At the same time, we noted in the last article that our recovery movement has at times struggled to name prudence or practical wisdom specifically as a central strand of the liberal arts tradition. And because of our modern scientism this has likely resulted in a de facto neglect of prudential wisdom in the classroom. We may give lip service to wisdom and virtue as our goals, but our teachers may be only nominally inclined to turn the liberal arts we train or the classic works we study toward the ends of practical wisdom. 

Even when we teach ethics, we are often like C.S. Lewis’ moral philosophers, quick to philosophize in the abstract, and to teach Great Books in their historical and literary context, but reticent to help students apply moral reasoning to their own lives. In fact, there may be some classical educators who view such preachiness as out of place. Their view of classical education is all classical languages and literature, mathematics and science for its own sake and for the mental training they afford. Practical considerations that include the particulars of modern life and the choices that students will have to make are, in their estimation, wholly out of place. They are quick to cry pragmatism and utilitarianism, preferring instead an arcane and ivory tower classicism. I would encourage such persons to read Proverbs, Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Plato’s Republic, and then return to read the rest of this series. 

In fact, Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of prudence proposes the ideal middle way in education between practicality and liberality, between what is useful and learning for its own sake. The joy of learning is indeed one of the values of the classical tradition, but so is practicality and a stoic awareness of the limited time we have on earth. We might think of this under the classical quest for the good life or the life well lived. Education is not all fun and games, even arcane and intellectual ones; our choices often have the weight of life and death upon them. In this light, all subjects of study have a practical dimension to them, in terms of how human beings should think about, value and use them for other ends. There is a hierarchy of goods and needs, and human beings ought to value the world in a certain way, in accordance with a true ordo amoris, to cite Augustine’s phrase for a proper ordering of loves. By adopting this perspective or attuning ourselves to this dimension of things, we will begin to see how we might instill prudence in the young. 

Deliberating about the Beneficial

Aristotle begins his more detailed discussion of the intellectual virtue of prudence or phronesis with a set of common sense considerations:

Regarding practical wisdom we shall get at the truth by considering who are the persons we credit with it. Now it is thought to be the mark of a man of practical wisdom to be able to deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself, not in some particular respect, e.g. about what sorts of thing conduce to health or to strength, but about what sorts of thing conduce to the good life in general.

Nicomachean Ethics, VI, ch. 5 (trans. by W. D. Ross accessed at The Internet Classics Archive)

People with prudence are masters of deliberation or consultation (as some translations have it; the Greek bouleuo can mean to “take counsel, deliberate, or resolve after deliberating”). They are able to consider counsel within themselves or with the help of others (“Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed.” Prov. 15:22 ESV), especially regarding what is good, beneficial or expedient for themselves. 

In case the idea of expediency or prudence itself sounds too Machiavellian, it is to what is expedient or beneficial (Greek sumphero) that Paul appeals in 1st Corinthians 6:1, instead of what is simply lawful. In this case, what is expedient or beneficial can be a guide to practical thinking with a higher moral standard than mere law. In this way, Aristotelian expediency can be baptized by applying Jesus’ Golden Rule to love others as we love ourselves. Since we naturally desire what is good and beneficial for ourselves, the spiritual virtue of love of God and neighbor can guide the intellectual virtue of prudence as we deliberate about what is good for our neighbor and ourselves in God’s good world. 

We must pause here to head off a potential misunderstanding of Aristotle’s statement above. In claiming that practical wisdom entails the ability to “deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself, not in some particular respect” like health or physical fitness, Aristotle might be heard as endorsing a philosophical quest for the good life, rather than something practical. On this view, Aristotle’s prudent person asks the big questions of life and doesn’t settle for simplistic answers or get sidetracked by subjects. After all, isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 

However, Aristotle cannot mean that a person could have practical wisdom and yet regularly and deliberately make choices that are unhealthy. Otherwise, how could it be that, as Aristotle later states, “it is not possible to be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral virtue” (Nicomachean Ethics Book VI, ch. 13). In their true form, moral virtue and practical wisdom are inextricably linked. So, some awareness of particular subjects, like health, that impinge on human wellbeing must be included in an education which aims to promote prudence. But it is one thing to study the art of medicine, with the goal of a profession in the medical field. It is entirely another to acquire the general understanding of particulars that will enable a person to live a healthy life, as one aspect of the good life. 

