In the final book of the Ransom trilogy, That Hideous Strength (Scribner, 1945), C.S. Lewis presents his readers with a stark contrast between two communities: the residents of St. Anne’s on the Hill and the conspirators of the N.I.C.E. in Belbury. In doing so, Lewis offers two pictures of humanity. One is characterized by relationship, nature, and beauty, while the other is marked by bureaucracy, cold rationality, and deception. 

To explore these contrasting visions, Lewis follows Mark and Jane, a married couple, in their individual journeys for meaning, belonging, and ultimately, redemption. Mark is a trained sociologist and fellow at the fictitious Bracton College. Despite his marriage to Jane and successful academic career, Mark is lonely and unfulfilled. In the opening pages, he takes immense pleasure in simply being included in a clique. Meanwhile, Jane, an academic herself, regrets the toll her marriage has taken on her academic career, and the current state of her and Mark’s relationship. She is bitter, hopeless, and discontent with the cards life has dealt her. 

In this article, I want to briefly sketch out some pivotal moments in the novel and then offer some insights for educators today. For while this story’s plot is thick enough to stand on its own, Lewis shares in the preface that there is more to the story, so to speak. He writes, “This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man” (7). Let us proceed with seeking to uncover this “point” to see what Lewis what might teach us.

Surprised by Joy

Early in the novel, Mark is brought into an exclusive group of the college, the Progressive Element, and eventually invited to join the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) itself. Through this process, his desire for belonging is quenched, though never fully, as he makes his way further and further into the inner circle. Still, it is a painful process. Despite repeated attempts to understand his job description and the reporting structure of the institution, his requests are constantly pushed aside. The deputy director John Wither is evasive and dismissive, despite regularly referring to the N.I.C.E. as a family. 

Meanwhile, Jane finds herself being drawn to a very different kind of community. Despite the men and women at St. Anne’s on the Hill referring to themselves as a “company” and “army,” they live together in a beautiful and spacious manor, fulfilling the vision of family that the N.I.C.E. allegedly claimed to be. In her first visit to the manor at St. Anne’s, she walks through a beautiful garden, teeming with life and beauty. Later, she meets with the director of the community, Dr. Ransom, and leaves overflowing with joy (149). 

Interestingly, the source of her joy when meeting with Dr. Ransom was not the conversation they shared together, but the transcendent experience of encountering his divine and royal aura. For the first time, her soul had touched the heavens, as it were, awakening in her a desire for beauty that had grown dormant over the course of her life. Suddenly she gained new eyes for the beauty of nature, from rays of sunlight to grazing wildlife. She longed to hear the chorales of Bach again and read the sonnets of Shakespeare afresh. She cherished the speech of her cabinmates in the train and rejoiced in her hunger and thirst for buttered toast and tea. Her conversion had begun.

Isolation and Objectivity

In contrast, Mark’s progress through concentric circles of exclusivity in Belbury finally leads to his own isolation as he sits alone in a cell awaiting his training in “objectivity.” Professor Augustus Frost, a leader in the innermost circle of the N.I.C.E., shares with Mark his vision for humanity as a race of pure mind and liberated of emotional preference. He desires to destroy all human instincts for what is right, noble, and beautiful. Interestingly, Mark’s training takes place in a room of disproportion with a ceiling covered in specks at irregular intervals. On the walls of the room are pictures, many of them with scriptural themes, yet each of them distorted through bizarre elements of horror and strangeness. Professor Frost’s goal is clear: destroy all of Mark’s intuitions for what is natural, normal, and right. 

To Frost’s surprise, however, the room soon began to have the reverse effect. The striking abnormality and ugliness of the room engendered in Mark a longing for the straight, whole, and normal. The narrator Lewis writes, “As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else–something he vaguely called the ‘Normal’–apparently existed” (296). In the end, Mark finds himself choosing a side, aligning himself with the mountainous pull towards the moral universe, and rejecting Professor Frost’s vision for objectivity untethered from objective value.

And yet, the ultimate test was yet to come. For, in a pivotal moment of the training in the objective room, Professor Frost, with demonic calculation, instructs Mark to trample on a full-sized crucifix and insult it. Unlike the moral defense against the other exercises that had risen inside of Mark, this was different. There was nothing about the wooden figure nailed to the cross that was inherently straight and normal. Though Mark is not a Christian, his conversation was already underway, and he realizes that the crucifix is…”what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight–what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross” (333). In this decisive moment, this test of tests, Mark refused to desecrate the image.

