artist working

Training in the Arts vs. Teaching Sciences

I have previously written on the classical distinction between an ‘art’ and a ‘science’, but I recently discovered some interesting confirmations of it in Plato and John Milton Gregory (two otherwise widely divergent figures in the history of education). In particular, the chief take-away for teachers is a clearer awareness of when you are focused on training students in an art vs. teaching them a subject.

To summarize the distinction, Aristotle defined the intellectual virtue of ‘art’ as a “state of capacity to make [something], involving a true course of reasoning” (Nichomachean Ethics VI.4, 1140a). The painter makes paintings, the musician creates music, the architect designs buildings. And all of them do so with a reasoned awareness of the constraints of the world and the proper steps necessary to bring what they imagine into being.

On the other hand, the intellectual virtue of ‘science’ or, in common parlance, ‘knowledge’ is “a state of capacity to demonstrate” (Nich. Ethics VI.3 1139b), meaning that in order to know something, someone should be able to prove it or give evidence that it is the case. Experts give evidence in order to prove the truthfulness of certain claims, thereby endeavoring to establish genuine knowledge about their subject.

Perhaps you can see in a glance why this is an incredibly important distinction for educators. Training a child in an art should follow a markedly different process than teaching a child a science! Artistic mastery requires a great deal of coached practice in the art, while knowledge of particular truths in a subject entails research, gathering evidence, careful thought and the weighing of arguments.

The Seven Liberal Arts

Where this comes to a head most of all is in our application of the classical liberal arts in our schools: particularly the trivium arts of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, but also the quadrivium arts of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. While we’ve continued to call them ‘arts’, it is my contention that we’ve been so caught up with modernist privileging of ‘science’ over everything else, that we’ve fallen into error in both our understanding of what these arts are in their essence, but also in our methods of teaching them… or I should say, of training students in them. We’ve treated the liberal arts as if they were sciences, and our students have been the worse for it.

In unpacking and applying this crucial distinction, let’s start first with John Milton Gregory’s distinction of training vs. teaching.

Training vs. Teaching in J M. Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching

At the school where I work we’re going through John Milton Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching as one piece of our faculty training for this year. In rereading it this last June, I came across a passage of his introduction that caught my eye because of its relationship to the classical distinction between an ‘art’ and a ‘science’.

John Milton Gregory divides the whole art of education into two “branches”:

“The one is the art of training; the other the art of teaching. Training is the systematic development and cultivation of the powers of mind and body. Teaching is the systematic inculcation of knowledge.” (p. 10, 2014 Canon Press reprint)

Here it was again articulated in a different form. Where Aristotle’s expression of it held the trappings of a work on personal ethics, and therefore focused on the subjective virtue of an individual, J. M. Gregory was expressing the distinction from the perspective of an educator. Education involves two core parts, we might say, training in the arts (i.e. any of the “powers of mind and body” that produce something in the world) and teaching of knowledge in any particular ‘science’, or subject in which things can be known.

J. M. Gregory goes on to explain the how and why of training in more detail:

“As the child is immature in all its powers, it is the first business of education, as an art, to cultivate those powers, by giving to each power regular exercise in its own proper sphere, till, through exercise and growth, they come to their full strength and skill.” (10)

This expresses well my previous article’s contention for the importance of lots of coached practice. Training students in an art requires giving them “regular exercise” and a long process for the development of “strength and skill.” I hardly need add that recent research on the importance of deliberate practice over the course of thousands of hours is confirming this traditional insight. Highly focused repeated firing of the relevant neural networks is apparently the key to the formation of myelin sheaths around those neurons, so that their firing can occur with high levels of efficiency and accuracy (see The Talent Code, or Talent Is Overrated, or Outliers or any other of the high performance literature drawing from Anders Erikson’s research).

Incidentally, J. M. Gregory also concedes that training is more primary, or that it is, as he says, “the first business of education,” because without the training of a child’s powers, they cannot even grapple with the stuff of knowledge. The arts are a basic human form of culture-making, without which knowledge is not even possible.

In contrast, J. M. Gregory describes teaching as the communication of knowledge, dropping Aristotle’s emphasis on the ability to demonstrate. Modernism and empiricism had effectively undercut Aristotle’s emphasis on deductive logic’s ability to “prove” from universals, and the promise of presenting the “results of modern science” had already come into its own and subtly influenced J. M. Gregory’s view of what it meant to teach knowledge. At least, that’s my explanation of this curious feature of his account, not to mention his decision to write his whole work focused on the rules of teaching and leave the art of training to the side.

Lastly, it is interesting to note how J. M. Gregory claims that these two aspects of education (training vs. teaching) “though separable in thought, are not separable in practice” (11). The fact that he emphasizes this so strongly–though understandable and no doubt correct—just goes to show how far the tradition has come since Plato and Aristotle. In those days the arts were viewed more concretely, almost as professions or trades, rather than academic attainments.

The Arts as Professions in Plato’s Gorgias

Since the Fall of 2018 I have used Plato’s Gorgias with students in my role as a Senior Thesis advisor. The dialogue is a spritely example of Socrates’ witty repartee with a prominent figure, who claims so much for himself. Gorgias was a famous rhetorician with a flowery style, who travelled around Greece taking payment from students to train them in his art.

