“A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:

1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.” (41)

In this series of articles we’re unpacking and reapplying Newport’s insights to see how they bring to light some of the core principles of classical education. For instance, the phrase multum non multa has often been used to emphasize an approach similar to his principles: depth over breadth, and quality over quantity. The phrase comes from a letter of Pliny the Younger 7.9-15 and originally refers to his advice for a student to read much, not many things. This could be taken to mean that he read the right books or the best books over and over again rather than simply reading more. It thus stands for an important classical prioritization of the quality of material read or studied, over simply checking the box of more subjects or books, regardless of their importance or enduring value.

In this article we’re going to unpack Cal Newport’s first principle of doing fewer things and apply it to the students’ work of learning in school. Along the way we’ll discuss some of the complex problems around what this means for the number of subjects, the structure of the school day, and the type and number of assignments we give to students. Let’s dig in.

In the context of knowledge work on the job, Cal Newport explains how his revolutionary idea of doing fewer things might play itself out:

“Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most.” (53)

As I’ve said before, Newport’s book will likely be helpful and inspiring to classical school administrators as well. The dizzying variety of demands involved in running a small school can be overwhelming. Cal Newport’s not alone in the business and productivity workspace to argue for focused effort on the work that matters most and the ruthless elimination of secondary obligations that are really distractions. It’s almost a mantra, even if still widely unpracticed. For instance, in their book The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth behind Extraordinary Results, Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan made the best-seller lists by arguing that “success isn’t a game that’s won by whoever does the most,” but that instead people should ask themselves, “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” In this context, Newport’s “Do fewer things” feels almost modest and more realistic in its understatement. 

Doing fewer things perhaps resonates most obviously with the multum non multa saying. I like to think of it most of all as embracing depth, not breadth. If you try to do too much in work or in school, you will often end up doing shallow, incomplete work of questionable quality. Committing to doing fewer things feels scary, as if we are abandoning the societal value accorded the sacred claims of “productivity” in the first place. But it actually enables the type of focus and attention necessary for the true productivity or accomplishment that moves the needle (to invoke a worn-out business cliche…). As Newport’s explanation reminds us, some projects matter more than others, and it can easily be demonstrated that this is the case in school too. 

Busyness and relentless activities do not produce great students. In the tradition there was a recognition that certain studies would serve as the foundation of other studies. The liberal arts were the “tools of learning,” according to Dorothy Sayers, that would enable the student to work as a craftsman of general learning and knowledge and therefore continue learning well for life. The problem of modern education was focusing on teaching “subjects” rather than these tools, and thus wasting labor. We can see how one of the central clarion calls of our educational reform movement (Sayers’ “The Lost Tools of Learning” essay) resonates with the call to do fewer things. What are those things we should do, according to Sayers? Grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. And all the subjects that you might choose are merely grist for the mill. The focus of the educator should be on the students’ accomplishment or productivity in handling these tools. 

This is one helpful way of approaching the challenge, but it requires the consistent intentionality of the teacher to work against the grain of her culture in a purely mental way. If the curriculum writers and designers consistently pull her back to the rigmarole of manyness over muchness, it is worth questioning how much has really changed here. This has led some classical education leaders to radical proposals like putting everything on block periods and cutting classes down to the bare minimum of “classical subjects.” The obvious problem with this is which subjects to cut. It may be easier in the upper grades to collapse history, literature and Bible or theology into one another through an integrated humanities course, as does the Omnibus series of Veritas Press. But in this case, we have not really saved time or done fewer things; we have simply combined or grouped these areas of study together. In the meantime, we have actually added to the number of subjects or courses studied by introducing philosophical texts into K-12 education, along with logic and rhetoric courses. 

In the lower grades we might ask what we are cutting with equal, if not stronger, force. Surely, we are not cutting phonics or grammar, penmanship or composition, history, literature or Bible? Perhaps we should cut mathematics and science? Or the unnecessary fine arts, like music and drawing? Are there any advocates for cutting PE? How about recess? What does “do fewer things” and multum non multa practically mean in a modern school? Is it really classical to have fewer subjects? 

