The idea behind positive psychology is contained in the adjective “positive.” It’s not about trying to be positive or optimistic. Positive psychology is an intentional departure from a focus almost solely on diagnosing and treating psychological pathologies. This shift saw research begin to investigate concepts like wellbeing, excellence and human flourishing. Instead of viewing every human as containing a set of psychological pathologies, there emerged a view that a human could be coached and counseled towards a better version of themselves.

In this article, we will consider the history and key figures of positive psychology and relate this work to some practical practices we can use in our classrooms. In many ways, positive psychology promotes many of the ideals of classical education and some of the tenets of a biblical worldview. Yet, there may be ways in which we should critically examine this work to capture what is most valuable, while clearly defining points of tension with a Christian perspective.

History of Positive Psychology

We can actually trace the main concepts of positive psychology back to the work of ancient philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle. These philosophers sought to articulate what it means to live a good life, which is aimed at achieving happiness or eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία). In the Phaedrus, Plato shares the story of a charioteer driving two winged horses each having an opposite character. The charioteer must train the noble horse so that the horse full of vices cannot lead the chariot astray. Similarly, Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics lays out the pathway to eudaimonia via the acquisition of virtues which are acquired through the practice of habits. These virtues or excellences (aretai) leading to a life marked by happiness or joy is what modern positive psychology seeks to promote.

Maslow’s Hierarchy

Abraham Maslow, famous for the hierarchy of needs, set a course towards health in his groundbreaking work Toward a Psychology of Being (1968). In this he notes that psychology had up to that point been inclined to treat “sickness.” In the Freudian framework, the individual and the therapist ask the question, “How do I get unsick?” But what if the interior person can be aimed towards higher values and principles? Can a person be pointed towards a new question, “How do I get healthy?” Maslow famously quipped, “It is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half” (Toward a Psychology of Being 5). Aiming towards health is a worthy aim and a good corrective to the dominant model of psychology of his time.

What Maslow developed was a theory that aimed to explain human motivations towards peak experiences. Why do some people aim for excellence and actually achieve satisfying results? Most people languish in a state of unfulfilled potential despite having a sense of motivation towards certain goals in life. He developed a hierarchy of needs, depicted with a pyramid in most expositions of his model. The five levels begin at the base with physiological needs like food and shelter. Above this are safety needs such as job security. He identifies love and belonging as the next level, which includes family and friendship. Esteem is the penultimate level including concepts such as respect, status and recognition. Finally the tip of the pyramid is self-actualization where an individual achieves meaningful goals. Maslow did not consider that one progress linearly through this hierarchy, nor that the categories were rigid. Multiple levels of needs can be satisfied, for instance, by landing a job that fulfills physiological and safety needs while also being an achievement of one’s potential.

Christians have not been entirely comfortable with Maslow’s work. The hierarchy of needs, where one must address basic need before arriving at a place of self-actualization seems to miss the mark when it comes to understanding our nature as fallen beings in need of salvation accomplished by another individual—Christ Jesus. McCleskey and Ruddell critically evaluate Maslow’s theory of motivation from a biblical worldview. In their assessment, they find his theory actually offers little of actual help. “So, there is no real hope in Maslow’s approach beyond a vague belief in a secular, utopian, theoretical possibility” (“Taking a Step Back—Maslow’s Theory of Motivation: A Christian Critical Perspective,” JBIB 23 [2020] 14). A fundamental flaw seems to be the individualistic paradigm. Even though connection to others is included in the hierarchy, family and friendship seem to be expressed as a need that support personal achievement. A biblical vision of life fulfilment seems to reverse this, as a deepening walk with Christ brings one closer to God and others.

In fairness to Maslow, he was not aiming to develop a theory that adhered to Christian theology, and in some respects, we can perceive that some basic elements of his theory can be connected to Christian practices. The Bible showcases a variety of personal spiritual disciplines—such as prayer, meditation, fasting, and giving—that foster spiritual growth and a deeper connection to Christ. There seems to be a simplified hierarchy of the disciplined life at the base and greater freedom at the pinnacle. Interestingly, the Christian disciplines seem to promote abstinence from elements of Maslow’s hierarchy—fasting, solitude, humility—on the journey to spiritual fulfilment.

Seligman and Peterson on Core Virtues

A different take on human flourishing was articulated by Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson in the book Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004). Here they apply historical and cultural analysis to identify six core virtues that seem to have a high amount of similarity across different cultures. These core virtues—courage, justice, humanity, temperance, transcendence, wisdom—aggregate other similar virtues, such that we might consider these master virtues that entail other excellence qualities. Whether we fully agree with the listing or definitions of these core virtues, it is interesting to see a shift towards values that would be appreciated within both classical and Christian spheres.

The six core virtues are spelled out in detail by Seligman and Peterson. Courage is “the capacity to overcome fear” (Character Strengths 36) that is manifested not only in the physical sphere, but also in the moral and psychological spheres. They note that courage is not only seen in single acts of courage but also in persistent or chronic spans of courageousness. Additionally, courage is readily seen in heroic examples of the soldierly type, however it is most often an internal state pertaining to things like motivations and decisions.

Justice connotes fairness that is often associated with equity and equality. This virtue can manifest itself differently in collectivist versus individualistic cultures. Concepts of justice can skew towards merit-based reward systems and need-based systems. What seems to transcend this cultural divide is that justice is prevalent in traits like “fairness, leadership, citizenship, and teamwork” (37).

Seligman and Peterson classify the third virtue as “humanity,” defining this as “the virtues involved in relating to another.” Concepts such as generosity and altruism are central to this virtue. They write, “We are quite capable of and often willing to engage in acts of generosity, kindness, or benevolence that are consensually recognized and valued and that elevate those who witness them” (37-38).

Temperance is “the virtue of control over excess.” Seligman and Peterson include in this virtue concepts pertaining to abstinence from various appetites such as eating, drinking and sex, general self-restraint, and the ability to regulate one’s emotions. “Thus,” they write, “temperance is a form of self-denial that is ultimately generous to the self or others—prudence and humility are prime examples” (38). I think their inclusion of the word “generous” provides a positive hue to what might otherwise be construed as potentially harmful to self.

Transcendence can be difficult to define. Seligman and Peterson borrow from Kant and call this “the connection to something higher—the belief that there is meaning or purpose larger than ourselves” (38). People can feel this when they look up at the expanse of stars in the night sky or stand on the beach by the ocean, feeling a sense of the immensity of the universe and our own smallness within it. There is a sense of awe, however, in this perception of one’s insignificance that has an uplifting effect.

Wisdom is a virtue that has classical and Christian traditions associated with it. Seligman and Peterson call wisdom “a form of noble intelligence” that can be described as “knowledge hard fought for, and then used for good” (39). The enumerate strengths included within this virtue such as creativity, curiosity, judgment and perspective.

The turn to virtues as a marker of human flourishing has been found to be more consistent with a biblical worldview than what we found with the hierarchy of needs. We see similar kinds of character traits listed in the virtue lists of Paul’s letters (e.g., Col. 3:12-13). There is a practical wisdom that connects the biblical tradition with the same kind of classical virtue ethic of the ancient philosophical tradition we investigated earlier.

Csikszentmihalyi on Flow

A final figure who has contributed significantly to our understanding of positive psychology is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “me-high chick-sent-me-high”). Famous for the term “flow,” he has studied the internal experience of high performance. Instead of looking at the character traits we are aiming for (virtues) or the pyramid of requisite conditions to achieve high performance (hierarchy of needs), by looking at the feeling of optimal performance, he has attempted to articulate a common human experience. We often think of high performance as the domain of peak experiences, such as winning a tournament or being awarded a Nobel prize. However, getting “into the zone” is something children experience when they are absorbed in play. This differentiates achievement from the cognitive state of high performance.

It’s one thing to describe a common shared experience, and another to figure out how one can enter into this state. Flow is a state of complete immersion in an activity such that one experiences a state of effortless concentration and timelessness. Some of the factors the lead to a state of flow come from 1) the optimization of requisite skill and perceived challenge, a state described by Vygotsky as the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), and 2) the amount of personal motivation to engage in a task. In other words, this is a goal-oriented activity that matches skill to challenge. As Csikszentmihalyi describes it:

“The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forgoes everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives” (Flow 6).

Notice how the word “struggle” implies that at times there might be feelings of strain or even pain in the experience. Csikszentmihalyi describes how a swimmer might feel aching muscles whilst fully absorbed in training. An author might feel a sense of mental strain while fully absorbed in typing out the next moment in the emerging plot of a novel.

