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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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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Next Article in this Series: “Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s”

An example of this can be found in Leisure the Basis of Culture where Josef Pieper defended the role of leisure as a deeply human and transcendent experience. Leisure, for Pieper, is properly defined as a celebratory and worshipful stepping apart from the workaday world. It looks and feels more like contemplation or the philosophical act. More recently Chris Perrin, founder of Classical Academic press, has drawn from this idea to commend school as schole, returning us to the linguistic history of the word ‘school’ as leisure. 

The point here is that the purpose of education is something grander and wider than we often allow it to be when we focus on the needs and goals of the workaday world. It entails a sort of restful contemplation that does not have in view mere practical considerations. In this account, then, education is about stepping away from the utilitarian world and embracing the transcendence implied in our human nature. As the teacher of Ecclesiastes puts it, God “has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Eccl 3:11 ESV). 

David Hicks too in the classic Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education zeroed in on the crass utilitarian values of a technocratic state. As he pointedly expressed in the prologue:

The modern era cannot be bothered with finding new answers to old questions like: What is man and what are his purposes? Rather, it demands of its schools: How can modern man better get along in this complicated modern world? Getting along — far from suggesting any sort of Socratic self-knowledge or stoical self-restraint — implies the mastery of increasingly sophisticated methods of control over the environment and over others. Man’s lust for power, not truth, feeds modern education. But this fact does not worry the educator. From his point of view, the new question has several advantages over the old, the most notable being that it better suits his scientific problem-solving approach. Like the ancient Sophist, he is out to build his status by proving his usefulness; and like the Sophist, he appears unabashedly confident in the efficacy of his methods, which in a peculiar way bestow on him the power to bestow power.

In doing so Hicks struck a chord similar to C.S. Lewis’ masterful The Abolition of Man which defended traditional values against the modernist aim of creating “men without chests”. In analyzing the Green Book, an unnamed modern textbook, Lewis reveals how its authors, instead of teaching English, teach a questionable philosophy that is suspicious of human values. A modernist preference for so-called “objective facts” has pushed out of consideration–and therefore out of the educational project–human values like beauty and honor. Treating such things as merely personal subjective feelings, they have stripped education of its heart and turned it into a head game. 

This modern fallacy, Lewis said, has colossal implications that pave the way for the totalitarian state to make men of its own choosing. The men at the top of the power structure (the enlightened scientists and government bureaucrats) will inevitably feel the need to use their power to condition men according to their own schemes, since traditional and transcendent values have now become subjective preferences that they can manipulate for their own ends. Lewis closes his short tour-de-force with an appendix demonstrating the trans-cultural nature of certain moral values and principles, developing on his reference to the tao or moral law in his argument. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives

Less than a decade later on the other side of the Atlantic, a committee of American college and university examiners, headed by Benjamin S. Bloom, the University Examiner at the University of Chicago, set out on a project to classify the educational objectives of teachers. While we may not think of Bloom’s taxonomy as participating in this broader modern discussion of the purpose of education, their idea of creating a taxonomy for educational goals inevitably interacts with broader questions of purpose. 

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

1. Knowledge

1.1 Knowledge of Specifics

1.2 Knowledge of Ways and Means of Dealing with Specifics 

1.3 Knowledge of the Universals and Abstractions in a Field

2. Comprehension

2.1 Translation

2.2 Interpretation

2.3 Extrapolation

3. Application
4. Analysis

4.1 Analysis of Elements

4.2 Analysis of Relationships

4.3 Analysis of Organizational Principles

5. Synthesis

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

6.1 Judgments in Terms of Internal Evidence

6.2 Judgments in Terms of External Criteria

Bloom’s taxonomy is virtually ubiquitous in contemporary educational circles. One of my first years teaching at a classical Christian school, a list of all the verbs associated with Bloom’s cognitive domain of educational objectives was handed to me and my colleagues, with the instruction: “Be sure to ask discussion questions and give assignments that involve students in higher order thinking, and not just low level knowledge!” Colorful charts and diagrams of Bloom’s taxonomy abound on the internet, especially on teacher websites. Many reflect the revision published by a group of cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists and instructional researchers in 2001, which renamed and slightly restructured the 6 major objectives of the cognitive domain. 

