This series may not be able to answer all the controversies and complex intricacies of this age old set of questions, but at least if we follow out these different strands, we might be able to be more aware of our preconceived notions and how they are affecting our view of the children in front of us day after day. Even as Christians we can tend to hold contradictory notions at one and the same time and this befuddles our practices and responses to everyday occurrences. Once we follow the ghost of the soul out into the courtyard of ideas, we’ll find both valuable insights into who we are and how we should be educated, but also incorrect notions that should be discarded and reburied as liable to lead us astray. In this way we can end the haunting of our educational practices by false views and unhelpful practices.

We can profitably begin with Plato’s account of the soul as immortal and containing three parts which must be properly harmonized with one another through education. Before Plato significant thinking about the nature of the soul had already begun among earlier Greek philosophers, but no one thinker arguably has had a greater influence on Western conceptions of the soul than him. 

The Immortality of the Soul

In Homeric times the word for soul, psyche in Greek, had more of a straightforward referent, something akin to ‘life’ on the one hand, and ‘shade’ or ‘ghost’ on the other: 

The soul is, on the one hand, something that a human being risks in battle and loses in death. On the other hand, it is what at the time of death departs from the person’s limbs and travels to the underworld, where it has a more or less pitiful afterlife as a shade or image of the deceased person.

See Ancient Theories of Soul (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Summer 2009 Edition)

This set of meanings is roughly comparable to the common use of ‘nephesh’ in the Hebrew Old Testament, which may have originally meant ‘neck’ or ‘throat’. Your soul in this ancient Greek or Hebrew context is what makes you alive, and perhaps, ironically, the part of you that lingers on in Hades or Sheol after you have died. 

Plato develops especially on this second meaning in the Phaedo to express his view that the human soul is immortal. For Plato this immortal soul is embodied throughout a human life and can be affected negatively by the choices and lifestyle lived in the body. Purifying the soul from bodily entanglements is part and parcel of the true practice of philosophy, which involves a type of dying that leads to genuinely blessed life. 

This Platonic view of the soul will influence Stoicism, as well as later Gnosticism. Moreover, it seems almost impossible not to conclude that Jesus and the apostles are not, in some ways, both countering and affirming it, as earlier Jews had before them. For instance, Jesus says, “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt 10:28 ESV). This seems to agree with the idea that the soul outlives physical death, adding further the Christian view of final judgment and everlasting “destruction” in hell. 

At the same time, we do not have any Christian affirmation of the idea that the soul pre-exists bodily life in normal humans. Therefore, Plato’s supposition that all learning is in fact remembering finds no support in Christian theology. It also brings with it its own set of problems, like the possible infinite regression of souls passing into and out of bodies. Plato’s socratic method of educating by ‘drawing out’ the knowledge already nascent inside the soul must find some other justification than this theory of the soul for classical Christian educators. 

But we have had no trouble doing so, since asking the student questions to prod thought is attested elsewhere, not least with Jesus himself. In addition, the value of socratic or maieutic instruction is found in training a student in the art of dialectical reasoning and, at the same time, forcing a student to analyze their own partially formed or borrowed answers to life’s fundamental questions for logical consistency. This process can help bring about a metanoia, a repentance or change of mind, where a student adopts a more consistent understanding of the world. We can safely do away with pre-existence while holding onto the human soul’s continued existence after death based on the biblical support.

The Tripartite Soul: Rational, Emotional, and Appetitive

In Plato’s Republic his tripartite theory of the soul finds its most stunning and educationally suggestive descriptions. The overarching concern of the dialogue is the attempt by Socrates to explain what justice is and why it is worthwhile in and of itself, regardless of society’s rewards. The tale of the ring of Gyges told in book 2 helps to bring the issue to a head by positing a scenario in which a man with a ring of invisibility could practice all manner of injustice without any fear of punishment. It is a case of absolute power corrupting absolutely and challenging the hearer on whether he wouldn’t do the same thing, if given the opportunity. 

Socrates’ extended answer to the question of whether justice truly leads to happiness or blessedness hinges on the order or disorder of the several parts of the soul. He maintains that the tyrant with absolute power is actually the most miserable and unhappy type of person. In order to explain why he writs large the nature of the soul, by expanding into an inquiry into the just city-state, which ends up having the same harmonious parts as the individual human soul.  “Corresponding to the three types in the city, the soul also is tripartite,” says Socrates (Perseus Digital Library, Book 9, 580d). “Each of us also in whom the several parts within him perform each their own task—he will be a just man and one who minds his own affair” (441d-e).

The three parts are the rational, high-spirited, or we might say emotional, and the appetitive. The symbolic images he assigns to these are a man (rational), a lion (spirited), and a monkey or monster (appetitive). “Does it not belong to the rational part to rule, being wise and exercising forethought in behalf of the entire soul, and to the principle of high spirit to be subject to this and its ally?” (441e) asks Socrates. These two parts, then, allied together, can effectively “preside over the appetitive part which is the mass of the soul in each of us and the most insatiate by nature of wealth” (442a). In Plato all the non-ideal forms of government, as well as the non-ideal forms of individual character, are explained through various types of disordering of these fundamental parts of the soul or city. 

We can pause at this point to note that Plato’s tripartite soul draws from our common sense self-awareness as human beings. Each of us has felt within 1) the massive force of appetitive desires, 2) the high emotional spirits of a desire for honor and the motivation to act, 3) the ability to think rationally about things, whether our own affairs or abstract sciences. Naming these various parts of the human inner life does not exactly put us in heavily speculative or theoretical territory, unlike the soul’s pre-existence. Whether we think of Freud’s superego, ego and id, or the biblical language of mind, heart and flesh or passions, we find ourselves assuming something very like the threefold division of Plato. In other words, Plato’s tripartite soul is fundamental and necessary, virtually uncontestable (unless we get down very deep in the weeds of exact distinctions), and therefore incredibly important and valuable.

Plato has posed the question of human justice or righteousness as a matter of a rightly ordered soul in harmony with itself. In doing so he framed the work of education and personal growth as aiming principally at what came to be called the cardinal virtues: practical wisdom or prudence, courage, temperance and justice. Practical wisdom arises when the rational part of the soul rules and is obeyed in a person’s choices. Courage involves the high-spirited part’s emotional regulation according to right reason, even in the face of fears. Temperance, or self-control, comes about when the mass of desires and appetites submit to the rational and spirited part, with the outcome of these three being a person who acts justly toward himself and others. 

How does this educational goal come about? we might ask. What pedagogy or means can be turned to this end or purpose of education? Plato’s answer is that it is “the blending of music and gymnastics that will render them concordant, intensifying and fostering the one with fair words and teachings and relaxing and soothing and making gentle the other by harmony and rhythm” (441e-442a). A literary, poetic, and musical education filled with examples of real goodness, truth and beauty (we must engage in some censoring of the poets, Plato asserts) will tune the heart to right reason. Physical training to endure pains and sufferings, improve fitness and build up well-trained reflexes of nerve and sinew, rather than pampering the flesh, will set the appetitive part in submission. (For more on gymnastic and musical education, see Clark and Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition.)

Based on his symbolic and tripartite image of the soul, the task of education becomes very clear, aiming both at justice and ultimate happiness or human flourishing as two sides of the same coin:

And on the other hand he who says that justice is the more profitable affirms that all our actions and words should tend to give the man within us complete domination over the entire man and make him take charge of the many-headed beast—like a farmer who cherishes and trains the cultivated plants but checks the growth of the wild—and he will make an ally of the lion’s nature, and caring for all the beasts alike will first make them friendly to one another and to himself, and so foster their growth. (589a-b)

This type of self-culture implies the help of a certain type of parental discipline and educational regimen that might be otherwise unwelcome. The conclusion is that each soul has a “many-headed beast” within it that must be taken charge of, checked, and dominated. The heart and sense of honor and motivation must be made an ally to the reason, “cultivated plants” like good habits and right emotional responses must be “cherished” but wild growths must be pruned, weeds dug up by the roots. 

Moreover, the three parts of the soul have each, according to Plato, a different set of natural desires. The rational part is a lover of learning and a lover of wisdom, the natural philosopher in us. The spirited part is a lover of honor; we might call this our social-emotional nature, easily swayed by the wrong influences, but a powerhouse of energy and drive. The appetitive part is a lover of gain, money or profit, chiefly concerned with how to satisfy its own desires. According to this insight, then, the major concern of education is not simply how to train the skills of one individual part of the soul, i.e. honing the faculties of the rational part. For, if the appetitive part or spirited part are ruling the man, then the powers of the rational part of the soul can themselves be used in service of the man’s avarice and unchecked ambition. Instead, the challenge of education and self-culture is how to properly order the development and growth of the three parts of the soul in harmonious and proper relationships with one another. Each part must do its own proper task, claims Plato. 

To the extent that Plato is right about this, modern education is found to be wanting because of its abandonment of traditional values and morality. Without an agreed upon principle for the ordering of the soul’s affections, as C.S. Lewis explained in The Abolition of Man, education will tend to be disforming, making bloated heads and shriveled chests, or we might say, unrighteous men, enslaved to their own prejudices and appetites. This much we have said before on Educational Renaissance, but perhaps now we can see more clearly how it is this tripartite view of the soul that hovers over this educational problem. As we continue our series on The Soul of Education we will see how this fundamental insight from Plato finds expression or contradiction in various ways.

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This is why it has been so crucial for classical Christian educators to return to foundational questions. The average parent or teacher in our movement may tire of such stargazing, but it is necessary. The means that we use to educate young human beings must be consistent with the end or purpose of education. 

But the purpose of education itself and the means we use to educate must also be consistent with our answer to the even larger question of what a human being is. Most of our practical disagreements in how to educate children have these fundamental worldview questions hovering in the background, like a ghost that will continually haunt us if we do not acknowledge its presence. 

To picture worldview commitments as star-gazing or a set of higher level propositions, at the top of a chain of deductions written out on a whiteboard somewhere, tricks us into thinking that we can assume them and get on with application. But this is untrue. The soul of education must enliven our work with children and be embodied in our curriculum, pedagogy and classroom leadership moment by moment, otherwise we will repeat the errors of competing worldviews and beliefs, half-truths and downright falsehoods.

The soul of education is therefore found in our view of the soul. Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education is a notable example of this recognition. She grounded her educational ideas on the fundamental claim that children were persons. “I believe that the first article of a valid educational creed–’Children are born persons’–is of a revolutionary character; for what is a revolution but a complete reversal of attitude?” (The Parents’ Review 22; June 1911, 419-437). Our attitude toward children will inevitably shape our work as educators in ways that are beyond our immediate awareness. Classical Christian educators advocate a similar reversal of attitude or revolution in education.

We may not think of the word ‘person’ as carrying the same theological or philosophical weight as the word ‘soul’. But Charlotte Mason draws our attention to our modern assumptions about the nature of human beings through this word. Today even as classical Christian educators, we are stymied by a mishmash of terms for the nature of human beings: from traditional and religious terms like ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, to the language of modern psychology and neuroscience. How do we make sense of it all? And how are these terms and our half-formed understanding of them implicitly shaping our attitude toward the children we educate? 

I have heard one of the leaders in our movement meaningfully claim that in education we are “nourishing souls,” rather than any number of alternatives. At the time there was a collective sigh in the room as we felt at a visceral level the weight of this re-imagination of education. But why? What does the word ‘soul’ even mean? And how can it be more than the ghost of our traditional imagination in a world where human beings are conceived in terms of their amygdala, frontal lobes, and dopaminergic system?

As Christians committed to the language of scripture regarding our flesh, soul, mind and spirit, how can we sift through the varying conceptions of the human person for the fundamental insights that can create a Christian revolution of attitude and methods in our educational endeavors? 

In this series of short articles on the soul of education, I propose to evaluate ancient and modern theories of the soul, from Plato and Aristotle to modern psychology and neuroscience, in order to glean important and revolutionary insights for our day-to-day educational practices. The ghost of these various conceptions of the soul are haunting our schools and classrooms. Like the Stoic Athenodorus we have to keep our heads about us, follow the ghost out into the courtyard of ideas, and learn its story by digging in the spot where it left, if we would no longer be haunted (see Pliny the Younger’s Letter to Sura). In our next article we will begin this process with Plato’s tripartite soul and its implications for education. 

