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

The Limitations of Artistic Divisions

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

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

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

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

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

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

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

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

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

The Transcendence of Artistry into Morality

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

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

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

Artistry’s Moral and Spiritual Limitations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artistry as a Prelude to the Other Four Intellectual Virtues

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next subseries in Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues:

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

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Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of artistry (Greek: techne) is by its very nature creative and productive. In order for it to flourish in a school culture, it must draw some of its lifeblood from the natural creative and productive impulse of children as human beings. When they see the products and beautiful creations of the masters of these living traditions, then they will naturally want to imitate them (see Comenius, The Great Didactic, 195-196). Drawing from this natural desire will make unnecessary the carrots and sticks of modern education’s manipulative motivational techniques. 

The Example of the Renaissance Guilds

We might be tempted to think that the structure of a system, like a school, has nothing to do with the cultivation of high levels of artistry or genius. We are tempted to think primarily in terms of in-born talent as a fixed entity (see Aristotle and the Growth Mindset • Educational Renaissance), but research on geniuses and elite performers points in another direction. In his book, The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle notes that geniuses “are not scattered uniformly through time and space” but “tend to appear in clusters” (61-62): 

Athens from 440 B.C. to 380 B.C., Florence from 1440 to 1490, and London from 1570-1640. Of these three none is so dazzling or well documented as Florence. In the space of a few generations a city with a population slightly less than that of present day Stillwater, Oklahoma, produced the greatest outpouring of artistic achievement the world has ever known. A solitary genius is easy to understand, but dozens of them, in the space of two generations? How could it happen? (62)

The scholar David Banks proposes a number of possible explanations that we might expect: the prosperity of Florence, its relative peace and freedom, etc. Unfortunately, each one of these is disproved by the historical record. Instead, the flurry of genius-level work is best explained by a social structure and educational process relentlessly focused on deep practice: the craft guilds:

As it turns out, Florence was an epicenter for the rise of a powerful social invention called craft guilds. Guilds (the word means “gold”) were associations of weavers, painters, goldsmiths, and the like who organized themselves to regulate competition and control quality. They had management, dues, and tight policies dictating who could work in the craft. What they did best, however, was grow talent. Guilds were built on the apprenticeship system, in which boys around seven years of age were sent to live with masters for fixed terms of five to ten years. (64)

The apprenticeship process that we have discussed throughout this series, it seems, can have better and worse cultural structures for training students in artistry. On a side note, the hierarchy of excellence seems to foster artistic genius more readily than the democracy of talent. In addition, the experience of apprentices at the bottom of the hierarchy mirrors the recommendations of Comenius for students to begin with the most basic and practical skills of the craft, and not with elaborate theory. As Coyle further explains,

An apprentice worked directly under the tutelage and supervision of the master, who frequently assumed rights as the child’s legal guardian. Apprentices learned the craft from the bottom up, not through lecture or theory but through action: mixing paint, preparing canvases, sharpening chisels. They cooperated and competed within a hierarchy, rising after some years to the status of journeyman and eventually, if they were skilled enough, master. This system created a chain of mentoring: da Vinci studied under Verrocchio, Verrocchio studied under Donatello, Donatello studied under Ghiberti; Michelangelo studied under Ghirlandaio, Ghirlandaio studied under Baldovinetti, and so on, all of them frequently visiting one another’s studios in a cooperative-competitive arrangement that today would be called social networking. (64)

This apprenticeship system can be thrown in stark relief with our common vision of what a “liberal arts education” should look like. Are our teachers masters of the liberal arts? Are our students cooperating and competing within a culture focused on rewarding excellence? Or are they simply hearing lectures on knowledge, taking notes and taking tests? Is their educational experience properly artistic in nature, focused on production in the common, liberal and fine arts? Are they systematically and structurally encouraged to try to solve problems of a production, even if they fail again and again along the way? Or are they motivated by grades, and jumping through the hoops of a rigid system?

In short, apprentices spent thousands of hours solving problems, trying and failing and trying again, within the confines of a world build on the systematic production of excellence. Their life was roughly akin to that of a twelve-year-old intern who spends a decade under the direct supervision of Steven Spielberg, painting sets, sketching storyboards, setting cameras. The notion that such a kid might one day become a great film director would hardly be a surprise: it would be closer to unavoidable (see Ron Howard). (64-65)

The Renaissance Guilds offer us a compelling vision of how the academy could be structured for artistry in a way that transcends the conventions of the modern school.

Adopting an Apprenticeship Model of Grading

This leads us to a first implication for the academy of our better understanding of Apprenticeship in the Arts. Students should be induced to create and produce with excellence, not by the overuse of fear or love, grades, punishments or rewards, but by their natural desire for imitation, creativity and production. Charlotte Mason put it this way: 

These principles are limited by the respect due to the personality [i.e. personhood] of children, which must not be encroached upon whether by the direct use of fear or love, suggestions or influence, or by undue play upon any one natural desire. (vol. 6, p. 80)

For this reason, and to avoid the grade inflation so typical of schools today, at the school where I serve as principal we have adopted an apprenticeship model of grading for our younger students and in artistic subjects for older students . 

This Apprenticeship model attempts to assign accurately a student’s level of mastery of grade-level artistic expectations. Since, as we discussed before, so much of K-12 education consists of training in the arts (if we include all the skill development of the liberal arts as well as the fine and performing arts!), it makes the most sense to assess students’ progression through the traditional vision of apprenticeship. When learning an art, every student begins at the level of novice, where the entire nature of the art and its practice is still new and unknown to the student. Through introduction to the art and early experiences in beginning to imitate a master, the student proceeds to the status of apprentice. At this point the student must still be watched closely by the master as he or she is producing, since the apprentice is liable to make mistakes and therefore still in need of some hand-holding and regular demonstration or correction to help the student practice the art correctly. After the student has gained some facility and can work mostly on his or her own, he has attained the status of journeyman, being able to produce the goods of the art dependably and with a measure of both autonomy and excellence. Finally, when a student displays a high level of artistry, excellence and a seasoned understanding that implies the ability to teach or train others in the craft, he or she has become a master, at least of that subskill. 

Apprenticeship Model Grade Levels

• Novice — a student who is new to the art and unacquainted with the processes that lead to proper production
• Apprentice — a student who is imitating the processes with some measure of success, but is also in need of frequent support and correction by the master
• Journeyman — a student who can produce the beautiful goods of the art with some autonomy and creative artistry
• Master — a student who consistently displays artistry and independent creativity, as well as the mastery that implies the ability to train others in the art

Adopting this sort of grading philosophy and system in a school can help clarify for teachers, students, and parents the actual nature of much of the educational project. When traditional grades are used it is often unclear whether or not students should be graded mainly on the completion of assignments or their effort, as opposed to their understanding and mastery. While no doubt students who work hard should be recognized in some way, when artistry is being judged it can actually be demotivating to students to adopt an A for effort standard. Objective grading honors the facts that students’ consciences are sensitive to and can observe quite clearly in front of their faces: some students produce more excellent and beautiful work than others. 

At the same time, this apprenticeship model avoids the judgmental approach of a traditional, objective grading system, because it creates a story arc of progression from the lower levels. Everyone starts out as a novice in any area of artistry. Very few students will attain mastery of any art or subskill in a given year in which it is introduced. When this expectation is introduced and normalized in a school culture, the rare situations of student mastery can be appropriately recognized and celebrated in a way that encourages all other students to continue to strive for excellence. 