My answer to the last question, and the answer of at least one stream of the classical tradition, is no. The problem is not the number of subjects but the approach to assignments and the pace and quality of student work. Quintilian, the famed Roman rhetoric teacher of the 1st century, provides the most ancient and authoritative voice for this embrace of manyness in subjects, if not in assignments. In his Institutes of Oratory Quintilian commends the importance of early training from the grammarian, and in that context emphasizes just how many subjects of books the student should read and learn from in his early years:

“Nor is it sufficient to have read the poets only; every class of writers must be studied, not simply for matter, but for words, which often receive their authority from writers. Nor can grammar be complete without a knowledge of music, since the grammarian has to speak of meter and rhythm; nor, if he is ignorant of astronomy, can he understand the poets, who, to say nothing of other matters, so often allude to the rising and setting of the stars in marking the seasons; nor must he be unacquainted with philosophy, both on account of numbers of passages, in almost all poems, drawn from the most abstruse subtleties of physical investigation, and also on account of Empedocles among the Greeks, and Varro and Lucretius among the Latins, who have committed the precepts of philosophy to verse.” (1.4.4; Translated by John Selby Watson, edited by Curtis Dozier and Lee Honeycutt.)

When Quintilian says that “every class of writers must be studied,” he encompasses the breadth of a humane and liberal education, not a bare-bones trivium training (without sufficient “grist for the mill”; let us give Dorothy Sayers her due…). We can hear the liberal arts categories, especially the quadrivium, endorsed explicitly in his mention of music and astronomy. And he specifically goes beyond those categories even to embrace the reading of philosophy, not after formal study of grammar and then rhetoric is completed, but before and during. 

It’s passages like these that show how insufficient a bare bones view of what it meant for ancients to study the trivium is, from the point of view of what we in modern times call “subjects.” Quintilian’s grammar stage (if we can call it that) embraced wide and humane reading across the subjects. We might even say that it encourages breadth over depth in reading, contrary to the apt phrase of Pliny the Younger. 

If any would claim that we are overstraining Quintilian’s context to apply it to the argument about the number of subjects for young students, we can point to an even clearer context where Quintilian specifically endorses sending our young orator in training to the teachers of grammar, music, geometry, acting and dance, and then answers the common objection of his day: 

“It is a common question whether, supposing all these things [grammar and music and geometry and acting and dance] are to be learned, they can all be taught and acquired at the same time, for some deny that this is possible, as the mind must be confused and wearied by so many studies of different tendency for which neither the understanding, nor the body, nor time itself, can suffice. Even though mature age may endure such labor, it is said, that of childhood ought not to be thus burdened.” (1.12.1)

Here we see him specifically take up the number of “subjects” studied at one and the same time, i.e. the question of a student’s course load, as it were. The supposed confusion and weariness might mimic our own concerns for leisure, contemplation and restful learning. His answer is so stunning and helpful that it is worth reproducing in full:

“2. But these reasoners do not understand how great the power of the human mind is, that mind which is so busy and active and which directs its attention, so to speak, to every quarter so that it cannot even confine itself to do only one thing, but bestows its force upon several, not merely in the same day, but at the same moment. 3. Do not players on the harp, for example, exert their memory and attend to the sound of their voice and the various inflections of it, while at the same time they strike part of the strings with their right hand and pull, stop, or let loose others with their left, while not even their foot is idle, but beats time to their playing, all these acts being done simultaneously? 4. Do not we advocates, when surprised by a sudden necessity to plead, say one thing while we are thinking of what is to follow, and while at the very same moment, the invention of arguments, the choice of words, the arrangement of matter, gesture, delivery, look, and attitude are necessarily objects of our attention? If all these considerations of so varied a nature are forced, as by a single effort, before our mental vision, why may we not divide the hours of the day among different kinds of study, especially as variety itself refreshes and recruits the mind, while on the contrary, nothing is more annoying than to continue at one uniform labor? Accordingly, writing is relieved by reading, and the tedium of reading itself is relieved by changes of subject. 5. However many things we may have done, we are yet to a certain degree fresh for that which we are going to begin. Who, on the contrary, would not be stupefied if he were to listen to the same teacher of any art, whatever it might be, through the whole day? But by change a person will be recruited, as is the case with respect to food, by varieties of which the stomach is re-invigorated and is fed with several sorts less unsatisfactorily than with one. 6. Or let those objectors tell me what other mode there is of learning. Ought we to attend to the teacher of grammar only, and then to the teacher of geometry only, and cease to think, during the second course, of what we learned in the first? Should we then transfer ourselves to the musician, our previous studies being still allowed to escape us? Or while we are studying Latin, ought we to pay no attention to Greek? Or to make an end of my questions at once, ought we to do nothing but what comes last before us? “

“7. So much more easy is it to do many things one after the other, than to do one thing for a long time.” (1.12.2-6, 7; pp. 61-62)

In this passage Quintilian makes a lock tight argument for our common practice of packing in subjects in period blocks and shifting a student’s attention from one to the other to make determinate progress in one, only to break off as fatigue begins to set in and start onto something new. While we may decry the school bell, as savoring of the factory, there is a sense in which this practice of the periodization of school into discrete subjects is both classical and incredibly powerful. Charlotte Mason had likewise repeated the Victorian proverb, “A change is as good as a rest.” It may even have been derived from this context, as Mason herself found an endorsement of narration in the early pages of Quintilian and her own familiar analogy of food and appetite for student learning, with variety as increasing the appetite or curiosity of the student. This is Quintilian’s early take on the science of human attention, as we have since explained through neuroscience: novelty increases both motivation and attention.

Does this mean block periods are bad? Not necessarily. The nature of the complex tasks, like socratic dialogue or writing, may actually benefit from longer stretches of work, especially for older students. But it is worth questioning whether the productivity claims of focusing on one project over multiple hour blocks apply to the education of children. As Quintilian concludes, it is easier to do many things, one after the other, than to persist in a single activity or project for a long time.

If, then, we have dismissed the spurious application of “Do Fewer Things” to cutting the number of subjects and the periods of modern school, what does that leave us with? Cut busywork! Cut the number of assignments down and instead ensure that students complete quality, complex work. Replace the endless hamster wheel of worksheets with written narrations and essay responses. Instead of coloring in preprinted outlines, have students develop an eye for careful copywork and artistry of their own. 

In the next articles on working at a natural pace and obsessing over quality, we’ll explain further what this application of “Do Fewer Things” looks like as we embrace depth over breadth in our approach to work, rather than cutting important subjects from K-12 education.

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“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deliberate vs Purposeful Practice in Artistry and Morality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identifying Subcategories of the Arts in Aristotle

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

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

Purposeful Practice in Artistry and Morality

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

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

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

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

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

Distinguishing Marks of Moral Virtue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crucial Distinctions between the Intellectual Virtues

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

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

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

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

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

The post What Bloom’s Left Out: A Comparison with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues appeared first on .

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

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

A Paradigm for the Liberal Arts Tradition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Learning Tree

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

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

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

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

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

Dispelling Two Myths about Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition

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

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

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

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

But this conviction is in no way incompatible with an academically rigorous education. In fact, it is reasonable to argue that this high view of children warrants an academically rigorous education properly defined. Children are not be treated as mere cattle on a farm or products on an assembly line. They enter this world with immense potential to think, create, explore, write, observe, perform, analyze, and more. As a result, the sort of work we give children to do in the classroom ought to activate and strengthen these capacities to the limits of each child’s potential. Charlotte Mason herself pokes fun at the sort of educational environments that are free of hardship, adversity, and genuine challenge. Humans, as it turns out, thrive in the face of challenge and experience real joy when coached to achieve excellence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Love of Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amateur Scientists

