and his colleagues sought.

Evaluation, likewise, is of many types, depending on the nature of what is being judged. At the very least, there is the judgment involved in scientific knowledge itself, in which a true course of reasoning is followed from a universal or particular to a conclusion (deductive or inductive reasoning). But there is also the artistic valuation of quality in the arts, which requires chiefly an experienced intuition (nous) in the specific form of artistry or craftsmanship. This is clearly different from mastery of the art itself, because the best critics are not always the best practitioners and vice versa. Lastly, judgments about the best course of action, whether for a person or a larger group (“political wisdom”) are made through phronesis or prudence, the practical wisdom which reasons correctly with regard to human goods. 

As before, these three types of evaluation are very different from one another, and wisdom to judge in one area does not readily transfer to the others. We can all imagine the celebrated literary critic who is notoriously unwise in his personal life, or the wise manager who can’t appreciate fine art in the least. A PhD in ethics may reason correctly to a scientific conclusion about what is right in theory, but be a terrible decision-maker in the midst of her interpersonal relationships. While we might be able to isolate “evaluation” as a category of mental skills in the abstract, in the actual practice of education developing a student’s judgment in various areas does not look very similar.  

To summarize, Bloom’s Taxonomy touches on important intellectual virtues that can be translated into Aristotelian terms. But its main weakness in practice is its tendency to isolate individual mental acts, as if they could stand as educational goals in themselves, in a way that seems to imply that these mental acts are the same skills or virtues, even if applied in different contexts. These abstractions served the trends of the mid-20th century, as psychological and cognitive studies attempted to delineate various cognitive abilities or acts, separated out from their lifeworld. But they neglected the philosophical tradition and unhelpfully isolated education from life and the professions.

Restructuring Bloom’s Through Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues

In the following outline, I detail a number of subheadings under Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as listed and explained in Book VI of his Nicomachean Ethics. While there are a number of ways I will need to explain Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as the proper goals of a classical Christian educational program, the main point for our present purposes is to draw attention to what Bloom’s Taxonomy left out or sidelined.

First, it should be noted that Bloom’s Taxonomy pointed in a number of ways to the complex skills of the liberal arts. While I think his grouping of trivium and quadrivium skills together under the same names is a liability in some ways, the idea that trivium and quadrivium reasoning should be integrated speaks in Bloom’s favor. Of course, Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain have advanced the proposition that the liberal arts were not meant to stand alone in the liberal arts tradition, but were the centerpiece of a larger paradigm that focused on the holistic formation of the human person (see The Liberal Arts Tradition 2.0). We are not disembodied minds, but piety, gymnastic and music should also be employed throughout education to train the soul, the body, and the heart.

Aristotle’s intellectual virtues take us one step beyond this thesis, perhaps, by positing that what we are calling virtues of the soul, body or heart have an intellectual component. Even if athletics or trades seem to involve the body more directly than the liberal arts or episteme, Aristotle is bold enough to call all crafts a form of intellectual virtue. While this might seem initially perplexing, it accords with our modern understanding of the brain. All human activity is guided through our central nervous system and involves the firing of neural networks in sequence. The skilled and cultivated habits, as well as the person’s planning, responding and interacting with the physical world, involved in, say, elite performance on the violin or world-class soccer playing, are intellectual feats! 

Recent discoveries in neuroscience are a testament to the development of white-matter in the brain, the wrapping of myelin-sheaths around neural networks to enable them to fire more quickly and efficiently, allowing for the development of incredible skill. In a way, we have the ability to affirm more strongly than ever before that ‘gymnastic’ excellence of all kinds (to borrow Clark and Jain’s terminology), as well as elite skills in the fine and performing arts, the trades and the professions, constitutes a particular type of intellectual virtue.

Perhaps it goes without saying that neglecting these skills as proper educational goals is tantamount to a betrayal of a much larger portion of education than we would often care to admit. A classical Christian educational philosophy should restore the dignity of these neglected intellectual virtues.

Phronesis, prudence or practical wisdom, is another intellectual virtue that is lost on Bloom’s, even if we have found places to mention it in our translation of his taxonomy. And that is because students are rarely addressed as actors in the world in the modern secular school. The heart of education has been cut out by our feigned indifference to human values. In their attempt to achieve neutrality, the intellectual aspect of morality has been relegated to a matter of opinion or personal preference.

Ironically, modern education aims to prepare students for professions through the cultivation of general knowledge and academic or cognitive skills. Implicitly, then the utilitarian earning of a professional salary is made the ultimate goal of education, rather than the life well lived. As a matter of fact, though, artistry or craftsmanship, whether in professions, liberal arts, or fine arts and sports, should be made a part of a rich and fulfilling life of service to God and neighbor. However, the development of artistry need not serve only utilitarian ends, nor should it become the end all be all. Instead, a wise life of making God-honoring and happiness-producing decisions is truly its own reward. 

