One of the encouraging recent developments in education is the recovery of the classical educational tradition of the liberal arts and sciences amongst Christian classical schools. Of course, we’re already laboring upstream, since to most people the term ‘liberal arts’ simply refers to general studies or the humanities. However, even the Christian classical school movement hasn’t always held on to an important classical distinction, the distinction between an ‘art’ and a ‘science’. As a movement of classical Christian schools, we’ve talked a lot about the liberal arts, especially the trivium, and more recently the quadrivium or mathematical arts. Recent books, like Kevin Clark’s and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition, have been careful to add in the sciences, including natural philosophy or the body of knowledge about the natural world, moral philosophy, or the body of knowledge about human beings, and divine philosophy, or metaphysics.
Of course, we’ve heard Dorothy Sayers call the liberal arts the lost tools of learning, and we’ve tried to apply her insights about how the trivium arts can map on practically to the different stages of a child’s development, and that therefore the arts aren’t exactly subjects in themselves but more like a way of approaching each subject. But in the classical tradition the difference between an ‘art’ and a ‘science’ was a little bit more subtle. A ‘science’ is simple enough because it comes from the Latin word ‘scientia’ meaning knowledge. A science is therefore a body of knowledge that a person might master. The way to master a science is simply to learn or discover all the truth that one can about that area and integrate it so far as possible with everything else one knows. An ‘art’ however is not a body of knowledge but an ability to create or produce something. So, for instance, a person who has mastered the art of architecture, will have the ability to design sound and esthetically pleasing buildings. The person skilled in the art of underwater basket-weaving will be able to weave baskets while submerged under water. An art is about the ability to make something; it is not primarily about knowing truths.
This distinction goes all the way back to Aristotle, when he defined the intellectual virtue of ‘art’ as a “state of capacity to make [something], involving a true course of reasoning” (1140a.31), whereas ‘knowledge’ or ‘science’ is a “state of capacity to demonstrate” (1130b.10). In other words, someone who is skilled in the art of basket-weaving has the ability to weave a basket correctly, based on prior experience and practice and according to the actual nature of the materials and the needs of a basket (“a true course of reasoning”); on the other hand, someone who has knowledge, or has learned a particular subject or ‘science’, is able to show or demonstrate that knowledge, whether through inductive or deductive reasoning. As the late Victorian British educator Charlotte Mason also said, “Whatever a child can tell, that we may be sure he knows, and what he cannot tell, he does not know.” Now Aristotle’s distinction between the intellectual virtues of ‘art’ and ‘science’ became a crucial touchpoint for the classical tradition of the liberal arts and sciences. However, our modern classical revival movement has not always been so clear about this distinction.
In its clearest articulation, then, the seven liberal arts were not ‘subjects’ or bodies of demonstrable knowledge, but instead were highly complex skills that students needed to be trained in over a course of years. Of course, under the general heading of philosophy there was a science for every one of these areas, like the science of grammar, since there was in the tradition a whole body of discovered truth about the grammar of various languages, or about logical reasoning, or about the nature of the rhetorical task. There is a science for every subject. But that was viewed as distinct from training in the art.
Naturally, students of the liberal arts would gain knowledge of all kinds along the way, especially concerning the liberal art they were studying, just as someone learning the art of basket-weaving would learn many things about baskets and how they are woven. However, a student’s ability to demonstrate their knowledge of basket-weaving is a completely different thing from their ability to weave a basket correctly. On the other hand, the liberal arts are a unique case, because the ‘products’ of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric are themselves the communicated products of knowledge, namely reading and interpretation (grammar), discussion and reasoning (dialectic or logic), and spoken or written persuasion (rhetoric). But the distinction still holds between the ability to make and pure knowledge.
How has the classical school movement grown in its understanding of this distinction? If we go back to Dorothy Sayers’s essay on the lost tools of learning, it’s easy to see that this distinction between arts and sciences was important for her. She claims that an important difference between modern and medieval education was the emphasis on ‘subjects’ versus “forging and learning to handle the tools of learning,” by which she means the trivium arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric. As she wrote, “Although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think; they learn everything, except the art of learning.” Doug Wilson, in recovering and applying her essay, has emphasized particularly her mapping of the trivium onto stages of a child’s development, so that the grammar of each subject is emphasized for young students, then the logic or reasoning for older, and eloquent expression of truth about a subject for the oldest.