I hope you enjoy this series of short articles as I take a break from my series of articles on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. The Soul of Education is tangentially related to that extended exploration and will provide me with some needed time to wrap up book editing and writing projects, as well as research for the next series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of intuition or understanding (nous). Share a comment or thought on how you think any of the competing theories of the soul might be affecting our attitude and methods in education!

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It is likely that Jefferson borrowed the three rights from John Locke. Almost a century prior to the American declaration, the English philosopher had written in Two Treatises on Government that government existed to protect a person’s “life, liberty and estate.” By estate, Locke surely meant property or “the possession of outward things,” as expressed in A Letter Concerning Toleration. We can find, however, in Jefferson’s revision of Locke’s three rights, a synthesis of Lockean philosophy, particularly drawing upon Locke’s phrase the “pursuit of true and solid happiness” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Jefferson’s synthesis of Lockean philosophy marked a turn away from previous expressions of rights in the Americas, particularly in the “Virginia Declaration of Rights” adopted in his home state a month prior to the ratification of the U.S. Declaration.

What all this means in terms of political philosophy is for greater minds than mine to figure out. The idea of happiness and the pursuit of it ought to capture our attention. What is “true and solid happiness?” To answer this, we need to address the matter of what we mean by “the good life.” I like how Jonathan Pennington puts it in Jesus the Great Philosopher:

“The Good Life is not referring to the lives of the rich and famous as revealed in the tabloid or expose show. The Good Life refers to the habits of practiced wisdom that produce in the human soul deep and lasting flourishing.”

Jonathan Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher, 29.

The good life requires an amount of practice in the habits of virtue. Only when well-practiced in the way of wisdom can a person experience “true and solid happiness.”

What is Happiness?

So what exactly is happiness? This is a question that goes all the way back to the ancient philosophers. Plato, for instance, understands happiness as the highest aim or goal of life. There is a moral aspect to this happiness encompassed in the word eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία). It could be the stronger feeling of unhappiness occurs when one falls short of this goal or target. Sin or hamartia (ἁμαρτία) in this understanding is a falling short of the highest aims of life or missing the mark, to draw upon the imagery of archery. This is the essence of tragedy, according to ancient writers. The individual who is not heroic enough to live up to the highest aim of life and yet is not truly a villain, falls short of the eudaimonic standard. Misfortune befalls that person though the simple circumstances of life, and that individual falls prey to their own frailty, thereby experiencing unhappiness not because they are the worst of villains, but rather because of not living up to the high ideal of the good life.

Plato spells out different forms of happiness in the allegory “The Charioteer” that is instructive. In the Phaedrus, he shares the story of a charioteer driving two winged horses each having an opposite character. The first is wild with passion and impulsivity. It is easily distracted by fleeting desires and would easily be led off course. This horse is most interested in instant pleasures. These characteristics make it such that the charioteer must ever be watchful over this horse and can never have a moment of ease, because he cannot trust the horse to guide itself toward the proper path ahead.

The second horse is a noble creature. It loves what is honorable, modest and temperate. Guided by a simple direction, this horse pursues a pathway to that end despite the many distractions that might meet it on the highway. The charioteer has instilled many good habits, training the noble horse such that the charioteer has implicit trust in the animal, safe in the knowledge that nothing could cause this horse to stray from the proper path ahead.

I think this allegory speaks to something within all of us. We are simultaneously the wild and the well-trained horse, contain both base passions and noble bearing. And yet, we can differ from one another in how much we entrust to which horse to guide us in life. It is this very idea that has caused confusion as to the meaning of Jefferson’s phrasing, “the pursuit of happiness.” In the guise of the first horse, this is the pursuit of fleeting desires, it is the distracted life of instant pleasures. These are simply not the hallmarks of the highest aim of life. Rarely would we say that a life spent in fleeting desires and instant pleasures is a life well lived. After many years inundated by advertisements that equate these desires and pleasures with the good life, we are often tempted to consider these as the status symbols of nobility. But I think this is hardly the Jeffersonian vision. It is certainly not envisioned in the ancient philosophical tradition. And hardly the biblical vision of the good life.

Our definition of happiness seems more associated with the second horse. The horse of noble bearing charts a course towards the true end of the journey, recognizing fleeting desires and instant pleasures as distractions from the deeply satisfying bliss of accomplishing life’s highest aim. Now it might be argued that we cannot arrive at that highest aim, so wouldn’t it just be good enough to simply enjoy the fleeting desires and instant pleasures life affords. But what one notices about the second horse is that the deeply satisfying bliss comes not in the conclusion of the journey, but on the entirety of the pathway towards that end. Whether we arrive at our highest aim or not, it is the pursuit of that deeply satisfying bliss that is itself deeply satisfying. This, then, must be our definition of happiness.

The Dopamine Problem

I alluded a moment ago to the fact that both horses reside within. It would be too simple to equate our dopaminergic system with the wild horse, even though dopamine generally gets a bad rap. Our motivational system utilizes an array of neurotransmitters to reward us, giving us that feeling of pleasure in response to stimuli our body wants more of. It would be all too easy to equate happiness with hormones in our brains. And yet, this whole system is entirely relevant.

Suffice it to say that the dopaminergic system is rather blind to the type of stimulus it receives. One can experience a dopamine release from reading a good book or taking a bite of cotton candy. You and I know there’s a significant difference in time invested as well as the relative the health benefits of these two activities. But our neurology cares not. There is a release of dopamine for either activity. To put it another way, both horses get fed even though one is a wild horse liable to go astray in pursuit of fleeting pleasures while the other is a noble and faithful creature.

A recent study was able to find, though, a dopaminergic answer to the question of instant versus delayed gratification. Yes, we get a dopamine hit regardless. However, a 2021 study investigated the dopaminergic (DAergic) release differential during delayed gratification in comparison to instant gratification. They write:

“We found remarkable and sustained DAergic activation when mice managed to wait longer and further demonstrated a causal link between DAergic activation and the increase in transient waiting probability. Furthermore, we found DAergic activity ramps up in a consistent manner during waiting, mimicking the value of waiting along with a series of states in our Continuous Deliberation RL model, both of which presumably contributed to pursuing a more valuable future goal and resisting the distraction of the less-optimal immediate options in our task.”

Gao, Zilong et al. “The neural basis of delayed gratification.” Science Advances vol. 7,49 (2021).

In exchange for an allegory of horses, we now have the mythology of mice in rather modern garb. Let’s break down what this study finds. For mice that waited, or experienced delayed gratification, the dopamine release was stronger, and there was more of it experienced over time. Not only that, but there was another impact in that the anticipation of a future goal caused an amount of dopamine to be released. In simple terms, the dopamine experienced with fleeting desires and instant pleases does not stack up against the dopamine experienced with deeply satisfying bliss. Or to put it yet another way. Although both horses get fed, one gets a basic meal while the other receives a more balanced diet.

So what keeps us from the pursuit of this better quality dopamine reward? Why is it that today we tend not to feed our better horse with a healthy diet and are quite happy to go on feeding a fattened wild horse? The answer to this is effort.

The pursuit of true happiness is effortful work. The pathway to deeply satisfying bliss is often not much fun and is associated with highly demanding practices. If we take seriously, however, the thesis of Cal Newport’s book Deep Work, it is the effortful work that is both rare and valuable in our world of distraction. What emerges is an economy of higher and lower values. I could scroll Facebook, and my dopaminergic system really likes that in the moment. In fact, it will tell me to keep on scrolling to squeeze out just a little bit more dopamine. But when I wake up from the rather shallow world of Facebook scrolling, I end up feeling empty and hollow. I get the symptoms of effortful work, but nothing to show for it. I feel like I did something, but in the end it amounts to nothing.

Compare this to, say, writing a 3000-word article on happiness (or reading a 3000-word article on happiness as you are now doing). It takes genuine effort to piece together a stream of thoughts. One must be careful to write clearly and accurately. There is intellectual work to be done both in the writing and in the reading of such a work. And when one is done with such a work, the feeling of tiredness occurs because effort was spent. It is demanding work. Attention must remain focused. There are moments when it is not quite fun. But in the end, not only does one feel like something was done, there is something of quality to show for one’s effort. Obviously, the reader will have to evaluate the relative quality of the writing and the thinking. But let’s say the writing is of rather middling quality. It still stands as something accomplished. Sure, one could go on to improve upon the ideas and the clarity of expression. The deep satisfaction comes at the thought that good effort has been spent, even if one has not arrived at the highest ideal.

Practicing Happiness

Practicing happiness has been a bit of a catch phrase in positive psychology. It is a method of proactively cultivating positive emotions to improve our wellbeing. When we cultivate gratitude, kindness, and optimism, there are positive effects that can be seen in our physical and mental health. In light of the discussion above, I want to add to this line of reasoning that effortful work put into our moral formation seems to be exactly the kind of endeavor that aligns with this concept of practicing happiness.

Many turn to positive psychology in an effort to alleviate stress. So it might seem strange to engage in effortful work. Here I think the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on “flow” gives us a framework for understanding how effortful work can actually be a stress management tool. A very basic understanding of flow is the experience a person has when they are fully immersed in what they are doing. I often imagine my son immersed in building with Legos when he was younger. He could sit for hours building without any real sense of an outside world. He was fully absorbed in what he was doing.

In his work on “flow” Csikszentmihalyi considers two realities that are present. The first reality we might call detachment. The immersive state causes an individual to “forget all the unpleasant aspects of life.” (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness) Thus, a deep engagement in effortful work can be a practice of detachment from anxiety and stress. We frequently engage in stress relieving activities such as watching YouTube videos or playing video games to create a type of detachment. But these activities are rarely ones that get us into the flow state that Csikszentmihalyi describes. So, the next time you are beset with anxiety or stress, consider some kind of more effortful practice that could get you into a state of flow. It could be as simple as piecing together a puzzle, tending a garden plot or reading a book.

The second reality we might call experiential happiness. Csikszentmihalyi shares how the flow state is associated less with hedonic pleasure and more with eudemonic happiness. This sounds rather familiar! By choosing experiences that immerse us into effortful work, we build up a reservoir of happiness that deepens as we acquire greater skill, see progress in our work, and have something to show for our work. Consider the happiness that is gained as a puzzle is completed, a garden bed blooms in season after season, or our bookshelf showcases a number of beloved favorites. For me the practice of running has been a place of flow. For years I have tracked my mileage and feel a deep satisfaction in the places I’ve run, the people I’ve run with, and the insights I’ve gained out on the trails.

This kind of deep work, of entering into flow, is an investment in yourself and you reap the reward of better mental and physical health. Now what I would like to add to my basic thesis here is that effortful work on our moral formation can’t help but contribute to a betterment of our mental and physical health. This takes me back to the ancient philosophers. Happiness or eudaimonia occurred as a result of virtues or arete (ἀρετή). Both Plato and Aristotle see virtues as excellences that we practice.

Newport, for his part, seems to have a profound understanding of this philosophical tradition when he describes the “sacredness inherent in traditional craftsmanship.” (Newport, Deep Work). Virtues are practices just like a wheelwright or blacksmith practices their craft. We grow in the skill of courage or faithfulness. We don’t acquire courage and then consider that done. In other words, there is always more to learn as we exercise the moral part of ourselves.

This leads to a consideration of how all of life is the pursuit of virtue. I really like how Alasdair MacIntyre captures the interplay of the virtues and the good life in his book After Virtue. He writes:

“The virtues are precisely those qualities the possession of which will enable an individual to achieve eudaimonia and the lack of which will frustrate his movement toward that telos. But although it would not be incorrect to describe the exercise of virtues as a means to the end of achieving the good for man, that description is ambiguous.”

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 148.

From this we gather that one cannot pursue happiness without the possession of virtues. This speaks to how important it is to set our young ones on a path of virtue from an early age. To do otherwise is to set them on a course of frustration throughout life. This does not mean that virtue cannot be acquired when older. But how much easier is it when a course is set properly from the beginning. MacIntyre goes on, though, to elaborate how the good life entails the continual practicing of virtues.

“But the exercise of the virtues is not in this sense a means to the end of the good for man. For what constitutes the good for man is a complete human life lived at its best, and the exercise of the virtues is a necessary and central part of such a life, not a mere preparatory exercise to secure such a life.”

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 149.

