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

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

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

Situating Techne as Traditions in Place and Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Fivefold Division of the Arts

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

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

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

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Common Arts Education and the Professions and Trades

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later articles:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloom’s Scientism: Objectivity and Measurability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Sciences vs. Moral Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, scientism is the trend in the social sciences, like the field of education, to conform to the pattern of the wildly successful hard sciences by proving themselves through data and pure reason alone. If we can prove it through an experiment and logic without appealing to any traditional belief, then we will accept it as true.

Educational schools have become labs, where white-coated practitioners test the latest theories on the millions of children scattered in their suburban and inner-city habitats across America. The best teachers read the educational journals and carefully follow the latest research on how to most effectively manipulate the environments of their subjects in order to attain society’s desired ends. Scientism listens to evidence and data, not to history or philosophy.

Why Scientism Is a Problem

Scientism is a problem because the field of education is not a hard science, but a branch of moral philosophy, scientia mōrālis. Every philosophy of education necessarily relies on a previously established account of what it means to be human. And yet, as Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain document in The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education 2.0:

“The methodologies of the contemporary social sciences implicitly critique traditional moral philosophy by suggesting it relies on assumptions about human nature and human purpose that are not rationally or empirically verifiable…. In actuality… all reasoning in the social sciences depends on a tradition of inquiry, whether Christian, Freudian, or Lockean, as well as personal and communal judgments and assumptions about the nature and purpose of human persons.” (132)

But scientism screens out such foundational questions about man, the good life, and ultimate purpose, in an attempt to be more precise—or precise in a different way—than the subject matter admits of (cf. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics I.3, 1094^b12-15).

In so doing, it does not actually attain a neutral, “objective” viewpoint; instead, half-baked philosophies and unexamined assumptions rush back in, as seven demons take the place of the one that was exorcised. Scientism promises us firmer knowledge, not swayed to and fro by the winds of history and the waves of philosophy, but in reality it delivers only ignorance of how we are recycling old ideas by recasting them into new, scientific-looking forms.

For example, Paul Hirst, an educationist of the last generation, popularized a view of “seven forms of knowledge” that was essentially an unacknowledged recycling of Isocrates’ vision of the seven liberal arts. One scholar has documented Hirst’s grave historical inaccuracies in his account of the history of education—all the more disturbing because of the work’s placement in a standard encyclopedia!

James Muir writes,

“Hirst’s ‘history’ of liberal education, though found in a standard reference work, is inaccurate to a degree that it is difficult to exaggerate, and it is now imperative that this article be replaced by an historically informed discussion.”[1]

Unfortunately, this lone voice has not been heeded. Why? Because almost no scholars in education departments are engaged in any meaningful way with the history of educational philosophy.

(Enjoying this article? Read its twin, The Problem of Technicism in Conventional Education.)

The Classical Contrast to Scientism

The classical education movement, at its best, is a way of saying “No!” to the scientism of conventional education, and saying “Yes!” to the rich tradition of philosophical thinking in our past. Being willing to look to the past rather than merely to the lab of educational researchers is a great gain.

Unfortunately, in our recovery movement’s first feeble steps in this direction, we have sometimes fallen into the same pitfalls as Paul Hirst, who attributed a doctrinal abstraction of his own invention (‘classical realism’) to a historical abstraction (‘the Greeks’) without any evidence from their actual writings: “There is little resemblance between the ideas which Hirst attributes to ‘the Greeks,’ and the educational ideas any of them actually held,” Muir points out.[2]

How often have we heard or promulgated similar doctrinal and historical abstractions in our stump speeches on the value of classical education?

To the extent that we attribute our educational ideas to the Greeks and Romans or even to the medievals without the hard, historical work of recovering what Isocrates or Aquinas actually wrote, we may be unwittingly participating in the scientism of our day.

Please do not misunderstand. We may need to use such abstractions and generalizations for heuristic purposes: for instance, an informational meeting for those interested in classical education probably shouldn’t be citing Isocrates, Plato and Quintilian, and distinguishing between their very different philosophies of education! There are times for making a careful contrast between the trends of modern educational practices and those of earlier eras.

However, if in our books, conferences and blogs we do not rise to a higher standard of historical accuracy, then I am afraid, even the classical education movement will be doomed to suffer the repeated recycling of old ideas only partially rediscovered.

Avoiding Scientism in our Classical Recovery Movement

Arguably we have made great strides in this direction in the successive waves of the classical education movement. Clark and Jain, authors of The Liberal Arts Tradition are to be commended for, among other things, their substantive and rigorous research to lay out a paradigm that is based on historical and philosophical analysis of the tradition. No end of commendations and endorsements are due for such a crucial foundation stone for our growing movement (especially the expanded and revised version 2.0). However, their primary goal is still to recover a generalization of the tradition, even if they land at different authors, times and places for various aspects of it.

What about a careful analysis of the practices and philosophy of educational philosophers and practitioners, in the context of their time and place, one author at a time? We have been so concerned with defining what classical education is monolithically that we tend to omit the obvious truth: there have been many classical educations, practiced very differently in various times and places.

A generalization of the tradition is a helpful thing, but it is only as good as the data from which the generalization comes. In other words, our generalizations about classical education rely on our detailed knowledge about specific expressions of classical education. The only way to get a Liberal Arts Tradition 3.0 is to first write a series of books exploring the differences and disagreements in the tradition. (Classical Academic Press has started in this direction with their Giants in the History of Education Series, but these short books are mostly meant to serve as basic introductions and contain little of the detailed historical and comparative analysis I am talking about.)

The only lasting solution to scienticism 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.

This would be all well and good and would probably have the positive side effect of making our commendations more winsome to a wider audience. I have known quite a few educators and parents who are slightly put off by some of the overly idealistic and sweeping rhetoric of classical education advocates. They, at least, might be more inclined to take a renaissance movement seriously that was more historically nuanced.

Likewise, we will have to give the devil his due: it’s not as if modern educational research has nothing of value, when burgeoning new disciplines like cognitive psychology and mind, brain and education (MBE) science are taking advantage of legitimate advances in neuroimaging and our understanding of the brain. (I owe my awareness of MBE primarily to Neuroteach: Brain Science and the Future of Education by Glenn Whitman and Ian Kelleher.) In so far as such insights reflect true developments in our understanding of human nature as created by God, we should expect to be able to integrate them with the best ideals and practices of the classical tradition.

