Each cultural time period generates new challenges for this objective, and ours is no exception. While classical Christian education emerged in Christendom, an era of western history in which the Christian faith was the cultural paradigm, this is no longer the case today. The “Age of Faith” may continue to cast its shadow over western society, but Christianity has lost its cultural cachet.

What does it look like, then, for Christian schools to prepare students for this new era? We cannot simply look back to the last century, or the century before that, or even the millennium before that. The last one thousand years all share a quality that the two thousand twenty-sixth year of the Common Era (i.e. 2025) does not: they occurred in a time when the intellectual, political, and cultural powers of the day viewed Christianity as the authority. If Christian educators want to glean wisdom from the past that is relevant for today, they must go all the way back to the days before Christendom, a time when Christians lived as strangers in a pagan society. This would take them to the 2nd and 3rd centuries when the young Christian movement was finding its way under the persecuting yoke of the Roman Empire. 

This article will explore how the early church engaged its pagan world intellectually and culturally in order to offer insights for modern Christian educators. The reality is that the world we inhabit today is, in many ways, more similar to the 3rd century than it is to the 20th century. A new form of paganism has emerged–an odd amalgamation of modern science, romanticism, and modern politics. In order for Christian educators to prepare their students to engage a pagan world, they need to understand it, and consider how their Christian brothers and sisters engaged it before them.

A Modern Pagan Society

Do we really live in a pagan society? Surely this is an exaggeration. Paganism connotes the widespread practices of superstition, animal sacrifice, and the occult. Even if practices like reading horoscopes are on the rise, they are certainly not mainstream.

In Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church (Eerdmans 2024), Stephen O. Presley suggests that the secular direction our culture has trod is a new form of paganism. Referencing Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s renown work A Secular Age, Presley observes that Christianity has become intellectually suspect and morally bankrupt. In its place lies “expressive individualism,” a form of epistemological and moral relativism that prioritizes internal feelings over external norms. Not unlike the 2nd century, in which the Roman Empire permitted a plurality of religious options so long as one bowed the kneed to Caesar as Lord, so our culture celebrates a religious pluralism for each to worship as he or she pleases.

Interestingly, contemporary culture has somehow made peace between the materialism of modern science with the romanticist qualities of the expressive individualism mentioned above. Truth, we are told, can be found through the deliverances of the scientific method and the inner revelations of ”who one is inside.” In this way, our culture prizes the objective truth of modern science and the subjective truths of the psychological “self,” yet not in an internally coherent manner. A dizzying schizophrenic oscillation of the objective and subjective is the result, in which both are valued but not simultaneously. You can have Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, but not together. 

Christianity, on the other hand, is paradoxically where the objective and subjective meet. “In the Beginning was the Word,” the Gospel of John tells us, and “…and the Word became flesh.” Simon Kennedy, a research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia, makes this point in Against Worldview: Reimagining Christian Formation as Growth in Wisdom (Lexham Press 2024). In this book, Kennedy argues for a new way of thinking about Christian worldview, underscoring that only God possesses the authoritative Christian worldview. Humans can develop a Christian worldview, subjectively speaking, but only through seeking a true apprehension of objective reality “that is obtained through the process of learning about God, the self, and the world (15). 

Even while the objective and subjective remain unreconciled in contemporary culture, there is a third ingredient we must consider: modern politics. One quality of a secular society, again, according to Charles Taylor, is the “buffered self,” the idea that cosmic and spiritual forces do not impact everyday life. If this is the case, there is an authority and power vacuum, one that is quickly being filled by modern politics. We could see this phenomonon in the most recent election: the desperation, angst, and fear-mongering that occurred throughout the process. Both sides of the aisle used rhetoric in a way to indicate that democracy was on the line and that only their ballot nomination could save us. Many people today longing for good news about peace and security look not to their churches, but to their political leaders. The new hope is in public policy, elected officials, and the preservation of democracy as we know it.

The effect of the amalgamation of expressive individualism (truth is found inside), scientific materialism (the physical world is all there is), and modern politics (only effective government can save us) is the new paganism. This paganism rejects a transcendent creator over and above all things, and replaces him with a worldview of immanence. This immanence takes normally good things in this world–the individual self, scientific method, and democratic government–and deifies them. In order to equip students to engage our neo-pagan world, let us now examine how the early church did so long ago. 

To Sanctify a Culture

In his book cited above, Stephen Presley argues that the early church’s model for engaging the pagan culture of the day was not isolation or confrontation, but sanctification. The earliest Christians were living in a world in which Caesar was king, and the empire promised peace through strength. Perpetual violence, sexual license, unbridled leisure, and oppression of the weak were core elements of this ancient culture. Christians were required to think prudently and biblically about how they would navigate such a world while being faithful to Christ.

Presley proposes that the posture these early Christians adopted was one of cultural sanctification. He writes, “Cultural sanctification recognizes that Christians are necessarily embedded within their culture and must seek sanctification (both personal and corporate) in a way that draws upon the forms and features of their environment to transform them by pursuing virtue” (12). In other words, Christians should continue to live in their local communities, engaging in normal cultural practices (so long as they are not sinful), even as they determine when to abstain, holding fast to their identity as pilgrims destined for an eternal home.

Presley then goes on to offer five ways the early church engaged in this “slow and steady process of living faithfully and seeking sanctification both personally and corporately in ways that transform the culture” (20). 

First, the early church crafted a distinct Christian identity. Through catechesis and worship, believers grew to understand who they were individually and communally as followers of Christ in a Roman world. They understood that even though they lived in a largely pagan society, Caesar did not lay claim to their ultimate identity.

Second, early Christians lived out a political theology in which they submitted to civil authorities and worked to be active citizens. They took seriously the teaching of Jesus to “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” even as they faithfullly worshiped God as the supreme authority over all things. Moreover, they understood that their ultimate citizenship is in heaven.

Third, the early church navigated the intellectual climate of its day with wisdom and eloquence. The church developed its own public intellectuals, equipped to evaluate the dominant ideas of the day and provide a defense for the Christian faith. These Christian intellectuals, such as Irenaeus and Origen, did not cave to the attacks on their faith, but instead provided persuasive arguments and responses.

Fourth, these believers engaged in public life with humility, compassion, and courage. They did not abstain from contributing to society in normal ways–having jobs, partaking in innocent leisure, having families, or even serving in the military. Rather, they participated in these societal functions with wisdom and virtue. In addition, they displayed exceptional compassion, caring for the poor and marginalized of society.

Finally, the early church was resolute in its hope in the coming kingdom of God. While their neighbors trusted in the glory of the Roman Empire, early Christians rooted their faith in the salvation they received through Christ and put their hope in the future resurrection. This hope served as a north star for them, guiding them through the complexities of living in a pagan society with a clear vision for the future.