Csikszentmihalyi himself sees connections between the classical tradition and what he calls “the flow of thought.” Jason Barney, in his book The Joy of Learning, expands on this with a view to how to incorporate the concepts of flow in the classical classroom. In many respects, the work being done on deliberate practice stems from the idea of flow. The sense of effortless absorption in a task actually comes through applied effort in skills development.

Practices for Classical Educators

Having looked at the history of positive psychology, especially through an examination of three prominent figures, we can make some generalizations that will be helpful for classical educators. To begin with, the idea that psychology has something to contribute to our understanding of healthy internal processes provides us with some grounding to move away from solely viewing the person as a set of potential psychological disfunctions. Many students and parents self-diagnose things like ADHD, anxiety and depression. Understandably, many people react to negative feelings by trying to understand what is going on at a mechanistic level internally. Regrettably, individuals who lock in on such concepts can rely on misconceptions of these disorders, blaming them for deficiencies in knowledge and skills, and then limit their full engagement in productive practices that would cultivate positive feelings about their work and their selves. This does not mean that we would caution individuals from seeking help from qualified professionals. But interestingly, these professionals would actually prescribe some of the very practices associated with positive psychology—techniques to enhance singular focus, quite meditation, and deliberate practice.

Practically, there are several ways we can bring concepts of positive psychology into our classrooms in highly productive ways. First, cultivate virtues through well-planned habit training. For instance, when we think about temperance, it is rather difficult simply to tell students to be more self-controlled. So we need to put in the work of articulating what this looks like in daily life. We might choose some daily practices like sitting in “ready position” or organizing their locker. We support their efforts by succinctly describing the habit (two feet on the floor, back straight, energetic face) and reinforcing this consistently over the span of several days and weeks. It’s wonderful to see how a positive feeling about their work emerges as they are coached in what it looks like to work effectively in a classroom. Self control leads to self satisfaction.

Second, the disciplined life leads to higher orders of freedom and privilege. I think this may be what Maslow was attempting to describe, even though I think his hierarchy of needs is flawed in many ways. There’s something biblical about a shift in our thinking. The person who disciplines themselves to read scripture and pray daily gains the privilege of a closer walk with God and experiences freedom in Christ more consistently. The same can be said for more mundane aspects of life. The person who learns to effectively budget their income gains freedom to spend their money according to the plan they’ve set out. The athlete who has disciplined their body through regular training can run faster and farther through less effort. So, when we are training our students to “show their steps,” this disciplined approach in mathematics leads to great freedom in understanding mathematical processes and the privilege of working on higher orders of mathematical concepts.

Third, being more rigid on skills development up front leads to the experience of flow later. There are indeed better ways of doing things, and teaching these ways early assist students to fly higher long term. For instance, teaching students how to create flash cards on paper and being insistent on regular daily review is a skill that helps students learn things like vocabulary, math formulas and historical information in a thorough way. I used to think this was a nice add on for students to use if they had time and inclination. But over the years, I’ve seen the pattern that students who really thrive have put this tool into practice regularly. So this, for me, is no longer a nice add on but a first-order practice. You can think of other practices like showing steps in math, formatting a page in MLA format and sentence diagramming that cause early sweat but aim towards mastery, which entails greater ease and joy later.

It is interesting how positive psychology has championed the cause of encountering challenge and doing hard things. An impression some might have of positive psychology is that people need to boost their internal attitudes artificially by maybe telling themselves they’re great. Instead, much of the literature points toward how valuable challenge, grit and discipline are in cultivating a life of ease and happiness. Hopefully this brief overview of positive psychology gives you a few insights and practical tools that helps you to explore this field more.

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

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

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

Deliberating about the Beneficial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deliberating with the Variables

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

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

Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, ch. 5

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

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

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;

my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvelous for me.

Psalm 131:1 ESV

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

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

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

Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, ch. 5

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

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

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

Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, ch. 7

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

Reclaiming the Practical Perspective for Classical Education

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

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

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

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With this groundwork laid in Aristotle and modern research, we proceeded to articulate an understanding of the arts as situated in history and culture, as familial and traditional in nature. The upshot of this view is that we must apprentice students into specific traditions of artistry. We are not training abstract intellectual skills that can be transferred to new contexts, as Bloom’s taxonomy and the faculty theory of education supposed. When we train students in arithmetic or grammar, just like painting or gymnastics, we are inducting them into something both old and new. The ancient insights, styles and methods in these domains have been continuously adjusted and updated since their inception. This does not mean we must accept modern methods or assumptions in various arts (see A Pedagogy of Craft), but it does entail that some traditional artistic abilities and practices have little relevance in our contemporary context. Few schools teach horseback riding or ancient sailing and navigation techniques, and for good reason.

The Limitations of Artistic Divisions

In a similar way, there is no sacrosanct set of divisions between the arts handed down as if from on high. What we see in the classical tradition is a variety of distinctions between the branches of various artistic traditions as they developed over time. Many of the things that we regard as grammar (e.g., distinctions between singular and plural, parts of speech, types of sentences) are discussed by Augustine of Hippo in his treatise On Dialectic (de Dialectica). We should not be surprised at this fact. Since the arts are living traditions, human descriptions of their boundaries and nature are like mapping a flood plain. So, as much as we may nerd out about the Seven Liberal Arts (I am speaking to myself as much as to others…) we should not be disturbed when Hugh of St Victor, for instance, refuses to follow the early medieval divisions. 

(In the Didascalicon Hugh advocates for four branches of knowledge or wisdom: the theoretical [disciplines like mathematics, physics and theology], the practical [ethics and politics], the mechanical [architecture, medicine, agriculture, etc.], and logic, or the science which ensures proper reasoning and clarity in the other sciences.)

While we are, in this series, developing Aristotle’s divisions of the intellectual virtues, therefore, we should not prejudge the idea that his is the best or the only proper mapping of the intellectual virtues, the educational project or the distinctions between categories of knowledge. This series should be viewed as the opening of a conversation about rethinking our educational goals within Aristotelian terms, as more philosophically sound and helpful than Bloom’s Taxonomy. In the same way, though I have often referred to the classical distinction between the arts and sciences, it would be more accurate to reference the Aristotelian distinction between artistry (techne) and scientific knowledge (episteme), which had the effect in the tradition at varying times and places of issuing in a similar distinction between the branches of knowledge and of arts. 

Likewise, with arts in particular, I have proposed a fivefold division of the arts as in my view the most helpful for gesturing toward wholeness in our current renewal movement, and not because I dismiss the elegance of the threefold vision of common, liberal and fine arts, endorsed by Chris Hall, Ravi Jain and Kevin Clark. 

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

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

The main reason to do so lies in the realization that athletics, games and sports are indeed forms of techne, but they are not easily captured under the headings of common, liberal or fine. This is a problem if, as I contend, athletics, games and sports rightly play an important role within education. Separating out professions and trades from the common and domestic arts, secondarily, gestures towards modern cultural realities post-industrialization. Tending a garden in your backyard represents a different stream of craftsmanship than managing a commercial greenhouse. We risk a high degree of unhelpful equivocation by attempting to use medieval categories in the modern world. 

Of course, the fact that these are arts does not entail that we are obliged to train students in all of them—an impossibility in any case! What I have said is that we should structure the academy optimally to cultivate the arts and that we should aim at a universality, not a comprehensiveness, of artistic training in our K-12 educational programs. It is possible to train students in representatives from each of the five categories, with the liberal arts occupying a central role for the production of the other intellectual virtues (see later section in this article). As I discussed in an earlier article, the choice of which arts to cultivate constitutes a cultural judgment based on the calling and opportunities of a particular school. 

If all this talk of the culturally situated nature of the arts lands me in controversy, at least I can claim that I am not anti-tradition, but I am in fact restoring a proper understanding of artistic traditions against the modernist pretensions about objectivity. As Aristotle articulated so clearly, techne concerns itself with the ultimate particular facts, with what may or may not be, with contingent things and not with necessary being. Knowledge of how to make something does not constitute knowledge of the essences of things or philosophic wisdom. These truths are part and parcel of the natural limitations of artistry. 

The Transcendence of Artistry into Morality

However, it is also worth recognizing how artistry can in fact transcend itself. If craftsmanship can be figuratively represented by skillful hands, then as we already explained those same hands are hardwired to the heart and head, and even the spirit. In a way we have already noted this fact at length in the prelude to Apprenticeship in the Arts. Aristotle himself recognized the similarities between morality and artistry. But we have not as yet duly noted the extent to which the training of the hands also conditions the heart. As Comenius recognized, the arts require their own sort of prudence, by which the artisan foresees what will turn out for the best with his artistic production. 