That said, overemphasizing the judgment of grades can also be detrimental and ineffective. So even though it is important to retain the assessment of students’ mastery levels, perhaps the more effective assessments are cultural. When students are being trained to produce in a craft, their work should be displayed before their peers, their parents and the school community. This inspires the natural motivation to do their best and involves the natural judgment process of the community for what artistry looks like. Because of this, academic events, performances and competitions provide the natural clearinghouse for developing a culture of artistry. 

Many of these school events almost go without saying in the school calendar, but their value is often overlooked and neglected. Why do students work so hard for artistry in sports, when they might not for other school activities? Because their artistry is clearly on display and being judged through the natural cooperative-competitive environment of the game or tournament, with spectators watching for their success. In the same way, a classical Christian school can make much of liberal arts through academic events like a Spelling Bee, Speech Meet, or public debate, with rules strictly followed and mandatory participation, and with audiences and judges in attendance. In the same way, when classes perform recitations (i.e. memorized passages of scripture, poems or historical speeches) in front of the entire school and teachers are encouraged to impart a dramatic flair, the training of the rote memory turns into the artistry of rhetoric. 

Viewed in this light, school concerts and plays, competitions and games, art galleries, and displays of student work at events are not nice extras at a school. Instead, these school community activities become earnest teaching and learning moments that apprentice students in the arts and create a culture of craftsmanship in the academy. Academic events should be chosen with care and conducted with reverence for the mission and beating heart of the school. Although a school calendar can become overscheduled, we should remember that such performances, whether high or low stakes, are opportunities for cultivating the natural motivation of students to excel in artistry. Such opportunities are potentially transformative educational experiences and should be viewed as a crucial piece of the curriculum or course of study. 

Understanding the motivational value of proper grading in an apprenticeship model as well as the role of academic events, competitions and performances can go a long way toward creating a culture of artistry and excellence at a school. But we should not be unaware of the deeper spiritual ramifications of this process. 

Apprenticeship in Christian Perspective

First, we need to remember that the creation of beautiful and good things is innately human. God created mankind in his image as the stewards of creation and he commissioned human beings with the cultural mandate: the call to fill the earth and subdue it. This is rightly interpreted as an invitation to all the creative arts, or techne which use the stuff of earth as the raw material for the creating beautiful and good artifacts. (Read Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education.) That is precisely what we see happening in Genesis 4. In spite of sin and its disastrous effects displayed in Cain and Abel, we see the progenitors of various common, liberal and fine arts:

Adah gave birth to Jabal; he was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all who play stringed instruments and pipes. Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. (Gen 4:22 ESV)

Thus the apprenticeship model was born. We might note that it was initially passed down in families; apprenticeship and the father-son, mother-daughter relationship went hand in hand. 

So apprenticeship in true, good and beautiful arts is human and therefore part and parcel of a redeemed Christian life. As human beings created in the image of God, our lives are most whole and fruitful when they fulfill the creation mandate through some type of artistry, through culture-making to borrow Andy Crouch’s term.

But secondly, we can note from the traditional and familial nature of apprenticeship, that it often carries with it, by nature, the lifestyle of the master craftsman. All the arts are embodied by their master craftsmen in a way of life, involving their beautiful creation and practice of the art, ideally alongside a full and good life. But let me be clear, this very fact means that apprenticeship in the arts as a means of bringing up children in the discipline and nurture of the Lord (see Eph 6:4) must be embodied as part and parcel of a whole Christian life. 

So if Christian parents apprentice their child to a pagan man who is a master of rhetoric, they should not be surprised if their child eventually takes on the moral and spiritual faults of this man, even if they also gain some of his rhetorical skill. That is how human beings work. In the same way if a young girl is apprenticed to an immoral dance or music teacher, who is immersed in a pluralistic world with its values, it is not impossible that over time the influence of that world will be transferred to her alongside the art. 

This is one of the forgotten premises by which our Christian classical schools attempt to operate. In the modern factory model of education we have forgotten what Jesus said: “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40 ESV). Disciple – apprentice – student. We have forgotten that these are roughly equivalent terms

Of course, when we follow Quintilian’s lead and partially apprentice children to many different arts (see On the Education of the Orator I.12), we minimize the potentially negative influence of any one teacher, but we do not really depart from this principle. In fact, we might say that at an ideal classical Christian school, a university or wholeness of the arts and sciences, this apprenticeship process under the leadership of a head master, a head magister or teacher, or else a principal or chief teacher (this is what these words original meant), the whole school of teachers pass on a communal way of life together. The culture of the school with all its teachers, curriculum, classes and traditions, apprentices the individual students.

This insight about apprenticeship as resonating with the nature of true Christian classical education is well-summed up in a statement of the school where I serve as Principal, Coram Deo Academy. We say that we apprentice students into the Great Conversation for the purpose of the Great Commission and the Great Commandment. 

To sum up, so far I have indicated by two statements the way in which apprenticeship in artistry, i.e. various arts, established traditions of craftsmanship, whether liberal, common or fine, contributes to the spiritual development of children. Those two ways are, first, through the fulfillment of our human calling in the creation mandate to act as sub-creators of good and beautiful things. This is what it means to fulfill our purpose as human beings, and therefore artistry is part of how we experience the redeemed Christian life. But second is through Christian apprenticeship into the life of good works established for us by Christ the true Master’s life, death and resurrection, the life of those apprenticed to him and characteristic of the family of God. And we should recall again the warning attached to this point, that non-Christian masters, teachers, artisans are by nature liabilities as well as potential sources of the blessing of artistry. 

Entwining the Spiritual and Artistic Goals of the Academy

Because of this, the classical Christian school rightly has a high bar of qualifications for its faculty based on spiritual maturity. The character of the teachers will inevitably have a long term influence on the character of the students. Structurally, then, the leadership of a school should not only develop careful recruiting and hiring processes that are intended to ensure the Christian maturity of its teachers, they should bake into the life of the school some measure of the spiritual practices of the church that aim at developing spiritual maturity. It is not that classical Christian academies should attempt to replace the worship and community of the local church, but by involving the faculty and staff in the rhythm of prayer, worship, and scripture reading, characteristic of the universal church, the discipleship—or, should I say, apprenticeship—of the Christian life become evident in the school culture. 

It is important, in this connection, to fuse our goals for training in artistry through assessment and artistic events, with discipleship in an appropriate and not an artificial way. The cross country coach can lead students in prayer before a race. The Spring Concert can feature the famous poems, spirituals and hymns of Christian worship, artfully performed. Academic events can include brief homiletical exhortation and instruction as part of the program, alongside the competition or performance itself. Assessments, awards and recognition of artistry can be publicly relativized to higher spiritual ends. Excellence in artistry can be deliberately and intentionally pursued soli Deo gloria, with glory to God alone, as J.S. Bach signed his masterful musical compositions. 