This is why at Educational Renaissance we are committed to interacting in a meaningful way with sources of educational wisdom, both ancient and modern. Quoting from Aristotle and Charlotte Mason, Quintilian and John Locke helps keep us honest about what we’re talking about at any one time and avoid the sweeping generalizations so common in our world. Integrating their ideas with those of modern research, while being open to challenging either side, provides both a confirmation of their value and a translation for modern ears.

The Renaissance Solution to Scientism

What I’m calling for in education is something analogous to the Renaissance itself: a recovery of ancient sources of wisdom alongside a host of new advancements in science and technology, art and literature.

Cicero’s famous dictum applies to the classical education movement as a whole: “Nescīre autem quid antequam nātus sīs acciderit, id est semper esse puerum” (“However, not to know what happened before you were born, that is to be always a boy”). To grow up into mature manhood, we must know the history of educational ideas, not in word or in name, but in action and in truth.

This realization should be liberating and exciting, rather than leading us into the despair of what we do not yet know. Hindsight is 20/20 and we have the God-given glory of kings to enable us to surpass our forefathers, should we seriously take on the endeavor of historical inquiry. To use the common analogy, standing on the shoulders of giants can enable us to see further than they did, even if our stature does not match theirs. This is not an encouragement to hubris, but an acknowledgement of our high calling.

As Hamlet said,

“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world.” (II.2)

It is this Christian humanist vision of humanity in all its glory and possibility that supercharged the work of the Renaissance, and it can function similarly in the educational renaissance we are promoting today.

A great path of discovery lies before us, and after all, Rome was not built in a day. In fact, the recovery process must take time, if only because there is so much educational philosophy to recover. We should ask ourselves the encouraging question of possibility, “How might our schools grow, if we devoted ourselves fully to learning the history of educational philosophy, rather than the watered-down summaries of scientism?” I, for one, hope to find out.

[1] James R. Muir, “The History of Educational Ideas and the Credibility of Philosophy of Education,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 30, no. 1 (1998): 15.

[2] Ibid., 17-18.

Nota Bene: An earlier version of this article appeared on Forma: The Blog of the CiRCE Institute, February 2015, under the same title: https://www.circeinstitute.org/blog/problem-scientism-conventional-education.

Like this article? Read its twin, The Problem of Technicism in Conventional Education.

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In my first blog in this series, I began exploring this question through a close reading of Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education. In this book, Clark and Jain offer a paradigm for understanding classical education as it exists within the broader liberal arts tradition. According to these thinkers, the purpose of classical education is to cultivate virtue in body, heart, and mind, while nurturing a love for wisdom under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

This is a comprehensive purpose statement to say the least. It intentionally steers clear of several pitfalls, many of which modern education notably falls into. For example, it conceives of human beings holistically as embodied minds, hearts, and souls. This is a refreshingly biblical anthropology in contrast to naturalistic materialism on the one hand and dualistic platonism on the other. While naturalistic materialism fails to take seriously the immaterial components of a person, such as the soul, dualistic platonism makes the equal but opposite mistake of maligning the body in favor of some transcendent immaterial reality.

Another advantage of this purpose statement is that it rightly identifies the cultivation of virtue as a central aim in the educational endeavor as opposed to mere information transfer or workplace preparation. We live in a world today that is driven by hyper-efficiency and economic productivity, which has its benefits, but all too often has led to corruption, corporate scandal, and, over time, moral decay.

Finally, this statement underscores that nurturing a genuine love for wisdom–practical knowledge geared toward moral and upright living–is fundamental for what philosophers call the good life. Life is a complex journey, full of ups and downs, and it often demands hard decisions of its pilgrims. Students need all the wisdom they can gain in order to make this journey successfully.

To help educators follow and fulfill the purpose of classical education, in this blog, I want to hone in on three specific elements of a Charlotte Mason education that will aide them along the way. The three elements are:

1. A Broad and Liberal Curriculum 
2. Shaping the Affections
3. Habitudes of the Body

Together these three elements illustrate that Charlotte Mason can and should be properly situated within the liberal arts tradition as a proponent for educating the whole person.

A Broad and Liberal Curriculum

One of the hallmarks of a classical education is that it is “liberal,” that is, geared toward cultivating a rich intellectual life. In the Greco-Roman world, elite members of society were often provided a liberal education with the expectation that they would need to think, behave, and govern their estate or province in a virtuous and effective manner. A liberal education can be contrasted with one geared toward vocational training, that is, the practical know-how for doing a particular job. In our modern context, examples may include electric wiring or HVAC. Of course, this work is essential for society to function today. I don’t have a problem with electricians or HVAC technicians; if I did, I’m not sure how long I would make it through these midwestern winters! 

In Charlotte Mason’s day, the choice between liberal education and vocational training was pressing. There remained discernible class distinctions in society, but the industrial revolution opened the door for more children to be educated than ever before. The question thus became: which form of education would they receive? A liberal education or vocational one?

Charlotte Mason was convinced that all children could learn, regardless of social class or ability, and therefore insisted on providing the most intellectually nourishing education available. Interestingly, her conviction was not merely theoretical; it was tested through time and experience. In her preface to her six-volume series on education, Mason writes, “Eight years ago the ‘soul’ of a class of children in a mining village school awoke simultaneously at this magic touch [of knowledge] and has remained awake…. It may be that the souls of children are waiting for the call of knowledge to awaken them to delightful living” (Preface, xxv). The British educator had seen first hand that even children of the working class, which were often prejudiced against as intellectually sub-par, could find their minds awakened through a liberal form of education geared toward serving its students pure and unadulterated knowledge and fostering intellectual vitality.

What is the essence of a liberal education? According to Charlotte Mason, a broad curriculum composed of the best books, art, music, science, and history available. In her chapter on the three instruments of education, she concludes,

“All roads lead to Rome, and all I have said is meant to enforce the fact that much and varied humane reading, as well as human thought expressed in the forms of art, is not a luxury, a tit-bit, to be given children now and then, but their very bread of life, which they must have in abundant portions and at regular periods. This and more is implied in the phrase, ‘The mind feeds on ideas therefore children should have a generous curriculum’.”(Towards a Philosophy of Education, 92)

Here Mason is adamant that “humane reading,” that is, books pertaining to the humanities such as literature and history, are not add-ons to the curriculum, but the very “bread of life” for a child’s education. These books, especially living books full of ideas, provide the sustenance for a rich intellectual life. And while vocational training is certainly of value, it does not provide students with the tools for a vibrant intellectual life.

