In this series, I am taking my cue from Cal Newport’s helpful book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout and applying his insights to our expectations for student work in classical Christian schools. Like the modern office, forms of pseudo-productivity dominate the modern school system–a fact that explains how children can spend more time on school and edutainment than ever before and yet scores and cultural literacy continue to decline. 

The problem is that the quantity of easy assignments, like worksheets or entertaining presentations or videos, has crowded out the quality of learning. We have sacrificed depth to a shallow breadth and traded long term learning for an easy-to-teach, easy-to-grade hamster wheel of activities. 

In our last article we explored Cal Newport’s first principle for slow productivity: do fewer things. Resonating with the Latin saying, multum non multa (much not many), this principle is best interpreted as calling for fewer assignments of higher quality rather than fewer subjects in a day. We supported this classical application of the principle from no less revered a source than the Roman oratorical teacher Quintilian, who argued for, not against, wide reading across many subjects. But this doesn’t mean we can’t cut down on busy work and focus on the highest value activities for deep learning.

Part of the point of this assertion is that there may actually be an inverse relationship between the sheer number of assignments in school (or projects at work) and the real production of value or quality. As Newport explained near the beginning of the book, “The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that ‘good’ work requires increasing busyness–faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours” (7). But this busyness itself becomes a drag on true productivity because of the “overhead cost” as Newport has called it, of each new project or assignment.

This overhead cost leads to a waste of labor in the hurry through activities that are not effective in creating value, which in our case would be the durable learning and cultivation of intellectual virtues in a student. Busywork does not develop the mind of a scholar. 

These considerations lead us naturally in to Cal Newport’s second principle: work at a natural pace. The connection is obvious because the important work that does transform a student into a scholar requires a certain slowness of pace to be effective. Focusing too much on efficiency may cause us to short-circuit the process, leaving the student no better off than when she started. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day. True achievement takes time. You can’t rush greatness.

Newport unpacks his second principle of slow productivity for knowledge workers by calling for a sustainable and almost luxurious approach:

“Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.” (116)

His encouragement not to rush is made possible because crucial time has been preserved by doing fewer things. This move enables our work to be of higher importance. Students likewise will experience increased motivation when they sense that assignments are more naturally significant or meaningful. Busywork, on the other hand, demotivates a student, since he can feel its intrinsic pointlessness.

We should pause to note that just because a project takes a long time does not ensure it is important or meaningful. Teachers seeking to apply this principle in their classical school should consider what skills of hand and eye will be honed, what intellectual virtues like wisdom and understanding, will be developed before launching a time-consuming project that is ancillary to their curriculum. One litmus test might be whether it integrates the liberal arts with the common arts, while solidifying meaningful knowledge, as Chris Hall advocates for in his book Common Arts Education.

Cal Newport draws from the examples of ground breaking scientists to make the point of what a “sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity” ought to look like. He explains,

“These great scientists of times past were clearly ‘productive’ by any reasonable definition of the term. What else can you call it when someone literally changes our understanding of the universe? At the same time, however, the pace at which they toiled on their momentous discoveries seemed, by modern standards, to be uneven, and in some cases almost leisurely.” (111)

Newport’s use of the word “leisurely” resonates remarkably with an emphasis of the classical Christian education movement: recovering school as leisure. The Greek word from which school is derived, scholé, meant something like “leisure.” Christopher Perrin of Classical Academic Press has helpfully advocated for a recovery of scholé in school, drawing from Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Perrin defines scholé as “undistracted time…” in his book The Scholé Way. Likewise, Newport’s description of “settings conducive to brilliance” resonates with the classical education movement’s emphasis on beauty and aesthetics for the school environment. What could be more inspiring than the idea of restful learning at a natural pace in a beautiful and uplifting atmosphere!

Newport and Perrin are both quick to clarify that the feeling of intensity for work should vary. Productive school work, like scientific discovery, will have periods of intense effort, as well as restful or leisurely contemplation. Working at a natural pace means that we as teachers are attentive to these ups and downs. We don’t try to force an unnatural sameness, either of rigor or rest. There is a natural rhythm to quality accomplishment and genuine learning that God has built into the fabric of existence. Just as the Sabbath principle governs work in general, so too must peaceful learning and restful contemplation balance out more strenuous learning activities.

It might initially feel like a cop out to give more time in class to a challenging activity like writing. But it may be that it ultimately pays itself back in the genuine progress made by the student. After all, their minds are likely freshest for that type of focused effort during the school day. And teachers can actively assist in the process of coaching when they are present. Are we really surprised that students turn in poorly written essays, when they are forced to do it in the energy trough of the afternoon or the mental haze of the late evening? 

Still some will decry the loss of productivity. But the secret is opening out our vision of student productivity to a longer time horizon. As Newport discerns from the case of those leisurely scientists,

“Timescale matters. When viewed at the fast scale of days and weeks, the efforts of historic thinkers like Copernicus and Newton can seem uneven and delayed. When instead viewed at the slow scale of years, their efforts suddenly seem undeniably and impressively fruitful.” (113)

This perspective shift undergirds another influential Latin saying, festina lente (“hasten slowly”), which calls for a paradox of slow hurry. There must be a purposeful movement in a meaningful direction at the same time as a willingness to delay over the details to ensure quality and a student’s developing mastery. Great teachers can discern when to slow down and when to hasten on.

Part of this is because skill development benefits naturally from providing activities with the proper challenge. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyiy, the famous positive psychologist called this the flow channel, which is characterized by an avoidance of boredom because of the challenge being too low on the one hand, but also by preventing the anxiety caused by too high a level of challenge. Within this channel we are much more likely to experience the flow state, where time passes in effortless focus as we are absorbed in a meaningful activity. This modern discovery is part and parcel of the joy of learning as I have written extensively elsewhere. 

For our purposes, we can note that flow comes in many forms, both vigorous and contemplative, but more recent discoveries have shown it to be only one step in the flow cycle, which includes both a struggle phase beforehand while getting into flow and a recovery phase after which allows the mind needed rest for entering the flow cycle again (see Rian Doris, flowstate.com). One cannot be “on” all the time, so there should varying types and levels of focused effort throughout the school day and throughout the weeks and months of a school year.

While he may not personally connect flow state with his ideas of deep work or slow productivity, Newport does connect his thoughts back to Aristotle’s vision of eudaimonia (“flourishing or happiness”) and the contemplative life:

“In the Nicomachean Ethics, which would have been familiar to any serious thinker from the time of Copernicus onward, Aristotle identified deep contemplation as the most human and worthy of all activities. The general lifestyle of the scientist, by this logic, had a worthiness of its own, independent of any specific accomplishments in the moment. Little value was to be gained in rushing, as the work itself provided reward. This mindset supported a Renaissance-style understanding of professional efforts as one element among many that combine to create a flourishing existence.” (115)

What this masterful quote adds to our discussion so far is the intrinsic value of meaningful work. In addition to its practical value in transforming the student, learning should be done for its own sake and as its own reward. The hustle and bustle of modern schooling necessities against this more natural and humane approach. Meanwhile it fosters grade grubbing and the worst type of pragmatism in education. 

In the next and final installment, we’ll explore Cal Newport’s final principle of slow productivity, “obsess over quality” and wrap up the series with a summary of practical applications from all three principles. Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!

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How can teachers approach this year in a way that is different from the past? Experienced teachers may have a good idea at this point what their growth goals are for the year. To be sure, taking inventory of one’s skill in the craft of teaching is important. However, sometimes as people we need more than a new goal to pursue. We need a spiritual and mental reset.

In this blog, I want to encourage teachers to consider ways they might approach this year with more self-awareness and an increasing sense of peace. So often the frantic nature of our modern world throws us off kilter. But classical educators, with our eyes fixed on the good, true, and beautiful, ought to be different. Let us explore, then, some practical ways we might begin to cultivate peacefulness within ourselves, ultimately looking to the Lord to fill us with the peace that can only come from Him.

The Value of Self-Reflection 

Self-reflection is a helpful exercise to both begin and end your day. If you already have a morning devotional routine, then you can probably just add this to the mix. During self-reflection, you want to think through the elements of your day that you expect to be the most rewarding and challenging. What are you most looking forward to? What are you dreading? How do you hope to act and react throughout the hard parts? These sorts of questions can begin to prepare you emotionally for what could happen and equip you to respond how you would like to in real time.

A question I have started asking myself in the morning is, “At the end of the day, what do I hope to be most proud of?” Almost always, my answer has been that “I would love and serve people well.” Admittedly, I am somewhat surprised by my answer. With a full day of work before me, coupled with my goal-oriented personality, you might think it would be some accomplishment that would bring me the most satisfaction. But when I answer the question, assuming I am being honest with myself, the answer has to do with how I relate to those around me.

Self-reflection is also a helpful practice for the end of the day. Questions like “What did I do well today? What am I most proud of? How did I respond in the scenario I knew would be challenging?” can help bring closure to what perhaps has been an otherwise challenging day. The reality we must come to embrace is that life is not perfect. There will always be situations we wish had gone differently. But by asking these sorts of questions and processing what did happen, we can grow in embracing reality and see that God’s gracious plan is sufficient for our needs.