In the dialogue Socrates forces Gorgias to adopt the shorter method of discourse (i.e. Socrates’ preferred dialectical method) rather than his normal rhetorical speeches, before systematically picking apart what the art of rhetoric really is, and whether Gorgias can really train men in all he claims to. What is interesting to note for our purposes is further confirmation that even before Aristotle articulated the distinction between skill in an ‘art’ and knowledge or ‘science’, it was alive and well in Greek educational culture.

Roman sculpture

Socrates begins by discussing numerous other arts or professions, in order to illuminate what exactly Gorgias claims to be as a rhetorician. Throughout the dialogue he brings up the art of a weaver, a physician, a trainer, a business owner, an arithmetician, and a geometer, among other professions. Of course, he also mentions the art of dialectic that he himself engages in, and discusses at length the nature of Gorgias’ art of rhetoric. When Gorgias’ defines rhetoric as the art of discourse, Socrates makes the point that other arts deal with discourse as well. For instance, the physician discourses with the sick about the remedies for their condition, and the arithmetician about odd and even numbers.

In a way, Plato’s Gorgias foreshadows the later idea of the liberal arts, which would include arithmetic, geometry, dialectic and rhetoric. They are distinguished from other arts by how they use discourse in words or numbers to create their product. Unlike the products of a weaver or sculptor, a trainer or physician, their product itself is the discourse of words and numbers now present in the world. That product could be the ephemeral spoken address of an orator, or the record of it later written down; it could be the mental calculations of an arithmetician or the recorded transactions in a business ledger.

The dialogue is also interesting for how Socrates’ chief critique of Gorgias’ art of rhetoric turns on Gorgias’ claim to being able to persuade anyone of anything regardless of his lack of knowledge or expertise in that area. For example, Gorgias claims that his brother, a physician, could not get a certain patient to take his medicine, until he came along and pleaded with him. Socrates seems to almost be objecting to the art of rhetoric’s ability to persuade others of beliefs without “inculcating knowledge” or “teaching” them anything. For this reason, Socrates thinks the art of rhetoric is suspect because it can be used to convince people of false ideas just as well as true.

In other words, Socrates thinks training students in the art of rhetoric without teaching them true knowledge in the sciences leaves the world ripe for manipulation. For Socrates rhetoric is a manipulative technique like cookery (which doesn’t make food nutritious) or cosmetics (which doesn’t produce real health and beauty). All this would certainly support J. M. Gregory’s claim that training and teaching cannot (or should not) be divorced in practice, even if it is useful to distinguish between them in principle.

Two Errors in Training vs. Teaching

While I am inclined to think that our chief error today is aiming to teach students abstract knowledge and rules about the liberal arts, rather than affording them enough coached practice to develop proficiency, Plato’s Gorgias provides a unique and powerful check on the other side. Neglecting the teaching of genuine knowledge can be just as deadly an error.

Scylla and Charybdis in the Odyssey

We might conceive of these as classical education’s Scylla and Charybdis. On the one side is the perilous rocks of focusing so much on knowledge acquisition and testing, that students lose all active agency in their learning and come out of their rhetoric classes with a host of memorized figures of speech and rules, but no facility or confidence in speaking or writing. On the other side, is the vortex of Charybdis, where the powerful currents of worldliness draw in students whose training has given them the ability to manipulate others, regardless of truth or goodness.

Perhaps there are some debate programs, or classical schools, that so focus on mastery of rules and practice, without the heart of knowledge, that this is a live option worthy of fear. But again, my hunch is that most of our modern schools are so focused on the task of learning about rhetoric that our students left without much practice in learning how to speak, to stick with one example.

How do you keep the balance of training vs. teaching? Let us know in the comments and share this article with a friend if you found it helpful!

Check out more recent articles related to training in the arts!

Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship

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

Apprenticeship in the Arts: Traditions and Divisions

4 comments

  1. Thank you for this. I have often pondered the difference between these two ideas. It seems like the Apostle Paul might be getting at this in Titus 2 in his instructions concerning women. He lays out a responsibility for older women to teach the good (2:3- kaladidaskalos) to younger women and to train them in virtue/temperance (2:4-sophronizo) in the practical applications of it. This particular construction of words doesn’t have any direct parallels in the NT, but it does seem to be drawing from the virtue ideals of the Greek world. I first started thinking about this because Homer idealizes Penelope as a keeper of the home. Could Paul be condemning the Cretans with the words of their own prophets, while he commends an ideal from their own poets? Thanks for contributing to my musings.

    1. Teren, great scriptural parallel! I’d never noticed that before in Titus. I’ve come to think that the distinction between training and teaching transcends Aristotle, resonating in the lifeworld and common insight of humanity. For anyone who has experienced it, training someone else in a habit or skill is so manifestly different from communicating knowledge, that it’s almost impossible for a culture not to recognize it linguistically. That doesn’t mean that we can’t break the principles in practice, though, and perhaps especially in modern scientistic and technocratic world. Thanks for commenting!

  2. I appreciate this sentiment. One of the things I appreciate about using a program like The Lost Tools of Writing is that it emphasizes practicing rhetoric, whereas a rhetoric textbook will give students lots of information *about* rhetoric while having few, if any, actual exercises designed to practice the art.

    I think history is another discipline we treat as a science to our peril, but that’s a discussion for another day!

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