Through these five avenues, early Christians avoided isolation, such as “the Benedict Option,” and confrontation, attempting to seize the empire for themselves. Instead, they learned to live under the authority of the Roman Empire and engage a contemporary pagan culture, while not abandoning their faith in Christ and commitment to Christian virtue. 

Seek the Welfare

In our modern pagan society, the church has a new opportunity to live out its identity in this way. The idea of cultural sanctification allows believers to approach culture, not as a world to flee or fight, but to help flourish. This approach is reminiscent of the Lord’s instruction to the Jewish exiles in Babylon back in the 6th century:

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Jeremiah 29: 4-7 (ESV)

Here God commands his people to seek the welfare of the city, to contribute to its flourishing and success. Rather than waiting idly by for the eventual return to Israel, he instructs them to lead responsible lives, to engage in the culture, and to be productive members of the city. Moreover, he encourages them to pray for the city, remaining faithful to their Jewish identity even while they seek the city’s welfare.

In today’s pagan society, opportunities abound for Christians to embed themselves in culture while seeking to sanctify it. Christians simply committing to living virtuously will offer a stabilizing force for society and will set the church apart as a unique community. Engaging as active citizens and finding ways to serve in their neighborhoods is an additional way Christians can live out their calling to an unbelieving culture as God’s people. Finally, remaining conscious of prevailing ideologies of the day that run counter to Christianity, especially expressive individualism and what Carl Trueman calls the triumph of the modern self, will prove essential for preserving biblical doctrine.

These practices are all elements of an ancient Christian way of engaging a pagan culture, cultural sanctification, which “…sees Christians embedded within their culture but seeking sanctification so as to promote virtue and reject vice in their personal lives, in the church and in the activities and institutions of the surrounding world” (164). 

Insights for Christian Educators Today

What does it look like for Christian educators today to pursue this vision of cultural sanctification for their graduates?

Let me offer three suggestions.

First, Christian educators should reclaim the classical vision of education, which is the pursuit of wisdom and cultivation of virtue. The most important work teachers can do today, in partnership with parents, is to train students to be wise and discerning, both regarding intellectual ideas and practical day-to-day decisions. Presley’s observation regarding the virtuous lives of early Christians is profound, and yet, we must remember that virtue does not happen by accident. A virtuous persons is formed through the intentional cultivation of moral habits over the long-term. While grades, college acceptances, and accolades have their place, the cultivation of virtue must remain at the center of what Christian schools aim to do.

Second, Christian educators should equip graduates to grapple intellectually with the cultural ideas of the day. The way this occurred in the classical tradition is through training students in the liberal arts, the tools of learning. Modern education today is preoccupied with the pragmatic. Popular-level literature, worksheets, and 1:1 tablets is the strategy today for moving students from grade to grade. But for students to truly understand and evaluate competing ideologies, they need more than to study the “right answers.” They need to think through the ideas themselves, learn to define their terms, apply basic principles of logic, and debate opposing views.

Finally, Christian educators must infuse graduates with a theology of life that is grounded in scripture and tethered to a local church. It is no accident that Presley’s list regarding how the early church engaged culture begins with identity. If students are going to engage in cultural sanctification, they need to have clarity regarding their own life purpose. A robust theology of life provides students with the fundamentals of who they are in Christ, the different phases and stations of life they can expect to navigate, and a focus on the importance of staying connected to a local church.

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Nevertheless, when I say we have lost sight of the significance of the human mind, I am not referring to the significance we ascribe to our brains. We require young children to wear helmets when learning to ride a bike. We instruct people to cover their heads when walking through a construction site. We are taught in wellness classes how to care for our brains through exercise, eating proper nutrients, and turning off screens. The brain is well cared for in many respects.

The mind, not so much. Apart from mental healthcare, which is on the rise today, the mind is taken for granted as the faculty we possess to focus on whatever we please. These days, online video streaming is one popular option. Another is listening to music and podcasts. Too often, however, these objects of the mind do not offer it real sustenance. The sort of nourishment that comes through contemplating knowledge, the truth, and worthy ideas.

Why did God give us minds? What are they for? These are some of the questions I will explore in this new blog series. By digging deeper into what it means to be human and how we come to know, I hope to put forward a fresh vision for cultivating and caring for the life of the mind.

A Biblical Starting Point

Proverbs 3:5-7 notably instructs the listener to, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD, and turn away from evil” (ESV).

Although this passage does not use the word “mind” specifically, it is a helpful starting point for digging deeper into what it means to be human. In the ancient Hebrew conceptual world, one’s heart and mind are inseparable. As Timothy Pickavance notes in Knowledge for the Love of God (Eerdmans, 2022), the Hebrew word translated as “heart” can mean a number of things, but predominantly the whole of a person. In this way, it both individually and collectively refers to one’s will, emotions/desires, and even the intellect (20).

This conception of a human being’s inner life helps us make better sense of Proverbs 3:5, specifically how the verse connects heart to both trust and understanding. Intellectual activity, what we typically think of as the life of the mind, cannot be so easily disentangled from the emotions we experience, the decisions we make, or the things we love. The mind, we can say, is involved in whole-self flourishing. 

Getting the Self in Order

Contemporary culture, as we know, promotes self-authenticity and the importance of expressing our selves to those around us. What we need to wisely decipher is where biblical and cultural views of the self align and where they differ. 

One way to test this alignment is through looking at specific cultural examples. For instance, the cultural anthem of the past decade is, arguably, “Let it Go,” featured in Disney’s 2013 film Frozen. In the story behind the song, the main character experiences a crisis of self-identity as she seeks to keep secret a magical power, all within a fast-paced narrative featuring a talking snowman, ice palace, and snow monster. At a key moment in the story, the character finally accepts her identity, magical powers and all, and belts out a solo, promising to hide her true self no longer.

The salient point, illustrated through “Let it Go,” is that in contemporary culture, the self is fundamentally what one feels, in a psychological and emotional sense, about one’s self. The will and the intellect are eclipsed by feeling, steering the mind to a myopically inward focus. (For those interested, Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, helpfully traces the intellectual history of this view of what it means to be human.)

Alternatively, the biblical view observed in Proverbs 3:5 affirms the complexity of a human’s inner life, even while upholding its unity. A human is physical, but she is more than a body. A human is emotional, but she is more than her feelings. A human is intellectual, but she is more than the summary of her beliefs.

Descartes’ Cogito and the Foundation of Knowledge 

With this view of what it means to be human, we can now turn to the pursuit of knowledge. As J.P. Moreland observes in Kingdom Triangle (Zondervan, 2007), the Bible has a rich focus on knowledge and the importance of knowing. For example, the prophet Hosea laments,

My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I will also reject you from being my priest. Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.

Hosea 4:6 (NIV)

Here we see an emphasis on both knowledge and forgetfulness. It turns out that the pursuit and recollection of knowledge is no mere intellectual endeavor. It has real-life implications for those who would seek to live as the people of God. It is therefore of fundamental importance that we not only pursue knowledge, but get it right.