In a way, I would go so far as to rate phronesis as the chief goal of education, from a Christian if not also a classical perspective. As a warrant for this claim, I would reference the biblical book of Proverbs in support. If a person does not grasp the wisdom to live life well, whatever wisdom he thinks he has is little more than folly in the Lord’s eyes. 

But we should not fail to mention also Bloom’s neglect of sophia, philosophic wisdom, which combines intuition (nous) and scientific knowledge (episteme) and is the crowning intellectual virtue for Aristotle. This too is an important goal to name, and focuses attention on its antecedent virtues and their unique and interdependent relationship. These matters are worthy of fuller discussion than we can give to them at the present.

In summary, then, Aristotle’s intellectual virtues restore the intellectual virtues of the body and heart, the educational importance of beautiful craftsmanship and skill, as well as the moral wisdom of a life well lived. In addition, the virtue of philosophic wisdom clarifies a new crowning achievement of true education that Bloom’s Taxonomy does not have the resources to grasp. After this overview of what Bloom’s left out, we are now ready to turn to detailed exposition of each of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues in turn, drawing out the implications of this revised taxonomy for pedagogy (i.e. teaching methods), curriculum and school programs.

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Also, instead of looking at the purpose of education holistically and accepting a tradition of values, they aimed at neutrality in their framework to make it widely acceptable to educators with different philosophies. This tactic worked successfully, ushering in the wide adoption of Bloom’s taxonomy in the world of education. However, they had to use teachers’ own terminology for their goals, simply sharpened up a bit to be more precise. In so doing they capitulated to a lowest-common denominator view of the human mind and of education itself. 

While I already laid out the philosophical problems with this approach in the last article, I have not yet shown exactly how this gets ugly in real life. I alluded to the grade-focused anxiety or disengagement of many students. But there is more to it than that. What goes wrong in schools, when Bloom’s Taxonomy is built into the architecture of education? 

The answer to that question is simple, if controversial. When Bloom’s Taxonomy is fully embraced and practiced in an educational setting, the beating heart of education gets cut out. 

By this (rather dramatic) statement, I mean at least two things. The first is a reaffirmation of C.S. Lewis’s core argument in The Abolition of Man: that training “men without chests” devolves ultimately into propaganda. The second is a more subtle claim about human beings as agents and producers, and not just knowers, for which I will rely on Mortimer Adler’s Aristotle for Everyone. 

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

The Ugly of Bloom’s, Point 1: Bloated Heads and Shrivelled Chests

I have already referred to the argument of C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man in the introduction to this series. And while Bloom and his colleagues do not seem to be as obsessed with debunking traditional values as the authors of Lewis’ unnamed Green Book, nevertheless their neglect of the heart comes under the same sharp knife of Lewis’ critique. It is all the more ironic that Lewis’ short treatise predates Bloom’s by just about a decade, since it almost seems as if it was written to challenge their project as much as the English text book he quotes from.

At the climax of his first chapter, Lewis draws from Plato’s Republic to draw attention to the holistic nature of human beings as rational, emotional and animal. The kicker for our purposes is not just that human beings also need education of their “affective domain”, as Bloom would put it, but that the interrelationships between these elements of human nature must be educated or trained. As he explains,

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. 

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Deckle Edge, 2015), 24

The problems of life often pose themselves as a proper ordering of intellect, emotions or sentiment, and bodily desires or instincts. Where Bloom’s project is endorsed, even with completed affective and psychomotor domains, there is no principle of integration, no overarching purpose or set of values to govern the relationships between cold logic, hot feeling and bodily pains and pleasures. Lewis goes on, drawing from his classical sources,

We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment — these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

If Lewis had been directly critiquing Bloom’s Taxonomy, he likely would have said, “It would have been better if you had begun with the affective domain, and left the others to take care of themselves.” In fact, this is precisely the focus of Plato in the Republic as well as his Laws, where he emphasized the importance of music and gymnastic training in songs, dances, and poems, that are good and worthy of imitation from a moral perspective (see Patrick’s recent article on Human Development, the section on Plato). This is the core of primary education. 

Now we may believe with Charlotte Mason that since children too are persons, their intellects are also capable of proper education at the earliest levels. But that is aside the point of this present issue. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy aims only at the head or bare intellect with its abstract abilities of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. It is true that “application” and “evaluation” at least seem promising as education for life and not just academics. But when we read their explanation of “evaluation” as an educational objective, our hopes are soundly dashed and the spirit of the Green Book comes through:

Evaluation is defined as the making of judgments about the value, for some purpose, of ideas, works, solutions, methods, material, etc. It involves the use of criteria as well as standards for appraising the extent to which particulars are accurate, effective, economical, or satisfying. The judgments may be either quantitative or qualitative, and the criteria may be either those determined by the student or those which are given to him….

Man is apparently so constituted that he cannot refrain from evaluating, judging, appraising, or valuing almost everything which comes within his purview. Much of this evaluating is highly egocentric in that the individual judges things as they relate to himself. Thus, ideas and objects which are useful to him may be evaluated highly, while objects which are less useful to him (but which may be extremely useful to others) are evaluated less highly. 

