There’s a lot of talk these days about the war between STEM and the liberal arts (which we are meant to understand as the humanities generally). Often this gets posed as a trade-off between a utilitarian education—training our future engineers, scientists and programmers—vs. a soft education in human skills and cultural awareness.
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 1st 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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