From this vantage point, we are prepared to distinguish between two ways in which an education might be practical. The more common usage today sees education as job training. And for all its abuses, there is a legitimate sense in which an education should involve apprenticeship in practical arts, trades and professions. An educated person should, in a Christian’s view at least (see e.g., 2 Thess 3:10, ESV: “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.”), be prepared to provide for himself and have something to share with others (Eph 4:28: “Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.”). The second way education may be practical is in providing an understanding of right and wrong, good and evil, what is beneficial, excellent and praiseworthy in human life. Practical education not only enables a man to earn a living, but also to conduct his life.

Because of this, the art of medicine may be optional, but the study of health is not. But too often we neglect this second type of practicality in favor of the first. The same might be said of other subjects: history and politics, science and literature, technology, mathematics and economics. All these have their practical dimension, in which some understanding of them will help one to make beneficial or expedient decisions for oneself and others in the world. 

Deliberating with the Variables

Aristotle goes on to explain practical wisdom as distinct from the arts:

This is shown by the fact that we credit men with practical wisdom in some particular respect when they have calculated well with a view to some good end which is one of those that are not the object of any art. It follows that in the general sense also the man who is capable of deliberating has practical wisdom.

Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, ch. 5

In essence, prudential wisdom then is about calculating, consulting or deliberating about what is best. It consists in properly weighing the options. Moral virtue itself is a habit, and therefore does not involve deliberation. But only by deliberation are moral virtues maintained as habits, and only through the right hands will a person see the right ends and value the means correctly. The arts likewise involve habits, as well as thoughtful analysis of means and ends, but only for the purpose of production, not for essential choices about how to live in the world.

The prudential perspective thus sets limits on what is valuable to know or think. It is as the Psalmist said, 

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;

my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvelous for me.

Psalm 131:1 ESV

There is a humility in the concerns of prudence to focus on earthly things and human things, rather than divine or arcane marvels. The way Aristotle distinguishes these categories involves the idea of the variable and invariable, what is changeable or unchangeable. Philosophical discussions of contingency developed from this distinction between what must necessarily and logically be true and that which could be otherwise. We might think of variable things as the facts of a case. They are matters which could be different in a different case.

This distinction between the variable and invariable aligns with Aristotle’s distinction between practical wisdom (phronesis) and scientific knowledge (episteme). He explains,

Now no one deliberates about things that are invariable, nor about things that it is impossible for him to do. Therefore, since scientific knowledge involves demonstration, but there is no demonstration of things whose first principles are variable (for all such things might actually be otherwise), and since it is impossible to deliberate about things that are of necessity, practical wisdom cannot be scientific knowledge nor art; not science because that which can be done is capable of being otherwise, not art because action and making are different kinds of thing. The remaining alternative, then, is that it is a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man. For while making has an end other than itself, action cannot; for good action itself is its end.

Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, ch. 5

The goal of production is always its usefulness for something else, but a decision to act a certain way has its goal in itself: living a good life. So far so good on the distinction between artistry and prudence. We have had occasion already to define scientific knowledge (episteme) as the ability to demonstrate some truth. In Aristotle’s logical system of distinctions, the possession of scientific knowledge involves the demonstration or proof of something from first principles that could not be otherwise. Aristotle later mentions an example from mathematics: “that the triangle has or has not its angles equal to two right angles.” No one deliberates or takes counsel about that but only about affairs in which he can make a choice. The first principles that entail knowledge about triangles are fundamental and of necessity; we cannot really imagine a world in which they were otherwise. 