In the classical tradition, a student read and discussed some of the books Mason has in mind as part of their broader trivium training, the language arts of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. In addition, they would receive training in the quadrivium, which were the numerical arts. Together, the seven liberal arts equipped students to pursue scientia (knowledge) of the three major domains of knowledge–God, humanity, and nature. Following this tradition, Mason goes on to explain her curricular program in terms of this three-fold division.

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.

Shaping the Affections

Classical education is not only focused on cultivating the mind, however. As I explained in my first blog in this series, a particularly important element of education in the liberal arts tradition is tuning the heart to desire, that is, long for, what is good, true, and beautiful. Clark and Jain identify this as “musical education,” which is not to be confused with the modern subject of music related exclusively to instrumentation and singing. A student that possesses head knowledge but has no joy or love for what she has learned is missing the mark. Rather, her educators are missing the mark. When this happens, the very future of what it means to be human is at stake. 

At least, that’s what C.S. Lewis thought. In The Abolition of Man, the “abolition” Lewis speaks of with regards to humanity occurs when the affective element of education is lost. When education is reduced to either scientific analysis or subjective interpretation, the awareness of objective morals and values deteriorates. Knowledge either becomes exclusively scientific, pushing moral claims to the margins, or subjective, rendering value judgments as relative to the individual. What’s left is a race of humanoid imposters, inhabiting the earth with swelled heads and diminished chests.

In order to avoid this pitfall which Lewis believed the modern world had fallen into, education must have an affective impulse. That is, it must seek to shape the desires, intuitions, and moral imagination of the student. It must lead her into joyful engagement with reality and form value judgments about what is objectively true, good, and beautiful. 

Charlotte Mason sought to do precisely this through the various “studies” her students engaged in during their lessons. For example, Picture Study was an opportunity for students to discern and appreciate pictorial beauty in such a way that would stir their very hearts. Mason writes, “It is of the spirit, and in ways of spirit must we make our attempts” (Towards a Philosophy of Education, 214). Her students would gather around a piece of art together, study it intensively, tell back in detail, and share inspiring ideas about it. And to be clear, the task of appreciating beauty was not an optional activity in Charlotte Mason’s mind, nor was it rendered to the realm of subjective feeling. She writes in the fourth volume in her series, “Here again, I would urge that appreciation is not a voluntary offering, but a debt we owe, and a debt we must acquire the means to pay by patient and humble study” (Ourselves, Volume I, 103). In other words, the objective beauty manifested in art demands something of us morally. Children must therefore be exposed to this beauty, study it intently, and let it stir the affections for a second course.

The same is true for fables and poetry. Charlotte Mason writes, “A child gets moral notions from the fairy-tales he delights in, as do his elders from tale and verse…. Most of us carry in our minds tags of verse which shape our conduct more than we know” (Ourselves, Volume II, 10). Through the reading and reciting of poetry, the minds of students take in certain ideas and reject others. Parents and teachers need to be conscious of the tales and poetry they read children, and see the vast potential they have to form the moral imaginations and intuitions from a young age.

Finally, just as beautiful art, fables, and poetry have the capacity to shape the affections, so does music. Educators today tend to divide children pretty early on as musical and non-musical. Either the child has rhythm or she doesn’t. Or we ask her at far too young of an age, “Do you enjoy music? Would you like to study it?” As if a small child of five can make such a weighty decision! But Charlotte Mason was insistent that music appreciation no more requires the ability to play an instrument than Shakespeare appreciation requires the ability to act (Towards A Philosophy of Education, 218). 

The key to cultivating an affection for musical beauty is to present lavish amounts of it before children, give them tools for understanding its various forms, and exhort them to listen attentively to the beauty of the ear. For as Charlotte Mason puts it, “Many great men have put their beautiful thoughts, not into books, or pictures, or buildings, but into musical scores…” (Ourselves, Book I, 34). When the practice of listening to beautiful music occurs regularly and with due attention, the hearts of students are shaped to know, identify, appreciate, and grow an affinity for it. 

Habitudes of the Body

So far I have shown how deeply Charlotte Mason cared for the mind and heart of her students, but how about the body? An education that addresses the whole person will certainly take into account the physical component. This rings true in classical education. Clark and Jain provide a helpful glimpse of physical education in the liberal arts tradition through what they call gymnastic education. 

Gymnastic education focuses on cultivating inherent physical abilities in humans such as strength and dexterity. Jason writes, “In ancient Greece the gymnasium for adults (or the palaestra for youth) was a set of public buildings devoted to physical exercises and contests.” It was here that students came to educate the part of themselves that was uniquely physical. This is such a crucial component of classical education and it is a travesty when it is neglected, not least because physicality is part of God’s good creation. And it will be part of the new creation as well. Let me say just a bit more about this theological notion.

God did not create humans as embodied creatures accidentally or temporarily. Scripture is clear that in the eschaton a new heaven and new earth will arrive to replace the old heaven and old earth (see Revelation 21). This new earth will consist of an earthly city, complete with physical roads, gates, walls, and a golden street. This city will be inhabited by saints with resurrected bodies and ruled by a resurrected King. So if physicality is not inherently evil or temporary, but a gracious gift of God that is a component of what it means to be human, then we need to take special care to cultivate the inherent abilities in our physical bodies. Here’s where Charlotte Mason’s emphasis on habit comes in.

Charlotte Mason taught that education is a discipline and here she means the discipline of habit. As humans, we do not make every decision or perform every action at the conscious bidding of the will. Instead, our brains catch on to repeated behaviors over time and offload these behaviors from will to habit. Eventually, through practice, these actions become second nature to us. 

A great example of habit on peak display in my own life is my ability to effortlessly drink water from a glass cup (impressive, right?). I don’t (fully) consciously perform the complex physiological maneuver of extending my arm, closing my hands around the cup, bringing it to my lips, opening my mouth, and swallowing. Through time and experience, it has become habit. Charlotte Mason taught that habits, when trained properly, function as rails for the good life. There are habits of mind, such as attention, habits of heart, such as kindness, habits of soul, such as reverence, and habits of body. 