This sounds like a call for daily exercise, not of the physical sort, but of the moral sort. The virtues are to be practiced like a basketball free throw is practiced. One considers good moral exemplars, and then tries to “follow through” like they do. Each new day brings a new opportunity to practice patience or moderation or humility or any other virtue. Many of us will have daily practices such as a time of prayer, a run, or a family dinner. These are highly commendable and worth maintaining. To these I would recommend a daily virtue practice. It might look like the virtue journal kept by Benjamin Franklin. Or it might simply be a daily contemplation of a virtue you will practice. The idea here is to treat virtue as something to be continually exercised in the pursuit of true happiness.

A Biblical Exposition on Happiness

Far from being a coda or a proforma addition to what has largely been a philosophical article up to this point, I find it striking how the biblical testimony has always had an undercurrent of moral direction connected to personal happiness in communion with God. I recollect coming across this in my research on 1 Peter where Peter quotes Psalm 34. Despite his reputation as an “uneducated, common” man (Acts 4:13), Peter’s epistle stands alongside the great philosophers for its depth of thought and expression.

Psalm 34 as he quotes it reads:

“Whoever desires to love life and see good days,

Let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit;

Let him turn away from evil and do good;

Let him seek peace and pursue it.

For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous,

And his ears are open to their prayer.

But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”

Surrounding this quotation, Peter calls his readers to live a blessed life through the practice of virtues. He list several in 1 Peter 3:8—unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, a humble mind. In this life, we won’t be able to follow the path of happiness unhindered. This he writes, “But even if you should suffer for righteousess’ sake, you will be blessed” (1 Peter 3:14).

What we can take from this is that the Christian life is a well-practiced life. I am quick to point out how much we are reliant on the work of Christ to make us righteous and to provide the energies of our sanctification. But let us be clear that in following in the footsteps of Christ (1 Peter 2:21), we are indeed a fellowship of virtue practicers. Our course in following Christ is set on seeing good days and desiring to love life.

I am mindful as I conclude that I haven’t mentioned one word about education. And that is fine. As this is the summertime, this article is meant first and foremost to feed the souls of educators rather than to provide a teaching methodology. Yet, I think one can discern in and through much that is written here how central these ideas are to a sound philosophy of education. What is the highest calling for us as educators, but to show our students the pathway to happiness in life. And that will come as we ourselves enter into this pursuit of happiness.

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Dorothy Sayers, known for her essay The Lost Tools of Learning (1947), advocated for a return to liberal arts education. With a special emphasis on the language arts of the Trivium, Sayers believed that the best remedy against sensationalistic news headlines was to equip the intellect with the right tools. Sayers writes,

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

It took a few decades, but her essay struck a nerve. Today there are hundreds of classical liberal arts schools across the United States, and indeed, the world, who look to this essay as their source of inspiration. Through equipping students with the tools of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, students are trained how to learn independently, master words, and discern truth from falsehood for themselves.

C.S. Lewis, a friend of Sayers, offered different, but related, advice. In The Abolition of Man (1943), Lewis argues that the best defense against propaganda that preys upon our unguarded emotions is a good offense: trained affections (what we desire). Emotions and affections themselves are alogical (not illogical) and not the issue. The problem occurs when our desires, and emotions that accompany them, are untrained and left unprepared to respond to bad ideas. The solution for Lewis, therefore, is not to suppress our subjective responses, but to shape them properly. Lewis writes, “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts” (14). 

In this blog article, I will explore how Christian educators can preserve a holistic view of the human person, including emotions, while not falling prey to emotionalism. To do so, we need to avoid subjectivism on the one hand and disembodied rationalism on the other. The way forward is to train students’ affections and emotions to be in accordance with objective values embedded in reality.

An “Innocent” Grammar Textbook

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis’ thesis is that the key to saving the humanity of human beings in the modern world is to preserve the idea that a connection exists between subjective responses and objective values. That is, existence is not a moral free-for-all regarding what to believe and love, or how to live. Rather, there is an underlying moral fabric of the universe that humans must learn how to properly live within. 

To make his case, Lewis shows how subjectivism, the idea that there are no objective moral values, is already creeping into the broader western intellectual mainstream. Using The Green Book, a pseudonym for The Control of Language (1939), as an example, Lewis points out that the authors smuggle in language of subjectivity in their supposedly innocent treatment of adjectives. How so?

In this now-famous passage for Lewisian readers, the authors, whom Lewis pseudo-names Gaius and Titius, recall an episode from the life of Coleridge in which he and a fellow tourist visit a waterfall. As they behold the majesty of the falls, they are struck with awe. Coleridge deems the falls “sublime,” while his fellow tourist calls them “pretty,” to Coleridge’s chagrin. 

Gaius and Titius take this opportunity to correct Coleridge for his judgment of the fellow tourist. Coleridge, they write, has no reason to look down upon the poor word choice, because both descriptions are mere projections of subjective emotion. These value statements have no purchase on reality. It is not as if the waterfall actually contains a quality that merits a particular response. To be sure, if the tourist described the water as purple or if Coleridge claimed the falls were composed of salt water, this would be a problem. But for Gaius and Titius, the value statements such as “sublime,” “pretty,” or even “ugly,” cannot be aesthetically evaluated objectively because there is nothing aesthetically objective about the waterfall, or anything for that matter, to evaluate.

Attack on Metaphysics

The authors of The Green Book, it could be said, were merely drinking from the subjective water fountain of the academic waterline in 20th century Europe. In After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (2021), Michael Ward identifies two key figures who were influencing this subjectivism.

The first figure is philosopher A.J. Ayer, a leading figure for logical positivism. Logical positivism is the idea that meaningful propositions are only those that are either tautological (e.g. “All bachelors are unmarried”) or empirically verifiable. In this view, moral and aesthetic judgments are mere expressions of emotion (6). There are no inherent qualities such as “good” or “beautiful” in objects of the universe. All that exists is the world of our five senses. Language is meaningful insofar as it describes the natural world or communicates incorrigible logical truths. The conclusion is that value statements are mere projections of individuals and therefore are data for the social sciences. Ayer writes, “It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychology and sociology” (“A Critique of Ethics” (1952) in Ethical Theory: An Anthology (2007), edited by Russ Shafer-Landau).

The second figure is I.A. Richards, an interdisciplinary scholar well-known for his work on subjectivism. Subjectivism, like logical positivism, holds that there are no objective moral or aesthetic values. Value statements merely reflect the internal feelings of the subject. They cannot and do not correlate to objective qualities in external objects (7). Ward writes, “He (Richards) makes the same subjectivist moves in the field of aesthetics as Ayer does in the realm of ethics. The beauty of art, just like the wrongness of theft, is an interior feeling only, a personal experience in the mind of an onlooker, not the external reality that merits a certain response” (8). 

With these philosophical ideas in circulation, you can see why Lewis is concerned. It is one thing for these ideas to gain traction in the ivory towers of academia. It is another thing for these ideas to be smuggled into grammar textbooks for the general public. Through the innocent teaching of grammar, a whole generation could grow up indoctrinated to believe in the nonexistence of objective values.

With World War II raging on around Lewis, Ward captures the Oxford professor’s fear well:

Had human civilization run its course? With entire sections of the population in mainland Europe being systematically exterminated, with food scarce and death falling out of the sky, no one could avoid wondering what had led humanity to such a pass or whether it would ever regain its equilibrium. And did it even deserve to? Did the word deserve itself still mean anything? The status of desert, of objective realities meriting certain responses, had become an inescapably pressing matter of concern politically no less than ethically and aesthetically. Modernity was producing barbarism, but did it really matter? (9)

To deny a world of objective value is to deny any possibility of proper action in the world, including our emotional responses. It is to release humans to the whims of instinct, the spontaneous urges of desire, and ultimately, slavery to our base appetites. In this world, there is no moral ecology, no basis for distinguishing virtue from vice and good from evil. All that is left is a Nietzschean battle for the will to power. Lewis dedicates the remainder of The Abolition of Man to further diagnose this grave issue and issue humanity’s final prognosis. Spoiler: It is not “pretty.”

A Good Offense is the Best Defense

The solution Lewis prescribes is not to excise emotion from the human experience, but to shape our affections, and the emotions that accompany them, properly. This is the antidote to both bad philosophical ideas, like subjectivism, and practical everyday challenges like sensationalistic news media or propaganda. Interestingly, the The Green Book authors offered their own solution to propaganda in their day: use exclusively empirical arguments to critique faulty, sensationalistic arguments, thereby leading to the deflation of the emotional force.

Lewis, however, proposes a different way that takes into consideration the emotive and affective aspects of what it means to be human. He writes,

They (Gaius and Titius) see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda–they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental–and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. (14).

In other words, the best defense is a good offense. To train against sensationalistic propaganda, full of goodness and beauty fakes, expose children to examples of real beauty and goodness, through rich literature (6). The solution, therefore, is not to dispel with emotion or desire altogether, but to train it according to moral and aesthetic values, holding logic, emotion, and beauty together. An empirical solution alone produces “trousered apes,” as Lewis puts it, not full-orbed humans.

The call to shape our affections and train our emotions, of course, assumes there is objective value in the world to which we must respond. Going back to the waterfall example, the reason Coleridge was disgusted by the word “pretty” was because he believed the waterfall merited more than the meaning that word could conjure (15). In other words, the term did not align with the objective beauty of the waterfall. Later Lewis writes that emotions are alogical (not logical or illogical) in and of themselves… “But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it” (19). Students need to be exposed to numerous examples of honor, courage, self-sacrifice, and beauty. As they do, their emotions and affections will overtime align with reason.

The Important of Musical Education

In The Liberal Arts Tradition (3rd edition 2021), authors Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain sketch out what this training might look like. In their paradigm for understanding classical education, they point out that the liberal arts tradition of education is more than a program for the mind. Indeed, the tradition reflects a holistic understanding of what it means to be human as a complex unity of mind, heart, body, and soul. 

One key insight from the book is that before the liberal arts can be properly studied, students should be trained in a precritical fashion, called musical education. The authors write, ” The musical and gymnastic education fitted the students’ hearts and bodies to reality. The training of the body and the tuning of the heart to love what is lovely helped nurture the virtues of courage and temperance (bodily restraint)” (6). In other words, through telling stories, reciting poetry, and beholding beauty in nature and art, students are oriented toward objective values even before they can analyze these subjects critically with the liberal arts.

Conclusion: Read and Practice

If you are a regular follower of Educational Renaissance, you will not be surprised that I am going to close by emphasizing the importance of reading the classics and cultivating good habits. Lewis writes, “Without the aid of trained emotions, the intellect is powerless against the animal organism” (24). How do we train affections and emotions in accordance with what is true, good, and beautiful? Let me suggest two general ways:

First, we can shape the moral imagination of students through reading, listening, narrating, and delighting in all that is good, true, and beautiful. As children hear stories of heroism, compassion, courage, perseverance, and honesty, they will begin to recognize these virtues as good and worthy of imitation. As they delight in God’s beautiful creation, behold a dazzling seascape, or enjoy an inspiring musical score, they will begin to develop a desire and appreciation for the beauty around them.

Second, we can help students gain experience in a life of virtue through practicing good habits. The repetition of acts of service, kindness, honesty, and other habits will shape their hearts and minds in a truly formative way. As teachers cast vision for students of a life led by the Holy Spirit, and support them encouragingly on a daily basis, students undergo the sort of moral formation that will lead them to be well-rounded humans, trained with affections and emotions informed by reason, and prepared to thrive in God’s created moral order.

The post Irrigating Deserts in Schools: The Redemption of Emotion in an Age of Feeling appeared first on .

“Why the History of Narration Matters” series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 2: Classical Roots

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

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

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

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

This series began as an attempt to wrap up the loose ends of hints and speculations I had had for years, regarding the origins of Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration. Was it her own invention? Some passages I had discovered in a rhetoric textbook from the early 1900s, and then from Quintilian and John Locke, argued otherwise. Perhaps this, then, was a test-case for the broader question of Charlotte Mason’s relationship to the classical tradition.

Since then I have been able to fill in a pretty compelling set of stepping stones for the use of narration-like practices throughout the history of education. But one major gap remained…. the Middle Ages. I am excited to announce that I have filled in that gap; or at least, I have moved up the gap in the history of narration from the Renaissance proper to the twelfth century renaissance of the high Middle Ages. The source: John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, or defense of the verbal and logical arts of the trivium. The proponent of narration: Bernard of Chartres.