Further, the leadership of a school must be careful not to compromise core spiritual commitments for artistic ends, whether in hiring faculty or staff or in the nature of the content or practices. It can be so easy to tolerate that borderline coach or drama teacher, or to skate the line of acceptability in some way. Because, after all, the sports team or play is so important to the kids and their families…. Often this is a false dichotomy, but even when not, we should be willing to sacrifice high quality artistry for gospel purity whenever necessary, remembering Jesus’ words: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36 KJV) The value of intellectual virtues can never outweigh that of spiritual virtues. As Paul says, “For while bodily training is of some value, godliness [i.e. piety] is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come” (1 Tim 4:8 ESV). That said, artistry can be used in support of higher ends; prime examples are musical worship and preaching (derived from two of the traditional liberal arts, music and rhetoric). 

The classical Christian school is the ideal place for this beautiful fusion to occur and be actively trained. Such considerations should color an academy’s vision of their school’s or their students’ future greatness. Kolby Atchison has discussed the application of the Hedgehog Concept from Jim Collins Good to Great to classical Christian schools. Decisions about which arts to pursue and prioritize, when the list of possible arts seems endless, would benefit from careful thought about a school’s Hedgehog Concept: what the school can be the best in the world at will involve the culture, events and arts that are emphasized in the curricular and extracurricular programs. Innovations in a school will often occur here as leaders capitalize on local opportunities and the community’s unique giftings.

After all, we can become like the Renaissance Guilds in every area of artistic excellence possible. Greatness requires focused effort on particular arts. And true Christian artistry focuses us even more narrowly on what will serve Christ in our generational moment. As C.T. Studd wrote in his famous poem, “Only one life, ’twill soon be past, / Only what’s done for Christ will last.”

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final article in this series:

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

The post Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry appeared first on .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Liberal Arts as Pathways of Professional Preparation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artistic Training in the Academy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later articles in this series:

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

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

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

In addition, my five fold division of the arts is careful to situate various forms of artistry in time and place, their historical traditions, so that we can avoid modernism’s totalizing fallacy. 

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

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

The important takeaway here is the need to train students in embodied and culturally situated skills, rather than reducing the liberal arts, for instance, to general studies. Students should be able to produce something in the world because of their training in artistry, not just know random facts.

This led me to propose a pedagogy or training method for artistry, drawing primarily from John Amos Comenius, the famous Reformation educator. We distilled from Comenius a set of basic steps that all arts have in common:

1. Students are given a general acquaintance with the works produced, the end-products of the art.
2. Students respond with a natural desire to imitate through producing works of their own.
3. The master provides the students with the proper tools and models their use, showing them examples of the techniques.
4. The master corrects the students through both examples and advice, sharing the theories and precepts while correcting students.

These steps follow the classical principle of mimesis or imitation that the CiRCE Institute has popularized among classical educators. In many cases, however, the focus among CiRCE folk sometimes edges toward knowledge to be learned or understood rather than a complex skill to be mastered. Aristotle’s terminology helps us to make a crisper distinction between these two teaching tasks. Knowing a truth is different from know-how. Artistry, for Aristotle, is clearly know-how, while nous, or intuition, would correspond with the understanding of ideas or first principles. 

To be sure, the student must understand several things in order to develop in artistry: the purpose of the art he is learning, how to use the tools, how to avoid common mistakes, etc. So a student of an art does develop a certain intuition about quality artistry through an art, but that is not the primary goal. His understanding serves his practice and not the other way around. (Were the budding artist to shift gears and become a critic of the art, as retired football players sometimes become sportscasters or former politicians become political commentators, then the artist’s developed intuition would come to the fore as the intellectual virtue on which he would depend for his new rhetorical product.)

Developing a Lesson in Craft

The basic process outlined above can serve as the springboard for a more fully articulated lesson in artistry. In other contexts, I have advocated for a Narration-Trivium lesson structure aimed at training students in the Trivium arts, while teaching them the sciences, what we might call general content knowledge in various areas. In laying out an alternative lesson structure for training a student in the arts, I am not abandoning this earlier approach, but adding a very necessary complement to it. Let me explain.

One way of viewing the nature of good teaching is to isolate the main goal that such an act of teaching has, as in its own way Bloom’s Taxonomy is careful to do. John Milton Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching highlights the act of teaching as one of conveying knowledge or some truth. This sees teaching as primarily focused on content that a student absorbs into herself and makes her own. On the other hand, Gregory is careful to note in his introduction that there is another branch of the educational art, which he calls training and describes as “the systematic development and cultivation of the powers of mind and body” (10). Gregory even goes so far as to say, 

These two great branches of educational art–training and teaching–though separable in thought, are not separable in practice. We can only train by teaching, and we teach best when we train best. Training implies the exercise of the powers to be trained; but the proper exercise of the intellectual powers is found in the acquisition, the elaboration, and the application of knowledge. (11)

Gregory’s insight here is profound, but it does not quite make up for the fact that he has neglected the art of training by centering his whole work on the act of teaching.

In my view, the problem with Gregory’s attempt to merge training and teaching is one and the same with the totalizing impulse of modernism (in which Gregory participated). At some times, we are focused on training students in a skill, while at others we are endeavoring to teach them content knowledge. To operate as teachers with only one type of lesson, despite the differences between the intellectual virtues we are aiming to cultivate, is to court disaster at worst, and to confuse the issue at best. 

Thoughtful teachers do, in fact, operate very differently when they are training vs teaching. Aristotle’s distinctions between the intellectual virtues of artistry and scientific knowledge, intuition or prudence would have kept us more in line with common sense, if we had retained them. In Gregory’s favor I do think that we can maximize our content-based lessons, by also affording our students with practice in the trivium arts (see Narration-Trivium Lesson). In the same way, I believe that the Apprenticeship Lesson that I am proposing now can and should help students gain general knowledge. But I believe it is more helpful to teachers to set a primary goal for a lesson, and then allow subsidiary goals to fall in line to support. The Apprenticeship Lesson recognizes the development of artistry or skill as the primary goal, thus avoiding the knowledge-transfer default of much modern education.

The Apprenticeship Movement (I-We-You)

In his book Teach Like a Champion 2.0 Doug Lemov coined the phrase I-We-You to convey the movement in a practice-based lesson from modeling a new skill or process, to involving students together in the process, before releasing students to work on their own. In his most recent update (3.0) he uses the terms Direct Instruction/Knowledge Assimilation, Guided Practice/Guided Questioning, and Independent Practice (241-245). We can see the dichotomy even here between a focus on content and skills. ‘Practice’ seems to accord better with training in skills, while ‘instruction,’ ‘knowledge’ and ‘questioning’ gesture toward teaching content.

(Wondering how Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion can be appropriated by classical Christian educators? Check out Kolby Atchison’s free eBook, “The Craft of Teaching for Classical Educators.”)

In any case, the movement from modeling with examples (I), to holding the hands of students as they work (We), to releasing them to accountable independent practice (You) provides a handy application of Comenius’ steps. Its flexibility for artistic skills as different as proper form when shooting a basket or solving an algebraic equation make it a promising foundation for our Apprenticeship Lesson format. 

Do Now is another valuable teaching technique for an Apprenticeship Lesson that is described by Doug Lemov in Teach Like a Champion (see 3.0 p. 187ff.). The reason for this is the importance of immediately engaging students in productive activity when we are training them in an art. A key danger for trainers is to hinder a student’s progress by over-explanation of rules and precepts, when action should be the name of the game. As Comenius says in his Analytical Didactic, 

Doing cannot be learned except by doing. Hence the saying, ‘We create by creating.’ One becomes a writer by writing, a painter by painting, a singer by singing, a speaker by speaking; and so it is with all external acts. (155)

Therefore he goes on to express it as a principle that “in every art there should be more practice than theory” (157). 