Likewise, a hard and painful practice regimen enables the production of good and beautiful things. In this way, apprenticeship in the arts participates in the nature of the moral training that enables a person to delay instant gratification for the sake of a greater reward later. By thus disciplining the desires, artistic training acts as a natural prelude and arena for the development of self-control and this not only in athletics and sports, but in all the various arts. In both artistry and morality, one must aim at a target and pursue it through reasoned use of contingent means. Techne transcends itself through its natural participation in all the moral virtues and in the intellectual virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom. 

After all, the sphere of human production has a natural affinity with the sphere of human action and goods. Producing something beautiful and valuable is itself a prudent action for a human being. Even more, developing some form of artistry is necessary for living a good life and enjoying the good things of life. Adopting a craftsman mindset in one’s work and getting into the flow of deliberate or purposeful practice constitutes a chief element of a prudent, and therefore happy, life. One must at times display the moral virtues of courage, temperance and justice in the serious work of artistic excellence. Jordan Peterson, for one, has discussed the importance of fair play and reciprocity in games as an emergent ethic. 

Artistry’s Moral and Spiritual Limitations

All this said, we can note again the limits of this blending of artistry into prudence. After all, the super star performer and artistic genius are also liable to moral dissolution and depravity, as we have daily witness in the tabloids. As in the case of the traditions of artistry themselves, it seems that self-control and moral foresight are not necessarily transferred from one sphere of life to another. The devoted Olympic athlete has his impeccable diet and training regimen, but he might be notoriously licentious or proud.

This limitation even shows itself in the spiritual sphere where transformations of artistry can mask, for a time, the impurities of the heart. As Jesus stated explicitly in the Sermon on the Mount,

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” (Matt 7:21-23 ESV)

Spiritual gifts, or what we might call spiritual forms of artistry (since they are productive acts in the world), do not ensure that such artisans are morally sound. They might outwardly perform spiritual works, but in the eyes of God they remain still “workers of lawlessness.” In the same way, our liberal arts educated students may become nothing more than “clever devils,” to borrow C.S. Lewis’ phrase from The Abolition of Man. 

Among other things, this is why we must go on from artistry, which, for all its possibilities for transcendence, is properly basic and preparatory to the other intellectual virtues, rather than constituting them in itself. As Saint Paul claims, “I will show you a still more excellent way” (1 Cor 12:31b ESV), while he transitions from the gifts of spiritual artistry to the transcendent value of love, over and above all the intellectual and moral virtues on display in their full extravagance and grandiosity. Not just tongues of men, but of angels—what a statement to put the trivium arts to shame! “Prophetic powers” and understanding “all mysteries and all knowledge”—what phrases to humble the prophet, scholar and philosopher alike! 

It may be that we can ascribe the term ‘wisdom’ even to the greatest exponents of the arts, as Aristotle mentions in Book VI, ch. 4 of the Nicomachean Ethics. But by this we do not mean either that practical wisdom for life or philosophical wisdom of the highest mysteries.

Artistry as a Prelude to the Other Four Intellectual Virtues

And yet again, the arts can by their very nature transcend toward philosophical wisdom just like toward moral prudence. In the fine arts, for instance, it is not only their beauty that we prize but the messages that our great artists have embodied in shape and form. These insights into the nature of life and reality are valuable in so far as they are true. Or to put it another way, great artists rely on their intuition (nous) or understanding of reality (both in universals and in particulars) for the messages they have skillfully conveyed in artistic form. This intuition about life can, fortunately and unfortunately, coexist with poor habits and a personal lack of prudence. The artist may be our muse, whether or not she herself practices what she preaches!

Not all artistic productions convey a high degree of knowledge about the world, but the higher fine and performing arts, as well as the liberal arts do. In fact, it is these traditional productions of genius—paintings and sculptures, poems and novels, histories and plays, speeches and debates—that act as the forerunners of intuition and scientific knowledge in the student. It is through attention to these Great Works that defy easy categorization that the perceptive and reasoning abilities of the student are honed and developed. They provide a form of enriched second-hand experience enabling students’ thought to grow and mature. By imitating them throughout their training in the arts, students are given more than simply artistry itself. They are given the forerunners of the other intellectual virtues: the opinions of authorities, “the words of the wise and their riddles” (Prov 1:6b ESV).

While experiencing artistic productions can lead to artistry in the student when combined with imitation and coached practice, it is through reflection on the authorities, especially in the liberal arts, that prudence, intuition, scientific knowledge and ultimately philosophical wisdom are developed. In this way, while artistry is not enough, it is by nature a prelude to the other intellectual virtues. For this reason, the tradition recognized training in the liberal arts as preparatory to the sciences. In particular, the traditional productions of artistic wisdom are meant to provide fodder for reflection on the nature of human goods, thus developing prudence. From our Aristotelian vantage point, we can see the late medieval vision of moral philosophy as informing the individual’s development of phronesis. 

In a similar fashion, the arts help us see in a way that we would not on our own, forming our intuition or nous, those starting points for reasoning, whether in human, mathematical or natural spheres. At the same time, training in the liberal arts of language and number enable us to demonstrate propositions to be the case, establishing a statement as true or false. In this way, artistry with words and numbers constitutes the necessary prerequisite for scientific knowledge in what the later tradition would have called metaphysics and natural science. Both deliberation (for affairs of human choice regarding goods) and inquiry (for universal and particular truths regardless of human desire), then, require use, if not mastery, of the liberal arts for their practice. And so, these other intellectual virtues are dependent upon the liberal arts.

So, we are for this reason justified in seeing the liberal arts tradition as in a unique way indebted to the Aristotelian paradigm of intellectual virtues. Although not everyone in the tradition articulated this distinction between the liberal arts and sciences in the same way, the insight about the liberal arts’ central role as the pathways to moral virtue and wisdom owes a great deal to Aristotle. 

It is important to conclude by stating clearly that training in the liberal arts, like other forms of artistry, does not always and necessarily lead to the other intellectual virtues. As Clark and Jain have contended in The Liberal Arts Tradition, the liberal arts are not enough. We need only look to Plato’s Gorgias to see Socrates demolishing this supposition before Aristotle came along. Rhetoric could be a mere knack or craftiness that makes the worse appear to be the better cause. All the arts have their forms of trickery that are out of step with moral or spiritual reality. Artistry, particularly liberal artistry, can transcend itself as the doorway into deeper things, but it need not and therein lies the danger of relying or focusing on it alone. Which is why we must go on from artistry, entering the realms of prudence next….

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next subseries in Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues:

The Counsels of the Wise, Part 1: Foundations of Christian Prudence

The post Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 6: The Transcendence and Limitations of Artistry appeared first on .

“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

The post Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World appeared first on .

My claim is that in order to achieve lasting flow, one must achieve an appropriate level of intensity. The first aspect of this claim to elaborate is the concept of intensity. Intensity as I will be using it here occurs at the intersection of motivation and practice. It is only when students approach their work with intensity that they will achieve lasting flow.

The Winter Olympics recently concluded. The requirements for a sport to qualify for the winter games is that the sport occur on either ice or snow. That in and of itself sets the Winter Olympics apart from other sporting events. Consider the amount of practice athletes must accumulate in adverse conditions to become world-class competitors. After watching numerous interviews with athletes across many sports, a consistent picture emerged. These athletes were highly motivated, but also genuinely loved their sport. A twin pairing crystalized in my mind: motivation and love of the sport go hand in hand. Not everyone will be as highly motivated to put in long hours on the ice or snowy slopes, but perhaps there are other areas where any one of us might find the spark of motivation, and that spark most often consists in something that stirs our hearts.

Motivation

When we think about examples of motivation, we most often picture athletes. Whether it be the athletes of the Winter Olympics or some other sport, success stories are often the result of high levels of motivation. In her book Mindset, Carol Dweck highlights examples such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods to demonstrate how individuals “took charge of the processes that bring success – and that maintain it” (101). Athletes like this work hard every day to improve some aspect of their performance. Dweck quotes Tiger Woods as saying, “I love working on shots, carving them this way and that, and proving to myself that I can hit a certain shot on command” (102). This love of practice kept him returning day after day no matter the conditions outside.

Motivation comes in two flavors. Goeff Colvin, in Talent is Overrated, writes “The central question about motivation to achieve great performance is whether it’s intrinsic or extrinsic” (206). Extrinsic motivation is connected to external rewards such as stickers, candy or prizes, whereas intrinsic motivation is connected to the perceived value of the sport or academic subject. Notice the work “love” in the Tiger Woods quote above. Even though he has won a vast array of golf tournaments, he found intrinsic value in practicing the shots themselves. This occurs not only for athletes, but musicians, artists and mathematicians can be found who express this same kind of passion not simply for accolades or awards, but because there is a perceptual value in the subject.