Bloom et al., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, 185.

Man’s judgments, values, and evaluations are, in the main, dismissed as “highly egocentric” (Do I hear the shadowy ghost of Christian charity calling out in the background in spite of Bloom’s goal of neutrality?), but no solution is given other than training of the bare intellect: students should be taught to evaluate poems and data based on both internal and external criteria. As with many cases, this sort of intellectual solution may sound good in theory, but it is woefully ineffective in practice. 

Lewis explains why near the close of his first chapter:

The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Deckle Edge, 2015), 25.

The proper work of the intellect itself relies on “trained sentiment” and cannot ultimately do without it. As the Greek tradition discovered, it is philosophy, the “love of wisdom”, and not mere wisdom, as the Sophists so arrogantly claimed for themselves, that characterizes the truly educated person. The holistic education of the whole human person requires not just training every part, but the proper ordering of a person’s loves, thoughts and actions. 

But how does this dilemma practically affect teachers today, who have been born and bred in Bloom’s? That question can be answered by an illustration from Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0 in a section on lesson objectives. Notice how Lemov goes one step further than Bloom’s Taxonomy technically did, to rule out “affective domain” objectives altogether:

Setting measurable lesson objectives disciplines you in other ways. For example, it forces you to think through key assumptions. If your goal is to have students know something or understand something or think something, how will you know they have reached it? Thoughts are not measurable unless they are described or applied. Do your lessons rely on a balance of methods for describing and applying understanding?

If your goal is to have students feel, think, or believe something, how appropriate is that? Is it sufficient to read and understand poetry without enjoying, appreciating, or loving it? Are students accountable for accepting the judgments and tastes of others—or for learning skills that can help them make up their own minds? 

I am a pretty fair case study of this. Although I have a master’s degree in English literature, I do not enjoy reading poetry. In fact, I usually find it almost unreadable. I’m sorry to say (to all my fantastic professors and teachers) that I have almost never achieved the objective of loving a poem. Nevertheless, having learned to analyze and sustain arguments about poetry, and having had to critique those of others, has helped me to become a more effective thinker and writer and, occasionally (I hope), a more insightful person. So, in the end, I am truly glad to have studied and read poems in my literature classes. My point is that my best teachers held themselves accountable for what they could control (the quality of my thinking and the sustainability of my arguments), not what they couldn’t (whether I like reading the stuff). Even though their love for the things they taught me was probably their reason for doing the work, passing that love on to me fell into the realm of what they couldn’t control. They eschewed loving poetry as an objective, even if it was their motivation—an irony, to be sure, but a useful one.

Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0, 138-139.

Lemov has an interesting personal anecdote to support his point—one that many of us, I would imagine, can resonate with. It may not be reading poetry, but surely we all have something that we simply did not take to from our education… some skill or activity that we could never develop a taste for. And how often have we wanted something for our students in the feeling, enjoying, believing domain, and failed to reach this objective? Perhaps, we should just give up. Perhaps, simply focusing on “academic” and “intellectual” goals is enough.

But what if Lemov’s experience was ineffective because of improper methods and unhelpful timing? And not because it is impossible to train someone to love reading poetry? What if Lemov had not been introduced to this “love of poetry” later on in high school, college and grad school, through analysis, arguments and critique? But instead what if Lemov had had poetry read to him while sitting on his father’s or mother’s lap? And then gone to a classical grammar school, where good poetry was read aloud by the teacher animatedly and relished by the class daily, without any attempt at critical or literary analysis, or any fear of a grade hanging over his head? What if then he also memorized word-for-word select poems over the course of his early education, and learned to perform them dramatically as recitations amidst a group of excited, warm-hearted students, to the natural satisfaction of an audience’s applause? 

The point seems so obvious that it is hardly worth pressing: the methods we choose must be adapted to the objectives we have in mind, certain means are appropriate for certain ends. And certain educational goals are easiest to attain at particular times in a child’s development. 

The Ugly of Bloom’s, Point 2: Man as Maker and Doer, as well as Knower

You see, the human person cannot be analyzed and dissected into different parts that can then be trained to excellence separately. The harmony of an individual’s life is the ultimate goal of education, and must be attended to all along the way. Proper methods must be suited to proper times in a child’s harmonious development toward virtuous and wise adulthood. 

All this is assumed in the background of a more robust anthropology or understanding of human nature. In his book Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy, Mortimer Adler, the famous advocate of the Great Books and a democratic, moral classical education (though not necessarily Christian) provides the grounding for our second point on human nature. Adler divides his exposition of Aristotle’s thought into three sections on Man as Maker, Doer and Knower. He introduces these three aspects of humanity as “three dimensions” clarifying that they are not fully separate from one another. His explanation of each will be foundational for our later exploration of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, so I will reproduce it in full here:

In the first of these three dimensions, making, we have man the artist or artisan—the producer of all sorts of things: shoes, ships, and houses, books, music, and paintings. It is not just when human beings produce statues or paintings that we should call them artists. That is much too restricted a use of the word art. Anything in the world that is artificial rather than natural is a work of art—something man-made.