Lemov describes the cultural rationale that supports starting a lesson with a “quality task” that students can practice independently:

We want students to engage in productive and high-quality work that interests and challenges them right away, and over time we want to make a habit of this, so they expect to be actively and meaningfully engaged any time they enter our classrooms. We want them to know we are prepared and value their learning. They will not be passive; there will be very little downtime. (187)

We can imagine starting an Apprenticeship Lesson in a sport with a consistent drill that rehearses a set of core or fundamental skills; in a musical instrument, with scales or warm up exercises; in liberal art, with practice problems, exercises or a short writing task. The Do Now step of an Apprenticeship Lesson may not be strictly required, based on classical principles, but it remains a valuable default to be departed from only with good reason. 

Lastly, Lemov also articulates the value of checking for understanding (see ch. 3 of 3.0, pp. 75ff.; see also Kolby’s article on the topic). I have placed this as a step following guided practice (We) in the Apprenticeship Lesson, because of the danger of setting students’ free to independent practice too soon. Classical educators have long recognized the need to hasten slowly (festina lente) by ensuring the foundation is well laid, before building upon it. Comenius reflects on this fact for a pedagogy of artistry in The Great Didactic through the classical example of Timotheus the musician:

For this reason Timotheus the musician used to demand twice as large a fee from those pupils who had learned the rudiments of their art elsewhere, saying that his labour was twofold, as he had first to get them out of the bad habits that they had acquired, and then to teach them correctly. Those, therefore, who are learning any art should take care to make themselves masters of the rudiments by imitating their copies accurately. This difficulty once overcome, the rest follows of itself, just as a city lies at the mercy of foes when its gates are broken in. All haste should be avoided, lest we proceed to advanced work before the elementary stages have been mastered. He goes fast enough who never quits the road, and a delay which is caused by obtaining a thorough grip of first principles is really no delay, but an advance toward mastering what follows with ease, speed, and accuracy. (200)

Therefore it is prudent for the trainer of an art to check for students’ understanding before letting them practice independently, and then during independent practice, to circulate and actively correct students’ errors, as Comenius also states in his 9th canon, “Errors must be corrected by the master on the spot; but precepts, that is to say the rules, and the exceptions to the rules, must be given at the same time.” (200)

The Inspirational Coach

The various pieces of the puzzle for an Apprenticeship Lesson are almost interlocked. One final contribution comes from Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, which we have drawn from before to discuss the role of myelin (the white fatty substance that wraps around neural networks to increase speed and accuracy of firing) in the development of complex skill. Drawing from the research of Anders Ericsson, who coined the terms deliberate and purposeful practice, Coyle has painted a stunning picture of the “coaches” behind the training of world class athletes and performers. 

Aside from the core skill-set of providing the targeted feedback day in and day out, “like farmers: careful, deliberate cultivators of myelin” (Coyle, The Talent Code, 165), these Talent Whisperers, as Coyle calls them, are actually coaching their students to love the art. As he explains, 

They succeed because they are tapping into the second element of the talent code: ignition. They are creating and sustaining motivation; they are teaching love. As Bloom’s study [of world class performers’ first teachers] summed up, ‘The effect of this first phase of learning seemed to be to get the learner involved, captivated, hooked, and to get the learner to need and want more information and expertise.’ (175)

There must be a place for joy and inspiration, meaningfully conveyed from the coach to the artist-in-training. That is why I have placed an Inspirational Idea as a step in the Apprenticeship Lesson, even if this feature might not always be very long or strictly necessary. Speaking warmly about the beauty of the end product or the value of discipline, even for only 30 seconds, can help the average teacher pause long enough to consider the cultivation of her students’ motivation and love for the art, as opposed to just getting down to work and possibly losing them in drudgery.

The Apprenticeship Lesson

At this point I would invite you to visit a new webpage on Educational Renaissance that offers the Apprenticeship Lesson as a free downloadable resource. By sharing your email, you’ll receive our weekly blog in your inbox. If you haven’t already, I’d also encourage you to access my free resource on “Charlotte Mason and the Trivium” that details how to plan lessons with the Narration-Trivium Lesson structure. 

These two types of lessons complement one another by focusing either on training in artistry or skill (Apprenticeship) or on teaching new content knowledge (Narration-Trivium). In other words, the primary aim of the teacher is either for the student to acquire particular content knowledge in an inspirational subject area (Bible, history, literature, etc.), or the primary aim is for the student to acquire and hone particular skills in a discipline (writing, grammar, art, music, etc.). Actual lessons fall on a spectrum, with some focus placed on new knowledge and some focus placed on the students’ performance of a complex activity or creation of some product. The question of which lesson structure to use depends not on the subject, but the focus of this particular lesson within a broader unit plan. Is the main purpose of this lesson for students to assimilate content or develop and hone new skills?

When you download the Apprenticeship Lesson, you’ll be able to copy and paste a template with instructions that you can then use for planning lessons that train students in an art. Between the Apprenticeship Lesson and the Narration-Trivium Lesson, you should have all that you need to plan lessons that embody a classical pedagogy in any subject, with only minor modifications. I believe the process of lesson planning should be inspiring and enriching because of how it assists teachers in embodying classical principles in their teaching. In addition to preparing the teacher with the knowledge and materials necessary to help students learn most effectively, lesson planning should contribute to teachers’ long-term development.

Please reach out to me with questions as you try out the Apprenticeship Lesson, so that I can continue to refine and improve it for teachers!

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later articles in this series:

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

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

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

The post Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 3: Crafting Lessons in Artistry appeared first on .

If a person desires to cultivate their ability to sing or paint beautifully, they rarely do so by reading a book or attending lectures. Instead, they attach themselves to a teacher or coach, who has attained sufficient mastery of the skills to arrange a series of exercises for them, a practice regimen, and to give them regular feedback on their progress. This, in essence, is the pedagogy of apprenticeship that we will discuss more in this article. 

Avoiding the Totalizing Effect of Modernism on the Arts

But before we do, let’s remember that there are many different types of craftsmanship or artistry that have been developed by human beings throughout time. Arts may have an originator, as Jabal was the original keeper of livestock, Jubal the player on the lyre and pipe, or Tubal-cain bronze- and ironworking (see Gen 4:20-22), but they also have traditions that grow and change with new circumstances. The arts are not interchangeable, whether among each other or between different cultural circumstances. If one is trained in navigation, that hardly makes a person a qualified practitioner of medicine. A painter is not equipped to design buildings, nor a business owner to make furniture. In the same way, an ancient sailor cannot operate a nuclear submarine. The traditions of various arts are affected by the tools and technologies, the goals and circumstances of their application. Arts are not one size-fits all.

Perhaps these considerations are enough to counter the totalizing instinct of the modern era, which is well illustrated by Bloom’s Taxonomy. By abstracting six orders of educational objectives in the cognitive domain, Bloom and his colleagues assumed that the main thing in education was transferable intellectual skills. But a proper recognition of the arts (at least) as situated in time and place would help us to understand that a substantial amount of what we are seeking to pass on to our children consists in particular skills and abilities that were invented at a particular time and are judged to be of continuing relevance to life in the world.