In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Rene Descartes (1596-1650) understood precisely this in his own modern context. It was the pursuit of certain and unadulterated knowledge that led him to what he believed to be the only sure foundation of knowledge: belief in his own existence. Descartes’ well-known cogito— “I think therefore I am”– became his starting point as he realized that the only truth he could not coherently doubt is his own self-existence. For, the ability to even doubt one’s existence is evidence for it.

As intriguing as this argument is, a foundation of knowledge centered on the self should give us pause. Though the logic holds up, and no doubt sheds some light on what we can know with confidence, the cogito propelled Descartes and modern philosophers who came after him down a path illuminated by human reason alone. In doing so, they lost sight of divine illumination and the limitations of the human mind to fully understand.

Modernism: From Progress to Desolation

Postmodernism, along with its offspring relativism, is feared by many Christians today (and for good reason). However, what some fail to remember is that late modernism was no friend to Christianity either. While it is true that Descartes did reason from the cogito to the Christian faith via deductive logic, it was not long for subsequent modernists to reach a different conclusion, using their minds to argue for a naturalistic view of reality.

The chief problem with modernism is that it puts too much stock in the power of human reason to know. While modernists held to universal and objective truth, what they failed to see is that knowledge of the truth is a gracious gift of God. In a post-Fall world, every facet of a human is fallen. This is what Calvinists mean by the phrase “total depravity.” There is not a single square inch of a human person that is free from the effects of sin. This includes the mind.

As a result of this optimism in human reason, it was not long for the modernist conception of knowledge to simultaneously achieve impressive outcomes and run off course. With the success of modern science and technology, mastery over the natural world accelerated quickly, and with it, impressive advances in everyday life, from efficient machinery to increased life spans. However, at the same time, philosophers and scientists began to imagine life without God’s existence as not only possible, but probable.

Of course, we know that the era of modernism did not end well. The same modernistic philosophy that led to the birth of modern medicine paved the way for the creation of the atomic bomb. It need not be hypothesized what unbridled human reason leads to: two world wars, nuclear weapons, and multiple instances of genocide.

Postmodernism and a Post-Truth World

While modernism was correct to assume the existence of objective truth, it lost its way by untethering the quest for this truth from theology. Our modern scientific era has led us to believe that belief in the supernatural is unfounded, dubious, and impossible to reasonably defend. And yet, for as long as humans have existed, common wisdom has pointed to the existence and need for the divine. It takes a fair amount of hubris to disagree with millennia of sagacious insight on the deep questions of existence, and yet, this is precisely what the modern era has maintained. 

That is, until the emergence of Postmodernism. Nowadays, it is acceptable to believe in God so long as one does not claim that truth about God’s existence is objective. Truth now resides communally rather than universally. How did this shift come about? 

In Knowledge for the Love of God, which I quoted earlier, philosopher Timothy Pickavance suggests that the turn came, in part, with the shift from Newtonian to Einstenian physics (35). Isaac Newton (1643-1727), like other modern scientists, conceived of the world within a closed system. As he discovered and articulated the laws of physics, the universe was perceived to be orderly and predictable. However, with Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, this mechanistic view of the universe was displaced (see video below). Today, scientists know that the laws of the universe are relative to the space-time relationship and that atoms can be broken down into smaller, unpredictable entities called quarks. The upshot is that a purely materialistic conception of the universe turns out to be nothing other than a bunch of tiny things endlessly bumping into each other.

Postmodernists, conscious of this scientific discovery as well as the maladies of the 20th century, continue to feel the human longing for meaning but can no longer confidently ground it in something universal and objective. The result is that truth is now posited as subjective and relative to communities. These days, the deposing of truth as the final authority, especially biblical truth, has left the door wide open for Friedrich Nietzsche’s “will to power” prediction to come true. The emergence of different critical theories which offer totalizing power-centric explanations of society is the result of a world that left confidence in objective truth behind. Throw in the internet’s ability to fragment information and stoke mob-appeal instincts, and you have a recipe for the confusion so many people experience today.

Conclusion

To cultivate the life of the mind, we need to have clarity on the nature of the mind and what it is for. In this blog, I have attempted to show that the mind is one faculty within a complex, fully integrated self. As we observed in scripture, the mind is not so easily separable from the heart as contemporary culture would have us believe. The thoughts, beliefs, desires, decisions, and feelings we experience are all bound up together into what it means to be an embodied soul. To care for the mind, therefore, is to likewise care for all areas of one’s inner life. As we seek together to foster an educational renaissance in our modern era, a pivotal first step will be to retrace our steps to this full-orbed view of the mind. When we take this physical-spiritual perspective, we will not so easily lose sight of our need for divine grace in the pursuit of real knowledge, a trap into which both moderns and postmoderns have fallen.

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

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

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

Situating Techne as Traditions in Place and Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Fivefold Division of the Arts

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

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

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

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Common Arts Education and the Professions and Trades

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later articles:

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

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

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

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

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

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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

The post Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued appeared first on .

In this series on child development, I will take a look at a few of these matters bridging historical debates with modern research on topics such as the nature of the mind, the stages a child goes through as it develops and the goals or purposes of child development. Along the way I will also have in view practical take aways that will enable us to make the most of our resources as teachers creating optimal learning environments for our students. In this first part, we will tackle the issue of what the mind knows and how it knows.

We begin by going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. What we will see is that they come to different conclusions about the mind, especially with regard to how the mind comes to know things. In a previous post I looked at some of the neuro biology of the mind, using Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows as a point of departure. Now we can go way back in time to see how the mind was thought of by a couple of classical thinkers. Plato will assert that knowledge is innate, whereas Aristotle will contend that the mind is a blank slate and knowledge comes to the mind from the eternal world. We’ll take a long look at Plato and Aristotle, since they initiate the long debate about how the mind acquires knowledge. Along the way we will see that despite their differences, both situate their understanding of the mind within a broader context of educational goals. The virtuous citizen is the goal. For one, virtue is innate and must be drawn out. For the other virtue must be acquired through habituating the mind in the direction of virtue.

Plato on the Innate Mind

Plato addresses education primarily in two works, Republic and Laws. In his Republic, a system of education is outlined that would best support a just and orderly city-state. This Socratic dialogue devotes much space to the means and ends of educating everyone in society, yet the ultimate goal of education is to create a ruling class composed of guardians and philosophers. Plato’s Laws was written later in life and is a dialogue with an Athenian stranger. Like Republic, education is considered to be foundational to a properly just and ordered society. A summary statement occurs in Laws 643e, “the education we speak of is training from childhood in goodness (ἀρετή), which makes a man eagerly desirous of becoming a perfect citizen, understanding how both to rule and be ruled righteously” (trans. R.G. Bury [Harvard University Press, 1967]).