Additionally, through self-reflection, we grow in awareness of ourselves, both our words and our deeds. To this point, leadership professor Harry Kramer writes,

Being self-reflective means that when you’re at the top of that sine curve, you already know what you’ll do when things do go so well. You will be alert, and prepared for those initial signs of disappointment or upset, and you’ll act on them quickly, without getting sidetracked, being surprised or losing precious energy to worry, fear, anxiety, pressure or stress. Without self-reflection, you have chosen to wait until a crisis hits to figure out what you’re going to do, and by then it’s too late.

Harry Kraemer., Becoming the Best: Build a World-Class Organization Through Values-Based Leadership (Wiley, 2015), p. 22

When teachers practice self-reflection, they grow prepared mentally and spiritually for what surprises might come that day. Whether it is a misbehaving student, an upset parent, or overbearing administrator, teachers can approach the day with an inner-sense of peace grounded in God’s grace for them.

Leaning into Leisure 

As Josef Pieper observed many years ago in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, we live in a world that has largely reduced humans to workers. Education, family, and society have all become servants of economic output. To his point, more and more Americans are putting in 50 or 60 hour work weeks, as the research shows, leaving little desire for meaningful rest when the work week ends, if it does at all.

The solution, according to Pieper, is leisure. He writes, “Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude–it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend, or a vacation. It is in the first place an attitude of the mind, a condition of the soul, and as such utterly contrary to the ideal of ‘worker’…” (46).

What Pieper is getting at here is that leisure is not merely equivalent to non-work. It is not the default state of mind we find ourselves in when we are not on the clock. Rather, leisure is a contemplative state of being in which we grow as integrated selves and experience wholeness. It means not being busy, but letting things happen.

As Christians, we can introduce a spiritual layer to the conversation: leisure is the experience of connecting with God and growing in our reliance upon Him. To do this, we need time and space from activity. As we sit in silence, pondering the state of our being, our minds can further contemplate the nature of God and His eternal attributes: His holiness, eternality, and omniscience, for example. As we do so, we grow in acuity of our own finitude and the need to rest within the hands of God.

Reading to See

Finally, teachers can prepare for the upcoming school year by making time to read. In this way, they feed and nurture their own intellects even as they plan to nurture the intellects of their students. Admittedly, this way of thinking is quite counter-cultural. We have come to view education as a transaction of information that requires little intellectual depth for oneself. So long as the PowerPoints are made and lesson plans are full, preparation for the year is complete.

But what if real teaching is a meeting of the minds? If this is the case, then the teacher’s intellect is just as important for the learning that will take place as the students. Teachers can come to each lesson prepared to learn themselves, to change and be changed, by the knowledge they encounter.

In his latest book, Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state and Nobel Peace Prize winner, examines the lives of six great political leaders from the 20th century.

Adrian Woolrdridge, writing at Bloomberg on Kissinger’s work, observes, 

All six of Kissinger’s heroes were serious readers and writers. Sadat spent almost six years in solitary confinement with only books for comfort. In 1933, Adenauer retreated to a monastery to escape from the Nazis and spent his time studying two papal encyclicals, promulgated by Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, which applied Catholic teachings to socioeconomic conditions. Thatcher read her official briefs until early in the morning and drew attention to grammatical errors and stylistic blunders. De Gaulle wrote some immortal French. Deep literacy provided them with what Max Weber called “proportion” — “the ability to allow realities to impinge on you while maintaining an inner calm and composure.” It also provided them with a sense of perspective as they put daily events into the wider scheme of history or even God’s will.

When teachers read, especially when they read deep literature, their minds enter a state of deep contemplation and peace. After a busy school day, with the bustling of student activity, reading can be a strategic way to unwind. Of course, there are lots of other great ways to rest, but I would suggest that specifically for teachers, reading can be an exceptionally enriching activity. It feeds the intellect, plants new ideas in our minds, and, as Wooldridge mentions above, allows us to view daily events within a wider frame of history and, ultimately, God’s sovereign hand within it.

Conclusion

As teachers prepare for the start of the 2022-2023 school year, there is a lot they could and should do. But amidst their teacher checklists and marching orders from administration, my encouragement is to take some time to develop new habits. Self-reflection, intentional leisure, and reading to see are just three examples to help you begin.

Let me close with some encouragement from scripture. Towards the end of Colossians, Paul writes, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word and deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:15-17). More than anything else, may teachers at our schools this year be filled with the Word and Spirit of Christ, remembering that they are His hands and feet, equipped for every good work.

What ideas come to mind for you as you seek to start off the school year on a strong note? Comment below to share your thoughts with fellow teachers.

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In my previous article, I reflected on the nature of civilizations: how they emerge, what they are built upon, and why they fall. I specifically examined the story of the fall of the Roman Empire. While it is difficult for historians to identify a single point in time when the decline began, various cultural, moral, and economic factors interweaved to ripen the moment for Rome to fall. And fall it did, ushering in a two hundred year period known as the Dark Ages. While the Middle Ages themselves span a period of one thousand years, many of which were full of learning and insight, the first few centuries after Rome’s fall can fairly be characterized as a step backward. Roads became unsafe, public works such as the sewage system went into disrepair, and libraries were disregarded if not burned to the ground.

And yet, the Dark Ages may have been dark for some, but they were not dark for all. When Alaric, King of the Visagoths, crossed the Rhine and sacked Rome, signaling the beginning of the end of Roman imperial dominance, an unexpected spark of civilization was fanned into flame in an unexpected place—Ireland. While literacy declined across the Roman Empire through barbarian expansion, it was the Irish who saved, or at least helped save, civilization. How could this be? It all started with a man named Patricius, also known as St. Patrick.

Patrick, Apostle of Ireland

Patrick was a middle-class Roman Brit who planned on living a normal life. It was a major surprise then on the fateful day that he was kidnapped on Britain’s western shores by Irish pirates and become a shepherd’s slave for the next six years, from age 16 to 22. He suffered major beatings and starvation. He lost out on the education his friends would receive. He learned what it meant to suffer without hope. That is, until the fateful day that God rescued him. According to his self-penned Confessio, with copies dating back to the 8^th century, a miraculous ship appeared one day and led by a vision from heaven, he managed to escape and return to his homeland.

Can you imagine? The freedom he experienced after six years a slave must have been incredible. Finally, he can get back on with his life in Britain. But interestingly, he chooses a different path. Instead and inexplicably, he decides to return to Ireland, this time not as a slave, but as a missionary. He became ordained as a bishop and returned to Ireland, the land of his captors, to bring them the gospel.

Now, there are many myths about Patrick in his effort to evangelize the Irish, many of which could very well be true. Did he fight off pagan priests in a wild west showdown of magic and power over the elements? I’m not sure. Did he teach the Irish about the doctrine of the Trinity using the three leaves of a shamrock? We don’t know (though imagine if he used a rock–I can’t think of a surer way to unitarianism!).

But we know this. The island was transformed by this man’s courageous service and ultimately God Himself. Over the next 300 years or so, during the so-called Golden Age of Ireland, over 200 churches were planted, an estimated 100,000 Irish men and women came to the faith. Slavery was abolished and ancient Celtic practices of violence and human sacrifice all but came to an end. While 1,000 miles away Rome was moving from peace to unrest, the opposite was the case in Ireland.

The Spread of Libraries

But I have not yet explained how the Irish saved civilization. Sure, Ireland may have been preserved, but what about the rest of Europe? When Rome fell, the inhabitants of the region were not as fortunate: an entire library of classical literature was nearly lost. Homer, Plato, Demosthenes, Herodotus, Virgil, and Cicero. Lost. A thousand years of ideas about society, virtue, faith, and citizenship gone. The precious gift of literacy all but disappeared.

And yet, God in his providence, would use Irish monks to save it. While libraries burned on the Apennine Peninsula, they were built on the Emerald Isle. When monks and scholars fled the barbarian violence of the Goths and Vandals, they brought their texts to Ireland. There Irish monks fastidiously copied the texts, wrote commentaries, opened schools, and a renaissance of learning was born. Over the next few hundred years, Irish monasteries would pop up all over Ireland, Britain, and soon back to continental Europe. Eventually, literacy, learning, and confidence began to rise again in Europe, notably with Charlemagne and his prized teacher Alcuin. Western civilization, resting on the edge of a knife, was saved. Today there are decorated Irish manuscripts from the early medieval period that are the great jewels of libraries in England, France, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, and Italy, bearing witness to this amazing yet forgotten story.

Our Cultural Moment

We all feel the angst of our present times. While it is refreshing to live on the other side of the pandemic and the division it caused, we can sense that the tension is here to stay. As I write this article, Roe v. Wade has been overturned, sparking both celebration and anger. Meanwhile, inflation is rearing its ugly head, the Russia-Ukraine war continues, and the tenacity of the election year grows fiercer by the day.

With these kinds of issues swirling around us, it is natural for people to find ways to cope. These methods range from healthy to dangerous. For example, exercise can be a great way to relieve stress and clear one’s mind. So can picking up new hobbies, like keeping a garden or playing a sport. Sadly, of course, some people turn to less healthy methods, such as food, drink, or sexual addiction.