In the second of these dimensions, doing, we have man the moral and social being—someone who can do right or wrong, someone who, by what he or she does or does not do, either achieves happiness or fails to achieve it, someone who finds it necessary to associate with other human beings in order to do what, as a human being, he or she feels impelled to do.

In the third dimension, knowing, we have man as learner, acquiring knowledge of all sorts—not only about nature, not only about the society of which human beings are a part, not only about human nature, but also about knowledge itself.

In all three of these dimensions, man is a thinker, but the kind of thinking he does in order to make things differs from the kind of thinking he does in order to act morally and socially. Both kinds of thinking differ from the kind of thinking a human being does in order just to know—to know just for the sake of knowing. 

Mortimer J. Adler, Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1978), 17

In this passage, Adler has outlined for us something very unique about Aristotle’s intellectual virtues: they include each of the three dimensions. The intellectual virtue of art or craftsmanship (Greek: techne) is concerned with man as maker. The intellectual virtue of prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) is concerned with man as a doer, a moral agent. The other three virtues, scientific knowledge (episteme), intuition or perception (nous), and philosophic wisdom (sophia) concern man as knower. One of the central problems with Bloom’s Taxonomy is that man as maker and man as doer are virtually left out, neglected, and despised. The focus is placed on Homo Academicus with the same ugly result that Lewis so eloquently described. 

But more than that, it should be noted that Aristotle’s three dimensions of what it means to be human cut across the divisions of Bloom’s proposed domains (cognitive, affective and psychomotor). Man the Maker is involved intellectually, affectively and bodily in the creation of some new product in the world. Likewise, Man the Doer must think well about potential courses of action, even as his trained affections come into play to help or hinder him as he acts bodily in the world. Finally, Man the Knower must have body trained and heart attuned to the pursuit of wisdom, or else his thought will be unfruitful. In a way, Bloom’s Taxonomy has attempted to separate what God has joined together. 

It is not that it is wrong or impossible to distinguish between head, heart and hands as an intellectual exercise, but we never do actually make, act or know without the cooperation of each of these domains. The disorder, manipulation and motivational failures of modern education are the natural results of isolating school from life. In life we create, and creating has its own natural rewards; we act, and natural and relational consequences in the actual world are the result; knowledge for its own sake is the proper flowering of a life well lived and natural human curiosity. But when Bloom’s tries to put the cart before the horse, it crashes and makes a mess. 

In the next post we’ll explore in more detail what exactly Bloom’s Taxonomy leaves out from an educational program built on Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues. We’ll also explore the ways that Bloom’s objectives in the cognitive domain would interact with the goals of a classical liberal arts curriculum, viewed through an Aristotelean lens. Share your questions and thoughts in the comments!

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But it is important to acknowledge the value of Bloom’s project, especially in contrast to the rampant postmodernism that has swept through education since (see 2nd post). The benefit of Bloom’s taxonomy lies in its recognition of the need for clear targets. Without knowing where we are aiming at in education, we are like Alice wandering in wonderland with no sense of where she wants to go. We may get somewhere, but not likely to the true destination of education.

Bloom’s taxonomy may be reductionistic, but at least it lays out and defines a clear set of goals that educators might pursue. Modernism thus has a leg up on post-modernism, in that the house swept clean of all overarching values and metanarratives (except rampant individualism), then becomes subject to the seven demons more wicked than itself that our Lord spoke of. The clean house at least looks nice and could be used by different sorts of inhabitants in the future. But this analogy may seem to strike a more ominous note against postmodern education than I intend. Simply put, when clarity is away, ideologies come out to play.

In a way then, our critique of Bloom’s project is a simple one: Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues should not have simply taken modern educators’ own language as their starting point for their taxonomy of educational objectives.

They state this explicitly in Bloom et al., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain (Ann Arbor, Michigan: David McKay Co., 1956), 6: 

Insofar as possible, the boundaries between categories should be closely related to the distinctions teachers make in planning curricula or in choosing learning situations. It is possible that teachers make distinctions which psychologists would not make in classifying or studying human behavior. However, if one of the major values of the taxonomy is in the improvement of communication among educators, then educational distinctions should be given major consideration.

Even if their taxonomy brought clarity, definitions and examples to the teaching and testing process, they relied on the average American teacher or examiner’s assumptions about what education was all about. Instead of recovering the best of the liberal arts tradition on the nature of the mind, virtue and wisdom, they solidified a lowest common denominator philosophy of education. Teachers and curriculum writers are mostly talking abstractly about knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation, so we’ll detail and define those, provide some examples of examination questions and call that education. They justified this questionable move by modelling their project on the hard sciences and appealing to the philosophical pragmatism that had come to dominate educational philosophy in America. 

Perhaps the greatest irony in their approach is that they thereby furthered the divide between education and life. Classical education may sometimes be critiqued as an ivory-tower intellectual exercise, but its traditional focus on virtue, wisdom and the good life puts the lie to this claim. The liberal arts too are eminently practical, if we understand the word ‘practical’ appropriately. What could be more helpful in life than the ability to read, reason, persuade, calculate, chart, navigate and sing?