For Plato, the chief end of education was to create a ruling class that would ensure the freedom of society. “Our Guardians were to be freed from all forms of manual work; their function was to be the expert provision of freedom for our state” (Republic 395b-c; trans. H.D.P. Lee, [Penguin, 2003]). In order to promote these ends, virtue or arete was the purpose of education. In order for society to be free, its leaders must understand and practice virtue. Plato considered it essential that all children receive education, even though it was only the males of the ruling class that would go on to advanced study in mathematics and philosophy. So there is something democratic in Plato’s view on education (education for all children) that eventually funnels into something much more aristocratic.

Plato divided educational stages into three basic groupings. In primary or elementary education, students would learn music and gymnastics. Around the age of 18 students would then enter into military training. Then around 20 select students would enter into higher education studying mathematics, astronomy, musical theory, logic, metaphysics and so forth. It seems that Plato desired all children, even girls, to participate in primary education, although whether that was applied in practice is difficult to tell. In Plato’s thinking, we can see the emergence of something like stages of development leading to a stratification of education into three levels of education: primary, secondary and higher education. We will keep this three-fold division of education stages in mind in anticipation of part two in this series, which will delve deeper into stages of child development.

The rationale behind Plato’s understanding of primary education is worth exploring. In Laws (2.653d) Plato posits that children are like the young of other animals in that they are incapable of “keeping either its body or its tongue quiet.” This is why the primary mode of education should occur through singing in choir and dancing. “The well-educated man will be able both to sing and dance well” (Laws 2.654b). The proviso is that the person should sing good songs and dance good dances (2.654c). We can relate this back to Plato’s general understanding of education as aimed at virtue in The Republic where he posits that the child ought to have presented to them good speech (εὐλογία), good music (εὐαρμοστία), good forms of dance (εὐσχημοσύνη) and good rhythms (εὐρυθμία) in order that the mind and character of the child be well formed (Republic 3.400d-e).

Now what Plato proposes as the central method of education is mimesis, or the art of imitation. One key passage will suffice to convey his thought here. When a person is presented with items of eternal goodness and beauty “he will endeavor to imitate them and, as far as may be, to fashion himself in their likeness and assimilate himself to them” (Republic 6.500c). Thus, if a person is to be made into a virtuous creature, it is imperative that there is virtuous material for that individual to imitate. They become like the virtuous thing, which is why they must be presented with good speech, music, dances and rhythms.

I think Plato’s idea of imitation or mimesis has merit to it. We can perceive the connection between mimesis and narration, for instance. When we narrate or tell back, we are imitating and assimilating great ideas along the lines of what Plato envisioned. To learn more about the classical background to narration, see Jason’s second article in his series on the history of narration. I also appreciate how the CiRCE Institute has raised awareness of mimetic teaching as a method in the classical Christian movement. However, we might question Plato’s view of the child as dismissive of the child’s true potential. The view of the child is that it is a being that is not fully adult. In many respects this is true; many of the capacities of adulthood are absent in the child. But as we explore this concept of child development, Plato represents a particular view of the child as not adult and therefore lacking in some way.

Vocational Training or True Education?

There is much value in pausing here to consider a key aspect of Plato’s educational program. In Laws, Plato begins his analysis of education by looking at vocational training. He recommends, for instance, that a good builder should be directed to play with toy houses in the nursery (643b-c). This kind of vocational training enables the worker to be happy and possess mastery in a trade (643d). Plato then pivots to a definition of true education. If it was granted that the most happy and skilled craftsman was presented with miniature tools in the nursery, how much more would a virtuous citizen be trained to maintain a good state if presented with virtue in the nursery?

Based on his consideration of Plato’s Laws, Andrew Domanski provides a scathing comparison of Plato’s principles of true education and modernist education. Domanski writes:

“Plato insists on value-based education from the very outset. In so doing, he provides a moral and ethical impetus which is almost entirely absent from today’s secular systems of education. The general absence of Platonic virtue from modern early education goes a long way towards explaining the ills that increasingly beset our societies.”

Domanski, “Principles of Early Education in Plato’s ‘Laws,’” Acta Classica, vol. 50, 2007, p. 71.

As we consider how classical education seeks to renew lost educational principles, Domanski’s remark poignantly addresses a key critique we share. The failure of the modernist educational experiment has left generations adrift in a tempestuous ocean without any light to guide the way. The reduction of education to vocational training, Domanski argues, is not true education in the Platonic sense.

“It is clear by now that the bulk of what we call education today is, in Platonic terms, little more than vocational training. It follows that the majority of highly skilled professionals (for example doctors, engineers, nuclear scientists and economists), who have not received intensive early instruction in virtue, must be regarded as uneducated in Platonic terms. Conversely, a street-sweeper or labourer who has received early instruction in civic and moral values, would be considered to be education in the true, Platonic sense” (“Principles,” p. 72).

It is difficult to swim against this stream. Many students and parents come to us with the assumption that true education is merely vocational training. Many of us in our educational renewal movement were raised in this cultural assumption, making it difficult to not let the classroom collapse into mere vocational training. That’s why we need not only to train in virtue, but also to be advocates for a virtue-based education.

Aristotle and the Blank Slate

Aristotle inherited many of the views on education Plato put forward. In many respects, Aristotle’s views are nuances of Plato. For instance, Aristotle views the goal of education as happiness. Aristotle highly esteems virtue along with honor, pleasure and intelligence, but one pursues these for the sake of happiness (εὐδαιμονία) whereas one does not choose happiness in order to pursue virtue (Nic. Eth. 1097b). Now regarding happiness or eudaimonia, Aristotle puts forward that true happiness is conceived as the good life, which we might also call a life well lived. Aristotle considers that all people would agree that it is the good life that produces true happiness, but that what constitutes this happiness is a matter of dispute (Nic. Eth. 1095a). So from the outset, Plato and Aristotle are not in fundamental disagreement about the goal of education, they simply are emphasizing what we might consider two sides of the same coin. Virtue and living the good life go hand in hand, with both being necessary to promote a civil society.

Another development Aristotle puts forward is the role habit plays in education. He proposes that intellectual virtue comes about through instruction, whereas “moral or ethical virtue is produced by habit” (Nic. Eth. 1103a). Aristotle sees an etymological connection between the words ethic (ἠθική) and habit (ἔθος). A student is therefore to gain moral virtues through repeated exercises that build the character of the individual. You can read more about Aristotle’s view of habits in Jason’s article “Excellence Comes by Habit.” In addition, you can download my eBook “A Guide to Implementing Habit Training.”

Like Plato, Aristotle divided a child’s educational program into three stages. Aristotle’s view of the child was less animistic, as he included alongside music and gymnastic reading, writing and drawing. There was still a belief in the limitations of the child, however, with higher intellectual pursuits reserved for males in their twenties. Between the primary level of education, which tended to be more mechanical, was the military training of youths as they learned strategy and tactics alongside their military drills. The stages of education in both Plato and Aristotle were not based on a fully articulated understanding of stages of human development, so we will wait for the next article to really dive into this matter.