Habits of body can range from sitting up straight in a chair to holding the pencil correctly to doing neat work on a page. In other words, the training of physical habits doesn’t only apply to shooting a basketball or doing a front handspring. They are called upon whenever a routine action is habituated. Of course, the training of good physical habits takes effort. But the fruit is worth the labor! Charlotte Mason writes, “We admire the easy carriage of the soldier but shrink from the discipline which is able to produce it” (Towards a Philosophy of Education, 101). Later she writes,

“Consider how laborious life would be were its wheels not greased by habits of cleanliness, neatness, order, courtesy; had we to make the effort of decision about every detail of dressing and eating, coming and going, life would not be worth living.” (103)

Here she emphasizes that habits exist to make the good choices of the will easier and these choices often have both a cognitive and physical dimension.

In short, Charlotte Mason was clearly a proponent of training the physical body. She embraced the physical aspect of humanity and envisioned its potential given proper training. In School Education, she writes, “In all matters of physical exercise it is obvious to us that–do a thing a hundred times and it becomes easy, do a thing a thousand times and it becomes mechanical, as easy to do as not” (105). The road to a flourishing physical life entails self-discipline, self-control, and self-restraint through habit, both at home and at school. When these half-moral, half-physical “habitudes” become automatic, it is just as easy to do them as to not. These habitudes then free up our minds, wills, and bodies to focus on tasks amenable for a thoughtful and considerate life in community with others.

Conclusion

In this two-part series, I have attempted to demonstrate that the educator Charlotte Mason is rightly understood as a member of the broader liberal arts tradition of education. The practical resources she provides teachers seeking to educate within this tradition should not be unduly neglected. Her emphases on a liberal curriculum, heart-shaping lessons, and the discipline of habit entail a treasure trove of insight for whole-person education. If you are a teacher at a classical school or home-schooling parent, I can’t encourage you enough to give her techniques a try. Where to begin?

Check out Jason’s free eBook on narration, which he is developing into a full length book with the Circe Institute, expected publication this summer.

Or see Patrick’s free eBook on habit training to go more in depth on Charlotte Mason’s practice of training students in the habitudes of the body.

The post Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition, Part 2: Educating the Whole Person appeared first on .

Today the term ‘philosophy’ is almost synonymous with abstract questioning and skepticism; too often the modern discipline is construed as anything but practical—more likely to be concerned with whether or not we are in the matrix, or if words have any definite meaning at all, than how to live life in the here and now. As Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi mentions in his classic Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience:

“’Philosophy’ used to mean ‘love of wisdom,’ and people devoted their lives to it for that reason. Nowadays professional philosophers would be embarrassed to acknowledge so naïve a conception of their craft. Today a philosopher may be a specialist in deconstructionism or logical positivism, an expert in early Kant or late Hegel, an epistemologist or an existentialist, but don’t bother him with wisdom.” (138)

The specialization of modern philosophy has resulted in a focus on the obscure to the neglect of the tried and true. To be sure, deep and unanswerable questions are not new to the philosophical tradition, but the workable wisdom of the tradition has too often gotten lost in abstruse reasonings.

Part of the problem with this development is that philosophy is neglected among the young: at our PreK-12 schools and in home education. Parents, teachers and curriculum planners have imbibed the assumption that philosophy is for college students. The unfortunate outcome is that few college students have been inspired with the love of wisdom that would make collegiate study of philosophy fruitful. But more than that, the moral reflection and wisdom necessary for life are absent from the time of life when they are most necessary to form character.

Of course, I know very well that philosophy was conceived of as the culmination of the liberal arts tradition. (Clark and Jain make a movement in the right direction by according it a place in 9^th-11th grades in their paradigm; see The Liberal Arts Tradition, 2^nd ed. Appendix VI, p. 287.) In the Roman period only after gaining mastery of the liberal arts of language and mathematics would a student proceed to Athens or some other school of philosophers to pursue the deepest questions. But this didn’t mean that philosophical questions were neglected along the way. And if we’re going to recapture the love of wisdom and restore the school of philosophers in our educational renaissance, we’re going to have to find ways to embody the issues and subject matter of moral philosophy more clearly in our pre-college teaching.

There are three clear steps to doing this that are more or less hinted at in our psychologist’s reflections on finding joy and fulfillment by getting into the flow of thought through amateur philosophy. They are 1) to recapture the vision of teachers and parents as amateur philosophers, 2) to embrace the humble path of wisdom, and 3) to avoid the trap of specialization by becoming philosophical generalists, approaching every subject from the perspective of moral philosophy.

Teachers as Philosophers

Our cultural conception of the ideal teacher is haunted by the ghost of amateur philosophers. Mr. Miyagi from the 1984 film The Karate Kid is a good example of this. While the character Daniel benefits from the domain knowledge and skill of Mr. Miyagi in karate, what he is really in need of is instruction in a way of life. Mr. Miyagi teaches him how to overcome obstacles and setbacks, by, for instance, repairing the damaged bicycle that Daniel had simply thrown into the dumpster. Even Mr. Miyagi’s famous trick of teaching Daniel karate blocks through household chores is just as much a moral and spiritual lesson about humbly accepting the necessity of work and submitting to elders or the tradition even when you don’t understand. And the heart of the movie turns on the acceptance of tragedy and grief through stoic and eastern conceptions of self-mastery.

This is just one example that could be multiplied many times, with the point being that our culture still has this dream of a philosopher-teacher whose role it is to guide us on a quasi-religious quest for wisdom and the good life. This fact owes something to Socrates and to stoics like Epictetus, but also to many others in a great tradition of philosophical schools down through the centuries.

But in the modern educational system the possibility for teachers to take on this role has been all but crowded out through the domain-specific siloing of teachers into prescribed time-windows and the competing conception of teachers as professional bureaucrats who dare not venture into the personal lives and values of their students. (To be sure, if my children were attending a government school, I’m not sure I would want just anybody trying to play Mr. Miyagi for them….)

In the late 19^th and early 20^th century Charlotte Mason expressed a similar critique, except that she feared that a focus on cramming content into students was undercutting the teacher-philosopher approach. She felt that her philosophy of “living books” tested immediately by narration went a substantial way toward avoiding this problem:

“The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.” (vol. 6 p. 32)

The logic here is that when a teacher is too focused on forcing content into the minds of students, he or she is not able to focus on being the philosophical mentor that the student needs. Since the practice of narration helps to ensure that content is being assimilated well, the teacher is free to all but ignore that and focus on the deeper questions, the moral and intellectual habits of the student, and where next to point the student in their journey toward wisdom.