Hope for Redemption

In the end, both characters encounter elements of redemption, not only for their marriage, but for their moral and spiritual salvation.

Jane’s struggle with pride, most visibly manifested in the novel through her repudiation of traditional gender norms, is overcome as she realizes the goodness of being a creature under the authority and care of God. And yet the divine goodness she accepts comes at a high price: control. She must give up herself to another, to God himself, and let him mold her as he sees fit (316). The universe now appears to her much larger than she imagined. It is massive, stormy, beautiful, and unbending, existing independently of any human emotion or idea. She must embrace the truth that this reality is greater than herself by recognizing she is a creature of God.

Mark’s conversion is different. Though he exhibits the moral courage to resist Professor Frost’s training in objectivity, he has not had the benefit of being formed by the community at St. Anne’s. Only in the end does he begin to recognize his own shortcomings as a husband and lover. His fear is that it is too late, that what would be best for Jane at this point is to move on. But then, in the last available moment, love strikes him as only the goddess Venus can, and his soul is saved.

Insights for Schools Today

There are so many layers to this story, from the redemption of Mark and Jane to the heavenly presence of Dr. Ransom to the demonic nature of the N.I.C.E. It truly is a battle for the abolition of humanity.

In The Abolition of Man (Harper Collins, 1971), Lewis warns against a dystopian future in which humanity abandons traditional moral values in the name of scientific progress. Though he is clear that his argument is not against science itself, in his context he can see that the many successes of modern science have created a lure to conquer nature completely. In the end, all that will be left is to conquer human nature. He writes, “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won” (59).

Inspired by That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man, I will conclude this article by offering three suggestions for schools in order to resist the coming abolition.

1. Create communities of joy and hospitality.

One of the most endearing elements of the story is the community of St. Anne’s. While I did not focus on the themes of comradeship and belonging so much in this article, it is well worth study and imitation. It can be easy to think that the abolition of man is ultimately a philosophical debate and therefore will take place at an intellectual level. But the reality is that strongest way we can retain our humanity and moral values is through creating beautiful spaces of belonging for learning to occur. From filling our schools with beautiful art and nature to building time for deep relationships to thrive, our schools can become their own manifestations of the idyllic St. Anne’s community.

2. Champion the reality of objective moral values.

Certainly Lewis’ greatest warning in The Abolition of Man, manifested in the N.I.C.E. at Belbury in That Hideous Strength, is the rejection of traditional moral values, what Lewis calls the Tao (pronounced “Dao”). As Alasdair MacIntyre addresses at great length in After Virtue, the modern West has traded out objective moral belief for mere emotional preferences. Ideas of virtue and duty have been reduced to mere subjective responses that cannot be used for moral evaluation. In this framework, a solder sacrificing his life to save his squadron is a story that can engender emotions of high praise, but it is not representative of a deeper truth that we are morally obligated to imitate.

But as Lewis argues through different means in both books, moral truth, goodness, and beauty does exist independently of human perception. In their own journeys, Mark and Jane encountered what Lewis described as a mountain–an entity that existed apart from themselves that is firm, immovable, and embedded in the universe itself. This is natural law, or what Mark experienced as the Straight and Normal.

Our schools need to cling to and proclaim the reality of objective goodness, truth, and beauty, for the future of humanity is at stake.

3. Connect the study of science to worship of our Creator.

There is a warning in both books regarding the dangers that emerge when modern science, or any discipline for that matter, is untethered from moral and biblical truth. In the case of Belbury, the scientific activity literally became demonic. While it is important to equip our students with understanding of the scientific method, steps for conducting a successful lab experiment, and other elements of modern science, we should regularly connect our study of creation to worship of our Creator. For scripture commands us to subdue and cultivate creation, not conquer it out of human arrogance and pride.

It is this temptation toward human arrogance and pride that is the “hideous strength” of which Lewis warns. As the inhabitants of Shinar sought to make a name for themselves through erecting a great tower at Babel, so the temptation to be our own gods resided in Mark and Jane, as well as in us today.

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I am reading it aloud with my son this summer. I was struck on this reading (perhaps my fourth or fifth time through the series) by the critique Lewis levels on modern education in the opening chapter. As many may already know, Lewis spells out his philosophy of education in his series of lectures contained in The Abolition of Man. We’ll touch on that in a moment. But the interesting feature of the narrative is that one is able to see the failings of the educational system in 1950s Britain through a literary lens in more immediate ways than can be conveyed in a lengthier philosophical treatment. Let’s recount what occurs in the first chapter of The Silver Chair.