An essential component of finding flow is connecting students to intrinsic motivation. In his 2018 research paper, Jeff Irvine was “struck by the dominance of intrinsic over extrinsic in many theories related to motivation” (12). He goes on to comment:

“This is even more striking considering the dominance of extrinsic rewards in current education systems. Motivational theories emphasize the intrinsic dimension where research has shown important gains can be made in positively impacting student motivation. A significant body of evidence suggests that motivation has a major role in student achievement.”

Jeff Irvine, “A Framework for Comparing Theories Related to Motivation in Education,” Research in Higher Education Journal 35 (2018): 12.

To put it another way, carrots and sticks do not provide lasting motivation, we cannot reward or punish a student toward achievement in language learning, mathematics or writing mechanics. A more fruitful pursuit would be found by highlighting the value inherent in a language, in numeracy or in written communication. Connecting students to intrinsic value has much more durative impact that rewards or punishments.

A more recent study of musicians found a link between grit, growth mindset and flow. Their findings are fascinating. Musicians who found intrinsic value in music were more motivated to engage in daily practice, which led to increased skill, which led to a deeper love of music, which reinforced daily practice, and the cycle goes on and on. The authors found that musicians experienced flow as a result of long-term engagement with music through daily practice. They write:

“In the full model, music performance anxiety and daily practice hours are the only significant predictors for dispositional flow in this sample of musicians, suggesting that the strongest predictors for musicians’ flow experience are how you feel while playing music and how often you engage in it” (6)

Jasmine Tan, Kelly Yap, and Joydeep Bhattacharya, “What Does it Take to Flow? Investigating Links Between Grit, Growth Mindset, and Flow in Musicians,” Music & Science 4 (2021): 6.

Musicians who connect to the positive feelings that music provides through regular, daily practice deepen their experience of the flow state.

But notice how anxiety can inhibit flow. Fear of performance can lock up a musician, creating a negative feedback loop. Anxiety lessens intrinsic interest in music, and leads to diminished practicing resulting in little to no experience of flow. In a study of rock climbers, this concept of anxiety was noted to reduce attention and focus (55). However, stress and anxiety are constituent aspects of life. So we cannot completely eliminate stress and anxiety. Instead, high performers learn how to cope with anxiety. The authors of the rock climbing study write, citing other literature:

“Stress is an unavoidable and potentially positive aspect of life (McGonigal, 2015). A person’s approach to stressful situations (climbing or otherwise) may predict his or her success at negotiating the challenge. The ability of a person to engage cognitive inhibitors and set-shift (Derakshan & Eysenck, 2009), invoking specific mental capacities during specific events, may enhance performance and resilience in many challenging life domains.”

Andrew Bailey, Allison Hughes, Kennedy Bullock, and Gabriel Hill, “A Climber’s Mentality: EEG analysis of climbers in action,” Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership 11, no. 1 (2019): 64

Notice how stress can be embraced as a positive aspect of life. Top athletes learn to identify pre-match nervousness as the body’s preparation for action. As opposed to allowing stress and anxiety to shut them down, they accept the stress as an aspect of high performance. This mental work take practice and coaching to transform something potentially debilitating for inexperienced learners into something that can enhance performance.

One immediate take away from this examination of motivation is both the nature and locus of motivation. First, motivation is about the intrinsic value of the activity or subject at hand. Our chief goal as educators is not to throw a bunch of external motivators at the students, whether those be rewards or punishments. Instead, we ourselves need to identify the intrinsic value in the activity or subject with the aim of guiding our students toward that sense of value. Even so, we need to be open to students finding their own sense of value in a given activity or subject quite apart from our own. This leads to the second take away, the locus of motivation has to be the student. It is counterproductive for us as teachers to whip up a frenzy of motivation only for the students not to catch the bug themselves. Now there is definitely a role for us to play as motivators, but for long-term flow to be achieved, students need to take on board their own sense of motivation.

Practice

The first component of intensity is motivation. One’s level of intensity corresponds in some measure to the intrinsic value one places in an activity or subject. The second component of intensity comes down to practice. Here we’ll talk about two kinds of practice that promote intensity: deliberate practice and retrieval practice.

I remember my first violin teacher had a bumper sticker on her violin case that said “practice makes perfect.” Well, that’s not entirely the case. Perhaps better would be “practice makes better.” And it’s really not just practice, it’s practice of a certain kind. I could mechanically play through a piece and never really improve. What I learned over time as a music student is that focused practice on the problem spots is where real improvement occurs. You never really play through the whole piece in one sitting, you stop constantly to rework a section, get the finger right, repeat and come back to it.

The focused, intentional type of practice is what we call deliberate practice. Anders Ericsson put forward a framework in his 1993 article which posits that expert performance is achieved through effort directed towards improvement, even when the effort is not enjoyable (see K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100 (1993): 363-406). This is the article that gave us the 10,000-hour rule, later popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. Angela Duckworth, though, explains that the 10,000-hour rule is not about accumulating lots and lots of hours on task, instead we should think of it as a factor of the quality of time we spend practicing. And yet, individuals who commit to long hours of arduous effort seeking to improve a skill eventually experience the state of ecstatic immersion that Csikszentmihalyi terms flow. In her book Grit, Duckworth writes, “I’ve come to the following conclusion: Gritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow” (131). Duckworth’s point is that even though deliberate practice takes perseverance or grit, as she calls it, there is a payoff in the form of higher levels of performance and enjoyment.

Ericsson summarized the state of research on deliberate practice in a 2008 article:

“Based on a review of research on skill acquisition, we identified a set of conditions where practice had been uniformly associated with improved performance. Significant improvements in performance were realized when individuals were 1) given a task with a well-defined goal, 2) motivated to improve, 3) provided with feedback, and 4) provided with ample opportunities for repetition and gradual refinements of their performance. Deliberate efforts to improve one’s performance beyond its current level demands full concentration and often requires problem-solving and better methods of performing the tasks.”

K. Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview,” Academic Emergency Medicine 15 (2008): 991

Not the role motivation plays in Ericsson’s model. In addition, clearly defining goals and providing feedback are essential to deliberate practice. We will explore the fourth point in detail in a moment. But for now it is worthwhile to emphasize the word “deliberate” here. To do something deliberately is to do so with purpose or intent. Moving students away from rote or empty practice to practice that engages their understanding of the “why” of the exercise is essential to growth.

In an earlier article on deliberate practice, I used the analogy of weightlifting. In order to achieve hypertrophy, or muscle growth, weightlifters talk about making a mind-muscle connection. This has become an area of growing research (see J. Calatayud, J. Vinstrup, M. D. Jakobsen, et al. “Importance of Mind-muscle Connection during Progressive Resistance Training,” Eur J Appl Physiol 116 (2016): 527-533 and the extensive bibliography therein). For our purposes, the mind-muscle connection pertains to productive, effortful learning. Enabling our students to connect their intentional mind with their learning mind, in a manner of speaking, is a meta-cognitive goal we should strive for in our classrooms.

The second type of practice essential to achieving the kind of intensity that enables flow is retrieval practice. The book Make It Stick breaks retrieval practice into three components. First, there is spaced practice, or the spreading out of practice over time. “The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory” (49). It is better to allow a “little forgetting” to set in rather than massing practice in one session. It gives the feeling that learning has occurred, but the knowledge was simply placed into short-term memory.

Second, there is interleaved practice, or the randomization of skillsets such that the learner moves from skill to skill or subject to subject. This breaks up learning sessions. This process feels slow and can be confusing to students at first. However, it promotes long-term retention (50). So instead of grouping all addition problems followed by all subtraction problems, you would randomize the set so that you do a few addition then a few subtraction, and go back and forth.

Closely related to this is varied practice or mixing together different skillsets or subjects. Varied practice or variable training is more challenging than massed practice because it utilizes more centers in the brain, which leads to more cognitive flexibility (51-52). Consider a humanities class that reads short sections of literature alongside a philosophy book, with a smattering of poetry and scripture thrown in. Mixing subjects in this way highlights the uniqueness of the concept, forcing the learner to make associations drawing upon different parts of the brain.

Practical Steps

Getting students to a state of flow requires an accumulation of skill as well as a sufficient level of challenge. So it will not be every day that a flow state is achieved. However there are some practical steps you can take that will set your class on the path toward flow. Here are a few items to consider.

First, inspire your students early and often. Intrinsic motivation is such a key component that we should be demonstrating regularly the magnificence and wonder of the subjects we teach. You can do this by drawing upon your own sense of the intrinsic value of the concepts and ideas you are teaching. You can also have your students share what they find valuable or interesting or surprising.