The main point of debate between Plato and Aristotle comes not in the layout of their educational program, but in their view of the nature of the child’s mind. For Plato, all knowledge is innate, residing in the mind of the individual from birth. The role of education is therefore to unlock this innate knowledge through recollection or remembering. Because the soul is immortal, it has this connection to knowledge so that it is possible to discover what we do not know by courageous inquiry (Plato, Meno 86a-b). Plato illustrates this by Socrates questioning a slave boy and helping him discover his innate knowledge of a geometrical concept (Meno 84d-85b).

Aristotle, however, views the mind not as a storehouse of innate knowledge, but as a blank slate or tabula rasa. The mind of the child is like any other sense organ in that it is acted upon by outside forces. So one can write upon this blank slate by helping the child to acquire knowledge by learning and discovery (Aristotle, De Anima, III.4-7). Unlike Plato, who thinks education is the process of unlocking innate knowledge, Aristotle views education as the process of acquiring knowledge. This has been a longstanding debate for educational theorists down the ages.

The Enlightenment Dead End

The debate between blank slate theory and innate knowledge took on new energy during the Enlightenment. Rationalism had prevailed during the Renaissance era as a new humanistic impulse highlighted the role of human rational faculties as the sole source of knowledge over and against divine revelation. We can trace certain elements of the secularization of Western society to this transition, even though the rationalism of the Renaissance was one of the contributing factors to religious renewal during the Reformation.

Having already devoted so much space to Plato and Aristotle, we will rush our way through the major voices in the Rationalism/Empiricism debate. Several of these figures address education at length, and at some point I should come back to any number of them to further develop their nuanced take on education and learning. For now, however, the aim of this brief traipse through the Enlightenment is to see how blank slate and innate theories took on new emphases. In particular, we will see how both theories became divorced from the goal of education to form learners into virtuous individuals.

The Enlightenment questioned whether human rational thought was indeed the source of knowledge, pitting several figures against one another. Rationalists such as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz were contested by Empiricists like Bacon, Locke and Hume. A new emphasis on scientific method placed more confidence in sensory experience as the true source of knowledge, placing doubt on the role of rationality. The concept of the mind and its nature figured prominently in this debate.

René Descartes (1596-1650), regarded as the father of modern philosophy, argued that ideas are innate, divinely supplied and accessed through the application of logic. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1678), on the other hand, was an early proponent of empiricism, believing that human behavior can largely be explained materialistically. Ideas, he posited, are external to the human mind. This combination of materialism and non-innate ideas meant that Hobbes viewed though, imagination and memory as instances of sense experience working on the matter of the brain.

John Locke (1632-1704) took up the debate, directly opposing Descartes’s view of the mind, believing the mind to be devoid of all ideas at birth. It is experiences acquired through sense that become imprinted on the mind. Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) then categorically critiques Locke point by point. He posits that universally assented truisms must be innate. Anyone not assenting to a universal truth demonstrates that they have not become aware of it, not that it is not innate. This goes against Locke’s idea that universally assented truisms are actually acquired through experience, just that people have forgotten when and where they learned it.

The idea that human knowledge is solely gained through experience is then championed again. David Hume (1711-1776) essentially views human experience as sensate, making us nothing more than a bundle of nerves. For Hume there are no norms, only facts. This move in the empiricist camp moved rapidly toward skepticism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a rationalist who took a different view on norms, finding morality to be natural or innate. Surprisingly, though, he proposes that society has a negative influence impinging on the child’s innate perfectibility.

This review of the rationalist/empirical debate is far too succinct, but it lands us in a place where both innate knowledge and blank slate notions are no longer tied to the sense of virtue espoused by Plato and Aristotle. On the one hand, the blank slate theory of the empiricists leaves the individual a mass of sensate nerves, and knowledge as a store of facts disconnected from a sense of “ought.” On the other hand, innate knowledge can be likened to the “noble savage,” or humans in their natural state. Civilization corrupts this innate knowledge in the attempt to indoctrinate the individual with some moral code.

Confronted by Neuro-biology and Cognitive Science

Recently Steven Pinker challenged this state of affairs in his book The Blank Slate: The Denial of Human Nature (2003). Pinker’s concern is that people have committed to a view of human development as a blank slate to explain problems like racism or sexism as learned behaviors. He draws upon advances in neuro-biology and cognitive science to demonstrate that there are elements of the mind that are innate. He points to Noam Chomsky’s theory of language to show that underlying all human language are universal concepts of grammar. There is a certain amount of genetic code that determines, to some extent, cognitive behaviors. Furthermore, the brain has sets of neural networks that preprogram the mind to accomplish different cognitive functions, such as learn language, calculate quantities, or put one thought with another.

Pinker combines this notion of innateness with breakthroughs in neural plasticity to show that even though the mind is not a blank slate, the innate aspect of the mind is not predetermined solely by our genetic code. Yes, genes do a fair bit of work to determine certain outcomes, but genes work with feedback from the environment. Interestingly, the sense perception work that was so powerful an argument for empiricists in the Enlightenment didn’t account for genetic code. What Pinker shows is that aspects of our personality and temperament, which are genetically determined, create something like a sieve that regulates how we interpret our environments. Nature and nurture are working with and against each other, causing our minds to develop in somewhat unpredictable ways. Even though Pinker demonstrates how our minds are composed of far more innate factors that the blank slate accounts for, he also shows how neural plasticity means our brains change as they learn, acquiring new, non-innate knowledge. Pinker’s work, then, seems to move us in the direction of a synthesis of innate and blank slate theory in helpful ways.

One last idea I want to draw out from Pinker, which is why I have devoted so much attention to him, is that in light of the innate yet malleable mind, he demonstrates that morality is a universal. Every culture shares a great deal of common moral code traits. This concept reminds me of Jordan Peterson’s connection between the snake reflex and dragon narratives. Our brains are wired to flinch away from snakes or anything that looks like a snake. This is an innate, hard-wired reflex that requires no conscious thought. If we were to see, think and then react, we would already be bitten by the snake. This deep neurological structure is something Peterson connects to a universal fascination with dragon narratives. It seems that just about every culture has stories of heroes confronting dragons to rescue the maiden. What Peterson is observing is something that seems to be universal in every culture and that has a basis in our neurological brain structure. This corresponds well with what Pinker is talking about. Whereas the result of the Enlightenment project left us with a material brain and no virtue, Pinker has applied recent science to show a more nuanced understanding of the human mind connected with virtue.