Our conclusion, then, is simply a restatement of Aristotle’s definition of prudence (phronesis) as a “true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to things that are good or bad for man.” The true reasoning of practical wisdom takes place in deliberation, when a person takes counsel by considering various actions. He or she must know the particulars of the situation as well as universal human values. As Aristotle’s says, 

Nor is practical wisdom concerned with universals only—it must also recognize the particulars; for it is practical, and practice is concerned with particulars. This is why some who do not know, and especially those who have experience, are more practical than others who know; for if a man knew that light meats are digestible and wholesome but did not know which sorts of meat are light, he would not produce health, but the man who knows that chicken is wholesome is more likely to produce health.

Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, ch. 7

Aristotle comes full circle on the example of health, enabling us to confirm that there is a prudential perspective on the subject of human health. We can distinguish it even further from scientific knowledge now through this example. While a person might know through deductive reasoning from the first principles of (ancient) medicine and nutrition that light meats are digestible and wholesome, he could still be unaware of the particulars. An experienced person might not know the general categories and theory, but know the particular facts that chicken is wholesome. So, in deliberating about what to eat that might promote health, the experienced person is at an advantage over the person with theoretical knowledge.

Reclaiming the Practical Perspective for Classical Education

All that we have seen so far demonstrates the legitimacy of taking a practical perspective on various subjects in education. One of the unfortunate effects of the modern education landscape is that practicality has been subsumed under progressive education’s utilitarianism and pragmatism. In defending subjects like Latin, ancient and medieval history, and the arts, from those who swept out impractical subjects for dead people, some classical educators have strapped on the armor of “art for art’s sake” so long that have reflexively neglected the proper practicality of the classical tradition.

In this context, contemporary educators have tended to stress research findings to support making subjects relevant to the lives of their students. On the one hand, such insistence on connecting everything to students’ day-to-day lives seems extreme and anti-classical. Must I really make connections between modern day gang wars and the stories of the Greeks and Trojans? Context is everything. Such a teaching move could be either far-fetched or brilliant. Besides, the supposition that every subject of study must prove itself as relevant to the student before he or she can rightfully be expected to engage it with their full attention is manifestly pernicious. Teachers and schools end up cutting valuable subjects and justifying the practicality of STEM on the job-preparation motive alone. 

On the other hand, we now have classical reason, founded in the educational objective of developing prudence, to adopt the practical perspective, especially on the humanities, health, and economics, without neglecting the cultivation of other intellectual virtues in their place. After all, relevance is only one among several factors that “reduce stress and lead to the thinking, reflective brain response” (see Neuroteach, by Whitman and Kelleher, p. 69). It is not the case that every subject must justify itself as practical, in the sense of relevant to my personal life decisions. Yet the practicality of instructing the conscience for life must be the beating heart of the whole educational experience, not the whole of education but a living center that pumps the blood of human interest into every other part.

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For example, a teacher responsible for teaching The Great Gatsby must consider how the book will be taught, what she will focus on, and how she intends for students to develop and grow through the study. Each day, she walks into a room full of students in need of direction for approaching the text. This requires leadership.

In modern educational circles, we often speak, not of leadership, but of “classroom management.” Unfortunately, this phrase is embedded with faulty assumptions about who students are, what the purpose of learning is, and how we are to manage them toward some desirable end. As a result, classroom management techniques are problematic in two key ways.

First, classroom management techniques are often behavioristic. In other words, they seek to address the behavior of students through systems of external rewards and consequences, rather than aiming to form the whole person of the child, especially the heart. Strategies are deployed to artificially motivate behaviors of respect, obedience, service, and even kindness in a way disconnected from the child’s internal moral development. Is this child growing in a love and understanding of the idea of respect for authority? How is the child becoming more servant-hearted in her disposition? These questions are not usually asked in typical classroom management conversations.