Aside: This list of activities might seem like a reductionistic vision of the seven liberal arts, but I do not intend it that way. Instead I am attempting to reinstate the classical distinction between ‘art’ and ‘science’, recognizing Aristotle’s and others’ emphasis on arts as activities producing something in the world. I have for some time been envisioning a project that would look at the seeds of the liberal arts to recover their practical origins and purposes (working title = Free to Serve: Rediscovering the Liberal Arts as Practical Tools, coming once I have the time to devote to it).

Modern education in the tradition of Bloom’s, on the other hand, is the real culprit, abstracted as it is from a proper relationship not only to the working world, but also to a moral and communal life. Education becomes about preparing to perform on a modern standardized test, regardless of the ensuing life of the individual who either fails, passes with flying colors or is confirmed in mediocrity.

So then, we can break down the bad of Bloom’s under two headings: 1) its scientistic philosophy obsessed with objectivity and measurability, and 2) its social scientific focus on neutrality, rather than a holistic embrace of traditional moral philosophy.

Bloom’s Scientism: Objectivity and Measurability

In a way we should hardly be surprised at the scientism of Bloom’s taxonomy. After all, the idea of a taxonomy itself was borrowed from the biological sciences, acting as a vivid signpost of the larger project that so many in education and other “social sciences” found themselves swept up by during that era: to reframe the subdisciplines of traditional moral philosophy on analogy with the wildly successful hard sciences. Understood under this heading, the opening sentences of the foreword come sharply into focus:

Most readers will have heard of the biological taxonomies which permit classification into such categories as phyllum, class, order, family, genus, species, variety. Biologists have found their taxonomy markedly helpful as a means of insuring accuracy of communication about their science and as a means of understanding the organization and interrelation of the various parts of the animal and plant world. You are reading about an attempt to build a taxonomy of educational objectives. It is intended to provide for classification of the goals of our educational system. It is expected to be of general help to all teachers, administrators, professional specialists, and research workers who deal with curricular and evaluation problems. It is especially intended to help them discuss these problems with greater precision.

Bloom et al., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, 1.

I am not in any way retracting my praise of the value of clarity, when I remark that Bloom’s project relies on a false analogy between education and biology. Our educational goals may not, in fact, organize themselves neatly into a manageable number of orders and species, if we only provide clear definitions. Aristotle himself might have observed that such a discussion

“will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of; for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts.”

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Book 1, Ch. 3, 1094b.12ff., in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. By Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1730.

It may be that the real objectives of the craft of education cannot be so precisely distinguished and classified, let alone tested, without some damage being done to the nature of the subject itself.

We can imagine Benjamin Bloom and his fellow committee members, who were all college and university examiners, as well as the many educators who participated in the conferences from 1949-1953 that helped develop the taxonomy, being attracted by the idea of a taxonomy of educational goals tested by their examinations. Perhaps by classifying and standardizing terminology, they might have thought, we can do away with the subjectivity of all these K-12 schools and their teachers. Perhaps we can finally make our tests objective and do away with the immeasurable criteria by relegating it to the affective domain, which we can tip our hats to as valuable, while functionally ignoring it as subjective and too fraught with controversy.

I would not press my imputation of their motives too far, but there seems to be legitimate indications in this direction in their statements about their “progress” in the affective domain, Bloom et al., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, 7:

A second part of the taxonomy is the affective domain. It includes objectives which describe changes in interest, attitudes, and values, and the development of appreciations and adequate adjustment. Much of our meeting time has been devoted to attempts at classifying objectives under this domain. It has been a difficult task which is still far from complete. Several problems make it so difficult. Objectives in this domain are not stated very precisely; and, in fact, teachers do not appear to be very clear about the learning experiences which are appropriate to these objectives. It is difficult to describe the behaviors appropriate to these objectives since the internal or covert feelings and emotions are as significant for this domain as are the overt behavioral manifestations. Then, too, our testing procedures for the affective domain are still in the most primitive stages. We hope to complete the task but are not able to predict a publication date.

It may be that our authors express this hope with the utmost sincerity, but they have framed the task with such “difficulties” and in such a way as to make meeting their requirements all but impossible, because of not accepting the level of precision that the subject-matter properly admits of (contra Aristotle).

After all, these college examiners would likely have been temperamentally inclined to providing greater precision, just as they would have been socially pressured to model their social science after the hard sciences in the middle of the 20th century. 

In a way, Bloom’s taxonomy is simply the dictum of Galileo Galilei as applied to testable goals in education: “Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.” In Galileo’s defense, he probably did not envision the cannibalization of moral philosophy by the sciences. We should be careful again to affirm the value of measuring more in “social sciences” like education, psychology, and politics, than we had done in earlier eras. Measurements, like the abstract grading system commonly used in contemporary education, have almost certainly improved some things, but they have also had their share of negative effects—an observation that I hardly have to argue for, given the testimony of the countless parents of anxious or disengaged teenagers. 