This dovetails well with the problem of specialization mentioned earlier. Our psychologist’s goal is, of course, to make us all amateur philosophers, and so his encouragements are particularly helpful to us as teachers, as we consider taking up Mr. Miyagi’s mantle:

 “Amateur philosophers, unlike their professional counterparts at universities, need not worry about historical struggles for prominence among competing schools, the politics of journals, and the personal jealousies of scholars. They can keep their minds on the basic questions.” (138)

Teachers at PK-12 schools and home educators should view themselves as amateur philosophers and focus on the big picture and the basic questions of philosophy. We should major on the majors, especially because we have the freedom to do so, but also because it’s what our students need at this stage in their development. And while natural philosophy and metaphysics have an important place, moral philosophy is the beating heart of an education centered on the formation of character or the development of virtue. Therefore moral philosophy should be pursued with an appropriate passion, as Socrates did, focusing on almost nothing else.

The Humble Path of Wisdom

For some of us teachers and parents, this will mean going back to philosophical school ourselves, in the sense of dusting off that old philosophy textbook from college. Or, even better, we could pick up for the first time those philosophical classics the textbook references, like Xenophon’s Memorabilia or The Memorable Sayings of Socrates, any of Plato’s Dialogues, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, or Epictetus’ Enchiridion. If we’re going to approach our teaching with a philosophical spirit, we have to catch the bug somewhere. It’s best to embrace that humble path of wisdom-seeking for ourselves and learn to revel in it. As our psychologist comments,

“Again, the importance of personally taking control of the direction of learning from the very first steps cannot be stressed enough. If a person feels coerced to read a certain book, to follow a given course because that is supposed to be the way to do it, learning will go against the grain. But if the decision is to take that same rout because of an inner feeling of rightness, the learning will be relatively effortless and enjoyable.” (139)

Of course, this is good advice if our goal is only attaining flow in the pursuit of wisdom for ourselves. However, one of the first principles of philosophy, or the love of wisdom, is that it cannot be merely self-referential in this way. Csikszentmihalyi has caught himself in a philosophical paradox here, recommending the modern dream of a light and easy path of pleasure.

Reading whatever I feel like doesn’t seem like the transcendent pursuit of wisdom. After all, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10), and a sense of humility and submission to the tradition in the midst of and in spite of painful emotions is one of the first lessons we have to learn. Even Mr. Miyagi knew that…. (“Wax on… wax off.”)

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.

The Philosophical Generalist

But reading in this way to become philosopher-guides, we do not therefore embrace the steep climb of the specialist. We may need to climb the steep hill of Parnassus, or of Sinai, or finally of Calvary, but that is a different thing. As our psychologist mentions, specialization has its pitfalls:

“While specialization is necessary to develop the complexity of any pattern of thought, the goals-ends relationship must always be kept clear: specialization is for the sake of thinking better, and not an end in itself. Unfortunately many serious thinkers devote all their mental effort to becoming well-known scholars, but in the meantime they forget their initial purpose in scholarship.” (139)

We can be content to be generalists, especially if we can zero in on wisdom as the goal, rather than even the enjoyment of the pursuit of wisdom, which after all is a rather strange self-referential circle that our secular psychologist is unwittingly leading us into.

Part of the reason he feels he must do this is because of the splintering of moral philosophy into the social sciences (like psychology) in the first place. In The Liberal Arts Tradition (2^nd ed) Clark and Jain tell of the quest of the modern social sciences, like psychology, ethics or economics, to unmoor themselves from the unproven assumptions of traditional moral philosophy:

“The contemporary social sciences… often attempt to study aspects of man in isolation from one another without reference to man as a whole person in society pursuing happiness in and through his relationships. They also tend to ignore the central question of how virtue and meaning in life contribute to human happiness…. The methodologies of the contemporary social sciences implicitly critique traditional moral philosophy by suggesting it relies on assumptions about human nature and human purpose that are not rationally or empirically verifiable.” (132)

Our psychologist feels the need to justify recommending philosophical study merely on the basis of its potential for entering the flow state—an empirically verifiable method of increasing positive emotion. And since we all know positive emotions are a good thing, in a value-less world, he can recommend it to us without breaking our taboos (ironically) of radical individualism, since the positivity of positive emotions is a lowest common denominator value that we can all get on board with.

Of course, one of the reasons that we have been able to go as far with Csikszentmihalyi as we have in this series is that he stands within the new positive psychology movement, which is itself a revival of the virtue tradition of moral philosophy. In fact, Clark and Jain commend Martin Seligman, a founder of the positive psychology movement for how he “has powerfully and successfully unmasked the assumptions of the old therapy model and defended a return to the notions of eudaimonia [happiness or human flourishing], virtue, and the pursuit of meaning in life” (158); he “recognizes that there is a moral nature to human persons and that the social scientists have to recall lost categories such as responsibility, will, character, and virtue” (160).

My readers will have no trouble embracing such concepts, embedded as they are within a Christian worldview. But we can still feel intimidated away from employing these concepts and questions in our teaching. Especially if we’ve received some higher-level academic training, we may have been indoctrinated into the reigning social science dogma that aims to keep philosophy at bay.

When teaching history, for instance, we’re more inclined to focus on insuring proper delivery of content and the mastery of facts. We tend to avoid discussion of the virtue or vice of figures, why certain courses of action were right or wrong, and the questions of proper relationships or the purpose of government. In literature classes, we focus on questions of technique and artistry, authorial background and narrative trivia, to the neglect of the central moral dilemma of the book.

The example of Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi should encourage us to embrace the perspective of moral philosophy in our teaching of any subject, but especially in the humanities. Where are you on your journey in the love of wisdom? Let’s restore the philosophical school in our hearts, our homes, and our PK-12 classrooms.

Previous articles in this series, The Flow of Thought

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

Final installment: Part 9, The Lifelong Love of Learning.

The post The Flow of Thought, Part 8: Restoring the School of Philosophers appeared first on .

Similarly, within the Christian classical school movement, some have asked, “What has Charlotte Mason to do with Dorothy Sayers?” In other words, can the pedagogical insights of the British educator Charlotte Mason be conducive for classical education today? Where is there harmony? Where is there discord?

While a full treatment of this question, and the subsequent questions I posed, would require more than a single blog post, I want to begin the conversation by highlighting one prominent interpretation of classical education and then dispelling of two myths that would suggest Charlotte Mason and the tradition are at odds. The interpretation of classical education I will highlight comes from Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education, which has become a seminal text in the Christian classical school movement.