A growing trend I have seen people turn to for respite from the pressure of our current times is the screen. While the statistics vary, it safe to estimate that Americans spend anywhere from 7-10 hours on a screen per day. This includes cell phone usage, checking email, watching the news, and streaming shows (most often through services like Netflix or DisneyPlus). While it is outside the scope of this article to explore the neurological effects of this trend, I do want to register a concern nonetheless. In tense times like these, not unlike those in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire, we do not need more distraction. We need meaning. Our souls do not need more entertainment; they need engagement with the goodness and beauty of the world. Most importantly, of course, we need spiritual connection with our Creator God and to experience the grace available to use through union with Christ.

Cancel Netflix, Save Civilization

To wrap up this series, inspired by Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization, I was reminded and inspired by the power of books, specifically the Great Books. These books have been passed down throughout the ages and organically vetted for truth, depth, and insight. They serve as the foundation of civilization, both locally and globally. The West has its canon as does the East. My encouragement, then, for all of us seeking to kindle a renaissance of education is this: go to the library and read great books. Walk in the way of the Irish, put down your screens, and get lost in the world of word-encoded ideas. Ponder the good, true, and beautiful. Think deeply about God, humanity, and the created order. Cancel your Nexflix subscription and save civilization.

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You can imagine the horror, then, on that cold winter day when, Alaric, King of the Visigoths, crossed the Rhine and sacked “the Eternal City.” And although it would be another sixty years for the fall of the 500-year empire to be complete, uncertainty had already began to creep in. The empire was in decline. How could this happen?

In this blog series, I will explore why civilizations decline and how they might be saved. Today’s article will focus on the idea that civilizations are built on confidence and sustained by ideas encoded in the written word. A civilization’s literature, and in turn the skill of literacy, therefore, plays a key role in the active sustainment and maintenance of a civilization.

Why Did Rome Fall?

There are several theories that have emerged over the centuries to explain Rome’s fall, and with it, the two hundred year decline of western civilization, commonly known as the Dark Ages.

First, there is the spiritual theory. This theory holds that Rome fell because it could not effectively leave its paganism behind. While Christianity became legal under Emperor Constantine with the Edict of Milan in 313, and legally mandated under Emperor Theodosius in 380, Rome could never free itself fully from the idolatry of its pagan roots. Like the Tower of Babel, an empire built apart from God will inevitably crumble, Rome notwithstanding.

Second, there is the moral theory. Like the spiritual theory, this view assigns the blame of Rome’s fall to internal problems. The empire had become corrupt. Virtues that once kept the empire trim, sharp, steady, and agile were lost. Citizens exchanged virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and prudence for greed, sloth, and impiety.

Third, there is the barbarian theory. This theory blames the aggressors of the north–the Visigoths, Goths, Vandals, and so forth–who, for population growth reasons, needed more land to raise their families. The obvious direction was south. Blame Alaric, the leader of the Visigoths, and his compatriots for the fall of Rome.

Fourth, there is what I call the cruciform theory. Rome fell because it became thorough-going Christian. What do you expect will happen to an empire whose state religion embraces truths like “turn the other cheek,” “pick up your cross,” and “blessed are the merciful”? These aren’t exactly sessions to include in a military training course. When the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, its final days were numbered, so claim pagans of the 4th century and skeptics of the 18th century. 

Finally, there is the economic theory. It is difficult, if not impossible, to sustain a vast empire forever. Funding the military is expensive and keeping it in tip-top shape is a significant task. As leadership changed from generation to generation, financial and economic pressures finally had their way, crippling the military and weakening Rome to the point that it became vulnerable for a piece of straw to break the camel’s back.

Regardless of which theory, or combination of theories, is true, we know that Rome fell and it fell gradually. Prior to 410, there were warning signs to be sure, but the sacking of the city of seven hills remained an incredulous idea. And yet it fell all the same.

How Civilization is Built

Kenneth Clark, a 20th century historian, created a 13-episode documentary, available on YouTube, which chronicles the history of western civilization, beginning with its beginnings in classical antiquity. Clark suggests that civilization is comprised of more than proper table manners and good taste. Civilizations are built ultimately on confidence. Confidence in order, in society—in its history, philosophy, laws—and rooted in a shared vision for the good life, including its possibilities for the future.

I believe Clark is on to something. Civilization requires a general posture of confidence and optimism about what is possible for generations to come. It would be difficult to build anything without the assurance that you are on the right track. When I built my garden bed this spring, I first did a good amount of research on what would go into the project. What kind of wood would I need? What cuts should I make? How would I fasten the timber together? Through careful research, my confidence grew and a clear vision for the outcome emerged. I was ready to build.

Likewise, for a civilization to emerge among a people group, a shared vision for the future needs to materialize. This vision needs to be accompanied by “a way,” that is, a culture constituted of the approved speech, leisure activities, celebrations, and virtues for the people to aspire to embody. For example, in ancient Egypt, a particular confidence emerge that fueled a culture, leading for a civilization to emerge. Likewise, in classical antiquity, a general “way,” along with confidence in it, emerged within Greco-Roman culture. This allowed a distinct civilization to be built and endure for many years to come

The Taste of a Decadent Age

In How the Irish Saved Civilization (First Anchor Books, 1995), Thomas Cahill suggests that one way to understand what left Rome vulnerable in late antiquity is to peer into the life of a prominent figure from the era. He selects Ausonius the poet, who lived from 310-395. Cahill quotes Edward Gibbon, an 18th century Enlightenment skeptic and proponent of the cruciform theory described above, stating, “The poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age” (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Note 1 to Chapter 27).

Why so critical of Ausonius? According to Cahill, and Gibbon before him, the poet lacked any sort of genuine creativity. While he may have displayed skill as a teacher, the Roman had no business rising to such artistic and political prominence as he did in the late 4th century. His works are base, simple, and unoriginal. He seemed to value a life of comfort and pomp over virtue and effort. The fact that he was the top choice to tutor Gratian, the imperial heir of the time, and eventually tapped as imperial consul, tells us more about Rome’s dismal state than it does about Ausonius’ abilities.

Reflecting on Ausonius foolish leisurely activities and early retirement to his vineyards in France, Cahill writes, “How could a grown man have spent so much time so foolishly? Well, it’s what everyone else was doing. This is a static world. Civilized life, like the cultivation of Ausonius’ magnificent Bordeaux vineyards, lies in doing well what has been done before. Doing the expected is the highest value–and the second highest is like it: receiving the appropriate admiration of one’s peers for doing it” (21). 

Ausonius represents for Cahill a decline in creativity, a proclivity for a life of popularity, and the settling for a life of ease. If Ausonius is a caricature of the late Roman Empire, then we need not ask why Rome fell. The story is told within the biography of this poet’s life. He was an average man living among average men. He was praised for excellence despite not actually achieving it. Roman life had become decadent, not unlike Ross Douthat’s indictment of our own time.

Augustine: The Classical Man

Cahill contrasts the life of Ausonius with Augustine, whose life he believes was among the last vestiges of classical civilization before the spawn of the Dark Ages. Born in 354, Augustine penned the story of his conversion to Christianity, entitled Confessions, in 401. Rome would fall only 9 years later. As pagans began to blame Rome’s conversion to Christianity as the reason for the fall, Augustine would take up his pen to write hi master work The City of God Against the Pagans. According to biographer Peter Brown, Augustine refused to abandon his North African home in Hippo as he wrote this book, even as Vandals sacked nearby Carthage, a key outpost of the Roman Empire (Augustine of Hippo, 422).

Like Ausonius, Augustine was a teacher of rhetoric. He was raised on Virgil and Cicero, masters of grammar, and received additional training in the classical liberal arts. An exceptional scholar among his peers, Augustine would go on to study philosophy, a field reserved only for the brightest.

So what is the difference between Ausonius and Augustine? According to Cahill, “What Ausonius wore like a medal Augustine bears stamped on his heart; the show-off accomplishments of Ausonius are for Augustine honored disciplines of the spirit” (42). Here Cahill is getting at the actual essence of the men. While Augustine’s prominence was rooted in genuine creativity, robust scholarship, and authentic virtue, Ausonius was simply playing the part. At some point during Rome’s decline, the shortcuts of lesser men became acceptable, not merely as the norm, but praised as the ideal.

What Was Lost

A loss of virtue may lead to a civilization’s decline, but it is a loss of its confidence grounded in a shared heritage that will destroy it. For western civilization, this heritage was encoded in classical literature. After Rome fell, the future of civilization in the West rested on a knife’s edge. Cahill writes,

“What is about to be lost in the century of the barbarian invasions is literature–the content of classical civilization, Had the destruction been complete–had every library been disassembled and every book burned–we might have lost Homer and Virgil and all of classical poetry, Herodotus and Tacitus and all of classical history, Demosthenes and Cicero and all of classical oratory, Plato and Aristotle and all of Greek philosophy, and Plotinus and Porphyry and all the subsequent commentary. We would have lost the taste and smell of a whole civilization. Twelve centuries of lyric beauty, aching tragedy, intellectual inquiry, scholarship, sophistry, and love of Wisdom–the acme of ancient civilized discourse–would all have gone down the drain of history” (58).

But, of course, we know today that it did not. Something happened unexpectedly after Rome fell that led to civilization’s preservation. The title of Cahill’s book alludes to it: the rise of Irish monasteries committed to preserving the writings that served as the bedrock of civilization. In my next article, I will dive into this episode of the story and draw out some implications for us seeking to preserve civilization today.