While this investigation into the history of narration began with the theme of Charlotte Mason’s place within the classical tradition of education, it has come to represent more than that for me. In our recovery movements we have focused our attention on recovering the broader and more holistic purpose of education (the Why), in contrast to modern utilitarianism and pragmatism. In addition, we have rediscovered old curricular tracks (the What), like the liberal arts themselves. But we have not delved as deeply for the gems of pedagogy, the teaching methods of the classical tradition in all their multiform glory.

This short history of narration (which I am revising and expanding into a book to be published with Educational Renaissance) aims to uncover narration as it was practiced in the tradition, turning this pedagogical gem in the light of various centuries and cultural expressions. This historical understanding will then give us a flexibility and creativity of application with the teaching practice that we couldn’t gain any other way.

With that preface, let us travel back to the late Middle Ages!

The Twelfth-Century Educational Renaissance

Daniel D. McGarry sees the twelfth century as the birthplace of modern Western pedagogy, noting that while the “constituent elements were Greek, Roman, and early Christian in origin, yet it is also true that these received new form and life in the Middle Ages.”[1] He goes on to call this momentous time period of intellectual flourishing, in which John of Salisbury lived, the “twelfth-century educational ‘renaissance’.” Whether we agree with designating the twelfth century as the birthplace of modern Western pedagogy may depend more upon our assessment of the relative merits of ancient and modern teaching methods than anything else. But the important point for our purposes is the new life, and what we can undoubtedly call the rebirth of narration, among other teaching practices that occurred during this time period.

Jerome Taylor of the University of Notre Dame also has called the twelfth century a “renaissance”, describing it as “a time when centers of education had moved from the predominantly rural monasteries to the cathedral schools of growing cities and communes; when education in the new centers was becoming specialized, hence unbalanced, according to the limited enthusiasms of capacities of particular masters”.[2] Against this backdrop, John of Salisbury wrote his Metalogicon to combat a group scholars who repudiated the value of the Trivium arts of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, and claimed to advance on to mastery of philosophy in but a few years of study.[3]

John of Salisbury closes his discussion of the importance of full grammatical training by discussing an eminent teacher of the previous generation, Bernard of Chartres, who taught at the cathedral school there beginning in 1115. Bernard is the earliest figure to be attributed with the famous “standing on the shoulders of giants” conception.[4] With such a value for the thoughts of those who came before, it is no wonder that we see him using narration as a core teaching practice. As we have mentioned elsewhere, narration is a fundamentally pious act that accords well with a focus on classic literature and the Great Books.[5]

Bernard of Chartres Teaching Grammar

John of Salisbury begins by describing Bernard’s method of teaching grammar:

Bernard of Chartres, the greatest font of literary learning in Gaul in recent times, used to teach grammar in the following way. He would point out, in reading authors, what was simple and according to rule. On the other hand, he would explain grammatical figures, rhetorical embellishment, and sophistical quibbling, as well as the relation of given passages to other studies. He would do so, however, without trying to teach everything at one time. On the contrary, he would dispense his instruction to his hearers gradually, in a manner commensurate with their powers of assimilation.[6]

This explanatory lecture method is well attested for grammatical teachers in the tradition going right on back to Quintilian. What is noted as of special importance is Bernard’s avoidance of being pedantic about the wrong sorts of details. In his discursive commentary on texts, Bernard took a methodical and gradual approach, suiting his teaching to the receptivity of his hearers. His unique sensitivity to what his students could “assimilate” was likely borne of his practice of listening to his students narrate the next day (see below).

Proponents of narration might be inclined to see in Bernard’s method nothing more than the ineffective lecture-based approach to education that we deplore. But according to John of Salisbury, Bernard would not leave his readings of texts and lectures there, simply in the air to be remembered or not by his pupils. Instead, Bernard was aware of the necessity for mental exercise through narration or recitation:

In view of the fact that exercise both strengthens and sharpens our mind, Bernard would bend every effort to bring his students to imitate what they were hearing.[7] In some cases he would rely on exhortation, in others he would resort to punishments, such as flogging. Each student was daily required to recite part of what he had heard on the previous day. Some would recite more, others less. Each succeeding day thus became the disciple of its predecessor.[8]

Bernard’s teaching practice involved students in the imitation of the authors “that he read to them” (see n. 28). In addition, we can see that this was a required daily practice for all students – a fact that impresses us with the pedagogical value Bernard attributed to it.  John says he “would bend every effort” to this task. We might say that Bernard assigned his students homework to remember something of what he had taught them the previous day. Failing to complete your homework for Bernard’s class might have dire consequences (i.e. “flogging”). It seems at least partly ambiguous whether details from Bernard’s lecture would be included in students’ recounting of the content of the texts. But we could easily imagine commentary and text fusing together naturally when the previous day’s topics were retold by many students, one after another.

We might wonder whether the recitation that Bernard speaks of was similar to what Charlotte Mason called ‘narration’ or if it involved the word-for-word memorization of select passages from the texts Bernard read aloud, what many modern classical Christian educators and Masonites now call recitation. While the details here are somewhat ambiguous, a few factors push me in the direction of the former. First, the fact that “some would recite more, others less” seems true to life for educators who have used narration, whereas if word-for-word memorization were in view, we would expect a teacher to assign a set number of lines. Would Bernard leave it to chance which passages his students memorized? Likewise, the closing observation that each day “became the disciple of its predecessor” seems to fit better with an oral recounting of the content from the previous day by many students than memory work.

A later passage also exhibits the same ambiguity about whether narration or memorization is in view:

Bernard used also to admonish his students that stories and poems should be read thoroughly, and not as though the reader were being precipitated to flight by spurs. Wherefor he diligently and insistently demanded from each, as a daily debt, something committed to memory.[9]

It is possible that this passage refers to Bernard’s homework requirement of memorization, while the other refers to narration. Or both could refer to the same practice of narration or memorization. Either way, even if we were to conclude (which I doubt) that word-for-word memorization is intended in both these passages, we could still argue that such a heavy use of recitation (as “a daily debt”) edges into the benefits of the unique practice of narration because of how consistently and vigorously it engages the memory.

At the end of the day, it seems most likely that Bernard employed both narration and word-for-word memorization (as did Charlotte Mason and countless educators throughout history). What he was most remarkable for was his use of these imitative exercises as a daily requirement for all students. In this way, we can see the features of earlier rhetorical and grammatical teaching reinvigorated and taken seriously in a way that John of Salisbury, at least, found remarkable and rare in his own time.

Bernard’s “Conferences” and the Narration-Trivium Lesson

For classical educators who worry about a bare recital of content, Bernard’s methods went further to cultivate what we might call the higher order thinking skills and creative production of his students:

A further feature of Bernard’s method was to have his disciples compose prose and poetry every day, and exercise their faculties in mutual conferences,[10] for nothing is more useful in introductory training than actually to accustom one’s students to practice the art they are studying. Nothing serves better to foster the acquisition of eloquence and the attainment of knowledge than such conferences, which also have a salutary influence on practical conduct, provided that charity moderates enthusiasm, and that humility is not lost during progress in learning.[11]

Bernard’s “daily debt” did not only involve narration and/or memorization, but also literary composition and discussion. These “conferences” might have sounded like what we call socratic seminars, involving the discussion of ideas from the authors being read as well as their relationships and applications to other ideas. This conclusion finds support in John’s claim that they would have a “salutary [health-bringing] influence on practical conduct”. Or else, these conferences could have required students to critique one another’s prose and poetic compositions, judging their merits and flaws. In all likelihood, both sorts of discussions occurred thereby fostering both “the acquisition of eloquence and the attainment of knowledge”.

Bernard’s method of teaching grammar thus coheres broadly with the Narration-Trivium lesson structure that I have advocated for as a fusion of Charlotte Mason’s narration lesson with the classical tradition.[12] Bernard’s explanatory lectures provided the set-up or 1^st little talk that enabled his students to understand the texts that he read to them. His extended commentary on the text cleared up further difficulties and focused on the detailed development of grammatical learning. The text and proper explanation were then required to be narrated, not immediately, but the next day by each student, as much as he could remember. Students’ preparation for this task might have involved them engaging in their own sorts of retrieval practice activities (perhaps involving notes) which would enable them to tell in detail the next day. They may also have memorized word-for-word particular passages or quotations from the texts, which they might have jotted down in a commonplace journal.

Then students would engage in “conferences” where they discussed the ideas and features of the texts they were studying, based on their knowledge of the text gained through lecture and narration. Finally, they would also write their own imitative compositions, share them with others for discussion and critique, thus training them in dialectic and rhetoric, the second little talk and a creative or analytical response to the text. Instead of happening all in a single lesson, this process would begin on one day and continue into the next, a practice that I would commend as well, esp. for older students. The Narration-Trivium lesson structure is intended to be flexible and adaptable by the teacher to the nature of the subject-matter and the needs of the students.

Bernard’s Methods as a Classical Inheritance

We might be tempted to think of Bernard’s grammatical pedagogy involving narration as simply a blip on the timeline of the Middle Ages, but its resonance with the practices of the classical era should cause us to wonder whether there were many more unremembered Bernards throughout the Middle Ages at earlier monastic or church schools, who followed the traditions of genuine classical learning. Even in his own time, Bernard’s pedagogy was adopted by many, according to John, even if it died off quickly:

My own instructors in grammar… formerly used Bernard’s method in training their disciples. But later, when popular opinion veered away from the truth, when men preferred to seem, rather than to be philosophers, and when professors of the arts were promising to impart the whole of philosophy in less than three or even two years… [they] were overwhelmed by the onslaught of the ignorant mob, and retired. Since then, less time and attention have been given to the study of grammar. As a result we find men who profess all the arts, liberal and mechanical, but who are ignorant of this very first one [i.e., grammar], without which it is futile to attempt to go on to the others.[13]

John of Salisbury’s nostalgic reflections of his own quality instruction in grammar by teachers following Bernard’s approach might cause us to wonder whether the human tendency to take short cuts is really to blame for narration’s neglect. As Plato feared, writing has proved to be “a recipe not for memory, but for reminder,” filling men “not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom”.[14] In all times and places, narration (alongside other genuinely classical teaching methods) represents a hard and uphill climb, but the true route to the peak of the mountain of intellectual virtue.

In this final article on the history of narration, I’ve given you a taste of the book that Educational Renaissance published in early 2022: A Short History of Narration. I hope you’ve been inspired by the history of narration and that you will buy the book to take your practice of narration to the next level. Also, check out our webinars, like Habit Training 2.0 or one on Narration 2.0, to get the practical resources and insight you need to bring ancient wisdom into modern era in your classroom!

[1] Daniel D. McGarry, “Introduction” in The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2015), xv.

[2] Jerome Taylor, “Introduction” in The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, translated by Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961; Forgotten Books reprint, 2018), 4.

[3] He actually addresses one particular advocate whom he nicknames Cornificius for the ancient detractor of Vergil, but this may be a literary fiction, and either way, the individual represents a movement of thought, on which see John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 11.

[4] John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 167:

Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to [puny] dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.

[5] See Jason Barney, A Classical Guide to Narration, 89.

[6] John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, translated by Daniel D. McGarry (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2015), 67.

[7] The translator adds a note, ibid., 68: “Literally: what they were hearing, namely, the selections that he read to them [from the authors].”

[8] Ibid.

[9] Another note from the translator, ibid.: “Bernard apparently required of each of his students the daily recitation of some passages memorized from their current reading.”

[10] Translator’s note, ibid, 70: “collationibus, collations, conferences, comparisons. Although ‘conferences’ would seem to fit here as a translation, Webb holds that ‘comparisons’ is better….”

[11] Ibid.

[12] See www.educationalrenaissance.com for a free eBook explaining the Narration-Trivium lesson.

[13] Ibid., 71.

[14] Plato, Phaedrus in The Collected Dialogues, 520.

“Why the History of Narration Matters” series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 2: Classical Roots

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

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

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

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

The post Expanding Narration’s History in the late Middle Ages: Bernard of Chartres from John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon appeared first on .

Well, that depends on what humans essentially are. If humans are, at core, cognitive creatures, then it makes sense to focus exclusively on the intellect. This was the predominant view of modernism. Influenced by the Age of Reason and the notable success of empirical science, modern schools adopted a, generally speaking, intellect-only attitude toward learning. They drew a distinction between facts and values and insisted that only empirically-grounded facts could be studied. Everything else was dismissed as mere emotional conditioning.