A Paradigm for the Liberal Arts Tradition

To get started, let me first summarize Clark and Jain’s proposed paradigm for the liberal arts tradition. To be clear, I am not suggesting, nor do the authors, that this paradigm gets everything right about the western tradition of education. The history of education in western civilization spans millennia and cultures. It therefore encompasses a variety of thinkers and ideas that vary depending on their context and position within its development. Nevertheless, to suggest that there is no tradition at all is equally incorrect. Through careful study, we can observe some common threads present across time and place, which together bear witness to a single living tradition. It is precisely this rich heritage of education which Clark and Jain seek to uncover and illuminate for modern day scholars and practitioners alike.

The authors define the purpose of the liberal arts tradition in the West as follows: “Grounded in piety, Christian classical education cultivates the virtues of the student in body, heart, and mind while nurturing a love for wisdom under the lordship of Christ.” To unpack this purpose statement and help their readers keep the big picture in mind, they divide the paradigm into multiple categories—Piety, Gymnastic, Music, Arts, Philosophy, and Theology—or PGMAPT, for easy remembering. Let me briefly walk us through each category now.

Piety is the abiding love, gratitude, and loyalty members of a tradition share for their heritage. When fully realized, piety harnesses the heart and will toward a proper sense of duty for what has come before.

Gymnastic is the focused and intensive training of the physical body. As embodied souls, or ensouled bodies, humans must gain mastery of their physical bodies if they are to truly flourish in a physical world.

Music (not to be confused with the modern “subject” of music) tunes the heart to wonder, delight, and love. It forms the affections and moral imagination of the youngest students. Rather than focusing exclusively on instruments or singing, musical education is directed toward joyful engagement with reality. 

The Arts refer to the Liberal Arts, both the Trivium (language arts) and Quadrium (numerical arts). Together they are to be understood as the tools of learning, the intellectual skills required to create and justify knowledge.

Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge about the world, understood in a threefold division: knowledge about humans, nature, and metaphysics. Together these divisions point toward a single unified and synthetic view of knowledge and reality.

Finally, Theology is the study of divine revelation, which is the culmination of knowledge in the western educational tradition. Theology provides the unifying framework for all the liberal arts and sciences. 

The Learning Tree

Together these categories work together sequentially, resulting in a paradigm, or a comprehensive structuring, of the liberal arts tradition. To help their readers grasp this structuring, Clark and Jain liken it to a tree. 

The roots of the tree are piety, for, without piety, a person would have no reliable map or compass for one’s purpose in life. Piety serves both as a launching pad and source of sustenance for one’s understanding and approach to a meaningful life. Next come Gymnastic and Music, located on the lowest part of the tree trunk, indicating that these categories begin during the earliest years in a child’s education. Physical development and self-control, for example, are crucial during this stage. What initially begins with basic head movement and rolling on the floor quickly turns into crawling, walking, and soon enough, running and jumping. Likewise, the minds of children are incredibly active and curious, seeking to absorb everything in their paths. Therefore, the right stories, songs, and art should be offered and assimilated for their moral imaginations to flourish. 

With this foundation laid in the early years, training in the liberal arts occurs next. Not understood as stages in childhood development, but rather as dynamic tools of learning across grade levels, students learn how to use these tools as they engage with linguistic and mathematical content. The language tools have to do with all that is necessary to read and interpret a text, think critically, engage in discussion, and communicate both orally and in writing with eloquence. The number tools have to do with understanding the complex relationships between quantity, size, location, and shape, and then applying this knowledge toward practical outcomes. 

Together the liberal arts of language and number are the tools of learning that equip a student to think independently and dynamically. And while the training in these skills includes the transmission of some knowledge content, the focus is on honing skills that they may then go on to utilize in their own pursuits of knowledge down the road. Philosophy, the pursuit of wisdom, consists of all the subjects, or fields of knowledge, that one can study, such as chemistry, biology, economics, history, or literature. Philosophy, as the domain of all knowledge, is located at the highest point on the tree trunk, indicating that if a student has made her way up to this point, she is now ready to begin the real work of the tree: bearing fruit. This feature of the illustration is crucial for it reminds us as educators that the ultimate purpose of education is not mere knowledge, but virtue formation and the cultivation of desire directed toward the good, true, and beautiful.

And where does theology belong on the tree you might ask? Interestingly, theology itself is not located in any one particular place on the tree, but instead is situated above the tree. This unique positioning communicates that knowledge and understanding of the Triune God transcends all the other categories of education.

Dispelling Two Myths about Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition

Now that I’ve sketched out Clark and Jain’s comprehensive interpretation of the liberal arts tradition, I want to now dispose of two myths that question whether Charlotte Mason’s educational principles fit within the tradition.

The first myth is the simplistic notion that while Charlotte Mason emphasizes ideas, classical education focuses on something else entirely: facts. While it is true that Charlotte Mason greatly emphasizes the power of ideas, it is not accurate to say that classical education, or the liberal arts tradition more broadly, focuses on facts. The popularization of this viewpoint is, of course, understandable. The birth of the classical Christian school renewal movement began, in some ways, with Doug Wilson’s interpretation and application of the Trivium as he understood medievalist Dorothy Sayers to be explaining it. According to this treatment of the Trivium, the elementary years should focus exclusively on fact memorization as a way of honing the liberal art of grammar.

Recently, however, this view of grammar has been shown to be insufficient and inconsistent with the liberal arts tradition. The liberal art of grammar, as it would come to be shown, has more to do with reading and interpretation of language rather than fact memorization, and, additionally, was never historically confined to a particular stage in childhood development. So the idea that classical education necessarily elevates facts over ideas isn’t historically accurate and therefore not essential to the liberal arts tradition. More and more classical schools today are moving away from this approach, in fact, while retaining Sayers’ fundamental insight that young minds can and should be intellectually challenged appropriately. 

The second myth I wish to dispel is that Charlotte Mason elevated, above all else, the cultivation of a love for learning, while classical educators prioritize academic rigor. In response to this myth, let me say that Charlotte Mason was indeed passionate about awakening the minds of children to real knowledge. She believed that each child was a person made in the image of God, and, therefore, parents and teachers are limited to certain methods for raising and teaching these young scholars. She was deeply committed to educating children in a way that is befitting of their personhood: morally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically.

But this conviction is in no way incompatible with an academically rigorous education. In fact, it is reasonable to argue that this high view of children warrants an academically rigorous education properly defined. 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. Charlotte Mason herself pokes fun at the sort of educational environments that are free of hardship, adversity, and genuine challenge. Humans, as it turns out, thrive in the face of challenge and experience real joy when coached to achieve excellence.