Second, on the analogy of the weightlifters who prime their workouts by making a mind-muscle connection, we need to help our students prime their minds for the intensity of deliberate and retrieval practice. Because this kind of practice takes energy and intentionality, students cannot simply be given sets of exercises without proper priming. Here are a couple of suggestions to prime students for high performance. Use students’ imagination to visualize high performance. For instance, before beginning practice problems in mathematics, you could ask students, “How would a mathematician think about this problem?” This kind of imaginative priming has them take on the character of a high performer in math.

Another strategy to prime students for mental intensity is through nostalgic recollection, or remembering previous high performance. Whereas the previous strategy visualizes future high performance, this exercise primes students for mental intensity by recalling some previous experience they had of high performance. Taking mathematics as the example again, a student can draw upon any memory of high performance – in a sport, musical instrument or other academic subject – to get into the mindset of active engagement with their work.

Third, we need to place before our students what has been called “worthy work.” If in retrieval practice we are turning away from massed practice, in worthy work, we are turning away from empty repetition. Charlotte Mason describes the depths and heights of what we are striving toward:

“What we desire is the still progress of growth that comes of root striking downwards and fruit urging upwards. And this progress in character and conduct is not attained through conditions of environment or influence but only through the growth of ideas, received with conscious intellectual effort.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 297.

If we are placing in front of our students materials that have proper depth to them or reveal the heights of the heavens, the “conscious intellectual effort” becomes the fitting disposition of the student. If the work is worthy, there is so much more scope to find intrinsic motivation.

The post Finding Flow through Effort: Intensity as the Key to Academic Success appeared first on .

While we know that Aelius Theon used written narration to train future orators in memory and invention, and that Quintilian saw it as a core practice connected to the ability to learn, it is not really until Comenius that narration is a central teaching method. Erasmus too recommended the narration of a teacher’s lecture, thus shifting the focus to knowledge of content and away from rhetorical style and fluency. But only Comenius made of narration a golden key to unlock the doors of knowledge to the student.

In my article on The Great Didactic we saw how Comenius envisioned teaching as opening founts of knowledge, and the process of students narrating to one another as part and parcel of the nature of knowledge itself: it must be shared! Developing his analogies from the natural world, Comenius advocated for narration under the analogy of intellectual nourishment through collection, digestion and distribution. The teacher first collects and digests knowledge, and then distributes it to others; then, in an ironic transformation the student becomes the teacher to do the same for his fellows. Thus, Comenius recommends a process of repeated narrations of content given by the teacher (or his book) with corrections by the teacher.

In this article we will explore how Comenius developed his thinking about the teaching method of narration or the student becoming the teacher in The Analytical Didactic, which is really a section of a longer work (The Methodus) that he wrote much later in life. In The Analytical Didactic Comenius “reinterpreted the principle of nature that he had described in The Great Didactic as a principle of logic” (John E. Sadler, “John Amos Comenius” in Encyclopedia Britannica; accessed January, 2021). While his translator found in this a movement away from the fertile and imaginative quality of his first didactic (see the Introduction), my impression was of the bracing winds of truth blowing steadily through Comenius’ treatment of teaching method. Where some of Comenius’ insights seemed strained and overwrought in the analogies from nature in The Great Didactic, the crystal clarity of Comenius’ principles and applications in The Analytical Didactic leaves little that can be objected to. I encourage you to find a copy and read it yourself; it’s a book that I anticipate coming back to again and again.

Narration as Review and Examination

First of note in Comenius’ recommendations for what Charlotte Mason called narration is his focus on the importance of reviews and examinations. The whole passage that most concerns practitioners of narration comes at the end of The Analytical Didactic in a section on “how to teach rapidly, thoroughly, and agreeably” (171). His comments on review and examination reminded me of my own statements in A Classical Guide to Narration about how narration serves both as a method of assimilation and of assessment. In other words, when students narrate, they store what they are learning in long term memory, AND teachers learn what students know and don’t know.

Comenius begins by claiming that “the more anything is handled, the more familiar it becomes; consequently, if we would have our students well acquainted with anything and ready to use it, we must familiarize them with it through reviews, examinations, and frequent use” (191). He goes on to say that these “reviews and examinations” should occur “even during the process of learning”. Comenius reinforces the importance of continual review and testing through the analogy of a traveler becoming acquainted with a road through the process of going backward and forward on it, retracing his steps through narration, and then digressing along different alternate routes along the way (191-192).

Narration, Analysis and Practice

For Comenius, then, narration is not to be opposed to analytical discussion, but is complementary to it. He sums up the natural progression of learning, review and examination through three questions:

1. Has the student learned something? This will be apparent if he can repeat it.
2. Does he understand it? This will be discovered by a variety of analytical questions.
3. Does he know how to use it? This will be revealed by prescribed but unrehearsed practice. (191)

Narration is the first step in a process. This view finds expression in the Narration-Trivium lesson structure that I developed based on Charlotte Mason’s narration lesson for young children. By following up narration with dialectic or analytical discussion, teachers can help deepen students’ understanding from a bare recital to fuller comprehension. This functions like the digressions down alternate routes in Comenius’ analogy. Practice then corresponds, to some extent, to the rhetoric phase or response to the rich text.

The Student as Teacher

Comenius’ practical application of this principle involves the same ironic transformation of student into teacher that he advocated for in The Great Didactic:

We can do this by urging him not merely to pay constant heed to the demonstrations and explanations of the teacher but also to reverse the role and to demonstrate and explain the same subject to others; furthermore, he ought to see and hear others besides his teacher give these demonstrations and explanations. I must make my meaning clearer by quoting a set of verses well known in schools:

                        Often to ask, to retain what is answered, and teach what remembered,

                        These are three means that will make the disciple surpass his own master.

The third part of this advice, that about teaching what we have retained, is not sufficiently well known, nor is it commonly put into practice; yet it would be highly profitable if every student were required to teach others what he himself has just learned. Indeed, there is a great deal of truth in the saying, ‘He who teaches others educates himself,’ or, as Seneca puts it, ‘Men learn while they teach.’ This is so not merely because teaching strengthens their conceptions through repetition but also because it offers them opportunities of delving further into the subject. (See Sec. 85.) (191-192)

What Comenius adds to this discussion from his previous treatment is a new articulation of the value of teaching for deep learning. In claiming that the conceptions are strengthened through repetition, we are on the solid ground of what modern learning science calls retrieval practice. But in describing the “opportunities of delving further into the subject” we seem to add on to bare retrieval the value of elaboration or making further connections to what one already knows. Acting as the teacher doesn’t just store memories, it improves and develops insight or understanding.

Comenius then expresses this method as “a practical rule” to the effect that “every pupil should acquire the habit of also acting as a teacher” (193)—an idea that is both stunning in its simplicity and also revolutionary in terms of common teaching practice. Every student? Really? Acting as a teacher to the others? Adopting this practical rule would upend how most classrooms operate in terms of their daily practices. For the teacher who imagines that it can’t be done with any efficiency in time, remember that this passage is from Comenius’ section on rapidity and thoroughness in teaching and learning. He is not unaware of time constraints. His detailed method in the Analytical Didactic greatly resembles what he had previously shared in The Great Didactic:

This will happen if, after the teacher has fully demonstrated and expounded something, the pupil himself is immediately required to give a satisfactory demonstration and exposition of the same thing in the same manner. (If there are several pupils, they should do so one after another, beginning with the more talented.) Furthermore, pupils should be instructed to relate what they learn in school to their parents or servants at home or to anyone else capable of understanding such matters. (193)

Comenius again wants the students who are more likely to have understood correctly to give the first exposition, so as to avoid the wasted time and confusion likely to result from incorrection narrations. He adds the practical expediency of having students share their knowledge at home. Assigning students to narrate stories or explain concepts in detail to their parents is not an impossible homework assignment, but one that might further several purposes of the school, especially if a school has a strong vision for parental involvement and support like many classical Christian schools.

Rationale for Narration

Comenius’ reasons for this narration practice with repeated tellings of a teacher’s demonstration or explanation are more succinct than in The Great Didactic but express the same basic thoughts:

In the first place, pupils will be more attentive to every part of the teacher’s exposition if they know that presently they will have to repeat the same matter and if each one fears that perhaps he will be the first to be asked to do so. (See Sec. 86 above.)

Second, by restating exactly what he has been taught, everyone will imprint it more deeply in his understanding and memory.

Third, if it appears that something was not understood quite correctly, this practice will offer an immediate opportunity for correction (on the great value of this see Axiom XCVII).

Fourth, it will enable teachers and pupils to make certain that they have grasped what they were supposed to grasp, for the mark of knowledge is the ability to teach.

