In this series we’ve been finding arguments for a classical education from the unlikely realm of positive psychology, particularly Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s classic Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. After connecting the concept of flow with Aristotle’s link between virtue or excellence and eudaimonia (happiness or flourishing), we’ve been racing through aspects of the liberal arts tradition, in a sort of running commentary on Csikszentmihalyi’s chapter, entitled The Flow of Thought.
I’ve already treated science briefly under the heading “The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games.” That’s because the quadrivium, or four mathematical arts, included not only arithmetic and geometry, but also music and astronomy. The quadrivium art of astronomy was the STEM of the ancient and medieval world, focused on developing the skills of tracking, charting and calculating the heavenly bodies and applying such knowledge to the travel technologies of the day.
But science itself as an enterprise is worthy of being treated more fully, as our psychologist does in a subsection entitled “The Delights of Science” (134-138). His main object is to restore science to its rightful place as a potential flow activity for his readers. Just as we could become amateur historians as a more joyful way of structuring our leisure time and finding meaning in life than watching TV, so for Csikszentmihalyi there’s no reason why we couldn’t become amateur scientists, even if we don’t have “extravagantly equipped laboratories, huge budgets, and large teams of investigators” (134).
As important as this contention is in a day when the professionalization of ‘big science’ and the utilitarian cowing to STEM jobs crowds out the love of science, I think we classical educators can take it one step further. It’s not just the love of science that needs to be restored; there’s also an older, more Christian conception of science as philosophy, or the love of wisdom, that needs to be rediscovered if we’re going to recapture the joy of science for ourselves and our students.
The Love of Science
But first let’s rehearse our psychologist’s encomium on the love of science. The first step in recovering the love of science is to strip away the sense of impersonal system hanging about it. One of the reasons we tend to discount the idea of being an amateur scientist—engaging in the work of science simply for the love of it (amateur coming from the Latin word for ‘love)—is because of science being conceived as an impersonal system for determining objective truth.
In fact, the problem may be the result of our textbooks which too often present accepted knowledge and theories without any of the story or narrative of their discovery. But even in our day and age it’s not the impersonal system of science that makes discoveries, it’s individual scientists, often working in teams to be sure, but not always. As our psychologist emphasizes:
“It is not true, despite what the advocates of technocracy would like us to believe, that breakthroughs in science arise exclusively from teams in which each researcher is trained in a very narrow field, and where the most sophisticated state-of-the-art equipment is available to test out new ideas…. New discoveries still come to people as they did to Democritus, sitting lost in thought in the market square of his city. They come to people who so enjoy playing with ideas that eventually they stray beyond the limits of what is known, and find themselves exploring an uncharted territory.” (134)
This is an important point to make because one of the natural joys of the scientist is the possible discovery of some new or striking truth about the created order. If our schoolbooks present scientific information without the stories of discovery, the flow experience of Democritus, “lost in thought,” is left out and the life of exciting exploration of the natural world remains unsung.
Practically oriented parents may push their children into science careers because of the hope of steady lucrative gain, but there’s a reason why many teenagers opt for the arts (even if the winner-take-all environment contains little hope of a sustainable career). The arts wear their enjoyment on their sleeve!
What may be surprising to us, in our technocratic world, but would not be, if we attended more to the history of science, is that the scientist can just as easily attain flow: “Even the pursuit of ‘normal’ (as opposed to ‘revolutionary’ or creative) science would be next to impossible if it did not provide enjoyment to the scientist” (134). You’ll remember that one of the requirements of getting into flow is the presence of “rules that limit both the nature of acceptable solutions and the steps by which they are obtained” (135). Well, Csikszentmihalyi quotes from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to illustrate how scientific research meets this standard:
“By focusing attention upon a small range of relatively esoteric problems, the paradigm [or theoretical approach] forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable…. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skillful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well…. The fascination of the normal research paradigm… [is that] though its outcome can be anticipated the way to achieve that outcome remains very much in doubt. The man who succeeds proves himself an expert puzzle-solver, and the challenge of the puzzle is an important part of what usually drives him on.” (as qtd on 134-135)
This passage makes me think of how Ravi Jain has advocated for a pedagogy of puzzle, proof and play in mathematics. Apparently the same should apply to the early training of research scientists.