Practical Take Aways

Having walked this long road through philosophy and theory, let’s consider a few practical results of this study of how the mind develops. First, we see how theories of the mind brought us to a fairly destitute place devoid of values. As an educational renewal movement, we can now understand that the goal toward which the mind is developed is a value-rich end. We are cultivating virtues. Certain aspects of virtue are inherent in the child, while others require us to bring virtuous knowledge into contact with the mind. We can agree with Plato that courage already resides in the person and only needs to be unlocked. But we can also agree with Aristotle that a truly courageous person is one who is practiced in courage, who has formed the habit of courage. Let us not shy way from connecting learning to values.

Second, the mind seems to come preprogrammed for learning and that certain avenues of learning are optimal for acquiring new knowledge. I was struck by this quote from Charlotte Mason which seems to anticipate some of Pinker’s conclusions:

“I have so far urged that knowledge is necessary to men and that, in the initial stages, it must be conveyed through a literary medium, whether it be knowledge of physics or of Letters, because there would seem to be some inherent quality in mind which prepares it to respond to this form of appeal and no other. I say in the initial stages, because possibly, when the mind becomes conversant with knowledge of a given type, it unconsciously translates the driest formulae into living speech.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, pp. 333-334

Notice how she finds that the mind has a certain “inherent quality” that enable the mind to acquire knowledge. That quality is a literary bent. The mind really likes story. So when presenting new information, embedding that knowledge in story form optimizes learning. I think this is why a vast majority of Scripture is in narrative form and why children love to hear stories. Let us not shy away from placing before our children great stories full of rich ideas and noble values.

Finally, the notion that children are persons takes on new significance when we realize that their minds are composed of innate qualities and yet are capable of learning much new knowledge. When we consider how children are beings with genetic data and predispositions but are also beings capable to tremendous change, there is a sense of marvel we should have when beholding a child. When we educate there is untapped potential that will grow and learn regardless of our influence on the child. In this way the teacher really needs to get out of the way so that the child can flourish. But because the child can also be molded, we as teachers must be careful to place before the child that which is worthy of his or her attention. Let us not shy away from promoting a growth mindset among our children.

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

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

Why Scientism Is a Problem

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

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

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

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

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

James Muir writes,

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

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

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

The Classical Contrast to Scientism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avoiding Scientism in our Classical Recovery Movement

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

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

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

The only lasting solution to scienticism in education is ultimately an entire Renaissance project in which we return ad fontēs (“to the sources”) in an effort not simply to generalize a definition of what classical education is, but to distinguish between the different visions and practices of the multifaceted tradition. In so doing we will have to be prepared to not like everything we see; we may be forced to engage in some negative judgments on some aspects of the tradition, even as we are inspired and challenged by others.

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

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

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

The Renaissance Solution to Scientism

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

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

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

As Hamlet said,

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

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

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

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

[2] Ibid., 17-18.

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

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

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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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John the Baptist as Teacher

John the Baptist lived an austere lifestyle. He adhered to asceticism, wearing garments made of camel hair and restricting his diet to locusts and wild honey (Mark 1:6). John’s ministry lines up with the classic prophets of the Old Testament, as seen in his challenge of the political and religious elite in Jerusalem, but also in the manner of his address. For instance, he says of himself, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,” clearly alluding to Isaiah 40:3 (John 1:23). John the Baptist as a teacher draws upon the way in which discipleship or mentoring was modeled among many of the classic prophets. Martin Hengel notes particularly the relationship between Elijah and Elisha in his book The Charismatic Leader and His Followers. Hengel’s point was that Jesus calling his own disciples mirrored that of the OT prophetic tradition (see in particular pp. 17-18). This model, though, is likewise helpful in understanding John the Baptist, who also had a group of disciples (John 1:35), including Jesus of Nazareth.

John’s role as a teacher of Jesus might seem a bit of a stretch, given that John is never depicted as teaching Jesus. But the evidence that John played a formative role in Jesus’ life is seen in his inclusion at the beginning of all four gospels, right at the conclusion of Jesus formative years. Jesus’ baptism by John points to the familiarity between the two. In Jesus’ baptism at the hands of John there is simultaneously a submission on Jesus’ part to John as well as a recognition by John of Jesus’ superior role and mission. J. Ramsey Michaels bases the discipleship of Jesus to John on the phrase “he who comes after (ὀπίσω) me.” E. P. Sanders concludes after a close study of John 1-3, that Jesus’ mission “while independent of that of the Baptist’s, is similar in nature and near in locale.” The scholarly consensus is that Jesus spent some amount of time as a disciple of John before beginning his own ministry, but this consensus has not gone unchallenged. A recent PhD thesis at Edinburgh proposes that Jesus in all probability did not spend any time as a disciple of John. Max Alpin’s reasoning is essentially based on the fact that “Jesus had great confidence in his beliefs,” meaning “we simply would not expect him to have chosen to submit himself to John’s leadership.” In my estimation, there seems to be no problem with an individual having great confidence in his beliefs submitting to the teaching of a prominent religious figure. I think the prominent role John the Baptist plays at the beginning of all four gospels points to an essential influence John had on Jesus to frame his early ministry. The gospel of John elaborates by hints a closer connection, showing that Jesus chose his own first disciples from among John’s disciples (John 1:25). Seeing Jesus’ early ministry in light of time spent learning from John provides insights into some key moments in the gospels.

John’s message was simple: ““Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matt. 3:2). People came from far and near to hear John and some received baptism, while others scoffed. The message is expressed with simplicity, yet is full of meaning. There is the call to listeners to an active response. The imminence of God’s heavenly kingdom evokes an emotional factor eliciting hope or impending doom. When we look at Jesus’ ministry, we see he proclaims the very same message. Matthew records Jesus first message: “Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matt. 4:17). Now this wasn’t a rote, memorized, dry recitation. Jesus’ proclamation has all of the conviction and passion that John expressed. The point, though, is that we have in this shared message a link between teacher and student. Viewed from the vantage point of models of communication, we can verify that the teacher’s message has been properly decoded and assimilated. John the Baptist, his role as predecessor completed, recedes into the background in the Gospels, perhaps as we would expect in a story centering on Jesus himself.

Jesus as Learner

Jesus as learner is a remarkable reality when we take into account his divine and human natures. Consider that the fullness of God (all knowledge, all power, everywhere present) became incarnate in a helpless baby (no knowledge, vulnerably powerless, physically present in one location). Paul expresses this as making himself “nothing” (Phil. 2:7). This humiliation meant that Jesus had to learn information he had called into existence. The author of all language had to acquire a mother tongue as we did. He learned the trade of carpentry from his father. He devoted himself to learning the very scriptures that he had inspired and that pointed to himself.