In the classical tradition, however, the idea never gained traction that a human can be reduced to a brain on a stick. Instead, philosophers like Plato espoused a tripartite portrait of human beings: humans possess intellectual, affective, and appetitive components. The formative purpose of education for Plato is to shape humans to be virtuous, that is, to develop proper affections that will empower reason to subdue the appetites of the flesh. Or, as C.S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man, education prepares a human to use the head to rule the belly through the chest.

In this blog article, I will explore the idea that a truly formative education shapes not only our moral strength, but our very affective desires. Drawing on the work of James K.A. Smith, I will show how habits shape desires and the object of our deepest desires reveals who we are becoming. Educators, therefore, must think carefully about the practices put on repeat in their schools and how these habituated practices are shaping the very affections of their students.

Creatures Who Worship

In Desiring the Kingdom (Baker Academic, 2009), Calvin College philosophy professor James K.A. Smith argues that humans are liturgical creatures. In other words, the longing to worship is a central feature of what it means to be human. The question is not whether we will worship, but what or whom we will worship. Deep within our bones is a desire to love and experience the transcendent. Until this desire is fulfilled, we remain restless, hungry, and unfulfilled. As St. Augustine put it in Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

In our modern secular world, religion may be on the decline, but our longings to experience transcendent fulfillment are not. Pointing to ongoing zeal for the market, malls, and the military, Smith offers three examples to demonstrate that when humans displace God as the object of our deepest desires, we replace Him with lesser goods. And when traditional religious rituals are excised, they are replaced with secular rituals, repeated affection-shaping practices, all the same. The diligent repetition of these practices is precisely how we keep the zeal for the objects of our desires intact.

Shaping Affections Through Habits

Now, on the surface, it may seem that humans wake up each and every day with the volition to choose what they will love and to what degree. But what Smith points out is that our loves are largely directed and aimed by habits already in play. These habits not only determine how we spend our time, but what we grow to love and, ultimately, what good life, or future kingdom, we envision to pursue.

Imagine, for example, the young man who begins each morning with phone in hand, checking last night’s scores across the National Basketball Association (NBA). He reads game summaries, notes individual player statistics, and checks the standings in each regional division. Finally, he scours the web for the latest updates on his favorite team, the Chicago Bulls. 

After a half an hour on the glowing rectangle, he rolls out of bed and prepares for the day. On the way to work, he listens to sports radio, recapping last night’s events, and looks forward to lunch break when he can discuss the latest NBA drama with his coworkers. He works diligently throughout the day and rewards himself every hour with a short excursion on his sports news app to preview the games scheduled for that evening. 

On the way home from work, he self-injects one more dose of sports radio, and thinks about whether he will watch the upcoming games at home or at a restaurant with friends. Pulling into the garage, he checks his text messages and the decision is confirmed. He pulls his Chicago Bulls jersey on and heads off to the local pub and is greeted warmly by his fellow religionists–I mean– fans.

Which Good Life? Whose Kingdom?

A cursory analysis of this everyday scenario would dismiss it as simply the story of a young man who enjoys professional basketball and supporting his local sports team. When we dig deeper, however, we see how his day is saturated with habits formed through practices that are training his desires and fueling his imagination. Checking his phone first thing in the morning, listening to sports radio on his drive into work, conversing with friends on the topic over a meal, and donning the ceremonial garb (a sports jersey) in the evening are habits which subtly reinforce who he is and what he longs for.

If he keeps this routine up, his devotion will only grow and with it his longing to re-experience day after day this vision of the good life. It slowly becomes part of who he is and brings a fulfillment that nothing else can. The path is set, with bricks composed of habits paving the way. His desires are honed in on the target and only the installation of new habits, humanly-speaking, can change the direction of the kingdom he is seeking.

Desiring the Heavenly Kingdom

LIke the basketball devotee, our schools are honing in on a certain target or vision of the good life, and this target is regularly reinforced through practices. For economically-prosperous countries in the West, it is very difficult to escape the attractive kingdom of wealth and materialism. This vision of the good life promises so much: comfort, popularity, acceptance, recognition, experiences, and the like.

But if our schools are to remain distinctively Christian we must look beyond this earthly kingdom in order to fix our eyes on something greater: the kingdom of God. What does this kingdom look like? 

In his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul writes:

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’

1 Corinthians 1:26-31 (ESV)

It seems to me that this passage captures the essence of the heavenly kingdom. It is a kingdom composed of citizens who do not pretend to be of high-repute or worldly honor. They do not view themselves as deserving of either God’s grace or cultural recognition. They see the promises of the world for what they truly are: empty siren songs designed to stroke the ego, meanwhile the rocks of destruction grow ever closer.  

The vision for the good life we desire as Christians, and pray for our students to desire, is marked by hailing the power of Jesus. Our Lord Jesus, “God from God, Light from Light,” descended into this world to bring the kingdom of heaven, marked by baptism, self-denial, forgiveness of sin, and the hope of resurrection. 

Liturgies in our Schools

Smith proposes that we can determine the kingdoms our schools are oriented toward by taking inventory of its daily liturgies. By liturgies, he means the thick practices that shape our vision of a kingdom. For example, the liturgies of the basketball fan described above are his morning routine on his phone catching up on all the highlights, connecting with his friends at lunch on the topic, and scheduling his evenings around the upcoming games schedule. These liturgies–practices with desire-shaping and imagination-fueling power–shape his vision of what he longs for most.

So what liturgies exist in our schools? What repeated practices seem to bear the greatest influence over the culture of the student body? Over the parent community? Over faculty and staff? Are these liturgies oriented toward kingdom values of lifting up the name of Christ, growing more holy, and learning as a way of bringing honor to God? Or are our school liturgies at present spreading the gospel of a different kingdom, perhaps marked by academic repute, cultural acceptance, and worldly achievement?

Diagnostic Questions for Christian Educators to Consider:

To help you as a Christian educator discern with the Spirit’s aid what liturgies exist in your school and what liturgies don’t yet exist, here are some probing questions to consider:

1. What repeated practices seem to have the most influence in your school? What do students get most excited about? Why? 
2. What can you have students do, and do on repeat, to help them learn about and grow in their desire for the kingdom?
3. What thick practices of the church are appropriate to bring into your school while respecting the unique place the local church is to play in the life of believers?
4. How can the practices you implement in your school be distinctively counter-cultural, yet perhaps not anti-cultural? In what ways is your school practicing baptismal renunciation and cultural abstention? What are you saying “no” to?
5. How are you using instructional time to shape student affections for the kingdom? How can you incorporate embodied learning practices into your lessons?
6. How are using non-instructional time to shape student affections? What practices exist in the hallways, during passing periods and lunch times, and at recess?

Conclusion

These are challenging questions to be sure and, more than anything, they are designed to give us pause to reflect on our craft. To shape student affections for the kingdom, teaching a Christian worldview is not enough. Offering Bible classes is not enough. A weekly chapel is not enough. These are necessary components to be sure, but, they are mostly cognitive strategies when the students in our classrooms are affective creatures. In order to reach affective creatures, we need affective strategies–approaches to education that reach the heart. These will be strategies that acknowledge our embodiment and see the connections between what we do, what we long for, and therefore, who we are becoming. May we as educators continue seek first the kingdom of God, and as we do so, invite our students to join us on the journey.

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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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We closed the last article by proof-texting the importance of practice from the New Testament letter to the Hebrews: “But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Heb 5:14 ESV). We equally could have quoted from Paul’s famous encouragement to Timothy, “train yourself for the purpose of godliness…” (1 Tim 4:7). The word commonly translated as godliness (eusebeia) is the Greek word for piety, the fulfillment of one’s obligations to family, the broader community, and God himself. It is a virtual summary of all the moral and spiritual virtues. And Paul’s point is that Timothy should train himself, as a man exercises at the gymnasium to stay in prime shape for military service or the competitive games. 

The word for ‘training’ is gymnazo and had already become a standard metaphor for moral and intellectual cultivation by Paul’s day. In fact, Socrates himself had some of his famous discussions about virtues like friendship or temperance with his followers in the gymnasium. On more than one occasion he compared his method of dialogue to a wrestling match and once exclaimed that he had a furious love for that type of exercise in the pursuit of truth (Plato, Theatetus 169b-c).

In ancient Greece gymnastic training itself consisted, as we might have guessed, of physical exercises in strength, speed and dexterity, and these became the analogy for mental gymnastics of all kinds. Even today many standard textbooks contain “exercises” which attempt to “train” the mind in various skills through practicing them again and again until they become easy. In The Liberal Arts Tradition Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain restore the value of gymnastic training as fundamental element of the classical tradition. By implicitly connecting it to the quadrivium arts (see the tree illustration in the front matter), they draw on this analogy between athletic training and mathematical exercises. But on a deeper level, philosophers made a link between the moral training of the gymnasium, which fostered military virtues like courage and resourcefulness in the face of danger, and the virtue-training of the soul. For instance, Isocrates, the first great rhetorical teacher of Greece, advised one of his students,

Give careful heed to all that concerns your life, but above all train your own intellect; for the greatest thing in the smallest compass is a sound mind in a human body. Strive with your body to be a lover of toil, and with your soul to be a lover of wisdom, in order that with the one you may have the strength to carry out your resolves, and with the other the intelligence to foresee what is for your good.

Discourses, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library 209, p. 29 

Unlike many in the modern world, Isocrates saw no conflict between bodily training and hard work on the one hand and the mental and spiritual training of philosophy or prudence on the other. This earlier move goes some way in explaining Aristotle’s understanding of artistry or craftsmanship as an intellectual virtue, even without an awareness of the nervous system. As another example, take Socrates, whom we might call the first philosopher. Instead of fitting the stereotype of an ivory-tower intellect, cultivating the mind but despising the body, he never neglected the compulsory military exercises, even into old age, and sharply rebuked any who did (see Xenophon’s Memorabilia). Proper cultivation of the body and mind, after all, are necessary elements of moral excellence, as well as of the intellectual excellence of prudence or phronesis, the ability to deliberate and act appropriately with regard to what is good for human beings. 

Deliberate vs Purposeful Practice in Artistry and Morality

The analogy between morality and artistry, specifically the artistry of bodily training, is thus well established in the tradition. But there are differences to be noted as well, since not all practice is the same. Some practice is deliberate, with clear goals and feedback and an agreed upon process of steps in the cultivation of excellence; however, there are practice regimens that are less clear and agreed upon, where the movement toward excellence is more cloudy and ambiguous. This second sort of practice may still aim at excellence, and therefore it has been called ‘purposeful’ in modern research on elite performance, but the pathway is less structured and clear. It is more like bushwalking than marching on the Via Appia. 

In his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Erikson describes the difference between this deliberate practice in the clarity of day and purposeful practice in the gloom and obscurity of night:

In short, we were saying that deliberate practice is different from other sorts of purposeful practice in two important ways: First, it requires a field that is already reasonably well developed—that is, a field in which the best performers have attained a level of performance that clearly sets them apart from people who are just entering the field. We’re referring to activities like musical performance (obviously), ballet and other sorts of dance, chess, and many individual and team sports, particularly the sports in which athletes are scored for their individual performance, such as gymnastics, figure skating, or diving. What areas don’t qualify? Pretty much anything in which there is little or no competition, such as gardening and other hobbies, for instance, and many of the jobs in today’s workplace—business manager, teacher, electrician, engineer, consultant, and so on. These are not areas where you’re likely to find accumulated knowledge about deliberate practice, simply because there are no objective criteria for superior performance.

Second, deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance. Of course, before there can be such teachers there must be individuals who have achieved a certain level of performance with practice methods that can be passed on to others.

With this definition we are drawing a clear distinction between purposeful practice—in which a person tries very hard to push himself or herself to improve—and a practice that is both purposeful and informed. In particular, deliberate practice is informed and guided by the best performers’ accomplishments and by an understanding of what these expert performers do to excel. Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there. (Peak 98)

Before this passage Erikson notes that he and his colleagues had identified certain fields, like musical performance, chess and athletic activities, where the “levels of performance have increased greatly over time” (Peak 97). This increase in feats of elite performance coincided with the development of “teaching methods” that assigned the student practice exercises specially designed to advance the student’s skills along the well-worn path of mastery. Since these exercises can be improved and honed as time goes on, students can advance more and more rapidly than their predecessors, and the myelin-wrapping activities of deliberate practice can enable human beings to attain greater and greater feats. 