Social Sciences vs. Moral Philosophy

But what really is the problem with the social sciences approach vis-a-vis traditional moral philosophy? Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain break this development down admirably in The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education (version 2.0):

The methodologies of the contemporary social sciences implicitly critique traditional moral philosophy by suggesting it relies on assumptions about human nature and human purpose that are not rationally or empirically verifiable. They have reduced the sphere of moral philosophy to the isolated study of ethics, dissociated from the social sciences. This can only be effectively argued for when reason itself is truncated. Reason is truncated in the sciences when it is only allowed to consider efficient or material causation (simple cause and effect or material composition). By doing this, reason is made to ignore key aspects of moral reasoning such as explorations of meaning and purpose (formal and final cause). Instead these aspects of reason are now condemned as irrational because they involve judgments made by communities of tradition and faith. (132)

Aristotle’s willingness to ask philosophical questions about the meaning and purpose of human beings, just as of animals or man-made objects like tables and chairs, stands in stark contrast with Bloom and his colleagues, whose decided preference is for a veneer of neutrality, objectivity and pragmatism. This is part of why I am proposing the replacement of Bloom’s taxonomy with Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, as primary goals of education. Because with Aristotle, at least, the intellectual virtues find themselves within a committed philosophical system that, even if imperfect, has been harmonized fruitfully with Christian fundamental principles before. (Aquinas comes to mind, amidst a whole tradition.)

Bloom, on the other hand, is content to punt on questions of meaning and value, the ultimate purpose of human beings and therefore of education itself. Human values and schools of educational philosophy can be safely avoided to gain widespread acceptance of a secular public discipline. As they freely admit in their foreword:

It was further agreed that in constructing the taxonomy every effort should be made to avoid value judgments about objectives and behaviors. Neutrality with respect to educational principles and philosophies was to be achieved by constructing a system which, insofar as it was possible, would permit the inclusion of objectives from all educational orientations. (6-7)

The house must be swept clean of non-objective, non-scientific value judgments, so that anyone can use it. Such a plan of attack is perfectly comprehensible for modern secularists (on their way to embracing pluralism). I am hardly criticizing their vantage point, given their worldview. But for contemporary Christians who embrace the tradition of moral philosophy, not to mention a classical philosophy of education, it certainly leaves something wanting. 

What after all is education really about? Mere training in intellectual abilities and skills? Or is human flourishing, moral virtue, wisdom for life, or even a relationship with the Creator God a proper goal? And what if such things cannot be easily measured? Should we therefore abandon them? Or perhaps, if we truly followed Galileo’s dictum, we would advance and not retreat. Perhaps we should work harder to make these goals measurable, even if we accept that such measurements might not be as precise as some others. That is the goal of this project. Advance into the fray of making measurable what truly matters in education. 

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“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

The case of Alice may be considered a good cipher for that of many modern educators. We have a vague awareness in all our modern ‘subjects’ and ‘classes’ that our students are supposed to be getting somewhere. But we are not always sure of where. At the end of the day, many teachers rejoice in success if they have simply made ‘progress’ in any particular direction. Work has been done, material has been covered, grades have been entered, and not too many disciplinary situations had to be resolved. 

In such an experience of teaching, Bloom’s taxonomy can act as a real savior, delivering the average teacher from the listless state of meandering about the work of school. The definite aims of the cognitive domain in all the precision of their taxonomy have the power to cut through the ambiguity and aimlessness of much modern teaching. 

In this article we build on our proposal to replace Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives with Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues by starting with an analysis of the positive of Bloom’s. In proposing a taxonomy of educational objectives, Bloom and his fellow university examiners made a real advance for modern education, even if they participated in the modern era’s reductionistic philosophy. In the midst of an educational climate that now hosts an active postmodern retreat from overarching values and metanarratives, the clarity of Bloom’s taxonomy of learning goals is like a breath of fresh air to many educators. Instead of wandering aimlessly like Alice in Wonderland, here at last is a clear and precise path forward. 

As I mentioned in the first article in this series, it is important to recognize the positive in Bloom’s taxonomy, even if we are ultimately going to propose a revision of it, because we are most likely to get back on track if we understand clearly where we went wrong. Wisdom involves sifting the value of another’s viewpoint and integrating its virtues into a broader theory. If we simply dismissed Bloom’s taxonomy as mere modernism, we would be acting only as reactionaries, like a pendulum swinging from one extreme to another. Instead we must take what is best from it and integrate it fully with the ancient and classical insights it neglected.

With that goal in mind, let’s now discuss three blessings of Bloom’s. 