Now I know very well that what I am saying now may sound like modern educational pragmatism, but allow me to counter this concern. When applied to the liberal ‘arts’, the traditional nature of the arts is another way of arguing for the Western tradition of grammar, logic and rhetoric; mathematics, science and music. These ‘disciplines’ were discovered in time and place, and mastery of them involves us necessarily in the tradition that each one birthed. So this supposed pragmatism or subjectivity ends up grounding us in the historical realities and the objectivity of an enlightened and practical tradition. It is modernism’s abstractions and pretensions to god-like knowledge that have left us moorless on a sea of preferential postmodernism, grasping about for anything that might be considered “useful”.

When applied to the arts in general, this recognition of the arts’ traditional nature led me to propose a fivefold division of the arts as a help to classical Christian educators. 

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

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

While I argued for the inclusion of athletics, games and sports as well as the professions and trades, I sympathize with Chris Hall, Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s three-fold division of common, liberal and fine arts. Perhaps it is simply because I like fives rather than threes… but in all seriousness, this division represents a judgment call on the best way to indicate to educators the proper types of artistry or craftsmanship that they should aim at in their various programs. 

Perhaps it goes without saying that no educational institution can train its students in every possible area of artistry. And if, as I have said, mastery in particular arts does not transfer to others, then every educational institution must engage in some level of discernment as they plot the curricular sequence and develop offerings in extracurriculars. Those schools that aim, to a lesser or greater extent, at the Christian, classical ideal of a university (from the Latin ‘universitas’ meaning ‘totality’ or ‘wholeness’; see Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University) will want to develop some level of mastery in each of these five directions, alongside the other intellectual virtues. But the particulars will of course be culturally situated, as are the arts themselves. (This does not, I might add, argue against the revival of an ancient art that has been lost, which may from time to time be absolutely crucial.) We must make these decisions boldly in our cities and communities with an awareness of the context and the availability of masters in the crafts to apprentice our young students.

Toward a General Pedagogy of Apprenticeship

In addition to avoiding the totalizing instinct in our artistic divisions, we must also avoid the temptation to think of training in the arts as essentially the same in each area. It is absolutely a different thing to train a student in geometric proofs, than it is to train him as a soccer goalie. According to Aristotle’s definitions, both are intellectual virtues that are rightly called ‘artistry’, but that does not mean they are the same or that the training should look similar. However, types of ‘artistry’ are sufficiently similar in some core essentials, such that Aristotle and the tradition have rightly distinguished them from the other intellectual virtues. So, while it doesn’t look the same to coach a student to excellence in singing or painting, I can call both these activities ‘coaching’ and certain types of teaching activities immediately come to mind as being more appropriate than others. Training activities in different types of artistry have more in common with one another, than they do with cultivating practical wisdom, scientific knowledge, intuition or philosophic wisdom. 

The key point is that while each art is distinct, the intellectual virtues themselves are taught in fundamentally different ways, because of their radically different nature. So we can generalize some aspects of proper training in an art in a way that will help us develop a pedagogy of apprenticeship. Far from contributing to the problem of treating everything alike, developing a pedagogy for each intellectual virtue will contribute greatly toward our ability to make proper distinctions between different types of teaching as educators. 

Happily I am not the first person to follow the Aristotelian tradition by seeking to develop a pedagogy of techne, Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of ‘artistry’ or ‘craftsmanship’. The great Christian Reformation era educator John Amos Comenius developed a pedagogy of art in his Great Didactic, articulating many similar points to what I have addressed in attempting to revive the classical distinction between an art and a science. His recommendations also accord well with what we know of the value of deliberate and purposeful practice from modern research on elite performance, which I have discussed at some length before (as has Patrick Egan in this article). 

What Artistry Requires

Comenius begins his discussion of a pedagogy for art by identifying the core requirements of artistry or craftsmanship. As he says,

Art primarily requires three things: (1) A model or a conception, that is to say, an external form which the artist may examine and then try to imitate. (2) The material on which the new form is to be impressed. (3) The instruments by the aid of which the work is accomplished. (194)

The “model or conception” may look very different in the different arts: a model of a house you want to build is different than a map of where you want to sail or the imaginary ark of a penalty kick in soccer. But all arts require this mental image or plan upon which the artist operates. Art cannot be an accident, for then it would not be art, but chance in Aristotelian terminology. In the same way, the materials worked may be vastly different, from the wood, metal and straw used in building to the words, phrases and arguments used in logic and rhetoric. Finally, instruments are necessary for craftsmanship, from a voice box for singing to the gardener’s gloves and the astronomer’s telescope. 

While it may seem obvious to point out these different artistic requirements, they are of immense help to a pedagogy of craft. How often do art students work on projects without a clear model or conception to imitate? We can forget to help beginners learn the basic principles of handling tools and materials correctly, particularly in cases where the tools and materials are less obvious, like the meanings of words, grammar and syntax in the case of the language arts. This draws attention to the fact that these requirements point in the direction of three other things that are prerequisites of artistry:

But when the instruments, the materials, and the model have been provided, three more things are necessary before we can learn an art: (1) a proper use of the materials; (2) skilled guidance; (3) frequent practice. That is to say, the pupil should be taught when and how to use his materials; he should be given assistance when using them that he may not make mistakes, or that he may be corrected if he do; and he should not leave off making mistakes and being corrected until he can work correctly and quickly. (194)

Comenius’s comments illustrate the idea that one of the main problems in the teaching of arts comes from rushing the early stages of development. The teacher or coach too often assumes that the novice knows how to use the materials or will not make any more mistakes after being corrected once or twice. The training of the hands (whether literal or figurative) must be slower and more methodical than that. Bad habits can easily be acquired through insufficient attention to the basics.

We can also note positively that it is not without significance that cognitive psychologists have developed the terminology of ‘mental models’ for a student’s absorption of these models or conceptions into his intellect in order to perform some artistic activity. The writers of Make It Stick define a “mental model” as a “mental representation of some external reality”, noting that they are extending its use to “motor skills, referring to what are sometimes called motor schemas” (6; n.1 on 257). They go on to illustrate their definition through the example of artistry in a sport like baseball:

Think of a baseball batter waiting for a pitch. He has less than an instant to decipher whether it’s a curveball, a changeup, or something else. How does he do it? There are a few subtle signals that help: the way the pitcher winds up, the way he throws, the spin of the ball’s seams. A great batter winnows out all the extraneous perceptual distractions, seeing only these variations in pitches, and through practice he forms distinct mental models based on a different set of cues for each kind of pitch. (6-7)

We can notice from this example that a person does not necessarily need to be able to articulate a mental model in words to have it. In fact, in this case if the player’s conscious mind were to get involve trying to categorize and analyze the cues, the ball would have already flung past the plate. Often an artist’s mental models are like these motor skills, hard-wired in as almost an instinctual, bodily response. These models or conceptions are formed by “frequent practice” with the immediate feedback of whether he was right in his swing or wrong. It must be reality that the artist is modeling in his mind as he works with his materials according to the natural constraints of the art itself.