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

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

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

For instance,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loving Science in School

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science as the Love of Wisdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previous articles in this series, The Flow of Thought:

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

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

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

Now, to be sure, practice is important, especially if it rises to the threshold of “deliberate practice,” an intensive approach which Patrick lucidly explained in a past article. He himself warns, however, that the repeated rehearsal of skills can be futile if the three other components of deliberate practice are not in play. Patrick writes,

“ We need to be careful with this first component. It is all too easy to set up high frequency and think we are accomplishing something, when in fact all we are doing is a long series of empty work.”

Here it is acknowledged that merely bumping up the frequency of practice is not enough to hone a skill or understand a concept, particularly complex ones that are multifaceted and layered.

Applying this to the classroom, what can be done to ensure that the sort of practice our students engage in is not wasted? From differentiating between direct and indirect objects to solving algebraic equations to writing thoughtful, well-developed essays, how can we train our students in such a way that the skills they develop and knowledge they gain remain in their memories long-term? 

The Myth of Massed Practice

In Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, authors Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel propose that one of the keys for long-term, strong and flexible mastery of a skill or concept is to mix up the practice. But first they dispose of the myth of massed practice. Massed practice is the focused, repetitive practice of one thing at a time until it is mastered (47). To be fair, this approach to learning is fairly intuitive and therefore enjoys quite a bit of trust from onlookers and practitioners alike. For example, the common advice for increasing one’s free-throw percentage in basketball is to shoot over and over again from the fifteen-foot mark (the distance from the free-throw line to the hoop). For those of us with basketball experience, we can even testify to the success of this strategy, specifically how quickly we experienced gains by utilizing this method. 

But real learning, insists the authors of Make It Stick, includes more than how quickly the skill is mastered or knowledge is acquired. What matters even more is whether that skill or knowledge is accessible to our memories when it is needed later:

“The rapid gains produced by massed practice are often evident, but the rapid forgetting is often not” (47).

The litmus test for successfully learning a skill, then, is whether this practical knowledge remains in our memory long-term. Scientists call the increased performance during the acquisition phase of a skill “momentary strength” and distinguish it from “underlying habit strength” (63). 

I have experienced this distinction between momentary strength and underlying habit strength too often in my ongoing development as a handyman. Thanks to the internet, when something in my house needs fixing or replacing, I need only search for the relevant video online to find out how to solve the problem. After watching the video (ten times over) and then completing the job myself, I gained momentary strength in the skill. I walked away from the project feeling confidently handy. However, three months later, when the same problem returned, I discovered that in the previous experience I had not actually gained underlying habit strength. As I scanned my memory for knowledge and proficiency of the skill, the search results were clear: no records found. (Note: I suppose I am exaggerating. My memory could recall some bits and pieces of what I had learned previously. But it wasn’t nearly sufficient for what I need to fix the problem again. Too much had been lost.)

Why? I had used massed practice, developing momentary strength, but not underlying habit strength that would serve me well long-term. I watched the video, spent a focused, inordinate amount of time honing the skill, and then neglected to practice it for three-months. Over this duration of time, the practical knowledge I gained was lost. It faded away into the distance, along with other short-term memories, like what I wore to work that day or what I had for breakfast.

So failing to gain long-term retention is one problem with massed practice, but even worse, this approach to learning, according to researchers, generally leads to inflexible, surface-level comprehension that is not amenable for complex cognitive acts like differentiation and application. In other words, it doesn’t lead to true mastery. 

Three Ways to Mix it Up

In order to reach this level of true mastery, mixing up the practice is the way to go. And, according to the latest research, there are three main ways to do so: 

1. Spaced Practice: Instead of intensively focusing on one skill for a single, extended session, space out the practice into multiple sessions. Work on it for a while and then return to it the next day or week. The space allotted between each session allows for the knowledge of the skill to soak into one’s long-term memory and connect to prior knowledge. Revisiting the skill each session certainly takes more effort, but that’s the point:

“The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory” (49).