Fifth, such frequent repetition of the same material will bring it about that even the slowest pupils may finally grasp the subject. Thereby (sixth) everyone will make swifter and sounder progress in every respect.

And thus (seventh) every pupil will become a teacher, in some degree or other; consequently, the opportunities for multiplying knowledge will be mightily increased. (193-194)

Then it will be clear how apt is the playful remark of Fortius: ‘I learned much from my teachers, more from my fellow-students, but most from my pupils.’ Or, as someone else has said, ‘The more often we impart learning, the more learned we become.’ Therein lies our enduring pleasure.[1] (194)

Comenius expresses many of the same reasons for narration that have been endorsed by more recent proponents, like Charlotte Mason. Using narration as a regular practice habituates students to pay attention, because they know that they will be held accountable. It also “imprints” the content “more deeply” on the understanding or memory, thus functioning as assimilation. And then retrieval practice with immediate feedback or correction provides the most effective way to ensure true learning. While this may seem to disagree with some of Charlotte Mason’s statements, her concerns about over-correcting young children or those new to narration have probably been misunderstood. The “bracing atmosphere of sincerity and truth” that she advocated for seems in full agreement with Comenius here, even if she emphasized the infrequency of correction needed for students trained on narration over years.

Finally, Comenius’ universal vision for the increase of Christian learning spills into his pedagogical considerations, as he imagines an army of irenic students-become-teachers advancing the cause of knowledge into every sphere of life and fighting back against the ignorance and darkness of a fallen world. And this is not just a duty or a burden to be borne, it is in our learning that we experience “our enduring pleasure,” Comenius says with a wink as he ends his treatise. I cannot help but hear resonances with the flow experience and the joy of learning that I have explored at length in my book The Joy of Learning. For Comenius this method of learning through teaching is not just logical, reasonable, thoughtful and humane, it advances the cause of knowledge itself and brings delight.

[1] Comenius writes this sentence in German: “Und so bleibet man immer bey der lust.”

“Why the History of Narration Matters” series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 2: Classical Roots

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

Part 4: Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration in Historical Perspective

Expanding Narration’s History with Comenius: Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 2 – The Great Didactic

The post Expanding Narration’s History with Comenius: Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 2 – The Analytical Didactic appeared first on .

If you’ve been following Educational Renaissance for some time, you might remember my history of narration series from last year. During the third article of the series I had a short section on narration in John Amos Comenius’ work, relying primarily on Karen Glass’s brief quotations in Know and Tell. At the time I was only beginning to read Comenius’ The Great Didactic in full, and I had not yet procured his Analytical Didactic. Now I have read and digested both, coming away with more narration gems to add to the history. Even then I wrote that “more remains to be said on Comenius and narration,” and now I am excited to expand that section on Comenius into an article or two of its own.

Returning to this topic is timely for me because the week before last I trained both my own faculty at Coram Deo Academy, and the faculty of The Covenant School of Dallas (what a privilege!) using this stunning passage on narration from Comenius’ The Great Didactic. So the practical application of it in our modern classical schools is fresh on my mind.

The great Czech educational reformer, philosopher, pastor and theologian, John Amos Comenius, sometimes called the father of modern education, represents the next stage after Erasmus in the history of narration’s rebirth during the Renaissance and Reformation era. The opening statement of his stunning work on teaching methods, Didactica Magna or The Great Didactic, promises much in terms that are familiar to advocates of narration:

“Let the main object of this, our Didactic, be as follows : To seek and to find a method of instruction, by which teachers may teach less, but learners may learn more; by which schools may be the scene of less noise, aversion, and useless labour, but of more leisure, enjoyment, and solid progress; and through which the Christian community may have less darkness, perplexity, and dissension, but on the other hand more light, orderliness, peace, and rest.”

John Amos Comenius, preface to The Great Didactic

As I have noted before, activities like narration that turn students into active learners are more likely to produce flow, thereby attaining for the student both “enjoyment” and “solid progress”.

Charlotte Mason found in narration an ideal “method” for realizing Comenius’ golden key of education: teachers teaching less and learners learning more. Whether consciously or unconsciously, she likely drew some of the details of the practice itself from him (in addition to other sources like John Locke).

As well, Comenius’ profoundly irenic Christian vision of how Christian education might contribute to healing the immediate wounds of Christendom’s strife and divisions (like the Thirty Years War) accords well with Mason’s educational leadership and the classical Christian education movement’s high hopes for renewal in the church. Education is not just for the training of individual Christians, but for the benefits experienced in families, churches and communities.

Rivulets Flowing Out

Comenius’ use of narration has a number of unique features and a flexibility and philosophical completeness that is hard to find in other educational thinkers. Therefore, it is likely to him that we owe the fundamental shift from narration as a progymnasmata or preliminary training exercise for rhetoric to a central learning method or strategy. He states the principle in global terms, while at the same time practically endorsing modern techniques like partner-narration:

Whatever has been learned should be communicated by one pupil to the other, that no knowledge may remain unused. For in this sense only can we understand the saying, ‘Thy knowledge is of no avail if none other know that thou knowest.’ No source of knowledge, therefore, should be opened, unless rivulets flow from it.”

John Amos Comenius, The Great Didactic, “Thoroughness in Teaching and Learning”, 155

This entire section on thoroughness in teaching and learning is essentially a tribute to narration, or more particularly the classical principal identified by Chris Perrin of Classical Academic Press through the Latin phrase docendo discimus (“By teaching we learn”) in his course Introduction to Classical Education. (I wonder where Perrin himself derived this Latin phrase from…. Was it from Comenius or an earlier thinker in the tradition? Or is it a phrase he himself quipped to represent a traditional conception?) Similarly, I have often referred to the classical principle of self-education (see my SCL presentation from 2020), citing Charlotte Mason’s quip that there is no education but self-education and Dorothy Sayers’s remarks about students learning how to learn in “The Lost Tools of Learning”.

The imagery of a fount of knowledge, a spring, being opened up and rivulets naturally flowing out to surrounding streams is evocative. Comenius is claiming that knowledge must be shared; it is a communal inheritance passing from one mind to another. For him it is as if there were a sacred commandment inscribed into the nature of the cosmos that knowledge is no mere personal possession, but a social trust.

On its own this claim holds the teacher to a high standard with regard narration and narration-like activities. Not a single source of knowledge opened (!), Comenius says, without students at least telling one another what they have learned. And yet how much “material” is “covered” by the average teacher without an opportunity for the student to become the teacher, in this splendidly ironic transformation that Comenius envisions as part and parcel of learning.

Collection, Digestion and Distribution

Comenius solidly anticipates the modern research that supports retrieval practice, spaced practice and mixed practice, but he does so through his prevailing method throughout The Great Didactic of drawing analogical wisdom from the created order:

From this it follows that education cannot attain to thoroughness without frequent and suitable repetitions of and exercises on the subjects taught. We may learn the most suitable mode of procedure by observing the natural movements that underlie the processes of nutrition in living bodies, namely those of collection, digestion, and distribution. For in the case of an animal (and in that of a plant as well) each member seeks for digestion food which may both nurture that member (since this retains and assimilates part of the digested food) and be shared with the other members, that the well-being of the whole organism may be preserved (for each member serves the other). In the same way that teacher will greatly increase the value of his instruction who 

(i.) Seeks out and obtains intellectual food for himself.

(ii.) Assimilates and digests what he has found.

(iii.) Distributes what he has digested, and shares it with others. (156)

If we pair Comenius’ call for “frequent and suitable repetitions” of the subject matter with The Great Didactic’s opening principle of teachers teaching less and learners learning more, then it becomes clear that by repetitions he is not envisioning a simply review process where the teacher goes over the facts again before a test. Instead, it is the students who will be repeating the content back, and as becomes clear later in the passage, not just in summary, but in full detail.

At first, the analogy from nature about the collection, digestion and distribution of “intellectual food” may seem to have awkwardly shifted topics. Now we are talking about the teacher grazing for knowledge himself? But in the following paragraphs Comenius will zero in on that third part, distribution, to detail his full method of narration. In the meantime, we can note that Charlotte Mason’s favorite metaphor about the mind feeding on living ideas is not, in fact, of her own coinage. For Comenius too there is a process of assimilation of knowledge that involves narration. But he stresses it as a communal endeavor, with teachers serving as the honeybees gathering sweet pollen for the production of honey and distribution to the younger members. Charlotte Mason, by contrast, is more inclined to minimize the collection and digestion process of the teacher (though she did write a stirring appeal to her ‘bairns’ encouraging them to foster their own intellectual life through avid reading), in keeping with her own focus upon the “living books” curriculum that she herself carefully selected.