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The Four-fold Manner of Knowing an Object

Among the most important concepts we teach our students in logic class or perhaps in rhetoric class is Aristotle’s four causes. Aristotle writes about the four causes in Physics 2.3, and examining an object or principle from the perspective of the four causes can provide a tremendous amount of knowledge, as Aristotle states, “Knowledge is the object of our inquiry, and men do not think they know a thing till they have grasped the ‘why.’”

The listing of the four causes as laid out by Aristotle can be examined in any order, although we’ll begin here by laying them out as he has written them. First, the material cause has to do with literal materials: a statue is made of bronze, an animal of bones and fur, etc. The second cause is what Aristotle calls the form or archetype (τὸ εἶδος καὶ τὸ παράδειγμα). This cause gets at the essence of the object under consideration. Philosophers have called this the “formal cause.” Taking the examples above, a statue is a work of art and an animal can be a predator or a pet. We can see that there is a growing complexity as we apply these thought exercises to any given object, which was the goal of Aristotle’s exercise.

The third and fourth causes take into account spans of time. The “efficient cause” is described by Aristotle as the source of change (literally “the beginning of change,” ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς μεταβολῆς). A sculptor created the statue whereas an animal was birthed from its parents. One can perceive a chain of efficient causes, for the sculptor was likewise birthed from his parents. This chain goes all the way back to what has been called “the unmoved mover” or what Aristotle calls “the maker of what is made and the changer what is changed” (τὸ ποιοῦν τοῦ ποιουμένου καὶ τὸ μεταβάλλον τοῦ μεταβαλλομένου).

If the third cause looks backward temporally, then the fourth cause looks forward to the end or telos of the object. There are many possible ends or goals for which an object tends. For instance, a statue might have as its ultimate goal to commemorate an individual or to bring delight to the viewer. The example Aristotle uses is walking. Why do we walk? For the goal of being healthy. The Westminster Divines who produces the Shorter Catechism begin with the “final cause:”

Q: What is the chief end of man?

A: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

These four topics or tools of investigation can be applied generally to every object. Once learned, these can be a handy structure to guide discussion in a classroom. If you are a teacher of logic or rhetoric, you can use these four causes as a brief exercise at the beginning of class as a warm up.

Applying the Four Causes to Educational Method

One of the projects I put my mind to was thinking through what is a student or learner. This idea forced me to examine more closely my educational philosophy and here I will attempt to bring into conversation Aristotle by way of the four causes and Charlotte Mason from her sixth volume Toward a Philosophy of Education.

A central tenet of Mason’s philosophy is that “children are born persons.” For Mason, this means that children are not blank slates, but are born with all the attributes and capabilities of an individual created in the image of God. Prominent in her thinking is that the mind is a powerful force from birth. The infant shows “that he always has all the mind he requires for his occasions; that is, that his mind is the instrument of his education and that his education does not produce his mind” (Vol. 6, 36). If this is the case for the infant, how much more ought we to appreciate the capacity of the learner at all stages of their educational journey. So, to that end, let us explore what a learner is according to Aristotle’s four causes.

What is a Learner?: The Mind

When we think about the material cause of a learner, our focus turns to the physical traits of the student. As bears of the image of God, we believe that all people are embodied souls. In the Shema of Deuteronomy 6, we are commanded to “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5). In other words, our material includes the immaterial. When Jesus quotes this commandment, notice that he includes an additional part of our humanity: the mind. “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Jesus includes our mental faculty alongside our spiritual, moral and physical traits. The reasoning faculty expressed by Jesus was already inherent in the immaterial heart and soul. However, the explicit expression of the mind subsumes even the reasoning part of us under the dominion of the Lord our God.

The mind itself, the central component of our learning, has its material aspect. Charlotte Mason explores the connection between the mind and the brain:

“A child comes into their hands with a mind of amazing potentialities: he has a brain too, no doubt, the organ and instrument of that same mind, as a piano is not music but the instrument of music. Probably we need not concern ourselves about the brain which is subject to the same conditions as the rest of the material body, is fed with the body’s food, rests, as the body rests, requires fresh air and wholesome exercise to keep it in health, but depends upon the mind for its proper activities.”

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 38.

In this passage, Mason leaves unresolved the mind/brain debate, which to her credit is an unproductive conundrum. Instead, where Mason takes us is to the analogy that the mind is nourished just like the body is. While our brain is composed of “nerved and blood” and therefore must be nourished by food, our mind is nourished by ideas.

What is a Learner?: The Capacity to Understand

The formal cause is the essence of the learner. There is a power within every child, within every human, to understand. It is in the nature of a child to be curious, and this curiosity is the effort to understand. According to Mason, learning is the capacity to “experience all the things they hear and read of” (Vol 6, 40). No matter what subject or lesson is being taught, the child in its essence will feed on ideas. Mason criticizes the teacher, who when presenting a lesson finds that the child is bored:

“If they do not [experience the lesson], it is not for lack of earnestness and intention on the part of the teacher; his error is rather want of confidence in children. He has not formed a just measure of a child’s mind and bores his scholars with much talk about matters which they are able to understand for themselves much better than he does.”

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 41

In this case, the teacher has not properly taken the measure of the learner. When we lecture and prattle on as teachers, we run the risk of diminishing the essence of the learner. But if we draw upon the curiosity and the will to understand inherent in the child, no lesson can be boring for the living ideas will be a feast for the mind.

What is a Learner?: Nourished by Ideas

The efficient cause of learning centers on the mind. An efficient cause, as Aristotle considers it, pertains to the principle or agent of change for the object under consideration. For Mason, “Mind must come into contact with mind through the medium of ideas” (Vol. 6, 39). A learner grows as a consequence of the mind growing. When the mind comes into contact with another mind, it is able to absorb knowledge just as nutrients are absorbed into our bodies through ingesting food.

“We must begin with the notion that the business of the body is to grow; and it grows upon food, which food is composed of living cells, each a perfect life in itself. In like manner, though all analogies are misleading and inadequate, the only fit sustenance for the mind is ideas, and an idea too, like the single cell of cellular tissue, appears to go through the stages and functions of a life. We receive it with appetite and some stir of interest. It appears to feed in a curious way.”

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 39.

The analogy can be spelled out more when we consider that the nutrients our body needs come from living things: plants and animals. Ideas are also living things. They grow, building off of one another and generating new ideas. So our minds grow not in physical size, but in greater intellectual capacity, through the ingestion of living ideas.

What is a Learner?: Fitted for the Good Life

The final cause is the aim or goal of the object. In our modern era, this has be a point of confusion. Is the end or goal of learning a good grade, an entry into a good college, or landing a good job? When these aims are teased out, we find that they fall short of the true glory of learning. It may be surprising what Mason sees as the goal for learning:

“Enough, that the children have minds, and every man’s mind is his means of living; but it is a great deal more. Working men will have leisure in the future and how this leisure is to be employed is a question much discussed. Now, no one can employ leisure fitly whose mind is not brought into active play every day; the small affairs of a man’s own life supply no intellectual food and but small and monotonous intellectual exercise. Science, history, philosophy, literature, must no longer be the luxuries of the ‘educated’ classes; all classes must be educated and sit down to these things of the mind as they do to their daily bread. History must afford its pageants, science its wonders, literature its intimacies, philosophy its speculations, religion its assurances to every man, and his education must have prepared him for wanderings in these realms of gold.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 42-43

In this, Mason anticipates the masterful work of Josef Pieper. In his Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Pieper argues that we have mixed up the aim of life. We have succumbed to a philosophy of “total labor,” adhering to the maxim “one does not work to live; one lives to work” attributed to Max Weber (Leisure 20). Pieper proposes an alternative view drawing upon Aristotle such that we work to have leisure. Now the problem is that we have not been sufficiently trained as learners to know what to do with our leisure time.

Mason envisions the monotony of world of work for work’s sake. Instead, if we truly understand that we are being fitted for living the good life, our educational aims take on new scope. Science, history, philosophy and literature are not aimed at getting a good job. Instead, they are aimed at making us the kinds of people that take joy in these areas of knowledge. We grow up to be people who retain the curiosity of childhood and seek understanding where it may be found.

Mason the Classical Educationist

I cannot be certain that Mason had in mind Aristotle’s four causes as she wrote about the learner. But what strikes me as I read through Mason is how compatible she is with the contours of the classical Christian education movement. Mason strikes me as someone as much steeped in the classical educational model as were Dorothy Sayers and C. S. Lewis. It was the prevailing model until the progressivist model of education set in with the onset of 20^th century industrialism.

I am often surprised when I hear speak of how Mason and classical education are incompatible. It is true that Mason is not spelling out the liberal arts trivium and quadrivium as our classical school tend to parse them out. But I think this has more to do with an undue focus on the structure of classical curriculum. Reading Mason as frequently as I do, it is in the cadences and tenor of her writings that one gets the sense of her indebtedness to the Greek and Latin philosophical tradition, to a Western cultural heritage that is accessed through great books, and to the centrality of Christianity to nourish our souls as much to feed our minds. Perhaps this unique take on reading Mason in light of Aristotle’s four causes will inspire you to further investigate Charlotte Mason as a classical educationist.