The Canons of Artistry

After establishing the requirements for artistry, Comenius lays out eleven canons for a pedagogy of artistry in his Great Didactic. Later in life he summarized this method of the arts more succinctly in his Analytical Didactic:

This method requires theory, prudence, and practice. Theory is necessary, so that a man, no matter what he does, will not do it like a brute, on blind impulse, but with an understanding of what he is doing. Such understanding inevitably brings with it caution and vigilance not to err in his work, and constant practice finally makes him incapable of error. (155)

The term “theory” explains the precepts and rules of his earlier discussion, and accords with Aristotle’s requirement that ‘art’ be according to reason. “Prudence” seems to draw attention to the artist’s sifting process, showing “caution” and “vigilance” to not make errors, but to act in such a way as to bring about the desired outcome. “Constant practice” completes the learning process by making him “incapable of error,” a state that we might call mastery. 

One of the main dangers, in Comenius’ mind, is that educators might overemphasize theories and precepts at the wrong stage of an artist’s development. As he notes in his first canon, “What has to be done must be learned by practice” (Great Didactic 194):

Artisans do not detain their apprentices with theories, but set them to do practical work at an early stage; thus they learn to forge by forging, to carve by carving, to paint by painting, and to dance by dancing. In schools, therefore, let the students learn to write by writing, to talk by talking, to sing by singing, and to reason by reasoning. In this way schools will become workshops humming with work, and students whose efforts prove successful will experience the truth of the proverb: ‘We give form to ourselves and to our materials at the same time.’ (195)

We can see that Comenius lends his support to the classical understanding of the liberal arts as forms of verbal craftsmanship. When we linger over the theories and rules, without giving our beginning students practice in talking, writing, singing and reasoning, we are breaking the cardinal rule of training in artistry. Comenius’ vision of schools as “workshops humming with work” sets an inspiring standard for us to judge our teaching by. It well accords with Dorothy Sayers’ interpretation of the trivium as the lost tools of learning. The upshot of her clarion call in the 1940s was that we were too focused on teaching ‘subjects’ rather that giving our students the opportunity to handle the materials of knowledge through productive and (we might add) artistic activities. 

Comenius thinks that the formation of students’ mental models for this practice should occur, not primarily through precepts or rules, abstract theories, but instead through examples (195). He cites Quintilian for classical support of his method: “It is many years since Quintilian said: ‘Through precepts the way is long and difficult, while through examples it is short and practicable.’ But alas, how little heed the ordinary schools pay to this advice” (195).

Comenius continues to look to the mechanical or common arts for fruitful analogies of how to best train students in grammar or logic:

The very beginners in grammar are so overwhelmed by precepts, rules, exceptions to the rules, and exceptions to the exceptions, that for the most part they do not know what they are doing, and are quite stupefied before they begin to understand anything. Mechanics do not begin by drumming rules into their apprentices. They take them into the workshop and bid them look at the work that has been produced, and then, when they wish to imitate this (for man is an imitative animal), they place tools in their hands and show them how they should be held and used. Then, if they make mistakes, they give them advice and correct them, often more by example than by mere words, and, as the facts show, the novices easily succeed in their imitation. (195-196)

Comenius’ description of the apprenticeship model of “mechanics” lays out a few key steps: 

1. Students are given a general acquaintance with the works produced, the end-products of the art.
2. Students respond with a natural desire to imitate through producing works of their own.
3. The master provides the students with the proper tools and models their use, showing them examples of the techniques.
4. The master corrects the students through both examples and advice, sharing the theories and precepts while correcting students.

This last point, the proper use of theory and precepts at the end rather than the beginning is detailed in his eleventh canon, where Comenius is focused on the swift correction of errors during practice:

(ix.) Errors must be corrected by the master on the spot; but precepts, that is to say the rules, and the exceptions to the rules, must be given at the same time.

Hitherto, we have urged that the arts be taught rather by example than by precept: we now add that precepts and rules must be given as well, that they may guide the operations and prevent error. That is to say, the less obvious points of the model should be clearly explained, and it should be made evident how the operation should begin, what it should aim at, and how that aim can be realised. Reasons should also be given for each rule. In this way a thorough knowledge of the art, and confidence and exactness in imitating will be attained. (200)

Comenius’ description of mistake-focused practice coheres well with what Daniel Coyle calls “deep practice” in his book The Talent Code. Practice must be purposeful or deliberate, to the extent possible, and take advantage of all the resources, in terms of rules and precepts developed by the masters in that tradition of artistry. The correction of errors and constant practice, based on examples and informed by theory, constitute the core essentials of the apprenticeship model of teaching an art. 

In the next article we’ll develop this pedagogy of artistry further by laying out an apprenticeship lesson structure to guide teachers of the arts, as we draw further insights from Comenius and modern research.

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later articles in this series:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Situating Techne as Traditions in Place and Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Fivefold Division of the Arts

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

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

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

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Common Arts Education and the Professions and Trades

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later articles:

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

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

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

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

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

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The rest of this series aims at a constructive development of Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues into a taxonomy of educational objectives of its own. The goal is to incorporate the value of Bloom’s project with the broader and more holistic philosophy implied in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, book VI. As mentioned in the introduction, this will involve extending Aristotle’s intellectual virtues into the later development of the liberal arts tradition of education. So this is not an Aristotle-only sort of proposal. Instead, I am proposing a taxonomy of sub-categories under the five intellectual virtues that is analogous to Bloom’s six orders of objectives in the cognitive domain. 

This article attempts to lay out the big picture of this classical taxonomy of educational goals by comparing it with Bloom’s and showing how it incorporates a number of “intellectual” categories that Bloom’s left out. In essence, then, Aristotle’s intellectual virtues combat against the reduction of the intellect caused by our modern categories. Although only five in number, the intellectual virtues are broader and incorporate more subheadings, including the professions, sports and production, among other things. Other problems caused by neglecting Aristotle’s categories include the over-abstraction or generalization of intellectual skills (implying they are transferable when they are not), siloing academic goals apart from the professions they are meant to serve, and not making distinctions between reasoning with language and with number. 

Let’s begin our comparison by unpacking Bloom’s Taxonomy in Aristotelian and liberal arts tradition terms.

Translating Bloom’s Taxonomy into Intellectual Virtues

One way of understanding the relationship between the six orders of educational objectives in the cognitive domain and Aristotle’s intellectual virtues is illustrated below. I have reproduced the list of Bloom’s hierarchy and indicated on the right in bold roughly what intellectual virtue it might correspond to in the Aristotelean framework I am proposing. For this purpose it was necessary to detail Aristotle’s virtue of techne, art or craftsmanship, as including the seven traditional liberal arts, which I have interpreted not as subjects but as the productive arts or crafts of language and number. 