But this contrast between Mason and Comenius could be overplayed, given Comenius’ ironic twist of the student becoming the teacher. So while teachers themselves should engage in the collection, digestion and distribution of knowledge, Comenius immediately shifts this application to the student-become-teacher through recourse to a well-known Latin couplet:

44. These three elements are to be found in the well-known Latin couplet:–

To ask many questions, to retain the answers, and to teach what one retains to others;

These three enable the pupil to surpass his master.

Questioning takes place when a pupil interrogates his teachers, his companions, or his books about some subject that he does not understand. Retention follows when the information that has been obtained is committed to memory or is written down for greater security (since few are so fortunate as to possess the power of retaining everything in their minds). Teaching takes place when knowledge that has been acquired is communicated to fellow-pupils or other companions.

With the two first of these principles the schools are quite familiar, with the third but little; its introduction, however, is in the highest degree desirable. The saying, ‘He who teaches others, teaches himself,’ is very true, not only because constant repetition impresses a fact indelibly on the mind, but because the process of teaching in itself gives a deeper insight into the subject taught. Thus it was that the gifted Joachim Fortius used to say that, if he had heard or read anything once, it slipped out of his memory within a month; but that if he taught it to others it became as much a part of himself as his fingers, and that he did not believe that anything short of death could deprive him of it…. (157)

Comenius’ main point is the incredible power of teaching others as a learning tool. Where Comenius has recourse to the anecdote of Joachim Fortius for support, modern research can confirm through studies the value of retrieval practice combined with the elaboration necessary for the act of teaching. This effortful combination of research-informed strategies essentially makes for the most durable and flexible learning, such that the new knowledge has become part of oneself.

Repeated Narrations of the Teacher’s Explanations with Corrections

This brings us to Comenius’ specific recommendations for narration, which are unmistakably surprising to those who are only familiar with Charlotte Mason’s advice. Note as we go the focus on the teacher’s lecture or explanation (just as with Erasmus), but also the repetitions and corrections. (We can observe as well that Comenius does not have our modern scruples about politically correct descriptions of students who struggle….)

This would certainly be of use to many and could easily be put into practice if the teacher of each class would introduce this excellent system to his pupils. It might be done in the following way. In each lesson, after the teacher has briefly gone through the work that has been prepared, and has explained the meanings of the words, one of the pupils should be allowed to rise from his place and repeat what has just been said in the same order (just as if he were the teacher of the rest), to give his explanations in the same words, and to employ the same examples, and if he make a mistake he should be corrected. Then another can be called up and made go through the same performance while the rest listen. After him a third, a fourth, and as many as are necessary, until it is evident that all have understood the lesson and are in a position to explain it. In carrying this out great care should be taken to call up the clever boys first, in order that, after their example, stupid ones may find it easier to follow. (158)

The teacher’s explanation here becomes the rich or living text, complete with examples in a particular order. The students are transformed into teachers, endeavoring to reproduce as exactly as they can the full substance of the teacher’s explanation. To make clear that he intends this as a global practice or central learning strategy, Comenius deliberately begins his description of the method with the phrase “in each lesson”. Instead of avoiding corrections during the narration, as Mason recommended, Comenius has the teacher actively correcting and expecting other students to get all the details right in subsequent narrations. While this is clearly not a word-perfect memorization, it edges in that direction and away from Mason’s insistence on a single reading and letting the students take what they do but trusting the process over time.

Interestingly, in commending the “exercises” and “repetitions” of narration, Comenius hits upon a few of the same rationales that Mason would later borrow to commend her practice of narration (e.g., the habit of attention; supporting “dull” students, to use Mason’s term; the love of learning; and self-possession in public speaking):

46. Exercises of this kind will have a fivefold use.

(i.) The teacher is certain to have attentive pupils. For since the scholars may, at any time, be called up and asked to repeat what the teacher has said, each of them will be afraid of breaking down and appearing ridiculous before the others, and will therefore attend carefully and allow nothing to escape them. In addition to this, the habit of brisk attention, which becomes second nature if practised for several years, will fit the scholar to acquit himself well in active life.

(ii.) The teacher will be able to know with certainty if his pupils have thoroughly grasped everything that he has taught them. If he finds that they have not, he will consult his own interest as well as that of his pupils by repeating his explanation and making it clearer.

(iii.) If the same thing be frequently repeated, the dullest intelligences will grasp it at last, and will thus be able to keep pace with the others; while the brighter ones will be pleased at obtaining such a thorough grip of the subject.

(iv.) By means of such constant repetition the scholars will gain a better acquaintance with the subject than they could possibly obtain by private study, even with the greatest intelligence, and will find that, if they just read the lesson over in the morning and then again in the evening, it will remain in their memories easily and pleasantly. When, by this method of repetition, the pupil has, as it were, been admitted to the office of teacher, he will attain a peculiar keenness of disposition and love of learning; he will also acquire the habit of remaining self-possessed while explaining anything before a number of people, and this will be of the greatest use to him throughout life.” (158)

Comenius is happy to use social pressure as a motivator to improve students’ learning, especially since he has abandoned the widely accepted corporal punishment of his day. Students’ natural desire not to appear “ridiculous” before their peers is arguably a more powerful and immediate spur to the effort of learning than an abstract symbol system like a grade. And while not wanting to seem foolish may not be the highest of ideals it does go some way toward creating a culture of learning among human beings as socially embedded and embodied creatures.

It is clarifying to hear Comenius indicate “several years” as the appropriate timeline for training students in this habit of “brisk attention” that will fit them for an “active life”. Likewise, the help afforded the teacher through opportunities to clarify and re-explain accords well with the real challenges of communicating effectively to students. Comenius gives every indication of having practiced what he is preaching, discerning the ins and outs of teaching and learning through philosophical reflection and practical experience.

As with Erasmus, it may be that the teacher is here supplementing or acting as the mediator between the students and the curriculum books. We might imagine a generally older set of students than Mason envisions, but he is undeniably more focused on the teacher as the initial distributor of knowledge. The repetitions seem designed to help students understand hard truths or difficult and complex ideas that are not easily grasped on a first hearing. Corrections, then, might be justified as a necessary safeguard to prevent students from confusing one another with incorrect explanations. We might ponder as well whether Mason’s advice not to “tease [young students] with corrections” focused more upon style and grammar, i.e. not attacking the endless string of ‘and’s that children often start out with. Perhaps she would have sympathized with corrections on matters of fact, when other students might become confused by another student’s misleading explanation.

As stated, Comenius’ variant on narration embodies the golden key of his Great Didactic by turning the student into the teacher after a teacher’s “demonstration” or “exposition”. It thus follows Erasmus in focusing on a spoken lecture or explanation by the teacher rather than a text. The new development present in Comenius is to emphasize the ironic transformation of student into teacher. In a future article we will look at material from Comenius’ Analytical Didactic to see how he developed his recommendations for narration later in life.

“Why the History of Narration Matters” series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 2: Classical Roots

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

Part 4: Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration in Historical Perspective

The post Expanding Narration’s History with Comenius: Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 2 – The Great Didactic appeared first on .

One of the best aspects of conventions is the opportunity to meet new people and deepen old friendships. The Symposium began with guests arriving and mingling with one another over coffee.

Emma Foss, music teacher at Coram Deo Academy, let a time of worship to kick off the event. She structured the time of worship around Paul’s triad expressed in Colossians 3:16 to “sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.”

The first keynote address entitled “Cultivating the Joy of Learning in the Classical Classroom” was given by Jason Barney. He developed his thinking about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow. He based many of his thoughts on his book The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow through Classical Education, but also extended his thinking to apply flow in practical ways.

Participants could choose topics in the first breakout session, with tracks catering to teachers or school leaders. After a catered lunch, Patrick Egan presented the second keynote address on “Cultivating Virtue through Habit Training.” He connected the dots between Aristotle’s conviction that virtues are cultivated through habits, the biblical mandate to “train up a child in the way he should go” (Prov. 22:6), and Charlotte Mason’s method of habit training.

A second breakout and guided discussion session preceded the final event; a panel discussion with all three Educational Renaissance authors moderated by David Seibel, Head of School at Coram Deo Academy. It was a discussion about discussion-based learning. The group differentiated discussions from other methods of learning and considered some practical applications for different grade levels and subject areas.