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“You’ve got to find what you love….[T]he only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle.” (as qtd in Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, 3) 

There are few premises more ubiquitous in our career counseling world than this passion mindset; and, as Cal Newport demonstrates, there are few ideas more misleading and damaging. Stories of people who quit their day-job to pursue their dreams often end in financial ruin, as well as the dashing of those same dreams. Interviews of people like Jobs who have ‘found their passion’ actually reveal that “compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion” (13). This is because passion for a career often coexists with quite a bit of drudgery and comes as the result of a great deal of effort expended in developing rare and valuable skills or what we might call arts. In fact, it is the “craftsman mindset,” Newport explains, that is the surest route to work you love.

What is the craftsman mindset? It is to focus on a job as an apprenticeship in a tradition of artistry as a means to offer some valuable good or service to the world at a high degree of excellence or mastery. Perhaps you can see how his insight connects with the apprenticeship process that leads to Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of craftsmanship or artistry (in Greek techne). Newport contrasts the craftsman mindset with the passion mindset this way:

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you…. When you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy—these come later…. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions [like]…. “Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?” (38, 39)

Ironically the advice to pursue your passion in work ends up resulting in a hyper-critical and self-focused spirit that makes it almost impossible to enjoy your work. Instead, if a person allows their consciousness to get lost in the hard work of creating value through deliberate practice of their craft, they are more likely to experience flow and over time earn the career capital needed to negotiate the details of their work to their own liking. Newport draws on the research of Anders Ericsson on deliberate practice and applies it to the professional world of not-so-deliberate pathways to excellence. 

This excursus on career counseling paradigms has a purpose in our overall evaluation of apprenticeship in the arts. Newports’ compelling case for the craftsman mindset sets in stark relief the modern school’s marginalization of artistry and craftsmanship, for all our elite stadiums and flashing performing arts centers. One of the major effects of Bloom’s Taxonomy’s abstraction of intellectual skills is that it has severed the life of the academy from the artistry of the professional career world. In addition, the passion hypothesis is one of the plagues of the postmodern buffet of potential selves that students are being subtly and not so subtly indoctrinated into in our contemporary schools.

In this article we will explore how to restore this link through a recovery of artistry in our schools without embracing either utilitarian pragmatism on the one hand, or the ivory tower separation characteristic of many modern and postmodern schools, whether they call themselves classical, progressive or otherwise.

The Liberal Arts as Pathways of Professional Preparation

In endorsing Newport’s craftsman mindset, I am very aware that I will sound like a utilitarian pragmatist to many classical educators. What, after all, hath Career to do with the Academy? Isn’t the entire purpose of the classical education movement to throw off the tyranny of the urgent and the capitalistic reduction of education to career preparation? The Academy should focus on the timeless and perennial things, not STEM and training for the jobs of tomorrow. 

While I understand and acknowledge the importance of this type of polemic against K-12 education as mere college and career preparation (in fact, we have engaged in it on EdRen from time to time, even or especially at the opening of this series countering Bloom’s Taxonomy), this argument in its bare form ultimately resolves itself into a false dichotomy. It is not either the case that education is all career preparation or that it involves no career preparation at all. In actual fact, a proper education ought to prepare a student for many different careers: as John Milton said in his tractate,

“I call therefore a compleat and generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publick of Peace and War.” (see “Of Education” in the John Milton Reading Room managed by Dartmouth College)

Just performance might correspond to Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis), while magnanimous might gesture toward the enlargement of mind or soul characteristic of a person who has attained some measure of philosophic wisdom (sophia) through the long cultivation of intuition (nous) and scientific knowledge (episteme). But skillful performance corresponds to apprenticeship in those arts which undergird all the professions. 

While training in artistry is, then, not the whole of a “compleat and generous Education,” it constitutes a fundamental core of training in productive intellectual virtue. This can be illustrated further through recovering the liberal arts themselves as pathways of professional preparation. In our zeal for the ivory towers of the Middle Ages and Classical Era, we too often forget the origins of the liberal arts themselves as professional arts. It may be true that the liberal arts are used to discover and justify knowledge (see e.g. Clark and Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition 3.0, 39-43), yet they began their traditional life as practical skills for prominent professions. 

• Grammatical training prepared the scribes of the ancient world in using the technology of writing to assist in marketplaces or business transactions, the religious affairs of a temple complex or the administration of a royal bureaucracy. 

• Rhetoric came to prominence in classical Greece largely because of a democratic city-state polity which relied on public speakers and trial lawyers to decide the city’s political strategies and legal cases. 

• Dialectic might be Socrates’ own invention, but his art of discussion arose in a rich context of traveling public intellectuals and built on the tradition of wise men and sages who functioned as professional teachers and purveyors of wisdom, developing into the tool or art of the philosopher.

• Arithmetic is the characteristic art of the household manager, the merchant and the treasury official. The earliest written documents in many societies are more than likely numerical records and calculations of goods and services.

• Geometry is the architect’s and the general’s art, because both building and war require the exact mathematical calculations involved in creating sturdy and dependable use of resources, whether wood, metal or stone, or else in coordinating the movements of regiments of armed men, cavalry or assault weaponry. 

• Astronomy, likewise, concerned the military general, as well as the merchant or ship captain, since charting the stars enabled one to travel from place to place reliably.

• And finally, the art of music was practiced by musicians who provided entertainment and the cultural transference of stories and values through soothing sounds and melodies, along with the poetic words that often accompanied the playing of an instrument. 

Apprenticeship in these liberal arts, just like the common and domestic arts, or other professions and trades, functioned as pathways of preparation for a life of service to the community. Even if they could be contrasted with servile arts as more fitting to a free man in ancient cultures, they nevertheless performed important functions for society that were remunerated, in one way or another. Therefore, drawing too strong a dividing wall of hostility between the Academy and the working world strikes me as historically inaccurate. Students today may choose between a technical college (remember that techne is Aristotle’s term for artistry) and a liberal arts college, but that does not mean the liberal arts are unconnected to the professions. 

This argument may be complicated by the fact that few modern professions require a person to practice only one art anymore. The modern equivalent of a blacksmith (i.e. a member of a company that forges metallic tools) might engage in several arts in a given day: computer programming (a development of grammar and arithmetic?), project management (rhetoric and dialectic), engineering and design (arithmetic and geometry), and checking and responding to email (grammar and dialectic). Of course, there are the specific sub-skills of using particular computer programs, machine maintenance, etc., that might be unique to a specific profession or company. But the point stands that the liberal arts, like all other arts, are not absent from the working world of production but are deliberately preparatory to its tasks. 

Artistic Training in the Academy

All this follows naturally from what we have said in earlier articles on Apprenticeship in the Arts. Since arts are living traditions with an originator, they are constantly being updated and adjusted to new contexts and technologies. Navigation is not now what it once was. The arts are culturally and historically situated; they may carry with them the memory of their traditions, as painters now must reckon with the styles and movements of the past. But the traditional nature of the arts entails their vital connection to their contemporary expressions in many professions or by their elite performers. Apprenticeship in the arts is one of the ways that the Academy draws its lifeblood from the working world. 

As such, the Academy is most likely to excel at cultivating the virtue of techne in various arts when it draws some of its strength from the professions of the surrounding community. This is part of the brilliance of John Milton’s call for connecting what Chris Hall calls the common arts with the mathematical arts in his “Of Education”:

To set forward all these proceedings in Nature and Mathematicks, what hinders, but that they may procure, as oft as shal be needful, the helpful experiences of Hunters, Fowlers, Fishermen, Shepherds, Gardeners, Apothecaries; and in the other sciences, Architects, Engineers, Mariners, Anatomists; who doubtless would be ready some for reward, and some to favour such a hopeful Seminary. And this will give them such a real tincture of natural knowledge, as they shall never forget, but daily augment with delight. (see “Of Education” in the John Milton Reading Room)

The idea that it is unclassical to share with students the experiences of the working world with all its goods, services and products is a pernicious one. We should be wary of falling into the trap of trying to prove that our education is unpractical to distinguish it from modern pragmatism and utilitarianism. Ironically, we will have to subvert the nature of the liberal arts themselves, as well as other arts to truly accomplish such an ivory tower task. It is all well and good to argue for schole or leisure as the basis of culture (see Josef Pieper’s book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, or Chris Hall’s reference in Common Arts Education, 41), but it is not quite accurate to blame the modern white collar and blue collar divide for a utilitarian view of the liberal arts, as Hall does: “these liberal arts were harnessed less for their ancient purposes, and more for their utilitarian ends” (41).

Leisure may have more to do with the philosophical act of contemplation, or the cultivation of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues of intuition, scientific knowledge and philosophic wisdom, than it does with the liberal arts. After all, this would seem to do better justice to the context of Pieper’s work. The liberal arts, like all other arts, are productive and savor more of the workaday world, even if they can be pursued for their own sake or as ends in themselves, as I have argued at length in The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow through Classical Education.

I absolutely concede the danger on the other side of reducing education to mere career preparation. This, however, is easily avoided by making the other intellectual virtues of Aristotle major ends or objectives of education as well. Prudence is not developed by time spent drawing a painting, nor is philosophic wisdom attained through an internship at a local company. But time spent being well coached by practitioners of various arts, in athletics, games and sports, common and domestic arts, fine and performing arts, the professions and trades, and the ever-present liberal arts themselves, will prepare students for the working world. 