A good example of this is 25 year old Roger Bannister breaking the 4 min mile mark in 1954. Before this time, it was thought to be physically impossible to break this barrier, but once Roger Bannister broke it several others quickly followed suit, and to date the four minute barrier has been broken by more than 1,400 male athletes, including some high school students. 

Anders Erikson highlights the need of a teacher for deliberate practice, who is qualified in that area of artistry or craftsmanship and therefore able to provide the exercises. This reaffirms our conclusion from last article, that contra the Rousseauian claims of unschooling, students learn best through the organized instruction of a teacher. However, we can note that in artistry or craftsmanship not all fields are equally susceptible to this type of deliberate practice. Erikson mentions hobbies like gardening and a number of professions, like teaching, business management and consulting, as areas that lack “objective criteria for superior performance.” He’s not claiming that practitioners of these arts cannot get better at what they do, but their path to excellence is less precise. They may practice purposefully toward improvement but there are no widely agreed upon standards (“objective criteria”?) or clearly laid out steps. In these arts, people practice in the dark. 

Identifying Subcategories of the Arts in Aristotle

It may be helpful at this point to lay out again my basic outline of Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues, including an extra layer of subcategories, in order to draw your attention to the nature of the virtue of techne which we have defined as artistry or craftsmanship.

It will be noted that under techne are included athletics, games and sports, which are rightly regarded as intellectual virtues under Aristotle’s definition, because they produce something new in the world through a true course of reasoning: the athletic performance whether in simplicity of a long jump or the complexity of a gymnastics routine. It is perhaps helpful to classify athletics and sports alongside the other arts in order to collapse the cultural false dichotomies of our day. Anyone who has seen a master athlete, say a gymnast, perform, will be hard pressed to exclude his work from the broader category that includes professional musicians and artists, as well as professions, trades, and the common and liberal arts themselves. These are all complex skills or areas of mastery, and our five part division is intended simply to gesture in the direction of the main types of craft or artistry that have been devised by human ingenuity and divine inspiration. 

Purposeful Practice in Artistry and Morality

But as we have said, not all techne have as fixed and exact a path of improvement as the others. And this is not only so in artistry, but also in matters of morality. In fact, this difference between deliberate and purposeful practice was anticipated by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics book II, where he also strikes a note reminiscent of the parable closing the Sermon on the Mount (i.e. building your house on the rock by putting his words into practice):

Since, then, the present inquiry does not aim at theoretical knowledge like the others (for we are inquiring not in order to know what excellence is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use), we must examine the nature of actions, namely how we ought to do them; for these determine also the nature of the states that are produced, as we have said. Now, that we must act according to right reason is a common principle and must be assumed—it will be discussed later, i.e. both what it is, and how it is related to the other excellences. But this must be agreed upon beforehand, that the whole account of matters of conduct must be given in outline and not precisely, as we said at the very beginning that the accounts we demand must be in accordance with the subject-matter; matters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good for us have no fixity, any more than matters of health. The general account being of this nature, the account of particular cases is yet more lacking in exactness; for they do not fall under any art or set of precepts, but the agents themselves must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion, as happens also in the art of medicine or of navigation. (Book II, ch. 2, pp. 1743-4)

Here Aristotle claims that morality is more like practicing in the dark, since “matters of conduct must be given in outline and not precisely”. This is because the man who is too rash should aim back toward cowardice if he would hit the mark of courage, yet the cowardly should turn toward being a little bit rash. Aiming at the golden mean of virtue or excellence is relative to the individual person and the situation at hand, even if it is a real and true quality. 

In the same way the arts of navigation and medicine, two important professions in Aristotle’s day, depend very much on the case at hand and all the particulars. There may be sub-skills that their practitioners can master, but the complex problems that will be faced—how to respond to an oncoming storm or what treatment to try first for a patient with a tricky set of symptoms—resist any attempt to be boiled down to a clear and simple set of practice exercises. But this does not mean people cannot become excellent navigators or physicians, simply that the way is less clear.

So then, we have seen that some arts have well-defined and clear steps to mastery through deliberate practice, but others do not. Moral actions, for Aristotle, may be trained by cultivated habit and practice, but the way is not always clear and well-defined enough to be subject to a deliberate practice regimen. Christians might initially object to this claim, citing the ten commandments and the way of discipleship as a straight and narrow path. But on reflection we must admit that temperance is not attained simply by a regimen of fasting—that was one of the Pharisees’ mistakes—nor is love of God attained by the rich young ruler obeying all the outward commandments from his youth. Jesus must prescribe a specific cure for his love of security. And so, while we cannot do away with habit training and the mentoring process, we know that diagnosing moral ailments and prescribing moral remedies is more fraught than we might sometimes imagine. If the recitation of Bible verses and specific acts of contrition and restitution were necessarily effective cures, Christendom would have advanced into the modern age and the virtues would adorn all of its members.

Distinguishing Marks of Moral Virtue

Part of the wrinkle with practicing moral virtues is that they require certain characteristics beyond that of many arts. Aristotle introduces these extra requirements in his ethics by first explaining the apprenticeship process in the liberal arts of grammar and music:

The question might be asked, what we mean by saying that we must become just by doing just acts, and temperate by doing temperate acts; for if men do just and temperate acts, they are already just and temperate, exactly as, if they do what is grammatical or musical they are proficient in grammar and music.

Or is this not true even of the arts? It is possible to do something grammatical either by chance or under the guidance of another. A man will be proficient in grammar, then, only when he has both done something grammatical and done it grammatically; and this means doing it in accordance with the grammatical knowledge in himself. (II.4)

In both morality and the arts, it is always possible to stumble upon the right way by chance. A person can act justly and temperately on an occasion simply because the circumstances favor it. This is part of why a single just act does not make a man just. In a similar way, even a toddler can say a perfectly grammatical sentence, but this does not mean the child has mastered the art of grammar. Likewise, a child can act justly under the guidance of his parent or teacher; while this might be a necessary step in his training in moral habits, it does not mean the child is just. If a teacher holds a Kindergartener’s hand as she writes a word with her pencil, that doesn’t mean the Kindergartener has mastered penmanship. The apprenticeship process begins with guidance, but ends with self-directed mastery. 

So far so good, but in the case of moral virtues, there is a further set of requirements, making their attainment different from the arts:

Again the cases of the arts and that of the excellences are not similar; for the products of the arts have their goodness in themselves, so that it is enough that they should have a certain character, but if the acts that are in accordance with the excellences have themselves a certain character it does not follow that they are done justly or temperately. The agent also must be in a certain condition when he does them; in the first place he must have knowledge, secondly he must choose the acts, and choose them for their own sakes, and thirdly his action must proceed from a firm and unchangeable character. These are not reckoned in as conditions from the possession of the arts, except the bare knowledge; but as a condition of the possession of the excellences, knowledge has little or no weight, while the other conditions count not for a little but for everything, i.e. the very conditions which result from often doing just and temperate acts. (II.4)

The three requirements for moral virtue are 1) knowledge, i.e. the prudence or practical wisdom to know that they are acting in a way that corresponds with their ultimate good, 2) deliberate choice of the actions for their own sake, and 3) a “firm and unchangeable character”. The first requirement is necessary because if a person eats temperately without knowledge he has simply stumbled upon the right path by chance, and there is no expectation that he will persist in it, since being blind he cannot see the path he chanced upon. 

The second requirement that a person choose the act for its own sake would seem to contradict both Aristotle’s commendation of habit and his earlier discussion of happiness or eudaimonia as the only true end toward which all other choices tend. We can probably resolve these dilemmas by recalling our earlier discussion of habit as not being thoughtless. In the contemporary world the concept of ‘habit’ often has behaviorist undertones, due to the influence of modern psychology and naturalistic materialism. But it seems as if for Aristotle, a moral custom or habit should still be a result of conscious choice, even if those choices came earlier to solidify stock responses by a regimen of training. Likewise, the comment about choosing the course of action for its own sake, should not be seen as indicating a final end, but merely qualifying the act as chosen because of its goodness, rather than for an ulterior motive. For example, a person might choose to eat temperately one evening because he knows that he plans to rob a bank and wants to ensure that his body and wits are not sluggish while committing the dastardly deed. 

The third and final requirement needs little comment, since we all know that human nature is changeable and fickle; a character quality only recently adopted will not necessarily characterize the whole of a person’s life. The strength of this statement is an important correction to modern nonsense about it taking only 21 days (or 30 or 66) to build a new habit. At the very least, this is not true of the more complex moral virtues that represent a firm and unchangeable character, even if it can secure a propensity to take a multivitamin after your morning coffee. One reason for this is the fact that it is purposeful practice which we must engage in to discern between good and evil; therefore, the practice must be “constant” and have time to grow to ripeness or maturity (see Heb 5:14). If practicing morality is like bushwalking, then it takes longer to learn the route and how never to stray, than it does to drive to work on paved roads. 

Practicing virtue is not the work of a summer, a season, a semester or even all of grammar school, but of a lifetime. As Aristotle says,

Actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.

But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy. (Book II, ch. 4; pp. 1755-6)

Aristotle’s rebuke to the mass of self-proclaimed “philosophers” strikes a note that will be taken up again and again by the Stoics: the centrality of action for the cultivation of moral virtue. In this he is arguably correcting a crucial misunderstanding of Plato’s emphasis upon knowledge. Many of Plato’s dialogues go about the work of promoting moral virtue by first revealing the ignorance of Socrates’ conversation partners about the nature of true virtue, whether piety, justice, temperance or courage. This seems to imply a doctrine of salvation by knowledge, a concept that Plato certainly affirms in a number of ways throughout his works. Unfortunately, human nature makes it all to easy for us to mistake our own theoretical insight for this saving, sanctifying knowledge; on the Christian side of things, the gnostics are the prime example of this error, as they considered their special gnosis, or knowledge, as exempting them from the hard work of moral practice.

Crucial Distinctions between the Intellectual Virtues

For this reason, Aristotle is careful to distinguish episteme or scientific knowledge, the ability to demonstrate the truth of something, and moral virtue. The first concerns man as knower, to borrow the terminology from Mortimer Adler’s Aristotle for Everybody, and the second concerns man as doer. But in fact, this division goes deeper for Aristotle, since even the term ‘wisdom’ itself has a line running through it. Phronesis, prudence or practical wisdom, characterizes the wise in action, while sophia, philosophic wisdom, or the possession of both knowledge (episteme) and intuition (nous) about the highest things, concerns the wise in thought, man as knower. 

This important set of distinctions cuts the line straight through the arts as well, where two equally damaging errors pervade the educational world of Bloom’s taxonomy. First, modernism’s emphasis upon scientific knowledge (episteme) to the neglect of all other educational objectives has run ramshod over the proper training of the arts. A “bare knowledge” is necessary for developing mastery in the arts, but far more important is the apprenticeship model that embraces a regimen of deliberate or at least purposeful practice. This is because the arts primarily concern man as maker, rather than knower. The knowledge necessary is little more than a precept here or there to guide practice: always point your toes, lift your knees higher as you’re running, open your throat more and relax your tongue, hold your paintbrush this way. But in the case of the liberal arts especially, this scientific knowledge mindset has short circuited the apprenticeship process in the arts of language and number by overemphasizing knowledge to the neglect of sufficient practice and feedback. Elaborate textbooks convey a host of instructions, but teachers without the proper skill in these crafts fail to coach their students to mastery. 

At the same time, a mistaken focus upon abstract cognitive or intellectual skills, also born of Bloom’s, has replaced the traditional liberal arts themselves with half-baked acts of the mind outside of their holistic and natural process in the search for truth. Comprehension and analytical exercises isolate useless “academic skills” from the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge regarding ultimate questions. The distaste of many students for academics grows from this arid soil of academic training without any phronesis or sophia. 

The way out of this mess is to restore each of these intellectual virtues as proper goals for education throughout the school’s curriculum and pedagogy. While some ‘subjects’ may be more suited to developing a particular intellectual virtue, Aristotle’s intellectual virtues cut across traditional lines. To bring our conversation full circle, moral discussions should occur in the gymnasium. Bodily habits should be reinforced in philosophy class. Liberal arts training should follow the apprenticeship model and not simply impart knowledge. At the same time, ultimate questions and practical considerations of human action should point the student upward toward practical and philosophic wisdom. Practice in the classroom, the studio and on the field should be purposeful, if not deliberate, and we should not “take refuge in theory”. In the next article we’ll zero in on the apprenticeship model of training in the arts and what implications this has for pedagogy and structuring a school’s curriculum and classes.