Why is Jill Crying?: The Darkness of Valueless Education

We are first introduced to Jill Pole as the girl crying behind the gym on “a dull autumn day.” We will immediately be told why she is crying, so I want to point out the use of the adjective “dull” here. It is often the case that weather reflects the mood of the characters. In this case, the word “dull” although depicting a particularly common autumnal day in England also plays a potential double service in framing the educational critique about to unfold. The weather is as dull as the school we will soon learn about.

So why is Jill crying?

“She was crying because they had been bullying her. This is not going to be a school story, so I shall say as little as possible about Jill’s school, which is not a pleasant subject. It was ‘Co-educational,’ a school for both boys and girls, what used to be called a ‘mixed’ school; some said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it.”

C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, 1

Notice again the word play, this time made more explicit as Lewis repeats the word “mixed” with two different senses. Jill had been bullied. We might think this is the result of the mixing of boys and girls: girls being the natural prey of the aggression of boys. But it soon unfolds that boys like Eustace are likewise bullied and girls like Edith Jackle can dish it out just like the boys. No, bullying is merely a presenting symptom of a deeper issue at Experiment House (the name of the school Jill and Eustace attend). Lewis places the blame on the leaders of Experiment House:

“These people had the idea that boys and girls should be allowed to do what they liked. And unfortunately what ten or fifteen of the biggest boys and girls liked best was bullying the others. All sorts of things, horrid things, went on which at an ordinary school would have been found out and stopped in half a term; but at this school they weren’t. Or even if they were, the people who did them were not expelled or punished. The Head said they were interesting psychological cases and sent for them and talked to them for hours. And if you knew the right sort of things to say to the Head, the main result was that you became rather a favourite than otherwise.”

C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, 1-2

Lewis here depicts a child-centered school environment where the leadership is more interested in experimental psychology than in training students to learn and think. Our author perhaps exaggerates to create a humorous opening scene, but there is much that rings true in the farce.

Throughout the rest of the chapter, we gain further insights into Experiment House. It is a school where “Bibles were not encouraged” (p. 5). It was a place of “hopelessness” (p. 6). And the expected outcomes at such a school are dire indeed.

“Owing to the curious methods of teaching at Experiment House, one did not learn much French or Maths or Latin or things of that sort; but one did learn a lot about getting away quickly and quietly when They were looking for one.”

C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, 8

Experiment House was less a place where children desired to learn, but a place where children desired to escape. Together Jill and Eustace escape to Narnia by way of a door in the high stone wall which was usually locked to keep the children from getting out.

Lewis’s Critique of Modern Education: The Loss of Values in Education

Underlying the cynical depiction of Experiment House is the profound concern Lewis has that modern education has jettisoned traditional values. Undue focus is given to scientism and technicism. I appreciated when Jason wrote on these two ideas, perhaps even coining a term or two. What these ideas capture is that science and technology aren’t the problem. Instead, it is something like the undiscerning application and the unpracticed practitioners applying new methods with the ring of science who have thrown out the baby, the bathwater and the tub as well. That is to say, modern education has sought to rid itself of the great books, the values that are embedded in them and the methods by which we might acquire knowledge of objective value.

Lewis expressed his philosophical critique of modern education in The Abolition of Man, the 1943 publication of a series of lectures on education delivered at King’s College, Newcastle. This was a good ten years before publishing in narrative form his cynical depiction of Experiment House in The Silver Chair. Central to his argument against modern education’s penchant for abolishing traditional values is what he calls the doctrine of objective value. This is “the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and other really false, to the kind of things the universe is and the kind of things we are.” To put this another way, if something exists in reality, there is a real, objective value associated with it. When we see a natural vista, say the Grand Canyon at sunset, the beauty of this vista is inherent in what it is we see. It is good and right for us to call it beautiful or sublime or majestic. So the doctrine of objective value would say that the kind of thing the Grand Canyon is calls forth such predicate adjectives as beautiful, sublime or majestic. Furthermore, because we are the kinds of creatures that we are, it is inherent in our natures to have an emotional response to the Grand Canyon that calls forth from us phrases like, “This is majestic.”