By showing them how these arts are currently practiced and drawing inspiration from these contemporary contexts, students will look out at their future selves as producers and will be inspired and ignited with the passion necessary for deliberate practice. This is why Comenius places as the first step for training in artistry that the instructor “take them into the workshop and bid them look at the work that has been produced, and then, when they wish to imitate this (for man is an imitative animal), they place tools in their hands and show them how they should be held and used” (The Great Didactic, 195-196). Human beings by nature desire to create; we are imitative culture makers!

Comenius’ vision of turning schools into “workshops humming with work” has this outcome as one of its goals: the invigoration of the learning environment through a proper overlap with the working world. Creative production has a power in it that can be harnessed for educational purposes. Then at the end of a productive apprenticeship session, “students whose efforts prove successful will experience the truth of the proverb: ‘We give form to ourselves and to our materials at the same time’” (195). Students are internalizing the craftsman mindset focused on honing their craft in productive service to the world.

This is not a carrots and sticks based motivational method, but the second level motivation of what Daniel Pink calls “mastery” in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He quotes Teresa Mabile, a professor of Harvard University, as saying, “The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it’s in the arts, sciences or business” (116). Pink goes on to associate this level of intrinsic motivation with Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow, the enjoyable experience of appropriate challenge in a meaningful pursuit of mastery. Connecting students organically to the real-world mastery of the working world, not trying to motivate them to perform well through grades and the threat of a menial career, is the real way to engage them delightfully in their studies. It also cultivates the craftsman mindset now that will help them experience work they love later. 

It is worth pausing to consider what percentage of an ideal school day would involve training students in arts. When you add up art class, music and PE, the language arts, math, and the training aspects of science, Bible, and the humanities, not to mention the sports, extracurriculars and other artistic lessons that students have after school, along with the practice regimen of both homework and these side pursuits, we might see the majority of a student’s day as engaged in some part of the apprenticeship process. It is imperative that we get this aspect of the Academy right. It is not just the training of students’ metaphorical hands that is at stake. 

In the next article, I will discuss the spiritual implications of how to capture students’ hearts through the apprenticeship model by creating a culture of craftsmanship. Building on our understanding of the importance of apprenticeship in artistry to connect the life of the Academy organically with the working world, we will delve into the example of the Renaissance guilds. This will help us consider macro-implications for the organizational structure of our schools, including the role of curriculum, academic events, and programs for specific arts in the Academy’s broader apprenticeship process.

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

11. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 3: Crafting Lessons in Artistry

Later articles in this series:

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

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Amusement is a passive state of entertainment. At its core, it is a form of distraction. People seek amusement when they are bored, when they seek to delay or avoid more difficult tasks, or when they have simply grown habituated to use their time unproductively. At times, amusement can serve as a form of escapism. When the pressure-points of life become exceedingly great, people seek to distract themselves temporarily from the present. Finally, and oddly enough, amusement can serve as a classroom management tool. Teachers implement techniques of amusement when they feel the attention of their students slipping and need to maintain control until the bell rings.

In this blog, I want to put forward an alternative to amusement: the discipline of study. Study is the act of intellectual reflection on something of substance–a person, an event, an idea, a book, and so forth. It entails getting to the real nature of something through sustained contemplation. Study takes work–deep work–as habits of attention and careful thinking are cultivated over the long-term. Educators, whether at school or at home, would do well to pursue the discipline of study in both their personal lives and in their instruction.

What is Study?

Unfortunately, we tend to think of study in modernistic terms as merely a form of academic production. For example, we instruct students to study the previous chapter for an upcoming test. Why? So they will be prepared to perform well on the evaluation, to produce high-quality results. Study in this context is less concerned with cultivating an integrated inner life as it with maximizing academic output.

In Leisure: The Basis of Culture (Ignatius Press, 1952), Josef Pieper puts words to the feeling of uneasiness we experience about this view of study. Following thinkers in the Middle Ages, Pieper differentiates between ratio and intellectus as definitions of understanding. 

Ratio is the active process of the mind to actively and discursively pursue understanding. It entails logical thinking and argumentation in order to reach some final conclusion. Ratio has very much consumed the modern way we think of study in which the mind is bent on some final result. Intellectus, on the other hand, is the receptive state of the mind to contemplate, similarly to the way the human eye beholds a landscape (28). It is not active, but passive, insofar as it awaits with anticipation to be moved by Truth.

The discipline of study, as I am thinking of it here, should be understood as a way of cultivating intellectus. It is the sustained act of contemplation, but in a restful and expectant sort of way. It is not weighed down by a future evaluation or the burden of production. Rather, when one engages in study, she peacefully wades into the intellectual deep, allowing her mind to contemplate what is true, good, and beautiful.

This act of reception, paradoxically, is easier said than done. Study, as Richard Foster observes in Celebration of Discipline (Harper and Row, 1978), can be difficult. It is is a skill developed through sustained effort until it becomes habit. But both the content of what we study and the very act of studying have the potential to form us. Foster writes, “What we study determines what kinds of habits are to be formed. That is why Paul urged us to center on things that are true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, and gracious” (55).

The Conditions for Study

Study is a discipline of the inner life. It allows us to get closer to knowledge of reality itself: more intimate understanding of ideas, events, relationships, ourselves, and most importantly, God. But there are a couple conditions for study. A slower pace is one of them. Time for quietness and stillness is another. These conditions are not common in the modern world, especially in modern schools.

Educators today try to cram as much as they can in a given day. Whether the pressure comes from administration, state objectives, accreditation standards, or from within, educators have become masters of efficiency. They map out the schedule with the detail of an engineer, ensuring that no minute be wasted or block be deemed futile.

Unfortunately, this approach to scheduling leaves little room to cultivate the discipline of study. Study requires quiet time for reflection. It calls for silence, simplicity, and at times, solitude. These conditions are rare in the modern world, much less in the classroom. But, then again, a deep inner level is rare. If we are going to cultivate it, we must be willing to go against the grain.

Study as Christian Formation

One specific benefit of the discipline of study is that it strengthens the integrity of one’s intellectual and spiritual lives as one unified whole. In Romans 12:2, the apostle Paul calls believers to “…be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect (English Standard Version). Likewise, in Philippians 4:8, Paul calls Christians to contemplate whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable and excellent. In short, Paul calls Christians to cultivate one’s intellectual life through study with the assumption that this practice brings spiritual growth.

And yet, study does not seem to be a common practice in Christian educational circles today. Christian schools offer Bible courses, organize chapels, hire Christian teachers, and lead morning prayers, but the cultivation of intellectus in their students is noticeably absent. For true Christian formation to occur, Christian educators should make time for the discipline of study. Study, when led by the Holy Spirit and accompanied with other disciplines, helps transform the whole person.

Towards an Education in Rest

At a plenary session at the Society for Classical Learning’s annual conference, Christopher Perrin argued convincingly that we need to recover an education in rest. Schools are busy and anxious, he observes, and students need relief from the chaos. In conclusion of this article, I suggest that cultivating the discipline of study is a natural first step in offering the sort of education Perrin has in mind.

While it is all too common today to blame technology as the reason for our fragmented lives and hurried schedules, the reality is that the problem is much deeper. It is moral and spiritual in nature. In this way, the problem is ultimately ourselves. We have embraced amusement as a primary approach for how to spend our time both at home and in the classroom. We have allowed the fast-paced nature of the modern world to infiltrate our lives, classrooms, and schools.

But, like all things, there is hope. God remains faithful to His people and strives to help them grow through the aid of the Holy Spirit. If we can lead our communities to cultivate the discipline of study, by God’s grace, we will see more young people become receptive to divine truth as they contemplate the deeper meanings in the world God created. Ultimately, we pray, they will come to center their minds on God himself, the Maker and Perfecter of all that is good, true, and beautiful.

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In order to escape the technological addiction that has mystified the 21st century, it is not enough to take smartphones, laptops, and video streaming services away. They must be replaced with something better. Something deeper. Something more satisfying.

In this blog, I will put forward one compelling alternative to digital saturation. It isn’t the only alternative, nor is it a sufficient one. But it is necessary. Here I have in mind cultivating the intellectual life. By this I mean the world of story and imagination. Thoughts and ideas. Concepts and principles. The life of the mind. 

The Road to Recovery

Sadly, like some prehistoric species, the intellectual life is all but extinct in some minds. I don’t mean this in a condemning sense. It is merely a diagnosis. We have become so acquainted to consuming that the idea of cultivating the intellect sounds incredulous. At best, it sounds boring. Why think when one can switch to auto-pilot?

In theory, people are first taught to cultivate an intellectual life in school. Or are they? For most of us, school was a pragmatic transaction from day one. First-graders may be six, but they are not dull. Their social acumen is developed enough to pick up on what matters in the classroom. The usual suspects include grades, prizes, and teacher-approval. 

Imagine, however, if the first day of school was an orientation to cultivating the life of the mind. No talk of a syllabus, grade criteria, or course objectives. Instead, the teacher begins by comparing one’s mind to a garden. Gardens don’t pop into existence weed-free and fruit-bearing. They must be tended, weeded, watered, and cultivated. As does the mind. The intentional teacher, dedicated to her craft, inspires her students to cultivate an Eden in order to discover that the labor is its own reward.