1. Objectives Avoid Subjective and Ideological “Learning” Activities
2. Objectives Drive Observable Growth
3. Objectives Foster Flow

The Blessings of Bloom’s 1: Objectives Avoid Subjective and Ideological “Learning” Activities

The value of educational objectives is well-illustrated by the anecdote of Doug Lemov, a trainer at Uncommon Schools and author of Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College. In describing a teaching technique he calls “Begin with the End,” he explains his process of lesson planning as a novice teacher:

When I started teaching, I would ask myself while I planned, ‘What am I going to do tomorrow?” The question itself revealed the flaws in my planning method in at least two critical ways—even without accounting for my sometimes dubious answers.

The first flaw was that I was thinking about an activity for my classes on the following day, not an objective—what I wanted my students to know or be able to do by the end of the lesson. It’s far better to start the other way around and Begin with the End—the objective. By framing an objective first, you substitute “What will my students be able to do by the end of my lesson?” for “In which activities will my students participate today?” The first of these questions is measurable in a meaningful way. The second is not. The success of an activity is not determined by whether or not you do it and students seem to want to do it, but by whether you achieved an objective that can be assessed.

Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College (Jossey-Bass, 2015), 132-133

Lemov’s original experience is reminiscent of Alice’s listless meandering and is a cogent critique of many teachers today. It is still common for some teachers to plan activities with no awareness of their purpose other than to fill up the time that students are there. Or worse is when teachers plan activities, like watching a part of a movie or a YouTube video, simply to check the box of incorporating technology into the classroom or some other ideological agenda. 

This sort of error is the result of what Lemov had earlier called ideologically driven guidance, where teachers are judged as effective based on whether they have checked off

a growing list of ‘musts’: teachers must teach English, math, science, history, the arts, banking and financial literacy, environmental stewardship, entrepreneurship, and personal hygiene, in a technology-rich environment that builds self-esteem, seats students in pods, provides multiple solutions to every problem, avoids ‘teacher talk,’ and never exposes a student to a page of text that has more than five vocabulary words he or she doesn’t know. Please don’t forget the anti-drug unit. 

Teach Like a Champion 2.0, 6-7

Kolby has written about this problem of ideologically driven guidance in a series on how to synthesize Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0 with the classical tradition. The solution to this plethora of bureaucratic hoops is to empower teachers as field experts and master craftsmen, who hold themselves accountable to what works in meeting real objectives for student learning.

In The Problem of Technicism in Conventional Education, I revealed the flaws in the modern focus solely on technique, to the detriment of more holistic goals, like wisdom and virtue, but it’s worth noting that the laundry list of postmodern ideological goals can leave the average teacher afloat on a sea of subjective preferences. Jumping through all the hoops makes each teaching moment as arbitrary as the last. 

By comparison with this, Bloom’s modernist focus on objectives for student growth has a healthy realism and objectivity to it. At the end of your course, unit or lesson, the student should be objectively developed in some way. They should know something real and measurable, and not just had a fluffy experience of some kind. And if some definite knowledge is to be transferred, then the teacher must know what that is. As John Milton Gregory, an earlier modernist-classical thinker, stated memorably,

“What a man does not know he cannot teach, or, if he teaches, cannot know that he teaches.”

John Milton Gregory, The Seven Laws of Teaching (Canon Press, 2014), 27

If the teacher begins with a definite goal in mind, then at least she can know whether or not she reached it and adjust accordingly. 

Which brings us to our second blessing of Bloom’s…

The Blessings of Bloom’s 2: Objectives Drive Observable Growth

We have all likely heard of the acronym SMART goals, but we may not know the story of their development. In his book Smarter Faster Better Charles Duhigg describes how Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, two university psychologists, researched the most effective way to set goals. One of their experiments involved coaching typists at a large corporation who were already the fastest at their company. Locke and Latham provided them with a system for measuring how quickly they typed — at the beginning of the study, they averaged 95 lines per hour — then they helped them set a specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound goal (SMART), like averaging 98 lines per hour over the next week:

The conversation didn’t take long—say fifteen minutes per person—but afterward each typist knew exactly what to do and how to measure success. Each of them, put differently, had a SMART goal….

But one week later, when the researchers measured typing speeds again, they found that the workers, on average, were completing 103 lines per hour. Another week later: 112 lines. Most of the typists had blown past the goals they had set. The researchers worried the workers were just trying to impress them, so they came back again, three months later, and quietly measured everyone’s performance once more. They were typing just as fast, and some had gotten even faster.

Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity (Random House, 2016), 117-118

The thing about goals is that they work! Objectives are powerful to the human psyche because they connect in to our dopaminergic system that rewards us for progress or movement in the right direction. As Brian Johnson, a self-proclaimed philosopher and personal-development coach, has paraphrased Aristotle, “We are teleological beings.” We naturally like to aim at targets.

As Duhigg explains,

“Some 400 laboratory and field studies [show] that specific, high goals lead to a higher level of task performance than do easy goals or vague, abstract goals such as the exhortation to ‘do one’s best,’” Locke and Latham wrote in 2006 in a review of goal-setting studies. In particular, objectives like SMART goals often unlock a potential that people don’t even realize they possess. The reason, in part, is because goal-setting processes like the SMART system force people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans. The process of making a goal specific and proving it is achievable involves figuring out the steps it requires—or shifting that goal slightly, if your initial aims turn out to be unrealistic. Coming up with a timeline and a way to measure success forces a discipline onto the process that good intentions can’t match.

