My claim is that in order to achieve lasting flow, one must achieve an appropriate level of intensity. The first aspect of this claim to elaborate is the concept of intensity. Intensity as I will be using it here occurs at the intersection of motivation and practice. It is only when students approach their work with intensity that they will achieve lasting flow.

The Winter Olympics recently concluded. The requirements for a sport to qualify for the winter games is that the sport occur on either ice or snow. That in and of itself sets the Winter Olympics apart from other sporting events. Consider the amount of practice athletes must accumulate in adverse conditions to become world-class competitors. After watching numerous interviews with athletes across many sports, a consistent picture emerged. These athletes were highly motivated, but also genuinely loved their sport. A twin pairing crystalized in my mind: motivation and love of the sport go hand in hand. Not everyone will be as highly motivated to put in long hours on the ice or snowy slopes, but perhaps there are other areas where any one of us might find the spark of motivation, and that spark most often consists in something that stirs our hearts.

Motivation

When we think about examples of motivation, we most often picture athletes. Whether it be the athletes of the Winter Olympics or some other sport, success stories are often the result of high levels of motivation. In her book Mindset, Carol Dweck highlights examples such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods to demonstrate how individuals “took charge of the processes that bring success – and that maintain it” (101). Athletes like this work hard every day to improve some aspect of their performance. Dweck quotes Tiger Woods as saying, “I love working on shots, carving them this way and that, and proving to myself that I can hit a certain shot on command” (102). This love of practice kept him returning day after day no matter the conditions outside.

Motivation comes in two flavors. Goeff Colvin, in Talent is Overrated, writes “The central question about motivation to achieve great performance is whether it’s intrinsic or extrinsic” (206). Extrinsic motivation is connected to external rewards such as stickers, candy or prizes, whereas intrinsic motivation is connected to the perceived value of the sport or academic subject. Notice the work “love” in the Tiger Woods quote above. Even though he has won a vast array of golf tournaments, he found intrinsic value in practicing the shots themselves. This occurs not only for athletes, but musicians, artists and mathematicians can be found who express this same kind of passion not simply for accolades or awards, but because there is a perceptual value in the subject.

An essential component of finding flow is connecting students to intrinsic motivation. In his 2018 research paper, Jeff Irvine was “struck by the dominance of intrinsic over extrinsic in many theories related to motivation” (12). He goes on to comment:

“This is even more striking considering the dominance of extrinsic rewards in current education systems. Motivational theories emphasize the intrinsic dimension where research has shown important gains can be made in positively impacting student motivation. A significant body of evidence suggests that motivation has a major role in student achievement.”

Jeff Irvine, “A Framework for Comparing Theories Related to Motivation in Education,” Research in Higher Education Journal 35 (2018): 12.

To put it another way, carrots and sticks do not provide lasting motivation, we cannot reward or punish a student toward achievement in language learning, mathematics or writing mechanics. A more fruitful pursuit would be found by highlighting the value inherent in a language, in numeracy or in written communication. Connecting students to intrinsic value has much more durative impact that rewards or punishments.

A more recent study of musicians found a link between grit, growth mindset and flow. Their findings are fascinating. Musicians who found intrinsic value in music were more motivated to engage in daily practice, which led to increased skill, which led to a deeper love of music, which reinforced daily practice, and the cycle goes on and on. The authors found that musicians experienced flow as a result of long-term engagement with music through daily practice. They write:

“In the full model, music performance anxiety and daily practice hours are the only significant predictors for dispositional flow in this sample of musicians, suggesting that the strongest predictors for musicians’ flow experience are how you feel while playing music and how often you engage in it” (6)

Jasmine Tan, Kelly Yap, and Joydeep Bhattacharya, “What Does it Take to Flow? Investigating Links Between Grit, Growth Mindset, and Flow in Musicians,” Music & Science 4 (2021): 6.

Musicians who connect to the positive feelings that music provides through regular, daily practice deepen their experience of the flow state.