We are grateful for all the participants in this inaugural event. The staff at Coram Deo Academy did an excellent job hosting the event. We look forward to next year’s event. Stay tuned for further information about the date and location for the Educational Renaissance Symposium 2022.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teach Like a Champion 2.0, 6-7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Duhigg explains,

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

Smarter Faster Better, 118

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ericsson and Pool, Peak, 105

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

The Blessings of Bloom’s 3: Objectives Foster Flow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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These are longer block quotes that will whet your appetite for exploring old articles you may have missed. If you’re new to Educational Renaissance (as many of you are), think of this as a cliff notes guide to some of the core ideas in education we’ve been recovering during these past 6 months. The longer format of these quotations gives our authors a chance to develop an idea more fully than the memorable maxims of last year.

If you missed our Summer Conference Edition article, check that out, especially if you’re new, for some updates on where Educational Renaissance has been and where we’re going. Hope you enjoy these quotable quotes!

Quote 1:

“The Roman world is one we can readily recognize because it contains so many of the trappings of our day. How many students moaned to go to school (ludum) because it meant they couldn’t play games (ludos)? What a peculiar word, then, to describe these two seemingly dichotomous things? Unless, of course, the word itself reveals that “school” and “game” are not after all dichotomous. If school is actually a place to play, and play is a place of learning, maybe the word ludus reveals something we are prone to miss about the reality of education.”

-From School Is a Game: Finite and Infinite Games in Education

Quote 2:

“A sense of piety, of duty or obligation to one’s family, city, culture and the divine, would properly recognize the individual as coming into the world dependent and situated within the broader story of the culture, within which the family and individual find their place. This contrasts sharply with the quest for “self-discovery among a buffet of potential selves” that characterizes modern individualism (Clark and Jain 22).”

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians

Quote 3:

“As Charlotte Mason observed, there is nothing quite like the experience of being struck by an idea. The experience is equivalent to being the recipient of some unexpected treasure. Ideas loosen our grip on holding a thin view of the world. They open our minds, especially through narration, to connections previously gone undetected and stir our imaginations to explore further up and further in. Ideas light the fire beneath us to learn, search, and discover.”

-From Charlotte Mason and the Power of Ideas

Quote 4:

“The hardest part of writing is staring at a blank page. The biggest hurdle is putting pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard. Making the cursor move forward is a major victory. What is it that keeps us from starting? It is the internal editor. Before we’ve even begun writing, our internal editor is already criticizing our work.”

-From The Writing Process: Sentences, Paragraphs, Edit, Repeat

Quote 5:

“The first step in recovering the love of science is to strip away the sense of impersonal system hanging about it. One of the reasons we tend to discount the idea of being an amateur scientist—engaging in the work of science simply for the love of it (amateur coming from the Latin word for ‘love)—is because of science being conceived as an impersonal system for determining objective truth.”

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 7: Recovering Science as the Love of Wisdom

Quote 6:

“Children are not be treated as mere cattle on a farm or products on an assembly line. They enter this world with immense potential to think, create, explore, write, observe, perform, analyze, and more. As a result, the sort of work we give children to do in the classroom ought to activate and strengthen these capacities to the limits of each child’s potential.”

-From Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition, Part 1: Mapping a Harmony

Quote 7:

“The satisfaction and joy of understanding is a profound experience, but it only comes after time spent in deep work. Waitzkin expresses the concept of deliberate practice as “numbers to leave numbers.” When we are confronted with highly technical information, it needs to be assimilated in such a way that it becomes integrated into our intuition…. A concert pianist doesn’t think about scales and arpeggios while performing on stage. This would detract from her expression. What we can assume when watching a virtuosic performance is that hours upon hours have been spent internalizing scale patterns so that the finger patters are simply part of her being. There is no thought of scales or of fingerings, simply of music. She has studied scales to leave scales, which is what Waitzkin is expressing here.”

-From The Art of Learning: Four Principles from Josh Waitzkin’s Book

Quote 8:

“Christ’s yoke may be easy and his burden light to the one who has taken it on himself (see Matt 11:30), but this is only so for the one who has taken up his cross to follow the master to the place of his own brutal execution. Even for Socrates, the love of wisdom was a “practice of death” (Phaedo 81a). So perhaps I should rather urge you to read philosophy not for flow and pleasure, but for pain and death, and because you must, not because you will want to. Such is the minimum commitment necessary of one who would be a philosopher-teacher.”

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 8: Restoring the School of Philosophers

Quote 9:

“So if one central aspect of classical education is the cultivation of the life of the mind, Charlotte couldn’t agree more. Her insistence that children read from a broad and liberal curriculum fits right in with the broader liberal arts tradition. In particular, her recommended practices of narration, transcription, dictation, and recitation all cultivate a healthy intellectual life for the child, regardless of upbringing, social class, or ability.”

-From Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition, Part 2: Educating the Whole Person

Quote 10:

“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.”

-From The Flow of Thought, Part 9: The Lifelong Love of Learning

Quote 11:

“This calling is found in scripture, for example, when the apostle Paul instructs fathers in the Ephesian church to bring up their children “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4 ESV). Discipline, or training, requires dedicated effort and intentionality on the part of both parent and child. It does not come by accident. And effective instruction, the meeting of minds around wisdom and knowledge, requires the instructor “to know that which he would teach,” as educator John Milton Gregory put it in The Seven Laws of Teaching (26). Most importantly, the discipline and instruction Paul refers to is to be “of the Lord,” that is, God-centered and in line with scripture.”

-From Cultivating and Community: Wisdom for Parents Educating at Home Amidst the Present Crisis

Quote 12:

“An infectious disease causes a pandemic that decimates the major urban centers in northern Italy. Doctors are recognized by their masks. The economy is disrupted through the loss of a workforce. The social order is overturned. Many turn to religion as a response to the pandemic, yet dogmatic norms are questioned.”

-From The Black Plague and an Educational Renaissance

Quote 13:

“If you’re looking to “optimize” the effectiveness of your teaching, focusing on forming relational connections with students is ironically one of the best investments. Students are eager to learn from a teacher they trust and admire; even the best students struggle to learn well from a cold and distant instructor.”

-From The Benefits and Drawbacks of Online Learning: 6 Hacks to Mitigate the Drawbacks

Quote 14:

“Curiosity is content without certainty and knowing all the answers. It is not concerned with saying the right thing or knowing ahead of time how people will react. Instead it remains focused on rumbling with vulnerability, embracing the unknown, and pursuing further knowledge in order to lead most effectively.”

-From The Importance of Courage and Curiosity for School Leaders Today

Quote 15:

“So what does it mean when I say life occurs in our classrooms? For one, it means that our students are whole persons. We are not just interacting with our students’ minds. Students are also emotional, social and spiritual creatures, just like we are. All dimensions of their personhood come into the classroom. All dimensions of their personhood are being trained and cultivated.”

-From Education Is Life: A Philosophy on Education

Quote 16:

“This holistic vision of a wisdom education in the vein of Proverbs requires much of the teacher. In classical education, likewise, the teacher must be a magister of the arts, a sage, a philosopher; must be a participant in the Wisdom that comes from above. Only then can the teacher cultivate wisdom in the young and simple. Only then will the teacher wisely order techniques, practices and assessments to the right ends.”

-From The Problem of Technicism in Conventional Education

Quote 17:

“As we think about nurturing confident faith in our youngest children, we must not begin with lofty arguments, but instead, the very best stories. These stories will shape the moral imaginations of students, filling their souls with a rich feast of ideas, characters, stories, poems, and fables.”

-From Teaching Confident Faith in an Age of Religious Uncertainty

Quote 18:

“So, what is the future of habit training? As we explored habit training in an online distance learning environment, we saw that the heart of the method hasn’t changed. My prediction is that habit training will remain the same. The method I have outlined here was essentially the same in Charlotte Mason’s time, and look how many technological and cultural shifts have occurred since the early 1900s when she wrote her six-volume philosophy of education. What this means is that investing in this method even now will reap benefits in your life as a teacher for years to come.”

-From Habit Training During Online Distance Learning

Quote 19:

“The only lasting solution to scientism in education is ultimately an entire Renaissance project in which we return ad fontēs (“to the sources”) in an effort not simply to generalize a definition of what classical education is, but to distinguish between the different visions and practices of the multifaceted tradition. In so doing we will have to be prepared to not like everything we see; we may be forced to engage in some negative judgments on some aspects of the tradition, even as we are inspired and challenged by others.”

-From The Problem of Scientism in Conventional Education

Quote 20:

“One aspect of the joy of learning is addressing this concept of humility. As human beings, we are limited, frail and fallible. Frequently we attempt to cover this up, to hide what we truly are behind the smoke and mirrors of our expertise and accomplishments. True human growth, though, only occurs when we uncover our true nature and deal with it. As an individual confronts an area of lack, there is a transformation that can occur, whereby something about us becomes strengthened.”

-From Summertime, and the Learning is Easy

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