Second, classroom management techniques are often task-oriented rather than people-oriented. This makes sense since the phrase emerged during the post-industrial revolution in which the effective and efficient completion of tasks was prized above all else. Now, at its best, modern business management theory is people-oriented, but most managers too easily slip into the mindset of “How do I get this employee to perform this task?” rather than “How do I lead this employee on a path toward growth and increasing expertise?” The latter focuses on the development of the talent and skill of people, not simply whether they are hitting the deadlines. 

To equip teachers to grow as true leaders of their students, in this article I will recommend three recently published leadership books that contain relevant ideas for classroom leadership. These resources will help teachers see their true leadership role and therefore embrace the responsibility for them to invest deeply in the lives of their students. While teachers will need to push through some of the business-focused examples of these resources, the underlying ideas are both relevant and applicable for classroom leadership today.

Multipliers by Liz Wiseman 

The first book I want to recommend is Multipliers (HarperCollins, 2017) by researcher Liz Wiseman. In this book, Wiseman sets out to show how leaders can make people under their supervision smarter, rather than targeting mere compliance. Early on, she differentiates between two managers, the Genius Maker and the Genius (9). The genius maker grows people’s intelligence by “extracting the smarts and maximum effort from each member on the team.” This type of leader talks only about 10% of the time, thereby making space for others to grow through active participation in coming up with solutions to a problem. 

In contrast, the genius is self-oriented. He is smart and successful, and everyone in the room knows who has the best ideas. He may facilitate “conversations” but soon these turn into opportunities for him to share his correct views with others. After all, he is the genius. Why not just listen to him? The result is that people do not have the permission to think for themselves or the legitimate responsibility to make decisions. It all goes back to what the genius thinks is right. 

For Wiseman, the genius maker is a multiplier of of intelligence while the genius is actually a diminisher. At heart, multipliers “invoke each person’s unique intelligence and create an atmosphere of genius–innovation, productive effort, and collective intelligence” (10). The upshot is that these leaders not only access people’s current capability, they stretch it. People actually report getting smarter under the supervision of multipliers. The fundamental assumption of a multiplier is “People are smart and will figure this out” whereas the assumption of the diminisher is “They will never figure this out without me” (20). 

Teachers can become multipliers of intelligence in their classrooms by resisting the urge to be the residential genius. Although they are older, smarter, and more experienced, these assets can be leveraged to empower their students toward growing their own abilities, rather than making it all about the teacher.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers:

• Do you empower students in your classroom to make major contributions to class culture, discussions, learning, and skill demonstration? 
• Is there room in your classroom for students to make mistakes as you stretch them to attempt difficult assignments?
• Do you ask your students to explain complex concepts to their peers rather than yourself?
• Does your approach to grading grow student intellectual confidence or does it foster dependence on your own intelligence?

Boundaries for Leaders by Dr. Henry Cloud

Boundaries for Leaders (HarperCollins, 2013) is written by clinical psychologist Dr. Henry Cloud, an author recognized for his work on cultivating healthy relationships. In Chapter 1, he writes, “This book is about what leaders need to do in order for people to accomplish a vision” (2). The key word here for Cloud is people. He will go on to argue that people perform their best work in healthy work cultures that take into consideration the psychological well-being of both employer and employee. By setting good boundaries in place and leading in a way that people’s brains can follow, Cloud contends, good results will come. 

Cloud writes that boundaries are made up of two things: what you create and what you allow (15). A boundary is a property line, marking out who is responsible and for what. When someone is given real ownership of something, anything that happens under their supervision only happens because they created it or allowed it. 

In top-performing classrooms, teachers teach in a way that makes it possible for their students’ brains to function as they were designed (25). This happens through setting good boundaries. Cloud writes, “Show me a person, team, or a company that gets results, and I will show you the leadership boundaries that make it possible” (26).

As a psychologist, the author is aware of how the human brain works and what leaders can do to maximize brain health and productivity. In turn, teachers can use these insights as they seek to pass on knowledge, skills, and virtues to their students.