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

1. Knowledge > The Intellectual Virtue of Nous, Intuition or Perception

1.1 Knowledge of Specifics > Of Particulars

1.2 Knowledge of Ways and Means of Dealing with Specifics 

1.3 Knowledge of the Universals and Abstractions in a Field > Of Universals

2. Comprehension > The Liberal Art (Techne) of Grammar

2.1 Translation

2.2 Interpretation

2.3 Extrapolation > Quadrivium Arts (when involving mathematical data)

3. Application > The Liberal Arts of Dialectic and Rhetoric – The Intellectual Virtue of Phronesis, Prudence or Practical Wisdom
4. Analysis > The Liberal Arts of Grammar and Dialectic and various Quadrivium Arts

4.1 Analysis of Elements

4.2 Analysis of Relationships

4.3 Analysis of Organizational Principles

5. Synthesis > The Liberal Arts of Rhetoric and Music

5.1 Production of a Unique Communication

5.2 Production of a Plan, or Proposed Set of Operations

5.3 Derivation of a Set of Abstract Relations

6. Evaluation > The Intellectual Virtues of Episteme, Scientific Knowledge, Nous, Intuition, and Phronesis, Prudence or Practical Wisdom

6.1 Judgments in Terms of Internal Evidence

6.2 Judgments in Terms of External Criteria

Bloom’s category of knowledge corresponds more or less to the intellectual virtue of nous, intuition or perception, not episteme or scientific knowledge. This is because scientific knowledge, for Aristotle, involves the ability to demonstrate or prove a truth claim, whereas the knowledge that Bloom is talking about is a traditional knowledge passed down by authorities. The basic understanding of the givens in any field or endeavor is grasped by a student’s understanding—another common translation of Aristotle’s nous—and is held in their memory as the starting point for all future thinking in this area. This sort of knowledge falls short of “justified true belief,” the philosophical tradition’s standard for ‘knowledge’ proper, and is therefore always subject to updating through the perception of new particulars or universals. 

What Bloom calls comprehension translates best as the liberal art of grammar, which involves the reading and interpretation of a text. The ability to translate what something says into one’s own words is, after all, the most basic way of demonstrating one’s understanding of a text or spoken communication. Of course, this ability is helped along by one’s general understanding or intuition of the subject matter in question (nous), but the activity of interpretation is itself a productive one, involving the student’s own communication and therefore falling under the intellectual virtue of techne, which is concerned with producing something new in the world. When Bloom’s Taxonomy discusses the interpretation or extrapolation of data, we have moved into the traditional realm of the quadrivium, the mathematical arts of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Arguably, extrapolating from mathematical data should be carefully distinguished from the interpretation of language; calling them by the same name, therefore, could be unhelpful and confusing to educators.

Application, listed as it is without any subheadings, is a particularly tricky element of Bloom’s taxonomy. Depending on the context, application could correspond to the liberal arts of dialectic or rhetoric, where the student argues for or against a particular course of action or belief. But it could also involve the students’ own judgment of how they should act in the world with regard to human goods (phronesis or practical wisdom). In fact, what Bloom means by application could be the application of moral reasoning to the content that is highlighted in a course or subject. He calls it “use of abstractions in particular and concrete situations,” but this is so general an activity that it seems to admit of almost every human activity, including all the arts and sciences, human decision-making and production. 

In a way all techne (arts, crafts or professions) involve the application of abstractions in concrete situations; this is why Aristotle requires of techne that it “involve a true course of reasoning” (see Nic. Ethics VI.4, 1140a9). All forms of artistry or craftsmanship must interact reasonably with the world as it really is, applying truths to particulars to produce something new in the world; otherwise, their proponents would not have excellence in the craft. Failures of application result in mistakes and errors in the execution of a productive plan.

Analysis corresponds to the liberal arts of grammar and dialectic, as well as various quadrivium arts, when mathematics are involved. Whether a student is analyzing grammar, terminology, circumstances and relationships, logical arguments, or the quantities, equations, data and experiments of science and math, students are utilizing subskills of the liberal arts themselves. As it turns out, this so-called analysis is a very different activity of the mind depending on what type of ‘analysis’ is being conducted. Parsing Latin verbs does not much resemble graphing equations. And knowing how to do one does not in any meaningful way help a student do any of the others. In fact, the line between analytical and synthetic activities in the liberal arts is often not very clear. So while it seems smart to distinguish between them, in practice it does not clarify the concerned educational objectives much. We would be better to aim for mastery of various liberal arts sub-skills, as they have been developed and honed by the tradition. 

Synthesis, then, is the outworking of analysis in a unique communication, and therefore the product of rhetoric or music. The traditional subdivisions of rhetoric, as well as all the genre distinctions made in a long history of composition, are more helpful for determining educational goals, than labelling something ‘synthesis’ as if it were an abstract intellectual skill. Again, it’s not that it is impossible to distinguish between our mind’s ability to put things together (synthesis) and to pick things apart (analysis). But in an actual assignment or task that we ask students to perform, doing one often requires the other right before or after it. The problem is essentially our modern attempt to dig down into the various acts of the mind, label these, and then elevate them to the place of intellectual virtues. It is the finished and complex skills with their multiple sub-steps in sequence that are properly intellectual virtues and educational goals, not the minute sub-steps in between. 

For example, putting together two equations in a system of equations, while an act of synthesis (putting two things together), is a particular sub-skill of mathematics that we have developed, which has no relationship to other synthetic acts, like taking two historical texts about the same event and synthesizing them together like a historian might. Labelling these tasks synthesis or analysis is ultimately self-defeating because they are complex intellectual skills that involve both mental acts, as well as knowledge, comprehension, application, etc. to complete. Asking educators to determine which one is their educational objective seems more likely to breed confusion and neglect of some parts of the complex skill, than the clarity for educators that Bloom and his colleagues sought.

Evaluation, likewise, is of many types, depending on the nature of what is being judged. At the very least, there is the judgment involved in scientific knowledge itself, in which a true course of reasoning is followed from a universal or particular to a conclusion (deductive or inductive reasoning). But there is also the artistic valuation of quality in the arts, which requires chiefly an experienced intuition (nous) in the specific form of artistry or craftsmanship. This is clearly different from mastery of the art itself, because the best critics are not always the best practitioners and vice versa. Lastly, judgments about the best course of action, whether for a person or a larger group (“political wisdom”) are made through phronesis or prudence, the practical wisdom which reasons correctly with regard to human goods. 

As before, these three types of evaluation are very different from one another, and wisdom to judge in one area does not readily transfer to the others. We can all imagine the celebrated literary critic who is notoriously unwise in his personal life, or the wise manager who can’t appreciate fine art in the least. A PhD in ethics may reason correctly to a scientific conclusion about what is right in theory, but be a terrible decision-maker in the midst of her interpersonal relationships. While we might be able to isolate “evaluation” as a category of mental skills in the abstract, in the actual practice of education developing a student’s judgment in various areas does not look very similar.  

To summarize, Bloom’s Taxonomy touches on important intellectual virtues that can be translated into Aristotelian terms. But its main weakness in practice is its tendency to isolate individual mental acts, as if they could stand as educational goals in themselves, in a way that seems to imply that these mental acts are the same skills or virtues, even if applied in different contexts. These abstractions served the trends of the mid-20th century, as psychological and cognitive studies attempted to delineate various cognitive abilities or acts, separated out from their lifeworld. But they neglected the philosophical tradition and unhelpfully isolated education from life and the professions.

Restructuring Bloom’s Through Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues

In the following outline, I detail a number of subheadings under Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as listed and explained in Book VI of his Nicomachean Ethics. While there are a number of ways I will need to explain Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as the proper goals of a classical Christian educational program, the main point for our present purposes is to draw attention to what Bloom’s Taxonomy left out or sidelined.