I think the incarnation tells us something profound about learning. Jesus entered fully into our human experience, validating something fundamental to our nature: to be human is to be a learner. We can fall prey to the notion that education is temporary, something to finish early in our youth before getting on with “real” life. True, much that has to be learned occurs early in life. Jesus’ training under John the Baptist was limited to a definite span of time followed by Jesus’ own career as a teacher. But Jesus’ learning is not isolated to his formative years. Hebrews 5:8 provides the insight that he learned obedience through his sufferings. Helmut Koester explains that “Jesus was never disobedient to God,” but that Jesus was able to “demonstrate obedience” by encountering difficult situations in his humanity “where the will of God was challenged and obedience was required.” In other words, the entirety of Jesus’ incarnate human experience was a learning experience, captured by the Greek word μανθάνω in Heb. 5:8. All of his life experiences, particularly those which caused him to suffer, were learning experiences. At one level, we can imagine that Jesus divesting himself of divine attributes to become human flesh (Phil. 2:7), was a form of suffering through the new limitations encountered in bodily form. But we can also point to the sufferings chronicled leading up to his crucifixion. The author of Hebrews makes this connection in 9:26, concluding that Jesus’ sufferings culminated in a one-time sacrifice to “put away sin.”  His entire life was a learning experience (just as his entire life is a teaching experience, but that is a topic for another time).

Learning is a profound aspect of human nature. Part of being image bearers is that we are learners. God incarnates himself in Christ into this nature. We must throw off the conception that learning is either for the ignorant or for only a short period of life. If learning is part of our nature, then all of life contains opportunities to learn. Learning doesn’t just occur in the classroom, but also in all possible spaces and throughout all possible ages. There is always something new to learn. This is not a result of the fall, but it is an essential aspect of our nature. In the Garden, prior to the fall, we see learning occur as God instructs the first man to obey the command to not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:16-17). Calvin refers to this event as “a kind of first lesson in obedience.” There is yet another moment of applied learning as God brings all the animals before the first man to be named (Gen. 2:19).

Learning and Teaching as Followers of Jesus

Today we have a tendency to treat education as a means to an end. Learning occurs for a brief spell at the beginning of life so that one can accomplish things later in life. Jesus’ incarnation as a learner, however, shows us that learning is something inherent to us as humans. Therefore, we must be careful not to compartmentalize learning as something to finish so that we can get on with the business of living life. The utility of education cannot be made to overshadow our human longing to learn. Learning is a creative and generative endeavor that reflects our own creation in the image of God. In light of this, we can consider several principles that enlighten our understanding of the nature and goals of education.

First, God’s revelation to humanity occurs through language. We see this first illustrated in Genesis 1 as all of creation is spoken into being by divine expression. The reflection on the incarnation found in the gospel of John expresses Jesus as the Word made flesh (John 1:14). Not only in the fact of God revealing himself to his creation, but also in the means by which he reveals himself, education and learning are essential aspects of our relationship with God. Divine truth is disseminated in language we can comprehend, making it possible for us to learn. This doesn’t mean that it is easy to learn God’s self-disclosure. That is why education must cultivate the intellect. God’s word is not only to be read, but also reflected upon, interpreted and applied. This is not to say that the spirit does not guide understanding of the text (a point which we’ll turn to momentarily), but we can at least say that a trained intellect is predicated upon the manner by which God reveals himself.

Second, through the incarnation God demonstrates his empathetic care for people. Jesus became human in the most vulnerable, helpless and powerless manner possible as a baby. Emptying himself of divine attributes, he enters into human experience and knows our sufferings (Heb. 2:18). Because of this, as the author of Hebrews drives home, Jesus is able to carry out his priestly role, supplicating for humanity because he knows through what he has learned, but also because his perfect life and divine nature gives him access to the throne of God that we ourselves lack apart from him. Empathetic care, then, must be a chief educational goal. Students must learn to care for God (reverence) and for other people (respect). Our daily work in each of our subjects must be imbued with care and devotion. We can cultivate a sense of our own priestly role in the world as caretakers of creation.

Third, Jesus, by entering into human form, entered into human structures of authority. Jesus became a child within a family, submitting himself within the hierarchy of the relationship between parents and children. Jesus at various points also recognized other authority structures, by having people he healed become cleansed by the priests (Luke 17:14), or by rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s (Matt. 22:21). We all live in hierarchies of authority, and Jesus entered into this aspect of our humanity as well. Learning the proper response to authority is an essential aspect of education. Obedience begins with self-discipline, learning to do what we ought in the face of competing desires to do what we want. But we must also learn how to obey teachers, employers, church authorities, government regulations. In order for these hierarchical relationships to work properly, roles of submission and authority have to be recognized. It is certainly the case that power and authority have been abused, and pushing back against authority in such cases can correct wrongs. But the throwing off of authority is not the normal operating procedure, it runs counter to our nature as humans. Jesus himself suffered from power wielded against him, but he still entered into our human structures. Considering who Jesus is, we can further explore this concept of authority. All authority is derived from some higher authority, a progression that eventually leads us to the authority that resides in God himself. Whatever role we think of—judge, president, teacher, parent—has a delegated or deputed authority to carry out whatever the role demands. The incarnation of Jesus Christ places the ultimate authority (God himself) within the hierarchy of authority. I think this points to something good and right about hierarchies of authority.

Fourth, human beings are soulful creatures, part of God’s physical creation, but spiritual just as He is. The temptation for those of us in education is to divide humans into physical, spiritual, emotional and intellectual components. We do damage to our students, though, when cut them apart in this way. We too often appeal to the intellect without consideration of the whole person. A child properly educated grows in all ways, in every part of their being. Caring for the whole being of our students means we help them develop a personal understanding of physical conditioning, of well ordered affections, and of their spiritual nature. By solely teaching to the intellect, we ask the student to sit still, to quiet their emotions, and, yes, our lectures lack spirit. Jesus taking on human flesh shows us our multifaceted nature. Not only do we see intellect, but emotions, physicality, and, of course, spirit.

Conclusion

It is with reverence that we contemplate the mysteries of the incarnation. Too many heresies attempted to sell short Jesus’ nature without fully articulating his divinity or his humanity. This meditation on Jesus as a learner obviously highlights his human nature, but hopefully not at the expense of his full divine nature. I believe the value we gain bears fruit in understanding our own nature as image bearers. We as teachers are created in the image of God, and we teach others created in the image of God. Jesus’ incarnation, his suffering, his death, his resurrection, all are part of the plan to accomplish our redemption. Jesus’ life also provides for us principles that can guide us as educators, giving us a robust educational philosophy.

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Dweck’s portrayal of how our beliefs influence our behavior is truly mind-altering, especially given how she bolsters it with numerous studies of children, teachers, athletes and businesses. The importance of adopting a growth mindset as a parent, teacher, coach or business leader can hardly be overstated. There’s a reason her work has made a significant splash and been called “one of the most influential books ever about motivation” (Po Bronson, author of Nurture Shock).