To make his point, Lewis takes to task the authors of The Green Book, hiding the true identity of the authors by way of pseudonymns. (The actual book in question is The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing, by Alex King and Martin Ketley published in 1939.) Lewis identifies how the authors are suspicious that “all predicates of value” (16) are based on emotions. Better to excise such frivolous use of language as children would then be made susceptible to propaganda. Such is the advice given in The Green Book. Lewis sees how this may at first glance be an appropriate exercise for the mind, but it leaves the heart untrained. Such an education produces what Lewis calls the trousered ape and the urban blockhead. The viewpoint of the authors of The Green Book “hold that the ordinary human feelings about the past or animals or large waterfalls are contrary to reason and contemptible and ought to be eradicated” (The Abolition of Man 22-23).

The dystopian society produced by educating boys and girls without proper training in the affections gives us individuals not only skeptical about value statement, but equally skeptical about ethics. Can we then trust that our neighbor won’t cheat? Can we expect the soldier not to abandon his post? We are left with a kind of brutish form of humanity (the trousered ape) or an uncaring intellectual (the urban blockhead). Experiment House in The Silver Chair exemplifies this with bullying becoming the singular factor for moving up the dominance hierarchy as a student. The leaders of the school view this with the kind of uncaring detachment of a lab technician.

The alternative to this is spelled out by Lewis in a brief review of such figures as Augustine, Aristotle and Plato. All three saw the goal of education as the formation of individuals whose emotions or affections were properly ordered according to the doctrine of objective value.

St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it. (26, referring to City of God book 15, chapter 22).

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 26, referring to City of God book 15, chapter 22

Here we see that the human must be trained to match one’s love to the object of affection. There are things in this world worthy of love and things in this world that are distasteful. Learning to distinguish and differentiate, to properly apply language appropriate to our response to things is one of the highest goals of education.

Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 26, referring to Nichomachean Ethics 1104b

The ordering of affections according to Augustine pursues the educational aims articulated by Aristotle. This is why we place before students great works of literature, art and music. We are also presenting to them great events from history or paying close attention to the world of nature around us. It is not only the great works, but likewise those worthy of disapproval.

In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 27, referring to Republic 402a

Plato’s educational schema has us training the heart before training the head. Distaste and delight when properly learned lead the way for reason to be well situated in the person. The malnourished souls of teachers and pupils alike at Experiment House make it a barren place, distinctly contrasted with Jill and Eustace discover once the locked door on the grounds of Experiment House are jarred open.

They had expected to see the grey, heathery slope of the moor going up and up to join the dull autumn sky. Instead, a blaze of sunshine met them. It poured through the doorway as the light of a June day pours into a garage when you open the door. It made the drops of water on the grass glitter like beads and showed up the dirtiness of Jill’s tear-stained face. And the sunlight was coming from what certainly did look like a different world—what they could see of it. They saw smooth turf, smoother and brighter than Jill had ever seen before, and blue sky, and, darting to and fro, things so bright that they might have been jewels or huge butterflies.

C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, 9

Both Heart and Mind: The Renewal of Values in Education

Schools have perennially been easy prey for social critiques. We can find many instances within generations of British literature ranging from Shakespeare and Milton to Austen and Dickens. This is because the effort to learn is distasteful when divorced from our natural curiosity and because education divorced from values is bland and lifeless.

The British schooling tradition is in many ways the classical model we have inherited in our educational renewal movement. Oxford and Cambridge became the standard model for liberal arts universities coming out of the Middle Ages. Every generation struggles to reform and renew education in part because we can never fully get it right. This is actually the strength of the classical tradition. It holds within it all the tools required to solve the problems and challenges that come from the classical tradition.

The power of Lewis’s critique holds all the more true in light of the expansion of technological power and the continued erosion of values in society. If Lewis was concerned about Men without Chests, perhaps we are facing Men with Mechanical Chests. Throwing more money and technology at an educational system that has divorced itself from values will only exacerbate our current dystopia. Just as Jill and Eustace glimpsed Narnia after breaking through the locked door, perhaps we can glimpse the green pastures of the renewal of values in education.

Once Jill and Eustace entered the world of Aslan they find themselves on the precipice of an enormous cliff overlooking the land of Narnia. Eustace falls over the cliff, but is saved by the breath of Aslan. Jill remains on the heights, seeing Aslan for the first time. There she is told four Signs that must be remembered that will guide them on their quest. Aslan instructs her to repeat the four Signs (and I would be remiss not to point out that even Aslan uses narration). Her mission is not only to remember and fulfill these Signs, but she must also convey them to Eustace. Their ultimate goal is to rescue Prince Rilian from the clutches of the Emerald Witch. If we have properly put on our mythological thinking caps, it is clear that Jill and Eustace must rescue social order in the form of the young prince from the embodiment of malicious chaos.