Bloom’s taxonomy has become one of those fixed touchpoints in contemporary education that simply falls into the assumed architecture of the discipline. Everyone accepts Bloom’s or revised Bloom’s. Everyone implicitly practices Bloom’s methodology when they identify learning objectives, whether for their course, unit plan or an individual lesson. Virtually no one, as best as I can judge, has actually read the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals: Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. Nor has anyone seriously questioned the underlying assumptions on which it is based. 

I began with the lead-in references to Pieper, Lewis and more contemporary classical education advocates, because their critiques have relevance for the educational project of Bloom et al. Arguably their classification of educational objectives suffers from the same modernist privileging of “objective facts” over human values. To be sure, they envisioned a project that embraced educational objectives in three domains: cognitive, affective and psychomotor. In this way, they attempted to signal the importance of the heart and the body, as well as the mind. But the way they construed the affective domain handbook (finally published a decade later) and their sharp divide between these areas ultimately ended up reinforcing the popular neglect of these domains, rather than reviving them. Ultimately, whether or not it was their fault or intention, almost no one uses Bloom’s taxonomy of the affective domain in any significant way, and the psychomotor domain was not even addressed by them, though a few other educators have proposed their own subcategories since.

For all intents and purposes then, Bloom’s taxonomy has privileged the cognitive over the affective and psychomotor; the head is focused on, to the neglect of the heart and the body. This is an outcome we would have expected of a generation of educators bred on curricula like the Green Book that Lewis so eloquently deconstructed in The Abolition of Man. Besides, their vocation as college examiners and their purpose for creating the taxonomy in the first place inevitably privileged the types of goals that could be easily measured on a modern test. Such goals too easily overlook the broader and deeper purposes of education that classical educators have tried to recover.

The outcome of Bloom’s taxonomy, then, was the contemporary privileging of the bare intellect in school settings, even if athletics and arts are still sometimes the dog that wags the tail of specific educational institutions. In his book Desiring the Kingdom James K.A. Smith has traced this modern emphasis on human beings as “thinking things,” primarily cognitive intellects at their best, back to Descartes’ philosophical project in search of objective truth and the Enlightenment as a whole. But rather than simply blaming Bloom and his committee or Descartes and his ilk–educators and philosophers who, after all, may have had the best of intentions–we may simply acknowledge that it is our modern way of thinking about ourselves and education that has poisoned the stew. 

After all, Bloom and his compatriot’s goal was relatively modest. They sought to articulate a taxonomy of generally accepted educational objectives to provide clarity for teachers, curriculum writers and examination writers. The point of the taxonomy was to gain widespread acceptance of a common language, thereby avoiding the vague, ambiguous and equivocal statements of educational objectives that were already in use at the K-12 and collegiate level. So Bloom’s taxonomy merely categorized and standardized the language that was already in use and reflected the popular trickle down of an earlier era’s philosophical trends. 

A Classical Taxonomy of Educational Objectives

The contention of this series is that, as Lewis famously quipped in Mere Christianity, we must go back to go forward. Having taken a wrong track, the quickest way forward is to turn around. Progress sometimes requires regress. 

But backtracking is more effective if one knows where one has gone astray. Otherwise we may find ourselves wandering back aimlessly with simply a regressive spirit that assumes that anything earlier or more traditional is better. We cannot ignore the real educational advances of the modern era. And so a simple tossing aside of Bloom’s Taxonomy will not do either. We must propose some account of the value of the project of classifying educational objectives, even if we reframe the enterprise in different terms. 