But perhaps it’s worth asking whether what Carol Dweck is saying here is fundamentally new. For those participating in an educational renaissance, it’s worthwhile to step back and consider the extent to which the new ideas of modern research are confirming (rather than discovering) the traditional insights of the classical tradition of educational philosophy. After all, as the writer of Ecclesiastes said, “there is nothing new under the sun” (1:9 ESV) and “of the making of many books there is no end” (12:12). In this case, I think we need look no farther than Aristotle, the great philosopher himself, for an anticipation of the growth mindset.

Near the beginning of his Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle announces a very similar research question to that posed in Dweck’s research:

“whether happiness is to be acquired by learning or by habituation or some other sort of training, or comes in virtue of some divine providence or again by chance.” (Book I, ch. 9, trans. by W. D. Ross, accessed at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.1.i.html)

The word translated happiness (Greek: ‘eudaimonia’) is not the flippant feeling that we often mean today. In fact, some circles are inclined to prefer the term ‘joy’ to happiness to imply something longer lasting—a life satisfaction or fulfillment rather than momentary excitement or the absence of challenges. Of course, Dweck uses the term ‘success’ in her study, which resonates better with the modern American focus on advancement in work and career. But both terms are meant to tap into the fundamental human drive for contentment, fulfillment, human flourishing, the good life.

And the question that is posed concerns whether or not our fate is fixed. Can we learn such that we succeed and find joy, fulfillment, blessedness, through our accomplishments? Or are we stuck with what we’ve got, such that we’d better hope we were one of the lucky ones, blessed by the gods (or by the random lottery of our DNA) with intelligence, talent, or whatever that it-factor is in our particular field or endeavor? Aristotle’s answer to this question is ultimately a nuanced one: No, if someone gets to the end of their life and dies horribly without friends and alone, all their accomplishments turning back on them and coming to naught, that person cannot be said to be blessed, no matter how successful they seemed earlier in life. Some external luck must play a role, but excellence, virtue can be developed, and it is virtue which ultimately makes a life blessed.

The key to Aristotle’s growth mindset is a proper conception of virtue or excellence (Greek areté) as an activity. The truly happy person finds fulfillment in the continual pursuit of excellence. As he explains,

“For no function of man has so much permanence as virtuous activities (these are thought to be more durable even than knowledge of the sciences), and of these themselves the most valuable are more durable because those who are happy spend their life most readily and most continuously in these; for this seems to be the reason why we do not forget them. The attribute in question, then, will belong to the happy man, and he will be happy throughout his life; for always, or by preference to everything else, he will be engaged in virtuous action and contemplation, and he will bear the chances of life most nobly and altogether decorously, if he is ‘truly good’ and ‘foursquare beyond reproach’.” (Book I, ch. 10)

Virtuous activities, for Aristotle, seem to be those physical, moral and intellectual virtues discussed throughout his Ethics, often described as a mean between two extremes: for instance, courage is a mean in having the right amount of fear, not too little (rashness) or too much (cowardice). Others, however, include the excellence of art, or skill in producing some good through a true course of reasoning; practical wisdom, or the ability to weigh correctly what things are good or beneficial for oneself; knowledge, or the ability to demonstrate the truth of something; and friendship (see Nic. Ethics VI.3-7 and VIII). In other words, the pursuit of excellence in school, work, business or relationships is the most likely course of action to bring about happiness.

And as he explains, part of the reason for that is that if you are seeing every opportunity as a chance to grow and improve in virtue (i.e. a growth mindset), then no matter what life throws at you, you will find satisfaction (eudaimonia) in that pursuit. Virtuous activities are durable sources of happiness, because they don’t flit away like less noble ones: money, sex, or power. There are very few circumstances, however challenging or disastrous, that don’t allow you the opportunity to contemplate or reflect on how you could improve. Even nobly bearing up under suffering is an exercise of virtue and will therefore give a measure of its own satisfaction.

One of the weaknesses of Dweck’s book is her narrow focus on success in specific life goals and endeavors, like school, sports or work, to the exclusion of this broader conception of the ultimate goal of a life well lived. But other researchers have made a stronger case for the connection between vigorous striving after excellence and happiness more broadly understood. For instance, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conducted a study conducted in the 90s, in which subjects would subjectively rate their mood at random times throughout the day. Cal Newport describes in his findings in his own book Deep Work:

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile…. Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title). At the time, this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock.” (84)

The opposite is actually true; people rated their work time much higher than their leisure time, in spite of thinking that they enjoyed their leisure time more. As human beings we were made to be most joyful when striving in pursuit of excellence, when engaged in deep work, or deliberate practice. As the wise author of Ecclesiastes had said, “There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil” (Eccl. 2:24). Toil is not all pain and drudgery, but can actually be enjoyed… if we believe we can grow and see each task as an opportunity to strive for excellence.

What difference should this make for the work of education? Well, educators themselves should embrace the life of growth. Excellent teachers are not born, they are made. We should strive for excellence in the craft of teaching, but also for the practical wisdom of living life well. But more than that, teachers should cast a vision for their students of pursuing excellence in each and every ability, skill or type of knowledge that the curriculum calls them to. They should explicitly teach students to believe that they can develop their abilities, and learning activities and practice sessions should be framed so as to reinforce that belief. Teachers should aim to get their students willingly and joyfully engaged in the hard work of learning through inculcating a growth mindset. John Milton, in his tractate Of Education, described it this way:

“But here the main skill and groundwork will be, to temper them such lectures and explanations upon every opportunity as may lead and draw them in willing obedience, inflamed with the study of learning, and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men, and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages.”

Here Milton claims that the most important and foundational task of the educator of youth is to put them into a certain mindset: that of being on fire with a zeal for learning and with a deep appreciation for excellence. Students also need hope, “high hopes” that they can make something of their lives, by living in service to their country and to God, and perhaps even becoming so excellent at what they do that their names go down in history. If this isn’t a growth mindset, I don’t know what is.

At the school where I work (Clapham School) these ideas are reflected in part of our mission, which is to “inspire students with an education… approached with diligence and joy.” This attempts to capture the powerful combination of hard work in the pursuit of excellence and the deep satisfaction that is the natural result. We call it joyful discovery for short. How will this influence your life, learning and pursuits? How will you teach, coach or parent differently because of your newfound understanding of the classical growth mindset?

For more on the growth mindset see my article on “Charlotte Mason and the Growth Mindset” here!

References:

Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation. Princeton, 1984. Also accessed at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.1.i.html.

Carol S. Dweck. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine: New York, 2016.

Cal Newport. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central: New York/Boston, 2016.

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Here you will find thoughtful engagement with educational ideas. Jason and I have devoted ourselves to the craft of teaching, accumulating hours in the classroom (sometimes together), providing oversight and mentoring as administrators, and exploring important ideas as speakers. We believe educational renewal can occur as we thoughtfully understand the great thoughts of past educators and engage with the educational ideas of today. Thanks for joining us, and we hope you find our contributions helpful as you work on your own teaching as a craft.

Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education. — Charlotte Mason

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