2. Interleaved Practice: While we experience the quickest gains by focusing on one specific skill or subset of knowledge over a period of time (momentary strength), interleaving, or mixing up the skill or concept you are focusing on in a practice session, leads to stronger understanding and retention (underlying habit strength). It feels sluggish and frustrating at times, for both teachers and students mind you, because it involves moving from skill to skill before full mastery is attained, but it leads to both a depth and durability of knowledge that massed practice does not (50).

3. Varied Practice: Varying practice entails constantly changing up the situation or conditions in which the skill or concept is being applied. It therefore strengthens the ability to transfer learning from one situation and apply it to another, requiring the student to constantly be assessing context and bridging concepts. Because this jump from concept to concept triggers different parts of the brain, it is more cognitively challenging, and therefore encodes the learning “…in a more flexible representation that can be applied more broadly” (52).

Test Case: Mixed Practice in Math Class

Let’s apply this concept of mixed practice to math class. The teacher is explaining to her students how to calculate the volume of geometric figures. The “massed practice” approach would have her teach the formula for calculating the volume of, say, a cube and then release her students to find the volume for ten different sized cubes. By the end of the class period, the majority of her students would be comfortable performing the algorithm, thereby demonstrating ostensible mastery of the skill (at least in the short-term).

Contrast this scenario with the “mixed practice” approach. The teacher might start by teaching the formula for the volume of a cube and then giving her students a couple practice problems to solve. But soon after, she would teach a different formula, say, the formula for finding the volume of a cylinder and, after that, a sphere. Upon giving her students a couple practice problems for each type of figure, she would instruct her students to complete a set of problems, in which various volume problems are interleaved. This problem set would force students to practice discernment: identify the particular figure, recall the relevant algorithm, and then run the numbers. Periodically, over the following days and weeks, the teacher would include various volume problems in the class warm-up and in the daily homework as well as other concepts previously covered.

As you can see from this example from math class, when mixed practice is implemented, underlying habit strength is forged. The order and types of exercises don’t permit a student to fall into mindless, rote practice. Instead, each problem requires higher level thinking skills beyond memorization such as categorization and application. In order to gain true mastery, the research is clear: mix up the practice. 

Mixed Practice and the Liberal Arts

Let me leave readers with one final thought: I’ve been using the modern phrase “true mastery” as shorthand for the sort of breadth and depth of learning we are aiming for at our schools and in our homes. But I could just as easily describe this outcome using language from the liberal arts tradition. When students engage in the challenge and rigor of mixed practice, they are being trained to learn and think for themselves, to engage in a form of self-education, which is a central idea in the classical tradition (as Jason explained so eloquently in his recent article for Circe). Their tools of learning, the liberal arts, are being sharpened, so to speak.

In addition, by providing opportunities for our students to engage in mixed practice, we avoid teaching them bad habits of cramming, that is, surface-level mastery for brief demonstration on an upcoming test. Instead we give them an opportunity to perform dynamic and valuable work, stretching their minds in flexibility, durability, and discernment, all of which is befitting of their God-given intellects and capabilities.

This is the sort of learning I get excited about and hopefully through this blog more parents and teachers can join us at Educational Renaissance in this life-giving work. 

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Given the hype for STEM, defending the value of the humanities (as Martin Luther did, for one) is an important move in the broader education dialogue. And it’s one that’s not very hard to make, when there are articles like this one on how Google was planning to hire more humanities trained employees rather than more programmers. It turns out that technological change and the job market aren’t making the humanities irrelevant after all.

But for a while I’ve felt that the trade-off between STEM and the humanities is an unfortunate false dichotomy. (Logic lesson: false dichotomy – when two things are posed as mutually exclusive options when both can be embraced at the same time.) The seven liberal arts of the classical tradition encompassed BOTH the language arts of the trivium (grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, or perhaps humanities in a general sense) AND the mathematical arts of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy).