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

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“Don’t you know that the beginning is the most important place of every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that stage it’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give it.”

Welcome back to my series on Plato’s Republic! As I shared in my first article, I’m producing this series for two reasons. First, I want to make Plato more accessible to everyone. Part of preserving the western intellectual tradition, or at least, not losing it, entails cracking open the books of old to rediscover what ideas they contain. Second, and most relevant for educators, Plato’s Republic contains ideas that have immense implications for education today. By going back in time to consider these ideas, educators can gain fresh insight into the nature and purpose of education, paving the way for an educational renaissance that fuses together the best of ancient wisdom and modern research. 

In Book I of the Republic, Socrates and his friends are left at a stalemate. They have attempted to defend the value of justice only to encounter a state of aporia, that is, uncertainty or doubt, instead. This conclusion to Book I is intentional on Plato’s part. He wants his readers to actively engage with his writings, thereby experiencing the joys and frustrations of intellectual inquiry for themselves. For Plato, encountering aporia is a crucial step in the learning process. Only by truly realizing one’s lack of understanding will one truly desire to grow in knowledge of the matter.

In today’s blog, I will take a closer look at Book II of the Republic. In this section, Socrates and his friends make progress in their inquiry regarding the nature of justice. First, they revisit whether justice is more desirable than injustice in the first place. Then Socrates puts forward his account of a just city to illustrate at a macro-level the origins of justice. Finally, Socrates and his friends discuss how the guardians, the warrior-leaders of the city, ought to be educated. Let’s take each of these in stride.

To be Just, or Unjust, That is the Question

In Book I, Socrates and Thrasymachus, the infamous Sophist, engaged in a heated debate over the definition of justice, specifically whether the just life is worth pursuing after all. Thrasymachus made a compelling case that life is merely a struggle for power and that it is clear to any rational person that injustice leads to greater success in the long run. Socrates refused to accept this position, insisting that justice cannot be reduced to power. He defined justice as the virtue of the soul and argued that without justice, the soul is left miserable, purposeless, and without direction.

As we turn to Book II, we see that Glaucon and Adeimantus find Socrates’ viewpoint attractive, but would like him to elaborate. After all, Thrasymachus has a point that injustice appears to triumph over justice more often than not. If Socrates is going to convince them, much less anyone else, he will need to go into further detail on what precisely is so desirable about justice.

To get the conversation going, Glaucon suggests that all human goods can be classified into three general categories of desire (357c). The question becomes: Where does justice belong?

The three categories are as follows:

1. Things that are desirable in and of themselves, things like enjoyment
2. Things that are desirable intrinsically and extrinsically, that is, they are desirable in and of themselves, but also bring beneficial consequences. Things like: knowledge, health, sight
3. Things that are only desirable for their consequences, such as physical exercise, medical treatment, and financially profitable activities

Socrates’ inclination is to place justice in the second category, the one reserved for things that are desirable in themselves as well as the consequences they bring (358a). Glaucon responds that this may be correct, but it is not the opinion of the majority. Most people tend to view justice in the third category, as a form of drudgery that nonetheless leads to fortuitous results.

To illustrate this point, let us say that I aspire to be a world-class table tennis player. I may be tempted at times to find ways to compete unjustly in order to expedite my international advancement. After all, if I lose an important match, say an important qualifying round, it could set back my career goal for decades. On the other hand, if it is publicly revealed that I have used an illegal paddle or weighted the ball illicitly, then my career may be permanently over. The upshot is that behaving justly in this situation is a form of drudgery (it may take years for me to receive international recognition for my skill), but it will likely serve me better in the long-run (no skeletons in the closet).

Notice that my chief motivation for behaving justly in the example above is not justice in and of itself. It is what justice brings me. This is a problem, thinks Glaucon, and he tells his own story to demonstrate why (359d).

The Myth of the Ring of Gyges

There once was a shepherd named Gyges, narrates Glaucon, tending his flock in a nearby field. Suddenly an earthquake strikes, causing Gyges to fall into a recess in the earth. Down in the recess, he chances upon a magic ring that allows him to turn invisible. As the story goes, it doesn’t take long for Gyges to realize the fresh opportunities that now await him. He uses the power of the ring for personal advancement. He seduces the queen, conquers the king, and declares himself the new ruler of the kingdom.

Now, to be clear, Gyges’ behavior here is horrid. We would like to think that the just person would act differently. Not so fast, says Glaucon. Suppose there are two rings of the type discovered by Gyges, one worn by a just man and the other by the unjust man. Glaucon argues that both men would behave exactly the same way. Why? If justice is only valuable for the benefits it offers, then it makes no difference whether one is just or unjust so long as one is not found out.

Glaucon uses this story to illustrate the problem associated with placing justice in the third category or even the second category for that matter. The appearance of being just is often more desirable than actually being just. As long as justice is desired for its benefits, one is inclined to put on the façade of behaving justly while secretly behaving otherwise.

Justice as Intrinsically Desirable

Adeimantus, the brother of Glaucon, underscores this point, demonstrating how justice is deployed for expedient ends in both Greek literature and everyday life (362e). He references the likes of Hesiod and Homer to demonstrate that Greek myths teach that justice ought to be pursued for the rich well of blessings it brings. Additionally, he acknowledges, 

“No doubt, fathers say to their sons and exhort them, as do all those who have care of anyone, that one must be just. However, they don’t praise justice by itself but the good reputations that come from it; they exhort their charges to be just so that, as a result of the opinion, ruling offices and marriages will come to the one who seems to be just…” (363a)

If Glaucon and Adeimantus’ concerns are accurate, then people are often just merely out of coercion. That is, they fear the social consequences of acting otherwise. This is a problem. As long as justice is desired for its benefits, the temptation to put on the facade of justice without actually being just will be a temptation. Thus, in order to give a rigorous defense for the value of justice, Socrates and his friends concur that justice must be defended as a good that is desirable in and of itself.

Otherwise, as Plato scholar Julia Annas puts it,

“Why be just, if you can get away with merely seeming to be just while in fact reaping the rewards of injustice?” (68). 

An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, Oxford University Press, 1981

As you can see, a difficult task has been set for Socrates. In his account of justice, he must demonstrate that it is desirable to be just even if one has the absolute guarantee that one’s injustice will not be found out. In other words, he must show that it is desirable to be just even if one suffers for it (69). Additionally, he must prove that “…it is undesirable to be unjust even with all the rewards that conventionally attach to the appearance of justice” (69). It is not worth being unjust even if one chances upon Gyges’ ring.

Building the Just City

Now that the group has agreed upon its terms for determining justice’s worth, Socrates prepares to offer his account of justice, beginning with its origins. To do so, he leads his friends to engage in a thought experiment regarding the origins of justice, not in an individual, but in a city (368e). If they can discover the origins of justice in a city, thinks Socrates, they will be able to apply this understanding to the origins of justice in the soul.

Socrates begins with the premise that cities are founded based on the realization that humans are not self-sufficient. They need the help of one another for the provision of basic necessities: food, shelter, clothing, etc. Socrates suggests that in order for a city to be self-sufficient, a minimum of four individuals is needed to take up the following productive roles: farming, housebuilding, weaving, and shoemaking (369d). er

In order to be most efficient, the principle of specialization is employed. Each individual will specialize in her own craft, rather than seeking to master all of them. This will lead to greater production in both quantity and quality over time. Soon enough, however, it becomes clear that in order for these four individuals to truly do their jobs well, they will need additional supplies, the goods produced by carpenters, smiths, craftsmen, shepherds, and even merchants (371a). Thus, the city slowly expands.

So far, no reference to justice has been made. Socrates is still establishing his framework for the city. Due to its meager provisions, Glaucon critiques it as “a city for pigs,” and Socrates concedes the point that as currently described, the city is unrealistic. So they begin to introduce certain luxurious elements into the healthy city, making it a feverish, or unhealthy, one (372e).

The problem is that with luxury comes excess of desire. Socrates describes it well:

“Then the city must be made bigger again. This healthy one isn’t adequate any more, but must already be gorged with a bulky mass of things, which are not in cities because of necessity–all the hunters and imitators, many concerned with figures and colors, many with music; and poets and their helpers, rhapsodes, actors, choral dancers, contractors, and craftsmen of all sorts of equipment, for feminine adornment as well as other things…” (373b). 

To Conquer and Defend

Up until this point, the simplicity and idyllic nature of the city is largely attractive. Wouldn’t it be lovely if such a city existed? If only! While Socrates isn’t a Christian, he has keen insight into the nature of human beings. He understands how luxury invites desire and that desire has no limits.

The result is that our beloved city, now injected with the thrills of luxury, must conquer neighboring lands in order to maintain its lifestyle. This ability to conquer, and defend, requires a standing army of specially trained warriors, following the principle of specialization, in the art of warfare (375b). 

These warriors, whom Socrates calls guardians, will not only need specialized training in how to use their weapons masterfully. Given their crucial role as defenders of the city, the guardians will need extended leisure time to remain dedicated to their civic duty. Moreover, they will need to be trained to be both gentle and great-spirited in order to be kind to their own and vigilant in warfare with their enemies.

A Guardian Education

Just as a guard dog is trained to differentiate between friend and foe, so the guardians will need to be educated if they are to protect the city from invaders. This education will consist of training both the body (gymnastic) and soul (music and poetry). The knowledge they gain will equip them to not only physically defend the city, but discern what is good for it. Therefore, thinks Socrates, it is crucial for the guardians to be trained as philosophers, that is, lovers of wisdom. Socrates summarizes,

“Then the man who’s going to be a fine and good guardian of the city for us will be in his nature be philosophic, spirited, swift, and strong” (376c). 

Additionally, the musical, or soul-craft, education of the guardians must begin from a young age. Socrates puts the point firmly:

“Don’t you know that the beginning is the most important place of every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that stage it’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give it.” 377b

Tuning the Soul

Given the high stakes of the musical, or soul-craft, education of the guardians, Socrates insists that the stories and poetry presented to the student guardians must be scrutinized. This instruction, after all, is shaping their souls to know and love what is good. Only the most fine and beautiful stories will be permitted (377b). 

Major works like Homer and Hesiod must be censured heavily. Stories that give false images or representations of what gods and heroes are like will be thrown out. These stories endorse terrible behavior, such as irreverent actions toward parents or being easily provoked to anger. (378b). They include episodes in which children rebel against their parents and parents abuse their children. Given that the young cannot distinguish between what is commendable and what is not, these stories must not be told.

Instead, all literature–epics, lyrics, tragedies, stories–must represent the gods as good. Bad things don’t come from good gods, Socrates insists. Only good comes from the gods. He concludes, “These stories are not pious, not advantageous to us, and not consistent with one another” (380c).

Moreover, stories in which the gods change forms must be censured. Change implies imperfection at best and corruptibility at worst. Student guardians must be taught that the gods are good, immutable, and truthful. But this is exactly the opposite depiction of the gods in the major legends. 

“A god, then, is simple and true in word and deed. He doesn’t change himself or deceive others by images, words, or signs, whether in visions or in dreams” (382e). 

The goal for the musical education of the guardians is to be as god-like and god-fearing as possible (383c). They are, after all, the defenders of the city. They are civic trustees, tasked with the responsibility to perpetuated the city’s flourishing and vitality. in this way, the future of the city is bound up in the education of the guardian class.

Application for Educators

Thus concludes Book II of Plato’s Republic. Justice has been categorized as a good that must be proven to be desirable in and of itself. Socrates has begun constructing his hypothetical city to identify the origins of justice and injustice. And a description of the education of the guardian class, the city’s noble defenders, is underway.

While this article must come to a close, let me leave educators with two practical takeaways.

First, I encourage readers who are interested in learning more about Plato’s idea of musical (soul-craft) education to check out Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition. In this book, they provide a helpful summary on how teachers can engage in the important work of shaping the moral and religious imaginations of their students through the power of story. You can read a great review of the book written by Jason Barney here.