So we see how the renewal of society occurs at the instruction of Aslan. The Signs given to Jill are basic instructions. They are functionally like the Ten Commandments, even though they are not laws, so to speak. But within the narrative they provide direction not only to the advancement of the plot, but they serve to motivate the wills of our two protagonists. In this way we can see that Aslan’s instructions are not just esoteric, intellectual knowledge. This is more like practical wisdom, rules the children can live by as they fulfill their quest. As they abide by these rules, they are corrected when they go astray and confirmed when they go aright. This is what we would expect of wisdom and knowledge leading to the renewal of society.

It would be all too easy to stretch the elements of the story too far. However, I think Lewis demonstrates in the narrative of The Silver Chair the point he makes theoretically in The Abolition of Man. When we are guided by objective values, society will have men and women capable of bearing the responsibility to renew society. When we jettison objective values, our men and women will be incapacitated, leading to the demise of society. And so with this in mind, as we anticipate the renewal of the school year, let us be mindful of objective values. Let us ponder anew the virtues – both cardinal and theological – that are guiding lights for our students. May we train them up in their affections so that they know to like and dislike what they ought and to accord to every object that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it.

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Also, instead of looking at the purpose of education holistically and accepting a tradition of values, they aimed at neutrality in their framework to make it widely acceptable to educators with different philosophies. This tactic worked successfully, ushering in the wide adoption of Bloom’s taxonomy in the world of education. However, they had to use teachers’ own terminology for their goals, simply sharpened up a bit to be more precise. In so doing they capitulated to a lowest-common denominator view of the human mind and of education itself. 

While I already laid out the philosophical problems with this approach in the last article, I have not yet shown exactly how this gets ugly in real life. I alluded to the grade-focused anxiety or disengagement of many students. But there is more to it than that. What goes wrong in schools, when Bloom’s Taxonomy is built into the architecture of education? 

The answer to that question is simple, if controversial. When Bloom’s Taxonomy is fully embraced and practiced in an educational setting, the beating heart of education gets cut out. 

By this (rather dramatic) statement, I mean at least two things. The first is a reaffirmation of C.S. Lewis’s core argument in The Abolition of Man: that training “men without chests” devolves ultimately into propaganda. The second is a more subtle claim about human beings as agents and producers, and not just knowers, for which I will rely on Mortimer Adler’s Aristotle for Everyone. 

Earlier Articles in This Series:

Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

The Ugly of Bloom’s, Point 1: Bloated Heads and Shrivelled Chests

I have already referred to the argument of C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man in the introduction to this series. And while Bloom and his colleagues do not seem to be as obsessed with debunking traditional values as the authors of Lewis’ unnamed Green Book, nevertheless their neglect of the heart comes under the same sharp knife of Lewis’ critique. It is all the more ironic that Lewis’ short treatise predates Bloom’s by just about a decade, since it almost seems as if it was written to challenge their project as much as the English text book he quotes from.

At the climax of his first chapter, Lewis draws from Plato’s Republic to draw attention to the holistic nature of human beings as rational, emotional and animal. The kicker for our purposes is not just that human beings also need education of their “affective domain”, as Bloom would put it, but that the interrelationships between these elements of human nature must be educated or trained. As he explains,

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. 

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Deckle Edge, 2015), 24

The problems of life often pose themselves as a proper ordering of intellect, emotions or sentiment, and bodily desires or instincts. Where Bloom’s project is endorsed, even with completed affective and psychomotor domains, there is no principle of integration, no overarching purpose or set of values to govern the relationships between cold logic, hot feeling and bodily pains and pleasures. Lewis goes on, drawing from his classical sources,

We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment — these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

If Lewis had been directly critiquing Bloom’s Taxonomy, he likely would have said, “It would have been better if you had begun with the affective domain, and left the others to take care of themselves.” In fact, this is precisely the focus of Plato in the Republic as well as his Laws, where he emphasized the importance of music and gymnastic training in songs, dances, and poems, that are good and worthy of imitation from a moral perspective (see Patrick’s recent article on Human Development, the section on Plato). This is the core of primary education. 