Then back in 2006 Robert Littlejohn and Chuck Evans wrote Wisdom and Eloquence, in which they argued against a strong emphasis on the trivium as stages of development, based on their analysis of the historical facts of the tradition. They also argued that the tools of learning are not the liberal arts themselves, but are skills like phonetic decoding, reading comprehension, critical thinking, research, public speaking, etc. The liberal arts, both trivium and quadrivium are subjects, not these discrete skills, claimed Littlejohn and Evans.
Now it’s important for us to concede their first point. The classical tradition has taught the trivium in many ways, but before Dorothy Sayers it’s almost impossible to find the idea that the trivium represents stages a child goes through in their development. In the Roman period students went to a grammaticus to learn how to read and write in Greek and their own language Latin. Quintilian, the famous Roman orator and educator, discussed how the equivalent Latin word for the Greek ‘grammatiké’ was ‘litteratura,’ literature, or I might say, literacy, and how among other things the student would learn to read literature and poetry, scan the meter, analyze the meanings of words, read it aloud properly with attention to proper phrasing and accent, and interpret it through all the necessary background information, whether historical, geographical or scientific (see Book 1.4 of Institutes of Oratory). That was training in grammar. After that a student would be sent to a rhetorical teacher like Quintilian to learn to speak publicly in every possible situation that might be needed to bring leadership to the public square. After that, education was done, unless a student wanted to go to Athens and study with the philosophers. That’s a very different picture of trivium education than what we might be used to; it’s not the grammar-logic-rhetoric as stages of development paradigm.
But to answer Robert Littlejohn and Chuck Evan’s last point about the liberal arts being ‘subjects’, we should go on to a more recent book by Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition. In their chapter on the liberal arts they use Thomas Aquinas, who held Aristotle’s distinction close to his heart, in order to explain that the liberal arts are the “tools by which knowledge is fashioned” (33). “An art could be attained from an extensive foundation in action and imitation forming cultivated habits,” say Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain, whereas “a science can be in the mind alone and does not require any practice or the production of anything.” Based on this distinction, from Aristotle to Aquinas and into our own recovery movement, it seems to make most sense to think of the trivium arts as something different than modern ‘subjects’. They are well-worn paths, they are complex imitative habits, they are the tools of learning, they are the skills needed to discover and justify knowledge.
Obviously, if this little review of our movement’s growing understanding of the trivium as arts is true, then it changes how we should view the trivium. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we should throw out our grammar, logic and rhetoric textbooks. But it should radically reorient us on what we think we’re doing when we’re teaching grammar. If ‘grammatiké’ is the ability to read and interpret texts, with all the sub-skills attached to it, like phonetic decoding, background knowledge, reading comprehension, etc., well then, what students need to master grammar in this sense is lots and lots of coached practice; they don’t necessarily need another lecture. They need to read harder and harder texts in all sorts of subject areas. And they need to be actively coached by their teachers in how to do this well, in what needs to be known and understood, in order to interpret this text correctly. And over time with practice, students will become more and more literate, they will become grammarians, skilled readers and interpreters. The same can be said for logic or, I prefer, dialectic, the art of reasoning and discussion. In order to master this art, students need to do lots and lots of discussing, being forced to think carefully about what they have read. They need to learn to argue with one another respectfully, anticipate others’ trains of thought, call out faulty reasoning in themselves and others. Most of all they need accountable practice in discussing important matters at a higher and higher level. Mastering rhetoric, lastly, comes in the ability to speak or write persuasively and knowledgeably about all manner of subjects. It is not the same as learning about the subject of rhetoric, the types, the proper divisions, rhetorical devices and flourishes that can be used, though these are all things it would be great for them to know. But a student could learn the science of rhetoric, be ready to spew forth the definitions of every term, yet be the least persuasive speaker or writer in the world.