Now, to be sure, Charlotte Mason did question the usefulness of grades and competition as tactics for motivating children to learn. Stemming from her view of human minds as living and hungry for knowledge, she firmly believed that knowledge itself ought to be the reward for the worthy work of learning. Interestingly, the strength of intrinsic motivation for learning has been confirmed in recent literature. For example, in David Pink’s Drive, the author shows that modern research has revealed that for worthy tasks, like learning, intrinsic motivation is more powerful for long-term gains and sustained achievement. So although Charlotte Mason was careful to not permit motivators often associated with academic rigor to enter her classrooms, there turns out to be good reasons, which are actually a,menable toward academic rigor, for doing so.

Hopefully I have whet your appetite for the possible harmony Charlotte Mason and the liberal arts tradition may share. In my next article, I will continue the conversation through providing some specific examples, such as narration (download Jason’s eBook here), habit training (download Patrick’s eBook here), and nature study from Charlotte Mason’s pedagogical practices that fit within Clark and Jain’s PGMAPT paradigm. For now, I encourage educators today who are interested in synthesizing these inspiring approaches to education to step back into their classrooms and give these ideas a try!

The post Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition, Part 1: Mapping a Harmony appeared first on .

I’ve already treated science briefly under the heading “The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games.” That’s because the quadrivium, or four mathematical arts, included not only arithmetic and geometry, but also music and astronomy. The quadrivium art of astronomy was the STEM of the ancient and medieval world, focused on developing the skills of tracking, charting and calculating the heavenly bodies and applying such knowledge to the travel technologies of the day.

But science itself as an enterprise is worthy of being treated more fully, as our psychologist does in a subsection entitled “The Delights of Science” (134-138). His main object is to restore science to its rightful place as a potential flow activity for his readers. Just as we could become amateur historians as a more joyful way of structuring our leisure time and finding meaning in life than watching TV, so for Csikszentmihalyi there’s no reason why we couldn’t become amateur scientists, even if we don’t have “extravagantly equipped laboratories, huge budgets, and large teams of investigators” (134).

As important as this contention is in a day when the professionalization of ‘big science’ and the utilitarian cowing to STEM jobs crowds out the love of science, I think we classical educators can take it one step further. It’s not just the love of science that needs to be restored; there’s also an older, more Christian conception of science as philosophy, or the love of wisdom, that needs to be rediscovered if we’re going to recapture the joy of science for ourselves and our students.

The Love of Science

But first let’s rehearse our psychologist’s encomium on the love of science. 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.

In fact, the problem may be the result of our textbooks which too often present accepted knowledge and theories without any of the story or narrative of their discovery. But even in our day and age it’s not the impersonal system of science that makes discoveries, it’s individual scientists, often working in teams to be sure, but not always. As our psychologist emphasizes:

“It is not true, despite what the advocates of technocracy would like us to believe, that breakthroughs in science arise exclusively from teams in which each researcher is trained in a very narrow field, and where the most sophisticated state-of-the-art equipment is available to test out new ideas…. New discoveries still come to people as they did to Democritus, sitting lost in thought in the market square of his city. They come to people who so enjoy playing with ideas that eventually they stray beyond the limits of what is known, and find themselves exploring an uncharted territory.” (134)

This is an important point to make because one of the natural joys of the scientist is the possible discovery of some new or striking truth about the created order. If our schoolbooks present scientific information without the stories of discovery, the flow experience of Democritus, “lost in thought,” is left out and the life of exciting exploration of the natural world remains unsung.

Practically oriented parents may push their children into science careers because of the hope of steady lucrative gain, but there’s a reason why many teenagers opt for the arts (even if the winner-take-all environment contains little hope of a sustainable career). The arts wear their enjoyment on their sleeve!

What may be surprising to us, in our technocratic world, but would not be, if we attended more to the history of science, is that the scientist can just as easily attain flow: “Even the pursuit of ‘normal’ (as opposed to ‘revolutionary’ or creative) science would be next to impossible if it did not provide enjoyment to the scientist” (134). You’ll remember that one of the requirements of getting into flow is the presence of “rules that limit both the nature of acceptable solutions and the steps by which they are obtained” (135). Well, Csikszentmihalyi quotes from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to illustrate how scientific research meets this standard:

“By focusing attention upon a small range of relatively esoteric problems, the paradigm [or theoretical approach] forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable…. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skillful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well…. The fascination of the normal research paradigm… [is that] though its outcome can be anticipated the way to achieve that outcome remains very much in doubt. The man who succeeds proves himself an expert puzzle-solver, and the challenge of the puzzle is an important part of what usually drives him on.” (as qtd on 134-135)

This passage makes me think of how Ravi Jain has advocated for a pedagogy of puzzle, proof and play in mathematics. Apparently the same should apply to the early training of research scientists.

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

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

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

Amateur Scientists

If we are inclined to doubt Kuhn’s description, our psychologist marshals the testimony of scientists themselves to confirm the point:

“It is no wonder that scientists often feel like P. A. M. Dirac, the physicist who described the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s by saying, ‘It was a game, a very interesting game one could play.’” (135)

If that weren’t enough, the sheer number of revolutionary scientists who were technically amateurs is truly astonishing: “It is important to realize that for centuries great scientists did their work as a hobby, because they were fascinated with the methods they had invented, rather than because they had jobs to do and fat government grants to spend” (136).

For instance,

• “Nicolaus Copernicus perfected his epochal description of planetary motions while he was a canon at the cathedral of Frauenburg, in Poland. Astronomical work certainly didn’t help his career in the Church, and for much of his life the main rewards he had were aesthetic, derived from the simple beauty of his system compared to the more cumbersome Ptolemaic model.” (136)

• “Galileo had been trained in medicine, and what drove him into increasingly dangerous experimentation was the delight he took in figuring out such things as the location of the center of gravity of various solid objects.” (136)

• Because the university of Cambridge was closed during the spread of a plague, “Newton had to spend two years in the safety and boredom of a country retreat, and he filled the time playing with his ideas about a universal theory of gravitation.” (137)

• “Luigi Galvani, who did the basic research on how muscles and nerves conduct electricity, which in turn led to the invention of the electric battery, was a practicing physician until the end of his life. Gregor Mendel was another clergyman, and his experiments that set the foundations of genetics were the results of a gardening hobby.” (137)

• “Einstein wrote his most influential papers while working as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. These and the many other great scientists one could easily mention were not handicapped in their thinking because they were not ‘professionals’ in their field, recognized figures with sources of legitimate support. They simply did what they enjoyed doing.” (137)

Notice the words our psychologist employs to describe these scientists’ experience and motivation: aesthetic, beauty, delight, playing with ideas, hobby, enjoyed. It may be that our utilitarian pushing of science is backfiring by flooding the market with more scientists, to be sure, but fewer true researchers. Perhaps what we need in science, ironically, is fewer professionals, and more amateurs.