Now we may believe with Charlotte Mason that since children too are persons, their intellects are also capable of proper education at the earliest levels. But that is aside the point of this present issue. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy aims only at the head or bare intellect with its abstract abilities of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. It is true that “application” and “evaluation” at least seem promising as education for life and not just academics. But when we read their explanation of “evaluation” as an educational objective, our hopes are soundly dashed and the spirit of the Green Book comes through:

Evaluation is defined as the making of judgments about the value, for some purpose, of ideas, works, solutions, methods, material, etc. It involves the use of criteria as well as standards for appraising the extent to which particulars are accurate, effective, economical, or satisfying. The judgments may be either quantitative or qualitative, and the criteria may be either those determined by the student or those which are given to him….

Man is apparently so constituted that he cannot refrain from evaluating, judging, appraising, or valuing almost everything which comes within his purview. Much of this evaluating is highly egocentric in that the individual judges things as they relate to himself. Thus, ideas and objects which are useful to him may be evaluated highly, while objects which are less useful to him (but which may be extremely useful to others) are evaluated less highly. 

Bloom et al., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, 185.

Man’s judgments, values, and evaluations are, in the main, dismissed as “highly egocentric” (Do I hear the shadowy ghost of Christian charity calling out in the background in spite of Bloom’s goal of neutrality?), but no solution is given other than training of the bare intellect: students should be taught to evaluate poems and data based on both internal and external criteria. As with many cases, this sort of intellectual solution may sound good in theory, but it is woefully ineffective in practice. 

Lewis explains why near the close of his first chapter:

The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Deckle Edge, 2015), 25.

The proper work of the intellect itself relies on “trained sentiment” and cannot ultimately do without it. As the Greek tradition discovered, it is philosophy, the “love of wisdom”, and not mere wisdom, as the Sophists so arrogantly claimed for themselves, that characterizes the truly educated person. The holistic education of the whole human person requires not just training every part, but the proper ordering of a person’s loves, thoughts and actions. 

But how does this dilemma practically affect teachers today, who have been born and bred in Bloom’s? That question can be answered by an illustration from Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0 in a section on lesson objectives. Notice how Lemov goes one step further than Bloom’s Taxonomy technically did, to rule out “affective domain” objectives altogether:

Setting measurable lesson objectives disciplines you in other ways. For example, it forces you to think through key assumptions. If your goal is to have students know something or understand something or think something, how will you know they have reached it? Thoughts are not measurable unless they are described or applied. Do your lessons rely on a balance of methods for describing and applying understanding?

If your goal is to have students feel, think, or believe something, how appropriate is that? Is it sufficient to read and understand poetry without enjoying, appreciating, or loving it? Are students accountable for accepting the judgments and tastes of others—or for learning skills that can help them make up their own minds? 

I am a pretty fair case study of this. Although I have a master’s degree in English literature, I do not enjoy reading poetry. In fact, I usually find it almost unreadable. I’m sorry to say (to all my fantastic professors and teachers) that I have almost never achieved the objective of loving a poem. Nevertheless, having learned to analyze and sustain arguments about poetry, and having had to critique those of others, has helped me to become a more effective thinker and writer and, occasionally (I hope), a more insightful person. So, in the end, I am truly glad to have studied and read poems in my literature classes. My point is that my best teachers held themselves accountable for what they could control (the quality of my thinking and the sustainability of my arguments), not what they couldn’t (whether I like reading the stuff). Even though their love for the things they taught me was probably their reason for doing the work, passing that love on to me fell into the realm of what they couldn’t control. They eschewed loving poetry as an objective, even if it was their motivation—an irony, to be sure, but a useful one.

Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0, 138-139.

Lemov has an interesting personal anecdote to support his point—one that many of us, I would imagine, can resonate with. It may not be reading poetry, but surely we all have something that we simply did not take to from our education… some skill or activity that we could never develop a taste for. And how often have we wanted something for our students in the feeling, enjoying, believing domain, and failed to reach this objective? Perhaps, we should just give up. Perhaps, simply focusing on “academic” and “intellectual” goals is enough.

But what if Lemov’s experience was ineffective because of improper methods and unhelpful timing? And not because it is impossible to train someone to love reading poetry? What if Lemov had not been introduced to this “love of poetry” later on in high school, college and grad school, through analysis, arguments and critique? But instead what if Lemov had had poetry read to him while sitting on his father’s or mother’s lap? And then gone to a classical grammar school, where good poetry was read aloud by the teacher animatedly and relished by the class daily, without any attempt at critical or literary analysis, or any fear of a grade hanging over his head? What if then he also memorized word-for-word select poems over the course of his early education, and learned to perform them dramatically as recitations amidst a group of excited, warm-hearted students, to the natural satisfaction of an audience’s applause? 