To this end I am proposing a return to Aristotle’s classification of Five Intellectual Virtues, as a replacement for Bloom’s six orders of cognitive domain goals. The five intellectual virtues are introduced and explained in their relation to one another in Book VI of the Nichomachean Ethics:

Let us begin, then, from the beginning, and discuss these states once more. Let it be assumed that the states by virtue of which the soul possesses truth by way of affirmation or denial are five in number, i.e. art, knowledge, practical wisdom, philosophic wisdom, comprehension…. (1139b.14ff.)

From The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2 (Princeton: 1984), 1799

In successive articles, I will cite Aristotle’s discussions of each of these intellectual virtues in turn and explain his distinctions between the intellectual virtues and how that initiates a seismic shift in our understanding of the broader purpose of education, as well as our lesson by lesson objectives. However, since Aristotle’s description of the intellectual virtues in Book VI of his Nicomachean Ethics is not as detailed with sub-categorization as Bloom’s Taxonomy, it will need to be developed and re-appropriated in light of contemporary Christian educational concerns, in order to serve as a rival taxonomy. Therefore, this series could properly be called a neo-Aristotelian Christian taxonomy of educational goals, since it represents a Christian development from within the Aristotelian tradition. 

While a fair amount of this project will involve reading and interpreting Aristotle, there will be times where his assumptions and language will have to be challenged or updated, either from broader Christian philosophical considerations, practical educational circumstances, or recent developments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. I will endeavor to signal when and how my proposal differs from Aristotle’s viewpoints, as best as I can understand them. In addition, I must confess to giving a layman’s reading of Aristotle’s ethics, as myself a lover of wisdom but without the specialization to wade into the discipline’s detailed criticism of the whole Aristotelian corpus. When my views differ from the consensus interpretation of Aristotle or there is a major division in schools of thought on an issue pertinent to my proposal, I will alert the reader in a note. 

Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues

1. Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship
   1. Common and domestic arts
   2. Professions and trades
   3. Athletics and sports
   4. Fine and performing arts
   5. The liberal arts of language and number
2. Episteme — (Scientific) Knowledge
   1. Natural
   2. Human
   3. Metaphysical
3. Phronesis — Prudence or practical wisdom
   1. Personal
   2. Household
   3. Managerial and Political
   4. Understanding and Judgment
4. Nous — Intuition or comprehension
   1. Of Universals
   2. Of Particulars
5. Sophia — (Philosophic) Wisdom
   1. Mastery of induction and deduction
   2. Knowledge and intuition combined
      • Natural
      • Human
      • Metaphysical

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of reviving Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues is the light it sheds on the subsequent history of classical education. The curriculum and pedagogy of the liberal arts tradition, as recovered by Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain (and others), appears in a new clarity and radiance, when seen through the magnifying glass of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. 

While it may seem like proposing the “intellectual virtues” of Aristotle hardly solves the issue of privileging the intellect over the heart and body, Aristotle’s concepts contain within them a proper integration of body, heart and head. For instance, techne or artistry often involves clear bodily connections that would qualify under the psychomotor heading of Bloom. In a similar way, phronesis or prudence involves the heart and Aristotle details and explains its specific connection to the moral virtues (which deserve a book of their own). This solves the problem of privileging one over the other better than Bloom’s original scheme, because what we really need is not just an account of educational objectives in each area, as if they were all equivalent and interchangeable, but also a principle for integrating the excellences or virtues that are proper to the different spheres of the human person. 

The task set before us, therefore, begins with analyzing where we have come: the good, the bad and the ugly of Bloom’s taxonomy. Next, it will be necessary to explain in some detail each of Aristotle’s five virtues as an alternate set of educational objectives. Lastly, we will work out what it might look like for our schools, our curriculum and our courses to aim at the intellectual virtues in a modern setting, including what shifts in focus and pedagogy that would entail. Such an endeavor promises to be a bumpy ride, so buckle your seat belts and hang on for this new series on Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues as a classical taxonomy of educational objectives.

Next Article in this Series: “Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s”

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