People coming from schools who implement traditionally modern methods to motivate learning may struggle to cultivate the intellectual life at first. “What will I get out of it?”, “This is boring”, and “I would rather do something else” are all common reactions. But if one can move beyond these initial obstructions, there is hope for recovering interest in intellectual matters. It will take time and effort, but it is possible.

The Importance of Self-Feeding

Once the intellectual life is conceived, it requires self-feeding for sustenance. This is the brilliant insight of educator Charlotte Mason. She insisted that the life of the mind will die if it remains dependent upon the sustenance of others. This is because the mind is like an organism, a living thing that needs to take care of itself. A nascent organism that depends on other organisms will be parasitical at best and fizzle out at worst. It is up to each individual to cultivate the life of the mind through feeding it regularly.

How does one feed the intellect?

This may sound surprising to some but reading, generally speaking, is not the precise answer. There are two reasons for this. First, not all books nourish the mind in the same way. Tech addiction is one major obstruction for cultivating the intellectual life and another is a diet of shallow books. Stories that are morally vacuous, sensationalistic, and stylistically weak fall into this category. These books won’t nourish the intellect any more than a sugar-glazed donut will nourish the physical body (even if it tastes good).

Good books must be chosen for self-feeding and, subsequently, they must be chewed upon. This is the second reason that reading is not, generally speaking, a sufficient path to the self-nourished intellectual life. Our minds need to act upon that which has been read. They need to do something with the knowledge that has been encountered. How often do we read something, probably too quickly, and try to recall it later with no success? We never gave our minds time to assimilate, or digest, that which has been encountered.

For Charlotte Mason, narration is the ideal way for students to assimilate knowledge. Give children the opportunity to narrate the text without looking back, after a single-reading, and the process for self-feeding begins. The mind comes alive as it processes in real-time what it ingested moments ago. The ideas of the text become part of the mind of the student. 

Making Time for Quiet

To cultivate the intellectual life , one must first recover and nourish it. Then one must sustain it intentionally. 17th century polymath Blaise Pascal famously wrote, “All of man’s problems stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Pascal’s observation is more than relevant for us today as we inhabit this present age of distraction. Technology is one contributing factor for incessant distraction, as I have already suggested.

Another factor is that most of us live in suburbs or cities. We are surrounded by people, pets, activities, stores, restaurants, and things to do. It is very difficult to find a place that is quiet and unoccupied. Professionally speaking, our work may not be physically laborious, but it mentally exhausting. And more often than not, our personal lives provide no respite. We are constantly on the go, bumping into people and things like electrons.

The solution to such mental crowdedness in order to sustain the mind is to carve out space for solitude. To be sure, minds can be nourished in social settings. Engaging thought-provoking questions, spirited debate, and penetrating discussion are all worthwhile intellectual activities. But the mind also needs time alone with no immediate distractions. It needs time to slow down, process, and reflect. It needs time to be alone.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Most of us begin feeling antsy after sitting still with no distraction for more than a few minutes. Our minds grow nervous, eager for something new to seize our attention. In reality, however, what the mind needs, even if it doesn’t realize it, is space to think. Perhaps surprisingly, making time for the mind to work brings unexpected rest.

The Benefit of Such a Life

Despite what has been written thus far, some readers may continue to struggle to see the value of the intellectual life. “What benefits will it bring?” they will wonder. “How will this support my personal advancement?” 

Questions like these miss the mark. To be sure, there is productive value in the intellectual life. I have already alluded to some examples. The nourished intellect, on average, will be more resilient than one that has been depleted. It will be more efficient in work settings. It will more effectively grapple with everyday problems. 

But here lies the paradox. The real benefit of the intellectual life is the joy of learning. One in pursuit of a nourished intellect for the sake of external benefits will eventually fizzle out. The work will grow too difficult and the benefits will no longer be perceived as worth it. Joy must accompany the process for the intellectual life to remain viable.

The good news, though, is that there is grace. As humans, we often begin our pursuit of good things for wrong, or imperfect, reasons. But amidst these mixed motivations, God can use these moments to transform us. He graciously conforms us to His image, revealing to us the goodness of Himself and the eternal reward of life with Him. When it comes to cultivating the life of the mind, we pray for God to reveal truth to us through the Holy Spirit and shape our affections to desire it and Him more and more.

Conclusion

As the apostle Paul writes in his closing remarks to the Philippians:

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you (Phil. 4: 8-9 ESV).

Amidst the busyness we all face in the modern world, may we make time for the intellectual life, reflecting on what is true, honorable, lovely, and just. Ultimately, as we engage in such reflection, may our minds turn to Him who is the manifestation of all these, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word who became flesh.

Recommended Reading:

Mind to Mind: An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason and Karen Glass

Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pense’es by Blaise Pascal and Peter Kreeft

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives

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

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

1. Knowledge

1.1 Knowledge of Specifics

1.2 Knowledge of Ways and Means of Dealing with Specifics 

1.3 Knowledge of the Universals and Abstractions in a Field

2. Comprehension

2.1 Translation

2.2 Interpretation

2.3 Extrapolation

3. Application
4. Analysis

4.1 Analysis of Elements

4.2 Analysis of Relationships

4.3 Analysis of Organizational Principles

5. Synthesis

5.1 Production of a Unique Communication

5.2 Production of a Plan, or Proposed Set of Operations

5.3 Derivation of a Set of Abstract Relations

6. Evaluation

6.1 Judgments in Terms of Internal Evidence

6.2 Judgments in Terms of External Criteria

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Classical Taxonomy of Educational Objectives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues

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

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

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

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

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

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I have to say I hesitated before using such a cliché myself in the title of this closing post in the Flow of Thought series, because I know very well how meaningless clichés can become. If everyone says they support the “love of learning,” then what does it even mean if it doesn’t change how we do school or run our classes? Now I do want to pause to indicate that, as far as I can read the education landscape, there has been a growing recognition in several quarters about the importance of inspiring a love of learning in students. More educators now than fifty years ago fear the deadening effect that incompetent and uninspiring teaching can have on students.

Previous articles in this series, The Flow of Thought:

Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake; Part 2: The Joy of Memory; Part 3: Narration as Flow; Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games; Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom; Part 8: Restoring the School of Philosophers.

At general education conferences I have attended educators are discussing more and more how grades and a focus on grades as a measure of achievement can suck the joy and life out of learning. It is not so bad outside the classical education and Charlotte Mason world, in this respect, as it once was, even if many teachers’ practices have not yet caught up with their values. Or perhaps we could say that, while many educators value the lifelong love of learning as a goal, they are currently trying to get their students there through entertainment, gimmicks and classroom management manipulations, rather than through the flow of thought. But we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that their efforts are sincerely meant, even if ultimately ineffective.  

And so, I would conclude that part at least of the reason for the cliched nature of the phrase the ‘love of learning’ is a real recognition of this noble goal on the part of educators. But the other reason I feel entitled to use this cliché in my title is the force of the argument we’ve made thus far in The Flow of Thought series. Our thesis has been, following the famed positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that learning can be enjoyable. If pursued in a way such that the challenges meet our current abilities, learning in any domain of the classical liberal arts and sciences can issue in the flow of thought.

Pleasure vs. Enjoyment

As you’ll remember, flow is that timeless state of focus and concentration that people around the world describe as exhilarating, meaningful and joyful. From rock climbers to scientists, mathematicians to novelists, whether as a hobby or one’s main work, getting into flow promotes something beyond mere pleasure that our psychologist terms “enjoyment”:

“Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some prior expectation or satisfied a need or a desire but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, perhaps something even unimagined before…. Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment. Playing a close game of tennis that stretches one’s ability is enjoyable, as is reading a book that reveals things in a new light, as is having a conversation that leads us to express ideas we didn’t know we had…. After an enjoyable event we know that we have changed, that our self has grown: in some respect, we have become more complex as a result of it.” (46)

It’s this sense of enjoyment that resonates with the love of learning, properly understood. It’s not the titillating pleasure of some entertaining tidbit that leaves you as ignorant as you were before. It’s the transformation of the self, the enlargement of the soul, through an encounter with reality, through a grappling with the forms of existence. Incidentally, this distinction mirrors Augustine’s distinction between to enjoy and to use (Latin fruor and utor), though Augustine reserves proper enjoyment for love of God alone. There is something about enjoyment, in this sense, that is transcendent.

One of the reasons I love Dr. Jordan Peterson’s lectures and his book Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is his ability to express the deep paradox of pain and meaningful transcendence one feels in this sort of grapping with reality. The love of learning is not watching some namby pamby cartoon with its prepackaged tasty morsels of information. It’s the exhilaration felt after facing your fears and wrestling that monster in the dark, or slaying the dragon of chaos just beyond the order of your understanding. It’s struggle and suffering in the pursuit of a meaningful goal. Learning, like life, is not all roses and cupcakes, even or especially when you love it. But in spite of the pain of progressing in the flow of thought, it’s still so enjoyable that we’re even willing to do it as a hobby.

Amateurs and Dilettantes

We’ve already discussed the idea of becoming an amateur scientist or historian. Our psychologist has suggested these avenues as methods to create order in consciousness in the average adult’s leisure time. Since TV correlates with mild depression (119), we need something more challenging to grapple with to experience enjoyment. Learning in any domain presents this optimal challenge for leisure, hence the lifelong love of learning.