Loving Science in School

While our psychologist’s main goal may be to inspire modern adults to rekindle their love of science through leisure time study and experimentation, we could also apply these insights to science education in our schools. For example, recovering the love of science for our students might entail more attention to the story of scientific discovery. In The Liberal Arts Tradition, 2^nd edition,Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain envision science classes “tracing the developments of a scientific idea through various new observations, mathematical innovations, and philosophical or theological convictions” (124). In this way science “recovers a kind of story or narrative—not a purely literary narrative, but a technical narrative” (125).

They are not the first to suggest a return to the narrative of science. Charlotte Mason in the early 20^th century had already advocated for a “literary narrative” even if she did not go as far as Clark and Jain in advocating for the technical side of things:

“Books dealing with science as with history, say, should be of a literary character, and we should probably be more scientific as a people if we scrapped all the text-books which swell publishers’ lists and nearly all the chalk expended so freely on our blackboards. The French mind has appreciated the fact that the approach to science as to other subjects should be more or less literary, that the principles which underlie science are at the same time so simple, so profound and so far-reaching that the due setting forth of these provokes what is almost an emotional response; these principles are therefore meet subjects for literary treatment….” (Toward a Philosophy of Education, 218-219)

For Charlotte Mason the commitment to “literary” books, what she elsewhere called “living books” came out of her conviction that the mind naturally responds with attention to beautiful, vigorous writing. Of course, if literary science books told the story of science, it would also be easier for students to be asked to narrate in science class. But we should also notice that Charlotte Mason doesn’t just want the story to be told without students understanding the principles. In fact, it is the “due setting forth” of scientific principles which “provokes what is almost an emotional response.”

But this literary and technical narrative of science should not crowd out the place for wonder, for laboratory and for hands-on discovery, especially early in a child’s development. Charlotte Mason also advocated for nature studies, in which “children keep a dated record of what they see in their nature note-books” while going on a “nature-walk” one afternoon a week (School Education, 236-237). Her goal was to train children in the love of nature and the skill of “interested observation.”

An important side benefit of a joy-centered approach to science instruction is to open up to non-professional scientists (likely the majority of our students) the possibility of ongoing amateur scientific investigation. As our psychologist observes, “If flow, rather than success and recognition, is the measure by which to judge its value, science can contribute immensely to the quality of life” (138). Their science education should train our students for a life-long love of science, just as much as it prepares our future scientists for college.

Science as the Love of Wisdom

However, merely rediscovering the joy in science, as if it were only a fruitful hobby, doesn’t get us all the way to a fully orbed, Christian, classical vision of science. Instead, the tradition viewed natural science as one branch of philosophy, the culmination of years of training in the liberal arts.

Now by ‘philosophy’ we don’t mean just the ivory tower study of obscure points, like whether or not we can actually know that we exist; based on the Greek roots a philosopher is a ‘lover of wisdom’. Wisdom encompasses not just the realm of metaphysical ideas, above most of our heads, but also the realm of humanity and the realm of nature; natural philosophy is what science was once called. In fact, science, which is from the Latin for ‘knowledge,’ and ‘philosophy,’ were once virtual synonyms. As Clark and Jain point out, “not until the turn of the twentieth century did the term ‘scientist’ begin to entirely replace the term ‘natural philosopher’” (The Liberal Arts Tradition, 2^nd ed., 108).

Charlotte Mason gestured toward a recovery of this ancient three-fold division of philosophy in her final volume Towards a Philosophy of Education when she structured her treatment of the curriculum under the headings: Knowledge of God, Knowledge of Man, and Knowledge of the Universe. As the tradition would have called it, scientia divina, scientia moralis, and scientia naturalis.

To give you an example of how important it is for us as Christians to recapture this idea of wisdom including natural science, think for a moment of the wisest king in Israel’s history: King Solomon. When God came to him in a dream and offered him anything he wanted, long life, riches, victory over his enemies, he asked instead for wisdom:

^“29 And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore, ³⁰ so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt. ³¹ For he was wiser than all other men, wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol, and his fame was in all the surrounding nations. ³² He also spoke 3,000 proverbs, and his songs were 1,005. ³³ He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish. ³⁴ And people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and from all the kings of the earth, who had heard of his wisdom.” (1 Kings 4:29-34 ESV)

Notice! Solomon’s wisdom included the humanities, proverbs and songs, but also the knowledge of trees and animals, birds, reptiles and fish. King Solomon was a scientist! He spent his free time in the flow of scientific investigation and discovery. He was wise in the ways of science.

As Christian, classical educators we need to affirm the BOTH/AND of the classical tradition, rather than the EITHER/OR our thinking often gets stuck in. We want our students to be philosophers, wise in matters natural, human and divine, by God’s grace. Too often we get stuck in labelling ourselves and our students math and science people, or humanities people: jocks, nerds or drama queens.

Perhaps this common problem illustrates more than anything I have said so far the importance of recovering a love of science as wisdom for our students. Wisdom is holistic and humans are too. While it is not wrong to have expertise, especially in our complex world, that should not come at the expense of being well rounded.

We could all love and enjoy science a little bit more. Perhaps seeing it as God-given wisdom will send us on our own personal journey of recovering a love of science for ourselves and our children.

New Book! The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow Through Classical Education

Enjoying this series? Jason Barney revised and expanded it into a full length book that you can buy on Amazon. Complete with footnotes and in an easy-to-share format for teacher training or to keep in your personal library, the book aims to help you apply the concept of flow in your classical classroom.

Make sure to share about the book on social media and review it on Amazon!

Previous articles in this series, The Flow of Thought:

Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake; Part 2: The Joy of Memory; Part 3: Narration as Flow; Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games; Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians.

Final installments: Part 8, Restoring the School of Philosophers, Part 9, The Lifelong Love of Learning.

The post The Flow of Thought, Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom appeared first on .