Smarter Faster Better, 118

Alice and teachers like her may have good intentions, but the discipline of crafting and committing to goals makes for better teaching. This is because it requires clearer and more disciplined thinking and planning about the best or most effective course of action. 

Another reason is that clear goals and a process that involves meaningful feedback are two of the characteristics that contribute to deliberate practice (or at least purposeful practice), which is the gold standard of skill-development. The leading expert on elite performance, Anders Ericsson, describes the feedback loop of positive motivation involved in setting such clear goals that add up to larger objectives in his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise:

Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspects of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement. Once an overall goal has been set, a teacher or coach will develop a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change. Improving some aspect of the target performance allows a performer to see that his or her performances have been improved by the training.

Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (Mariner Books 2017), 99

If teachers are holding themselves accountable to lesson goals and course objectives, then their teaching can become a craft that they practice in such a way as to attain greater and greater mastery. (By the way, this is exactly what Aristotle meant by the intellectual virtue of art or techne: a craft that someone can master to produce a noticeable difference in the world.)

After all, we know from studies that simply gaining more experience in a craft does not make a professional better, whether the person is a teacher, a doctor, a psychiatrist or a financial advisor. As Ericsson and Pool share,

Research has shown that the “experts” in many fields don’t perform reliably better than other, less highly regarded members of the profession—or sometimes even than people who have had no training at all. In his influential book House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth, the psychologist Robyn Dawes described research showing that licensed psychiatrists and psychologists were no more effective at performing therapy than laypeople who had received minimal training. Similarly, many studies have found that the performance of financial “experts” in picking stocks is little or no better than the performance of novices or random chance. And, as we noted earlier, doctors in general practice with several decades of experience sometimes perform worse, when judged by objective measures, than doctors with just a few years of experience—mainly because the younger doctors attended medical school more recently, so their training is more up-to-date and they are more likely to remember it. Contrary to expectations, experience doesn’t lead to improved performance among many types of doctors and nurses.

Ericsson and Pool, Peak, 105

Apparently, experience is not the best teacher, deliberate practice is. And specific measurable objectives increase the likelihood that a teacher is using the time in the classroom to practice her craft. 

The Blessings of Bloom’s 3: Objectives Foster Flow

For some classical educators, it is possible that the idea of educational objectives and goal setting has the tang of artificiality on it. They may feel that they left the educational establishment, in part to leave such things behind and simply enjoy the craft of teaching, focusing on the deeper and higher things. These past two sections may have been worrying to such educators, seeming to endorse the modern factory model of education. After all, isn’t true classical education more about the intangibles, the unspecific and not easily measurable? Isn’t it about transcendentals like truth, goodness, and beauty, and not the cramming of facts and the constant measurements of tests? 

To these educators I would appeal with the age-old saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” There is some dirty bathwater associated with goal setting and lesson targets. But arguably this is because of the ideologies and bureaucracy of modern educational institutions and not because of the principle itself. So we must ask whether in principle it really is anti-classical to have definite educational objectives to measure and push ourselves against. 

After all, it is not only to jump through bureaucratic hoops that we set goals. The ancient traditions of human beings all across the world involves setting skill-development goals with clear feedback. Humans do this for the joy of the game! It is intrinsically meaningful to grow and develop against a real standard. Having clear objectives and immediate feedback actually fosters flow, that timeless experience of getting lost in a challenging and meaningful activity. As the positive psychologist (and advocate of lifelong classical education) Mihaly Csikzentmahalyi explains in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,

The reason it is possible to achieve such complete involvement in a flow experience is that goals are usually clear, and feedback immediate. A tennis player always knows what she has to do: return the ball into the opponent’s court. And each time she hits the ball she knows whether she has done well or not. The chess player’s goals are equally obvious: to mate the opponent’s king before his own is mated. With each move, he can calculate whether he has come closer to this objective. The climber inching up a vertical wall of rock has a very simple goal in mind: to complete the climb without falling. Every second, hour after hour, he receives information that he is meeting that basic goal.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics ed., 2008), 54

Do you want to enjoy the experience of teaching? Then arguably adopting clear objectives for student learning and playing the game of always seeking improvement is the most direct route. Teaching is a craft, and excellence in a craft involves producing something definite in the world. There must be a product. If so, setting measurable and attainable goals for student growth and striving to meet those goals will be rewarding. 

We must of course still recognize that some of the best and highest aims of education are not easily measurable or attainable in a short time, and that does not mean we should abandon them as objectives. But that does not mean we can abandon SMART goals and lesson targets entirely. We must find a way to embrace both SMART goals and transcendent purposes at one and the same time. Yet that is a topic we must leave for next time…. 

Interested in more on fostering flow in your classroom? Download the free eBook here or visit the flow page to learn more and watch a video by the author, describing the flow state and its relevance to your teaching practices in the classroom.

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