In a way, astronomy was the paradigmatic STEM discipline, since it wove together the science of the natural world with mathematical calculations to “save the appearances” and had applications to the travel technologies of the day.

Problems with the Trade-Off Between STEM and the Humanities

Part of the problem with the whole dichotomy is that we’re left arguing about whether to privilege STEM over the humanities or the humanities over STEM, when embracing both would be mutually beneficial. After all, scientists still need to write and publish those rhetorical masterpieces we call academic papers to advance the discipline. And what culturally savvy hipster could not benefit from some of the scientific precision of mathematics and design thinking?

But the other problem, which is more to the point for this blog article, is that a utilitarian focus doesn’t serve either the humanities or STEM careers very well. And that’s because too much focus on money-making skills for the job market doesn’t end up creating the best professionals in either domain. That comes from deep work, passionately and regularly pursued. The best programmers get good at it because they love programming!

STEM and the humanities, or the seven liberal arts of the trivium and quadrivium, were discovered and developed in the first place, because getting into the flow of thought is a source of happiness and joy for human beings. Thinking along the lines of the liberal arts is more like a mental game than a utilitarian bid for power, money or success.

We get support for this notion from an unlikely source, the modern positive psychologist Mihayli Csikszentmihalyi. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial 2008), he writes:

“It is important to stress here a fact that is all too often lost sight of: philosophy and science were invented and flourished because thinking is pleasurable. If thinkers did not enjoy the sense of order that the use of syllogisms and numbers creates in consciousness, it is very unlikely that now we would have the disciplines of mathematics and physics.” (126)

The background for our psychologist’s claim is his idea that our consciousness as human beings is naturally disordered and chaotic, and so one of the primary ways to build human happiness is to engage in activities that order consciousness. While he explores many other ways of achieving flow, that optimal state where our skills meet our challenges and our focus is absorbed by a meaningful activity, one of his chapters is on the flow of thought, or how thinking itself can be an avenue into flow.

Mathematicians and physicists didn’t make their greatest discoveries and push the bounds of human knowledge because of utilitarian motives, but because they got lost in the joy of thought. As he goes on to explain, this claim flies in the face of many historians’ standard explanations of key discoveries:

“The evolution of arithmetic and geometry, for instance, is explained almost exclusively in terms of the need for accurate astronomical knowledge and for the irrigational technology that was indispensable in maintaining the great ‘hydraulic civilizations’ located along the course of large rivers like the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Indus, the Chang Jiang (Yangtze), and the Nile. For these historians, every creative step is interpreted as the product of extrinsic forces, whether they be wars, demographic pressures, territorial ambitions, market conditions, technological necessity, or the struggle for class supremacy.” (126)

Yes, these developments in arithmetic and geometry coincided with applications to “irrigational technology,” but that doesn’t mean that the individuals who invented them did so for such utilitarian reasons. Often it happens that the knowledge necessary for some practical application is discovered first with no thought of its usefulness or application. Then only later, and often by someone else, that knowledge is applied to a practical problem felt by the civilization.

For instance, Csikszentmihalyi tells of the discovery of nuclear fission and how the arms race of World War II is often urged as the inciting historical factor. However, the advancements in knowledge necessary to its development came before and were discovered in a more pleasurable and altogether collegial manner:

“But the science that formed the basis of nuclear fission owed very little to the war; it was made possible through knowledge laid down in more peaceful circumstances—for example, in the friendly exchange of ideas European physicist had over the years in the beer garden turned over to Niels Bohr and his scientific colleagues by a brewery in Copenhagen.” (126)

The joy of thought, of discovery and of solving abstract problems lies at the base of the advance of knowledge, in every age, time and place. As our psychologist summarizes:

“Great thinkers have always been motivated by the enjoyment of thinking rather than by the material rewards that could be gained by it.” (126)

This is supported by several quotations from the Greek philosopher Democritus, a highly original thinker: “It is godlike ever to think on something beautiful and on something new”; “Happiness does not reside in strength or money; it lies in rightness and manysidedness”; “I would rather discover one true cause than gain the kingdom of Persia” (127).