Well, this leads me to propose a twofold understanding of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. Each is both an art and a science, both a complex skill of communication and a traditional body of knowledge about that area. So everyone is right, Sayers, Wilson, Littlejohn and Evans, as well as Clark and Jain. This is perhaps easiest to see if I use my absurd outside example: basket-weaving. Imagine two different people who claim to be wise in the art of basket-weaving. One of them knows the whole history of basket-weaving, can name all the important figures, describe key changes in different cultures’ application of basket-weaving, and he himself even has his own particular theories about why basket-weaving developed as it did, but unfortunately, he has never actually woven a basket for himself. The other has never heard of any different way to weave a basket than the way that she was taught by her mother growing up, and yet she weaves baskets daily, that only get better and better, sometimes departing from tradition with bold and innovative designs. The first person is wise in the science of basket-weaving; the second is actually a trained basket-weaver, an artist in her own right. Of course, many artists also know some of the science, and many scientists have a rudimentary practice of the art.
The same can be said of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. There are bodies of knowledge about these arts that one can master. One can become a grammarian, one can study the philosophy of logic, or one can take courses in rhetorical studies at a university. Some amount of study in these sciences can help one to master the arts, just as knowledge of the history and various techniques of basket-weaving is useful to the artist. But someone could be a powerful public speaker without any study of the history of rhetoric, because of a combination of natural talent, imitation and coached practice.
This changes things for us as classical educators because it forces us to ask the question: “Which are we aiming for here?” If you look at many of our textbooks in grammar, logic or rhetoric, you have to admit that the method of the textbook seems to assume that the goal is primarily to teach our students knowledge about these ‘subjects,’ as if that were enough. This is to treat the liberal arts as if they were sciences. Now don’t get me wrong here, a science is a very good thing, and can be helpful, especially if it is fused with appropriate practice. However, the sciences of grammar, logic and rhetoric can be deadening if they are learned in the absence of training in the arts. There’s a reason in the tradition that the liberal arts preceded the sciences. And perhaps I should mention that it’s a particular flaw of the Enlightenment and Modernism that the sciences and being scientific are preferred to anything else. This may be one of the ways that we as classical educators have implicitly fallen prey to modern assumptions about education.
At the same time, we’re not the first classical educators to have fallen prey to this error. For instance, John Locke, the British philosopher, in his work on education, wrote:
“For I have seldom or never observed anyone to get the skill of reasoning well or speaking handsomely by studying those rules which pretend to teach it; and therefore I would have a young gentleman take a view of them in the shortest systems that could be found without dwelling long on the contemplation and study of those formalities.” (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, p. 140)
Locke claims that learning rules won’t make you either an eloquent speaker or a brilliant conversationalist, nor will logical systems of analyzing mode and figure, predicates and predicables, teach a young gentleman to reason well. That requires, he goes on, the imitation of great authors or thinkers and practice reasoning to the truth or speaking publicly. He recommends that young children be asked to narrate stories they have read, from Aesop’s fables say, and to read great orators. It seems that even in Locke’s day the classical practices of the trivium had gotten crystalized into a deadening form, where students learned the science, but not the art. They memorized rules for logic and rhetoric, but couldn’t reason to the truth, let alone speak fluently. As he explains later on,
“There can scarce be a greater defect in a gentleman than not to express himself well either in writing or speaking. But yet, I think, I may ask my reader whether he does not know a great many who live upon their estates and so, with the name, should have the qualities of gentlemen, who cannot so much as tell a story as they should, much less speak clearly and persuasively in any business. This I think not to be so much their fault as the fault of their education.” (141-2)
This is a haunting warning that we should heed well in our movement, in order to be sure that our schools don’t fall prey to this same fault. We might be training young ladies and gentlemen, who can spout off the right answers but do not in fact have the ability to think, speak and write, who have not, in fact, as Dorothy Sayers would say, learned the arts of learning.
Resources
Barnes, Jonathan, ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation,Volume Two. Princeton, 1984.
Clark, Kevin and Ravi Jain. The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education. Classical Academic Press, 2013.
Littlejohn, Robert and Charles Evans. Wisdom and Eloquence: A Christian Paradigm for Classical Learning. Crossway, 2006.
Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education (first published 1693) and Of the Conduct of the Understanding. Hackett, 1996.
Quintilian. Institutes of Oratory. Translated by John Selby Watson (1856), revised and edited by Lee Honeycutt (2007) and Curtis Dozier. Creative Commons, 2015.
Sayers, Dorothy. “The Lost Tools of Learning.” First delivered at Oxford, 1947. Accessed at http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html, June 2018.