The point seems so obvious that it is hardly worth pressing: the methods we choose must be adapted to the objectives we have in mind, certain means are appropriate for certain ends. And certain educational goals are easiest to attain at particular times in a child’s development. 

The Ugly of Bloom’s, Point 2: Man as Maker and Doer, as well as Knower

You see, the human person cannot be analyzed and dissected into different parts that can then be trained to excellence separately. The harmony of an individual’s life is the ultimate goal of education, and must be attended to all along the way. Proper methods must be suited to proper times in a child’s harmonious development toward virtuous and wise adulthood. 

All this is assumed in the background of a more robust anthropology or understanding of human nature. In his book Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy, Mortimer Adler, the famous advocate of the Great Books and a democratic, moral classical education (though not necessarily Christian) provides the grounding for our second point on human nature. Adler divides his exposition of Aristotle’s thought into three sections on Man as Maker, Doer and Knower. He introduces these three aspects of humanity as “three dimensions” clarifying that they are not fully separate from one another. His explanation of each will be foundational for our later exploration of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, so I will reproduce it in full here:

In the first of these three dimensions, making, we have man the artist or artisan—the producer of all sorts of things: shoes, ships, and houses, books, music, and paintings. It is not just when human beings produce statues or paintings that we should call them artists. That is much too restricted a use of the word art. Anything in the world that is artificial rather than natural is a work of art—something man-made.

In the second of these dimensions, doing, we have man the moral and social being—someone who can do right or wrong, someone who, by what he or she does or does not do, either achieves happiness or fails to achieve it, someone who finds it necessary to associate with other human beings in order to do what, as a human being, he or she feels impelled to do.

In the third dimension, knowing, we have man as learner, acquiring knowledge of all sorts—not only about nature, not only about the society of which human beings are a part, not only about human nature, but also about knowledge itself.

In all three of these dimensions, man is a thinker, but the kind of thinking he does in order to make things differs from the kind of thinking he does in order to act morally and socially. Both kinds of thinking differ from the kind of thinking a human being does in order just to know—to know just for the sake of knowing. 

Mortimer J. Adler, Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1978), 17

In this passage, Adler has outlined for us something very unique about Aristotle’s intellectual virtues: they include each of the three dimensions. The intellectual virtue of art or craftsmanship (Greek: techne) is concerned with man as maker. The intellectual virtue of prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) is concerned with man as a doer, a moral agent. The other three virtues, scientific knowledge (episteme), intuition or perception (nous), and philosophic wisdom (sophia) concern man as knower. One of the central problems with Bloom’s Taxonomy is that man as maker and man as doer are virtually left out, neglected, and despised. The focus is placed on Homo Academicus with the same ugly result that Lewis so eloquently described. 

But more than that, it should be noted that Aristotle’s three dimensions of what it means to be human cut across the divisions of Bloom’s proposed domains (cognitive, affective and psychomotor). Man the Maker is involved intellectually, affectively and bodily in the creation of some new product in the world. Likewise, Man the Doer must think well about potential courses of action, even as his trained affections come into play to help or hinder him as he acts bodily in the world. Finally, Man the Knower must have body trained and heart attuned to the pursuit of wisdom, or else his thought will be unfruitful. In a way, Bloom’s Taxonomy has attempted to separate what God has joined together. 

It is not that it is wrong or impossible to distinguish between head, heart and hands as an intellectual exercise, but we never do actually make, act or know without the cooperation of each of these domains. The disorder, manipulation and motivational failures of modern education are the natural results of isolating school from life. In life we create, and creating has its own natural rewards; we act, and natural and relational consequences in the actual world are the result; knowledge for its own sake is the proper flowering of a life well lived and natural human curiosity. But when Bloom’s tries to put the cart before the horse, it crashes and makes a mess. 

In the next post we’ll explore in more detail what exactly Bloom’s Taxonomy leaves out from an educational program built on Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues. We’ll also explore the ways that Bloom’s objectives in the cognitive domain would interact with the goals of a classical liberal arts curriculum, viewed through an Aristotelean lens. Share your questions and thoughts in the comments!

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