But notice how anxiety can inhibit flow. Fear of performance can lock up a musician, creating a negative feedback loop. Anxiety lessens intrinsic interest in music, and leads to diminished practicing resulting in little to no experience of flow. In a study of rock climbers, this concept of anxiety was noted to reduce attention and focus (55). However, stress and anxiety are constituent aspects of life. So we cannot completely eliminate stress and anxiety. Instead, high performers learn how to cope with anxiety. The authors of the rock climbing study write, citing other literature:

“Stress is an unavoidable and potentially positive aspect of life (McGonigal, 2015). A person’s approach to stressful situations (climbing or otherwise) may predict his or her success at negotiating the challenge. The ability of a person to engage cognitive inhibitors and set-shift (Derakshan & Eysenck, 2009), invoking specific mental capacities during specific events, may enhance performance and resilience in many challenging life domains.”

Andrew Bailey, Allison Hughes, Kennedy Bullock, and Gabriel Hill, “A Climber’s Mentality: EEG analysis of climbers in action,” Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership 11, no. 1 (2019): 64

Notice how stress can be embraced as a positive aspect of life. Top athletes learn to identify pre-match nervousness as the body’s preparation for action. As opposed to allowing stress and anxiety to shut them down, they accept the stress as an aspect of high performance. This mental work take practice and coaching to transform something potentially debilitating for inexperienced learners into something that can enhance performance.

One immediate take away from this examination of motivation is both the nature and locus of motivation. First, motivation is about the intrinsic value of the activity or subject at hand. Our chief goal as educators is not to throw a bunch of external motivators at the students, whether those be rewards or punishments. Instead, we ourselves need to identify the intrinsic value in the activity or subject with the aim of guiding our students toward that sense of value. Even so, we need to be open to students finding their own sense of value in a given activity or subject quite apart from our own. This leads to the second take away, the locus of motivation has to be the student. It is counterproductive for us as teachers to whip up a frenzy of motivation only for the students not to catch the bug themselves. Now there is definitely a role for us to play as motivators, but for long-term flow to be achieved, students need to take on board their own sense of motivation.

Practice

The first component of intensity is motivation. One’s level of intensity corresponds in some measure to the intrinsic value one places in an activity or subject. The second component of intensity comes down to practice. Here we’ll talk about two kinds of practice that promote intensity: deliberate practice and retrieval practice.

I remember my first violin teacher had a bumper sticker on her violin case that said “practice makes perfect.” Well, that’s not entirely the case. Perhaps better would be “practice makes better.” And it’s really not just practice, it’s practice of a certain kind. I could mechanically play through a piece and never really improve. What I learned over time as a music student is that focused practice on the problem spots is where real improvement occurs. You never really play through the whole piece in one sitting, you stop constantly to rework a section, get the finger right, repeat and come back to it.

The focused, intentional type of practice is what we call deliberate practice. Anders Ericsson put forward a framework in his 1993 article which posits that expert performance is achieved through effort directed towards improvement, even when the effort is not enjoyable (see K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100 (1993): 363-406). This is the article that gave us the 10,000-hour rule, later popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. Angela Duckworth, though, explains that the 10,000-hour rule is not about accumulating lots and lots of hours on task, instead we should think of it as a factor of the quality of time we spend practicing. And yet, individuals who commit to long hours of arduous effort seeking to improve a skill eventually experience the state of ecstatic immersion that Csikszentmihalyi terms flow. In her book Grit, Duckworth writes, “I’ve come to the following conclusion: Gritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow” (131). Duckworth’s point is that even though deliberate practice takes perseverance or grit, as she calls it, there is a payoff in the form of higher levels of performance and enjoyment.

Ericsson summarized the state of research on deliberate practice in a 2008 article:

“Based on a review of research on skill acquisition, we identified a set of conditions where practice had been uniformly associated with improved performance. Significant improvements in performance were realized when individuals were 1) given a task with a well-defined goal, 2) motivated to improve, 3) provided with feedback, and 4) provided with ample opportunities for repetition and gradual refinements of their performance. Deliberate efforts to improve one’s performance beyond its current level demands full concentration and often requires problem-solving and better methods of performing the tasks.”

K. Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview,” Academic Emergency Medicine 15 (2008): 991

Not the role motivation plays in Ericsson’s model. In addition, clearly defining goals and providing feedback are essential to deliberate practice. We will explore the fourth point in detail in a moment. But for now it is worthwhile to emphasize the word “deliberate” here. To do something deliberately is to do so with purpose or intent. Moving students away from rote or empty practice to practice that engages their understanding of the “why” of the exercise is essential to growth.

In an earlier article on deliberate practice, I used the analogy of weightlifting. In order to achieve hypertrophy, or muscle growth, weightlifters talk about making a mind-muscle connection. This has become an area of growing research (see J. Calatayud, J. Vinstrup, M. D. Jakobsen, et al. “Importance of Mind-muscle Connection during Progressive Resistance Training,” Eur J Appl Physiol 116 (2016): 527-533 and the extensive bibliography therein). For our purposes, the mind-muscle connection pertains to productive, effortful learning. Enabling our students to connect their intentional mind with their learning mind, in a manner of speaking, is a meta-cognitive goal we should strive for in our classrooms.

The second type of practice essential to achieving the kind of intensity that enables flow is retrieval practice. The book Make It Stick breaks retrieval practice into three components. First, there is spaced practice, or the spreading out of practice over time. “The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory” (49). It is better to allow a “little forgetting” to set in rather than massing practice in one session. It gives the feeling that learning has occurred, but the knowledge was simply placed into short-term memory.

Second, there is interleaved practice, or the randomization of skillsets such that the learner moves from skill to skill or subject to subject. This breaks up learning sessions. This process feels slow and can be confusing to students at first. However, it promotes long-term retention (50). So instead of grouping all addition problems followed by all subtraction problems, you would randomize the set so that you do a few addition then a few subtraction, and go back and forth.

Closely related to this is varied practice or mixing together different skillsets or subjects. Varied practice or variable training is more challenging than massed practice because it utilizes more centers in the brain, which leads to more cognitive flexibility (51-52). Consider a humanities class that reads short sections of literature alongside a philosophy book, with a smattering of poetry and scripture thrown in. Mixing subjects in this way highlights the uniqueness of the concept, forcing the learner to make associations drawing upon different parts of the brain.

Practical Steps

Getting students to a state of flow requires an accumulation of skill as well as a sufficient level of challenge. So it will not be every day that a flow state is achieved. However there are some practical steps you can take that will set your class on the path toward flow. Here are a few items to consider.

First, inspire your students early and often. Intrinsic motivation is such a key component that we should be demonstrating regularly the magnificence and wonder of the subjects we teach. You can do this by drawing upon your own sense of the intrinsic value of the concepts and ideas you are teaching. You can also have your students share what they find valuable or interesting or surprising.

Second, on the analogy of the weightlifters who prime their workouts by making a mind-muscle connection, we need to help our students prime their minds for the intensity of deliberate and retrieval practice. Because this kind of practice takes energy and intentionality, students cannot simply be given sets of exercises without proper priming. Here are a couple of suggestions to prime students for high performance. Use students’ imagination to visualize high performance. For instance, before beginning practice problems in mathematics, you could ask students, “How would a mathematician think about this problem?” This kind of imaginative priming has them take on the character of a high performer in math.

Another strategy to prime students for mental intensity is through nostalgic recollection, or remembering previous high performance. Whereas the previous strategy visualizes future high performance, this exercise primes students for mental intensity by recalling some previous experience they had of high performance. Taking mathematics as the example again, a student can draw upon any memory of high performance – in a sport, musical instrument or other academic subject – to get into the mindset of active engagement with their work.

Third, we need to place before our students what has been called “worthy work.” If in retrieval practice we are turning away from massed practice, in worthy work, we are turning away from empty repetition. Charlotte Mason describes the depths and heights of what we are striving toward:

“What we desire is the still progress of growth that comes of root striking downwards and fruit urging upwards. And this progress in character and conduct is not attained through conditions of environment or influence but only through the growth of ideas, received with conscious intellectual effort.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 297.

If we are placing in front of our students materials that have proper depth to them or reveal the heights of the heavens, the “conscious intellectual effort” becomes the fitting disposition of the student. If the work is worthy, there is so much more scope to find intrinsic motivation.

The post Finding Flow through Effort: Intensity as the Key to Academic Success appeared first on .

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 .