Csikszentmihalyi closes out his chapter on the flow of thought with reflections on how the modern world has lost this notion of the amateur because of what Josef Pieper has called a culture of “total work” (Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 25). Our psychologist discusses the words ‘amateur’ and ‘dilettante” in detail:

“There are two words whose meanings reflect our somewhat warped attitudes toward levels of commitment to physical or mental activities. These are the terms amateur and dilettante. Nowadays these labels are slightly derogatory. An amateur or dilettante is someone not quite up to par, a person not to be taken very seriously, one whose performance falls sort of professional standards.” (140)

This was not always so. The first is derived from the Latin verb amare, meaning “to love,” and referred to a person who engaged in an activity for the love of it, rather than professionally, for mere profit or material advantage. The second comes from the Latin delectare, “to delight,” and referred to a person who could spend his time doing whatever delighted him the most.

We too often forget this, but the sneer used to go the other way around. The upper class nobles and later on in Britain, at least, the upper middle class, looked down upon the professions and the act of receiving payment as being beneath them. This resonates with the classical contrast between the artes liberals and the artes serviles, those arts which a free man could engage in, not for profit but because he had the leisure that afforded him the opportunity to engage in the higher pursuits that would produce enjoyment (ideally, though this often devolved in the mere pursuit of pleasure), as opposed to the need to work for a living.

The irony is that we live in an era in which the noble’s leisure time is accessible to more people than ever before in the history of the world. Yet “total work” has taken over too many people’s lives, at the same time as passive entertainment predominates. In a lecture I attended last year, Andy Crouch, the author of Culture Making, expressed this cultural development as a movement from a rhythm of work and rest, to toil and boredom. And the skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety bear witness to the disorder in consciousness that results.

We have become too accomplishment focused and lost sight of the joy of experiences, according to our psychologist. And this fact is on display in the negative slippage in these words:

“The earliest meanings of these words therefore drew attention to experiences rather than accomplishments; they described the subjective rewards individuals gained from doing things, instead of focusing on how well they were achieving. Nothing illustrates as clearly our changing attitudes toward the value of experience as the fate of these two words.” (140)

Of course, we should note that there are benefits to our focus on achievement and work. The Puritan work ethic is certainly to be preferred to the privileged ennui of a class of nobles. But in a way that is precisely part of the problem I am describing. Without the love of learning we moderns are all at the same time oppressed proletariats and bored, yet privileged nobles, decrying the 1% that we are ironically a part of, if we only took a global and historical perspective.

The solution seems to be recovering the flow of thought in our leisure time as a lifelong pursuit, with the intrinsic goals of enjoyment on the one hand and personal transformation on the other.

Aside: Download the Free eBook “5 Tips for Fostering Flow in the Classical Classroom”

Wondering how to practically apply the idea of flow in your classroom? These 5 actionable steps will help you keep the insights of flow from being a pie-in-the-sky idea. Embody flow in your classroom and witness the increased joy and skill development that result!

You can download “5 Tips for Fostering Flow in the Classical Classroom” on the flow page. Share the page with a friend or colleague, so they can benefit as well.

Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation

Ultimately, this distinction between the amateur and the professional resolves itself into a spectrum of motivation. At one end of the spectrum is engaging in an activity entirely for some external reward, like money or a grade. On the other side is pursuing something merely for the experience itself, like popping a candy in one’s mouth because of the tasty pleasure one will experience.

For too many people learning and school have fallen too close to the first side of that spectrum. As our psychologist describes,

“Many people give up on learning after they leave school because thirteen or twenty years of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories. Their attention has been manipulated long enough from the outside by textbooks and teachers, and they have counted graduation as the first day of freedom.” (141)

They have “learned” for the sake of the grade and because of the need to jump through hoops in order to get on with the real business of life, which often ends up being no less extrinsic and utilitarian, as they get through another day of work, to get the money to live during the few short moments of free time before sleep and starting the rigmarole over again. Instead our psychologist would hope that the school system could be seen as the beginning, rather than the end of education:

“Ideally, the end of extrinsically applied education should be the start of an education that is motivated intrinsically. At that point the goal of studying is no longer to make the grade, earn a diploma, and find a good job. Rather, it is to understand what is happening around one, to develop a personally meaningful sense of what one’s experience is all about.” (141-2)

But if learning is conducted in such a way as to encourage the extrinsic rather than the intrinsic, when will that motivation counter slide on over to the other end of the spectrum? This is why Charlotte Mason call grades or marks “our old enemy” and commented in the preface to her final volume Toward a Philosophy of Education, on how “both teachers and children find an immeasurable difference between the casual interest roused by marks, pleasing oral lessons and other school devices, and the sort of steady avidity for knowledge that comes with the awakened soul” (vol. 6, p. xxvi).

In this series too, we’ve seen how joy in learning is not some mysterious, unattainable holy grail of education. Instead, training the attention and the memory, the trivium arts of language and quadrivium arts of mathematics, history, science and philosophy—all the domains of knowledge and mental skill present games and puzzles for the mind fit to occupy one in delightful contemplation for centuries. And this amateurish love of learning is marvelously democratic in nature:

“We have seen that the mind offers at least as many and as intense opportunities for action as does the body. Just as the use of the limbs and of the senses is available to everyone without regard to sex, race, education, or social class, so too the uses of memory, of language, of logic, of the rules of causation are also accessible to anyone who desires to take control of the mind.” (Csikszentmihalyi 141)

And freedom is found in this free flow of thought afforded by the classical liberal arts and sciences. Even a secular psychologist can acknowledge that “a person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free” since their “thinking will be directed by the opinions of his neighbors, by the editorials in the papers, and by the appeals of television” (141). Thus joy and freedom go hand in hand and issue from the use of leisure in meaningful pursuits.

Falling in Love with Learning

But this requires what Charlotte Mason called an “awakened soul.” We must fall in love with learning. This has analogies to the experience of the newly converted Christian who reads her Bible ecstatically and shares excitedly about the gospel with her friends and acquaintances. There is all the rush, obsession and passion of a lover in the pursuit. In the same way, our psychologist quotes a passage out of Plato’s Philebus to describe the disciples of Socrates:

“The young man who has drunk for the first time from that spring is as happy as if he had found a treasure of wisdom; he is positively enraptured. He will pick up any discourse, draw all its ideas together to make them into one, then take them apart and pull them to pieces. He will puzzle first himself, then also others, badger whoever comes near him, young and old, sparing not even his parents, nor anyone who is willing to list….” (as qtd in Csikzentmihalyi 142)

How can we bottle this true spirit of philosophy, this genuine love of wisdom, so that we can share it with our children and students, our friends and neighbors? Nay simply to drink a draught of it ourselves and restore again the fire that has burned low? What does it take to stoke up the joy of learning in our own lives?

Susan Schaeffer Macaulay talks about how this occurred for her children after attending a “small PNEU school [the organization Charlotte Mason founded], run in a classroom built onto the back of someone’s private home, looking into an English country garden” (38). Previously, one of her children at six years old was “happy enough,” what with the “hamsters, plants, paints, and lots of little booklets” or the “special TV programs, the cute sort that are intended to grab the child’s attention.” It wasn’t all bad. As Susan Schaeffer Macaulay says, “When she came home, she sometimes talked about something that had happened. But there wasn’t much to discuss.” The story was much worse for her older sister: “She was frustrated, had a low opinion of her own achievements, and had no interest in education” (38).

But attending a school inspired by the love of learning that took seriously the challenge of the liberal arts tradition caused a transformation:

“After the first day, Kirsteen came home glowing with life and interest. ‘We had the most exciting story today, but Mrs. Norton stopped at just the wrong place. I can’t wait to hear the next part of the story!’ And what was this exciting, vitalizing story? To my astonishment it was Pilgrim’s Progress, read to them in the original.

“The quite electrifying change in those two children is really indescribable. They had so much to talk about! A wealth of literature, history, art, which was so glorious to work through. Their eyes became brighter, their minds alert. We had grand discussions, again and again. Shakespeare had become a friend whose writing was much loved. The children would argue about the actual characters; for instance, whether Hermione was right or wrong, and what the old shepherd was actually up to (they were enjoying The Winter’s Tale).” (38-39)

The challenges inherent in cultivating this revolutionary experience of falling in love with learning are worth it. And they are worth it not only because of the enjoyment we experience. They are worth it because learning, knowledge, wisdom and skill are, in their very nature, both intrinsically and extrinsically valuable. The dichotomy between joy and usefulness ultimately resolves itself into a paradox.

Our chaotic world is so complex, so unique and so endlessly varied that true knowledge, deep understanding of reality is always useful. We may not know how some particular branch of learning will benefit us or the people around us, but it will. Our spectrum between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards is really a mountain peak, with the perfect blending of the two standing at the summit. Whether we approach the mountain of learning from the easy slopes of pleasure or the rocky crags of rewards, we must ascend the hill if we are to find the delights and benefits that knowledge afford the life well lived. The sights will be glorious, the exertion of the ascent will be exhilarating and view of the terrain will most certainly help us in getting where we want to go next.

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