For example, it is helpful for a teacher to understand that the brain relies on three essential properties to achieve a particular task, be it the following of a classroom procedure or the completion of an assignment:

1. Attention: the ability to focus on relevant stimuli, and block out what is not relevant (“Do this”)
2. Inhibition: the ability to “not do” certain actions that could be distracting, irrelevant, or eve destructive (“Don’t do this”)
3. Working Memory: the ability to retain and access relevant information for reasoning, decision-making, and taking future actions (“Remember and build on this relevant information”)

As teachers design their lessons and think through what they want their students to accomplish for the day, it is beneficial to think through these three neurological elements for the completion of a task. When we ignore one or more of these elements, we risk short-circuiting our students optimal use of the way God designed their brains.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers:

• What student behaviors in your classroom have you created or allowed?
• How do your lessons promote student attention on what is most important for the curricular objective?
• What procedures and expectations have you established and maintained to ensure that what is not important or destructive is not allowed in?
• How are you building your students’ working memory of key information to help them complete assignments with greater success? 

The Motive by Patrick Lencioni 

The Motive (Wiley, 2020), written especially for CEOs, explores the underlying motivation of a good leader. Author Patrick Lencioni, well-known for his book Five Dysfunctions of a Team, illustrates through a leadership parable that one’s motivation for leading will dictate what one prioritizes and how he or she spends her time.

In the parable, two types of leadership motivation are at play (135). Reward-centered leadership rests on the fundamental assumption that the leader, having been selected for the role, has arrived and therefore possesses the freedom to design her job around what she most enjoys. It is the belief that the leader’s work should be pleasant and enjoyable because the leadership position is the reward. She therefore has the freedom to avoid mundane, unpleasant, or uncomfortable work if she so pleases, which she does.

In contrast, responsibility-centered leadership assumes that leadership is all about responsibility and service. It is the belief that being a leader is responsible; therefore, the experience of leading should be difficult and challenging (though certainly not without elements of gratification). 

To be clear, Lencioni writes that no leader perfectly embodies one form of motivation or the other. But one of these motives will be predominant and leaders need to be self-aware of what drives them. Reward-centered leaders often resist and avoid doing the difficult things that only they can do for the team they are leading. As a result, the whole organization suffers.

When it comes to leading a classroom, there are all sorts of things that a teacher would prefer not to do: address difficult student behavior, call a parent with bad news to share, have “family talks” with the whole class about negative classroom culture issues, or give a low grade on an assignment. But to be the best leaders they can, teachers need to lean into these responsibilities and thereby discharge their role teacher well.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers

• What is your motivation for becoming a teacher?
• What are the 3-5 things you can do for your class that no one else can do? 
• How are you caring for your class culture, especially rooting out dysfunctional behavior and forming healthy interpersonal dynamics?
• What kind of feedback do you give your students on their behavior and work? 
• When was the last time you had a difficult conversation with a student in which you addressed unhealthy behavior?
• When was the last time you complained about a student’s or parent’s behavior? What steps do you need to take to address it?
• How often are you reminding your students of the big picture of their education, your particular curriculum, and the core values of your classroom?

Conclusion

Teachers are the leaders of their classrooms, responsible for casting vision for their students, supporting them in their work, and cultivating healthy classroom cultures. Rather than deploying classroom management techniques which can be overly behavioristic and task-oriented, teachers should embrace their role as leaders and focus on developing their people. By helping teachers become better leaders, we will see dynamic classrooms, better learning results, and, most importantly, thriving students.

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

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

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

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

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

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

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

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

Developing a Lesson in Craft

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Apprenticeship Movement (I-We-You)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Inspirational Coach

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

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

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

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

The Apprenticeship Lesson

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

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

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

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

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later articles in this series:

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

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

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

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

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 .

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. 

The post Breaking Down the Bad of Bloom’s: The False Objectivity of Education as a Modern Social Science appeared first on .

“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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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.

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