Second, as I was reading Plato’s section on what stories and poetry to put before students, I could not help but think of Charlotte Mason. In her writings, she is clear that children are to read and narrate only the best books, books that contain living ideas. I look forward to writing more about this in the future.

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“Whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, we are all more or less Platonists. Even if we reject Plato’s conclusions, our views are shaped by the way in which he stated his problems.”¹ 

In today’s article, I begin a new series on Plato’s Republic. I’ve been wanting to start this project for some time now for two reasons. 

First, I want to make Plato more accessible for everyone. The philosopher is a seminal figure in the history of ideas. Without his writings, it is difficult to know where western civilization would be today. In particular, Plato’s conception of reality as rational (and knowable) paved the way for rigorous intellectual inquiry to take root. Additionally, his notion of the Good as objective and distinct from the individual established the foundation for much of moral philosophy. In short, without Plato, we lose much of the philosophical foundation of western civilization.

Second, I believe the ideas found in the Republic have massive implications for classical educators today. If Plato is right that justice is not only a virtue to be exhibited by society, but the ideal state of one’s soul, then teachers would do well to understand more what he has in mind. When they do, they will see that their work in the classroom is no isolated mental exercise. Rather, teaching is a holistic endeavor dedicated to helping students order their souls for the virtuous, well-lived life.

Join me now as we enter the gates of Plato’s Republic and gain fresh insights into what it means to be human, the nature of justice, and the value of education today.

Down to the Piraeus

The opening scene of Book I in the Republic is memorable. Socrates and his companion Glaucon are visiting the Pireaus, the port of Athens, for a religious festival (327a).² Plato immediately embeds deeper meaning into the story by noting that the travelers are journeying downward. This movement indicates that Socrates, the wise philosopher, is descending from the world of knowledge into the cave of ignorance. His journey is missional in nature as he seeks to bring fellow humans out of intellectual darkness and into the light of objective truth.

For Plato, humans cannot be forced out of this cave; they must choose for themselves. Given this reality, education, as we will explore later in this blog series, is the process of pointing students toward the way up and out of the cave. But students must take the steps themselves. Practically speaking, filling the minds of students with facts or preparing them for college entrance exams might temporarily generate the facade of learning, but only time will tell if understanding has taken root. The ultimate test? Students will go on to not only learn what is good, true, and beautiful; they will desire it for themselves.

What drives Socrates’ missional descent? Why would anyone “go down” to the cave if they have already experienced the sunlight above? The answer is simple: community. Humans are creatures of relationship. According to Plato, humans are social and political in nature. They are not content enjoying the good and true alone. They are wired to bring others with them, up and out of the cave. In this way, the challenges of being a good man are inseparable from being a good citizen.²

An Unexpected Meeting

After Socrates and Glaucon attend the festival at the sea port, they begin their return journey to Athens. Soon they are stopped by a young nobleman Polemarchus and his father Cephalus. Before long, Socrates and Glaucon are humorously forced to stop for a visit at the home of the elderly Cephalus for an extended discussion with the father and son, and a few others. The topic of discussion: What is Justice?

The discussion in Book I occurs in two broad movements. In the first movement, Socrates has to deal with the traditional Greek view that justice is real but rather trivial. This viewpoint is embodied in the characters Cephalus and Polemarchus. In the second movement, Socrates has to address a far more nefarious view: justice is not real at all. There are no moral qualities inherent to the fabric of reality. All that matters is who has the power and what is most expedient. This view is represented by the moral skeptic Thrasymachus. 

Interestingly, in the conclusion of Book One, it is clear that socratic dialogue will not convince the morally complacent or the moral skeptic. The matter is too philosophically complex and the draw to live for what is most expedient is too alluring. The result for the interlocutors is a state of aporia, a state of confusion about what actually is true. Thus, the remaining nine books of the Republic pivot from Plato’s usual style of socratic dialogue to a form of lecture, with some Q&A, in which Socrates constructs his view of justice. Before we get there, however, let us take our time and first examine Socrates’ interlocutors in Book I and their respective views.

Cephalus, the Wealthy Moralist

Socrates’s first interlocutor is Cephalus, an elderly man who has earned himself a comfortable life through trade and manufacture. He is the epitome of a person in which morality and wealthy are intertwined. For Cephalus, one of the key benefits of being wealthy is that it enables a person to act more justly. He insists,

“Wealth can do a lot to save us from having to cheat or deceive someone against our will and from having to depart for that other place in fear because we owe sacrifice to a god or money to a person” (331b).

Thus, a just person in old age is able to look back on his life with peace knowing that he has lived a good life. According to Cephalus, wealth grants people the freedom from care, necessity, and fear of death.

From these opening remarks, Socrates distills Cephalus’ view of justice: being truthful and returning what one owes (331c). Cephalus appreciates and accepts this articulation of his view of justice. It can be boiled down to a few basic rules such as “Don’t lie” “Don’t cheat” and “Don’t steal.” Justice consists in the performance of certain actions, not in regards to whether the person is actually just.

As one can imagine, it doesn’t take much for Socrates to spot holes in this simplistic view of justice. For example, one would never return to an insane person a weapon that might lead to a tragic result. Yet, under Cephalus’ view, this is the just thing to do: returning what is owed. Humorously, rather than responding to this objection, Cephalus takes it as his cue to exit the discussion to go make another sacrifice, reinforcing his view that justice is grounded in doing, not being. He leaves his son Polemarchus to continue the conversation.

Can Justice Lead to Harm?

For Cephalus’ son Polemarchus, justice is more than following a few specific rules, but not much more. Following the poet Simonides (c. 548-468 B.C.), he generalizes justice to mean “giving to each what is owed to him” (331e). More specifically, he posits, justice is grounded in friendship. Friends owe it to their friends to do good for them, never harm. Conversely, enemies owe it to one another to inflict harm upon one another (334b).

Again, it does not take long for Socrates to disband Polemarchus’ view as he did his father’s. Using the method which dons his very name, Socrates leads Polemarchus to admit that justice, as he defined it, is both useless (333d) and at times harms good people (334e). Eventually, this leads Polemarchus to nuance his definition: treating well friends who are actually good and harming enemies who are actually bad (335a).

But this cannot be right, Socrates points out. After all, does not harming things actually make them worse with regards to what they are intended to be? Does not harming a racehorse make it a worse horse? In the same way, would not harming someone, even a wicked enemy, make the enemy an even worse human? How could a just person do that?

Moreover, if justice is a virtue, and virtue is the excellence⁴ of a thing, then how could good people make people bad through justice? They certainly cannot. It is the function of an unjust person to harm others, while just people are called to be good.

In conclusion, viewing justice as simply giving what is owed is insufficient. On the surface, it has a reasonable draw, but when you dig deeper, it is flawed. “It is never just to harm anyone,” is Polemarchus’ conclusion. Insofar as virtues are manifestations of the good, justice as a virtue cannot do the opposite and engage in harm.

No Justice, Only Power

Up to this point, there is one individual at the gathering who has not yet spoken: Thrasymachus, the Sophist. In Plato’s day, the Sophists were not a school of thought, but a group of professional teachers who lectured across cities and who claimed expertise in lessons needed for people to lead successful lives.⁵ Insofar as they viewed knowledge as a resource to be utilized for pragmatic ends, their motivation for learning was in stark contrast to Plato’s. They went around charging fees for their lessons, marketing themselves as consultants for the good life, while simultaneously throwing into question whether moral claims have any objective basis at all.⁶

Plato introduces Thrasymachus coming on the scene with style:

“While we were speaking, Thrasymachus had tried many times to take over the discussion but was restrained by those sitting near him, who wanted to hear our argument to the end. When we paused after what I’d just said, however, he couldn’t keep quiet any longer. He coiled himself up like a wild beast about to spring, and he hurled himself at us as if to tear us to pieces” (336b).

The description of Thrasymachus as a beast is intentional. He represents here the perpetual threat of the bodily appetites, eagerly waiting to conquer reason and morality. We will learn in later books that the well-ordered soul keeps the appetite in check. Here we will see an example of what happens when it fails.

Thrasymachus provocatively defines justice as “the advantage of the stronger” (338c). Rulers, he insists, make laws to perpetuate their own rule. Thus, justice is whatever the established rule says it is (339e). Socrates immediately begins his interrogation, first challenging what Thrasymachus means by advantage and then demonstrating how it is often in the best interest of rulers to seek the advantage of who they are leading, such as a captain commanding sailors on a ship (342e). Not to be outdone easily, Thrasymachus retorts that not all rulers seek what is advantageous for their subjects. Case and point: Shepherds and cowherds caring for their sheep and cows. They are not fattening the cows for the good of the cow, that’s for sure!

Then Thrasymachus pivots to make a different, potentially stronger argument: justice works for the advantage of the ruling class while injustice works for the advantage of those being ruled (343d). Making his point persuasively with examples, he concludes,

“So, Socrates, injustice if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice. And, as I said from the first, justice is what is advantageous to the stronger, while injustice is to one’s own profit and advantage” (344c).

Socrates responds, of course, with his own arguments. First, he argues that although injustice appears to have its merits, ultimately it is contrary to wisdom and virtue (351b). Second, he demonstrates that injustice is self-defeating and only leads to civil war, both corporately and individually (352a). While neither of these arguments are fully convincing, they do slow down Thrasymachus and force readers to seriously evaluate the strength of the opposing views.

Justice: Excellence of the Soul

Socrates’ final argument to demonstrate that justice is more than the advantage of the stronger and actually a moral good worth pursuing is with regards to function, specifically the function of a human soul. Everything has a function, thinks Socrates, ranging from race horses to cutting knives. For example, the function of a knife is to cut. Similarly, the function of the soul is life and self-rule.

Like other functions, there is a gradation to the extent to which the soul’s function is achieved with arete (excellence), or virtue (354a). To use the knife example again, a knife demonstrates arete insofar as it cuts with excellence.

For the function of the human soul, justice, Socrates insists, is this excellence. The key to the well-ruled soul is justice, the virtue of the soul.

Admittedly, this argument, while logically valid, is, again, not fully persuasive. It is not quite clear whether Socrates has it right about the function of the soul, much less that justice is the virtue of this function. Interestingly, it is at this point that the traditional socratic dialogue ends in the Republic. As I mentioned earlier, Book I ends with the discussion participants in a state of aporia, confusion over what is actually true. The question of whether justice is actually worth it essentially ends in a stalemate. Attentive readers themselves are left puzzled and confused themselves, setting the stage for Socrates to begin constructing his theory of justice.

Application for Educators

Throughout this series on Plato’s Republic, I am going to offer some practical takeaways for classical educators today. Each of these takeaways deserve an article themselves, but for now, these will serve to prime the pump for future writing.

Here are some practical takeaways from Book I:

Trust the dialectic. Real learning occurs through genuine inquiry, passionate discussion, and relentless searching for the truth. While Book I is intended to demonstrate the limitations of socratic dialogue, it also shows its merits. Socrates and his friends obviously cover some ground. They are able to identify some very bad ideas about justice and establish a general framework for a viable view.

Argue for the objectivity of moral truth claims. Thrasymachus put forth some dangerous ideas about morality, namely that it is subjective at best, and worthless at worst. He argues, at times persuasively, that maybe the moral life is a sham constructed by those in power to keep control. Undaunted, Socrates keeps his wits about him and defends the substance of moral truth claims. Likewise, teachers should be prepared to stand up for the truth, even while they allow their students to wrestle with complex ideas.

Cast vision for the Good life. While Socrates’ closing argument is not fully convincing, he does introduce the powerful idea that the Good life exists. In other words, there is a right way to live and it is not hopelessly arbitrary. If the human soul actually has an objective function, or purpose, then it is worth all the gold in the world to find out what this purpose is. Then one must seek to fulfill it with excellence. We must keep this vision for the virtuous life before our students, regularly encouraging them to seek what is good, true, and beautiful.

Endnotes

1. W.T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy, Volume 1: The Classical Mind, 2nd edition, Wadsworth Thomson Learning, 1980, p. 108.
2. Plato, Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube, Plato’s Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
3. Jones, 138.
4. It is worth noting that this argument assumes a particular definition of virtue as “arete,” translated from the Greek as “excellence” or “goodness.” A knife, for example, has “arete” with respect to its ability to cut properly. What is human “arete”? Keep reading the Republic with me and you will find out!
5. Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 6.
6. Ibid., 6.

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