The seven liberal arts of the trivium and quadrivium are those tools of knowledge that are so pleasurable in the handling. Let’s take some time to break down a few of them and see how they work, just for the joy of it.

Gaming the Liberal Art of Grammar

In the classical tradition grammar referred to a much broader category of skills that the modern subject does today. It included all the complex skills involved in reading and interpretation, as well as the mechanics of writing. The term was derived from the Greek word for ‘letter’ (gramma), and thus referred to the holistic study of letters. The famous Roman orator and teacher Quintilian explained in the 1^st century that the best Latin translation of the term was the Latin word litteratura from which we get ‘literature’ (see Institutes of Oratory II.1).

It’s not an accident that in our psychologist’s many studies, one of the most cited ‘flow activities’ that people self-report is the act of reading (Csikszentmihalyi 117). Deep reading, getting lost in a book, is for many a pleasurable activity—the title of Alan Jacob’s book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (which I highly recommend) says it all.

Of course, the foundation of this great grammatical activity of piecing letters together into words is the activity of naming itself. Brining order to consciousness relies on some sort of ordering principle and words provide that. They name persons, places, things or ideas, therefore creating order in the mind for an experience or phenomenon, where only chaos existed before:

“The simplest ordering system is to give names to things; the words we invent form discrete events into universal categories.” (124-5)

In both the Judeo-Christian worldview and the Greek roots of the classical tradition, this primacy of the word is endorsed:

“In Genesis 1, God names day, night, sky, earth, sea, and all the living things immediately after He creates them, thereby completing the process of creation. The Gospel of John begins with: ‘Before the World was created, the Word already existed…’; and Heraclitus starts his now almost completely lost volume: ‘This Word (Logos) is from everlasting, yet men understand it as little after the first hearing of it as before….’” (125)

Readers of the Bible will know that in Genesis 2 God assigns the task of naming the animals to Adam in the sequence leading up to the creation of Eve. Adam, whose name means ‘humanity’ in Hebrew, is given the honor and joy of naming the animals that God brings before him—a task that is fitting for him, given how human beings were made in the image of God according to the chapter before.

In its broadest sense then, grammar and the other trivium arts of dialectic and rhetoric involve the practitioner of them in the process of bringing order out of chaos. It is a godlike activity, to borrow the phrase from Heraclitus, to name and distinguish and describe reality. Why should we wonder that such a process would be pleasurable?

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

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

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

Embarking on the Quest of the Quadrivium

As with the language arts, it is to the ancient roots of the classical tradition that Csikszentmihalyi goes in order to explain the flow of thought along the lines of the quadrivium:

“After names came numbers and concepts, and then the primary rules for combining them in predictable ways. By the sixth century B.C. Pythagoras and his students had embarked on the immense ordering task that attempted to find common numerical laws binding together astronomy, geometry, music and arithmetic. Not surprisingly, their work was difficult to distinguish from religion, since it tried to accomplish similar goals: to find a way of expressing the structure of the universe. Two thousand years later, Kepler and then Newton were still on the same quest.” (125)

The point that our psychologist is eager to make in this recitation is that the quadrivium arts were not abstract skills aimed at utilitarian ends. Instead, Pythagoras and his students had religious goals of a monumental nature in their numerical and mathematical work. The birth of the quadrivium was nothing less than a “quest” to “find a way of expressing the structure of the universe.”

We can easily see how such a pursuit would catch the hearts and minds of students. Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain present a similar picture of the quest of the quadrivium in their book The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education (which is coming out soon in a revised and updated version!). They point out that “there was deeply spiritual element to it as well…. Pythagoras thought that the harmony of the spheres, part of the liberal art of music, was established by the power of ‘the One’” (version 1.1, p. 53). This, along with their suggestion that “the study of mathematics ought to strike a balance between wonder, work, wisdom and worship,” seems suggestive of the type of joy and pleasure attained in a flow activity.