First, it should be noted that Bloom’s Taxonomy pointed in a number of ways to the complex skills of the liberal arts. While I think his grouping of trivium and quadrivium skills together under the same names is a liability in some ways, the idea that trivium and quadrivium reasoning should be integrated speaks in Bloom’s favor. Of course, Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain have advanced the proposition that the liberal arts were not meant to stand alone in the liberal arts tradition, but were the centerpiece of a larger paradigm that focused on the holistic formation of the human person (see The Liberal Arts Tradition 2.0). We are not disembodied minds, but piety, gymnastic and music should also be employed throughout education to train the soul, the body, and the heart.

Aristotle’s intellectual virtues take us one step beyond this thesis, perhaps, by positing that what we are calling virtues of the soul, body or heart have an intellectual component. Even if athletics or trades seem to involve the body more directly than the liberal arts or episteme, Aristotle is bold enough to call all crafts a form of intellectual virtue. While this might seem initially perplexing, it accords with our modern understanding of the brain. All human activity is guided through our central nervous system and involves the firing of neural networks in sequence. The skilled and cultivated habits, as well as the person’s planning, responding and interacting with the physical world, involved in, say, elite performance on the violin or world-class soccer playing, are intellectual feats! 

Recent discoveries in neuroscience are a testament to the development of white-matter in the brain, the wrapping of myelin-sheaths around neural networks to enable them to fire more quickly and efficiently, allowing for the development of incredible skill. In a way, we have the ability to affirm more strongly than ever before that ‘gymnastic’ excellence of all kinds (to borrow Clark and Jain’s terminology), as well as elite skills in the fine and performing arts, the trades and the professions, constitutes a particular type of intellectual virtue.

Perhaps it goes without saying that neglecting these skills as proper educational goals is tantamount to a betrayal of a much larger portion of education than we would often care to admit. A classical Christian educational philosophy should restore the dignity of these neglected intellectual virtues.

Phronesis, prudence or practical wisdom, is another intellectual virtue that is lost on Bloom’s, even if we have found places to mention it in our translation of his taxonomy. And that is because students are rarely addressed as actors in the world in the modern secular school. The heart of education has been cut out by our feigned indifference to human values. In their attempt to achieve neutrality, the intellectual aspect of morality has been relegated to a matter of opinion or personal preference.

Ironically, modern education aims to prepare students for professions through the cultivation of general knowledge and academic or cognitive skills. Implicitly, then the utilitarian earning of a professional salary is made the ultimate goal of education, rather than the life well lived. As a matter of fact, though, artistry or craftsmanship, whether in professions, liberal arts, or fine arts and sports, should be made a part of a rich and fulfilling life of service to God and neighbor. However, the development of artistry need not serve only utilitarian ends, nor should it become the end all be all. Instead, a wise life of making God-honoring and happiness-producing decisions is truly its own reward. 

In a way, I would go so far as to rate phronesis as the chief goal of education, from a Christian if not also a classical perspective. As a warrant for this claim, I would reference the biblical book of Proverbs in support. If a person does not grasp the wisdom to live life well, whatever wisdom he thinks he has is little more than folly in the Lord’s eyes. 

But we should not fail to mention also Bloom’s neglect of sophia, philosophic wisdom, which combines intuition (nous) and scientific knowledge (episteme) and is the crowning intellectual virtue for Aristotle. This too is an important goal to name, and focuses attention on its antecedent virtues and their unique and interdependent relationship. These matters are worthy of fuller discussion than we can give to them at the present.

In summary, then, Aristotle’s intellectual virtues restore the intellectual virtues of the body and heart, the educational importance of beautiful craftsmanship and skill, as well as the moral wisdom of a life well lived. In addition, the virtue of philosophic wisdom clarifies a new crowning achievement of true education that Bloom’s Taxonomy does not have the resources to grasp. After this overview of what Bloom’s left out, we are now ready to turn to detailed exposition of each of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues in turn, drawing out the implications of this revised taxonomy for pedagogy (i.e. teaching methods), curriculum and school programs.

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We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Aristotle

What do you find yourself repeatedly doing? In this digital world, it is easy to immerse ourselves in the repetition of scrolling through social media or clicking out words on a device in the hope of inspiring minds and garnering followers. Yet, the digital world falls short of satisfying our deepest longings for meaning and purpose. The best moments in life are not found on a screen, but in deep, meaningful relationships and the creation of beautiful and useful things.

So, find ways to repeatedly, purposefully foster the habits of relating and creating. 

Though there is much to say on the subject of fostering healthy relationships, this article will focus on the habit of handwork. However, handwork need not be solitary. The art of creating alongside others brings a sense of community and comfort. Help your children foster sweet memories, giggling beneath blanketed forts or coloring comfortably together at the kitchen table. Develop bonds with your friends and family by asking them to join you in your creative endeavors.

As you work, ask yourself, “Who should join me?” Then, invite them. Teach them. Be together as you create and work with your hands. 

Handwork as a Habit Leading to Wonder

Aristotle said that, “Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.” Because young children are like “tender reeds, ready to grow and easy to train,” the habit of working diligently with one’s hands ought to be taught to children as young as four years old.

Young children readily engage in tactile tasks such as building, painting, drawing and cutting paper. Turn their willing hands to tasks that require repetition and precision to create strong habits of attention and perseverance. This habit of attention will in turn create a sense of wonder as children discover the world around them. 

Wisdom begins in wonder.

Socrates

Wonder is foundational to capturing a child’s attention. So begin with something that fills them with awe and awakens their desire to “make it too!” For example, a father using hammer and nail is likely to be interrupted by a child eager to practice what dad is doing. Soon father and child are happily hammering alongside one another.

The child’s wonder leads to wisdom as the skill of hammering in a nail requires a steady hand and focused attention. 

From Wonder to Wisdom by Hand

Whether you are teaching woodworking or finger-knitting, log-splitting or sewing, the same path from wonder to wisdom is travelled. All these skills require repetition in order to achieve excellence.

Mistakes will happen. Problems will need to be resolved. Children who face these challenges develop grit and become stronger emotionally. Just listen for the happy little voice shouting, “I did it!” and you will be thankful you started the journey of handwork together. 

A child who is busy with their hands is also busy with higher level thinking such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Analysis comes in the form of “what if” questions such as, “What if I use a different thickness of string in knitting, will my project look different?” Synthesis is when a child can defend their choices and discuss why they used a smaller nail for this project vs the larger one. In evaluation a child can construct and deconstruct their design and even change their opinion regarding the materials used, based on their experience.

Simple tasks, with little challenge may bring a quick smile, but immersing your child in a long-term project that requires deep thought will reap the rewards of confidence and character. 

1 Thessalonians 4:11 encourages us

“to aspire to live quietly, and to mind [our] own affairs, and to work with [our] hands.” 

So, turn off the technology and find some work for your hands to do. Lead yourself and your child into something creative and you may discover your side-by-side work evokes a calm, satisfying, joy-filled atmosphere that leads to habits of excellence.

About the Author

As a Classical Christian Educator, Joleen has had the joy of leading her young students to joyfully discover handwork that has a purpose.

As the director of Camping Stick Kids, Joleen enjoys writing, developing and marketing materials that will enable CSK to share the Gospel one camper at a time.

Download her free eBook Handwork with a Purpose!

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