Of course, for that to be the case, there would need to be, not only a transcendent quest, but also a series of sub-goals and intermediate tasks with clear feedback and of limited scope, so that the rules for a flow activity could be met. When a challenge exceeds the person’s skills by too much, anxiety tends to crush the possibility for flow; likewise, make the activity too easy and boredom ensues (Csikszentmihaly 74).

The development of rules, representations and proofs seem to assist in the process of defining discrete next steps in the grand quest:

“Besides stories and riddles all civilizations gradually developed more systematic rules for combining information, in the form of geometric representations and formal proofs. With the help of such formulas it became possible to describe the movement of the stars, predict seasonal cycles, and accurately map the earth. Abstract knowledge, and finally what we know as experimental science grew out of these rules.” (125)

It seems that the experience of flow and the advancement of discovery almost require the phenomenon of the absent-minded professor. That is because one of the demands of flow is that the mind be wholly absorbed in a meaningful activity. The scientist or mathematician so absorbed has “temporarily tuned out of everyday reality to dwell among the symbolic forms of their favorite domain of knowledge” (127). A great example of this is how the philosopher Immanuel Kant placed his watch in a pot of boiling water while holding carefully onto his egg in the other hand, ready to time out its cooking.

As our psychologist concludes:

“The point is that playing with ideas is extremely exhilarating…. Not only philosophy but the emergence of new scientific ideas is fueled by the enjoyment one obtains from creating a new way to describe reality.” (127)

The Games of the Mind and the Tools of Learning

Such observations about how the liberal arts of both language and number are pleasurable activities may raise a brow of confusion for some teachers and parents.

After all, knowing that great professors, scientists and philosophers can have a grand old time in their work doesn’t solve the angst of my child or the child in my class, who is either bored by a particular discipline or filled with anxiety and self-consciousness.

So how can we help turn the tools of learning into games of the mind for our students who struggle?

Part of the advice our psychologist’s book seems to imply is a reframing of the teacher’s task. While we might be inclined to think that teachers are primarily supposed to deliver correct information to students, perhaps instead teachers should be designers of flow activities within the discipline. If our goal is to cultivate a love of learning in students, then they will have to experience the challenge and discovery of learning for themselves. Receiving the answers is not an empowering, godlike task that optimally challenges your current skills (unless you’re at least required to narrate them back…).

Some examples are probably in order here. In a humanities class, perhaps students should be involved in the process of naming new experiences and ideas that they encounter in their books. How often, I wonder, does a humanities teacher think of the work of reading as an activity in which students will encounter new realities that they will then try to make sense of through concept formation? Are we asking them to notice and describe, to discuss and distinguish? That takes a lot of time devoted to classroom dialogue and is not so efficient as telling students the answers that teacher or students have diligently culled from SparkNotes.

For mathematics instruction Ravi Jain has discussed the importance of puzzle, proof and play. If we can get students puzzling and playing with numbers and formulas, then they will get in flow and start loving the process of discovery. Answers and alternate methods will generate excitement and be stored in their memory, as they strive for greater levels of skill along the quest. It can’t just be about chugging problems and memorizing formulas for an extrinsic reward, like a grade. The best programmers weren’t grade-chasers in their programming class (if they took one and weren’t just self-taught).

After all, the quest for ordering reality through language and number isn’t just about money and success. It’s a transcendent human activity, naturally pleasurable and desirable in and of itself. When we treat it as less than that, we fail to initiate our students into their full God-given inheritance as image-bearers and culture makers.

What other ideas do you have for turning the tools of learning into flow activities?

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

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

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

Past installments – Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake, Part 2: The Joy of Memory, Part 3: Narration as Flow. Future installments – Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom; Part 8, Restoring the School of Philosophers, Part 9, The Lifelong Love of Learning.

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