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Amateur Scientists
If we are inclined to doubt Kuhn’s description, our psychologist marshals the testimony of scientists themselves to confirm the point:
“It is no wonder that scientists often feel like P. A. M. Dirac, the physicist who described the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s by saying, ‘It was a game, a very interesting game one could play.’” (135)
If that weren’t enough, the sheer number of revolutionary scientists who were technically amateurs is truly astonishing: “It is important to realize that for centuries great scientists did their work as a hobby, because they were fascinated with the methods they had invented, rather than because they had jobs to do and fat government grants to spend” (136).
For instance,
- “Nicolaus Copernicus perfected his epochal description of planetary motions while he was a canon at the cathedral of Frauenburg, in Poland. Astronomical work certainly didn’t help his career in the Church, and for much of his life the main rewards he had were aesthetic, derived from the simple beauty of his system compared to the more cumbersome Ptolemaic model.” (136)
- “Galileo had been trained in medicine, and what drove him into increasingly dangerous experimentation was the delight he took in figuring out such things as the location of the center of gravity of various solid objects.” (136)
- Because the university of Cambridge was closed during the spread of a plague, “Newton had to spend two years in the safety and boredom of a country retreat, and he filled the time playing with his ideas about a universal theory of gravitation.” (137)
- “Luigi Galvani, who did the basic research on how muscles and nerves conduct electricity, which in turn led to the invention of the electric battery, was a practicing physician until the end of his life. Gregor Mendel was another clergyman, and his experiments that set the foundations of genetics were the results of a gardening hobby.” (137)
- “Einstein wrote his most influential papers while working as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. These and the many other great scientists one could easily mention were not handicapped in their thinking because they were not ‘professionals’ in their field, recognized figures with sources of legitimate support. They simply did what they enjoyed doing.” (137)
Notice the words our psychologist employs to describe these scientists’ experience and motivation: aesthetic, beauty, delight, playing with ideas, hobby, enjoyed. It may be that our utilitarian pushing of science is backfiring by flooding the market with more scientists, to be sure, but fewer true researchers. Perhaps what we need in science, ironically, is fewer professionals, and more amateurs.
Loving Science in School
While our psychologist’s main goal may be to inspire modern adults to rekindle their love of science through leisure time study and experimentation, we could also apply these insights to science education in our schools. For example, recovering the love of science for our students might entail more attention to the story of scientific discovery. In The Liberal Arts Tradition, 2nd edition,Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain envision science classes “tracing the developments of a scientific idea through various new observations, mathematical innovations, and philosophical or theological convictions” (124). In this way science “recovers a kind of story or narrative—not a purely literary narrative, but a technical narrative” (125).
They are not the first to suggest a return to the narrative of science. Charlotte Mason in the early 20th century had already advocated for a “literary narrative” even if she did not go as far as Clark and Jain in advocating for the technical side of things:
“Books dealing with science as with history, say, should be of a literary character, and we should probably be more scientific as a people if we scrapped all the text-books which swell publishers’ lists and nearly all the chalk expended so freely on our blackboards. The French mind has appreciated the fact that the approach to science as to other subjects should be more or less literary, that the principles which underlie science are at the same time so simple, so profound and so far-reaching that the due setting forth of these provokes what is almost an emotional response; these principles are therefore meet subjects for literary treatment….” (Toward a Philosophy of Education, 218-219)
For Charlotte Mason the commitment to “literary” books, what she elsewhere called “living books” came out of her conviction that the mind naturally responds with attention to beautiful, vigorous writing. Of course, if literary science books told the story of science, it would also be easier for students to be asked to narrate in science class. But we should also notice that Charlotte Mason doesn’t just want the story to be told without students understanding the principles. In fact, it is the “due setting forth” of scientific principles which “provokes what is almost an emotional response.”
But this literary and technical narrative of science should not crowd out the place for wonder, for laboratory and for hands-on discovery, especially early in a child’s development. Charlotte Mason also advocated for nature studies, in which “children keep a dated record of what they see in their nature note-books” while going on a “nature-walk” one afternoon a week (School Education, 236-237). Her goal was to train children in the love of nature and the skill of “interested observation.”
An important side benefit of a joy-centered approach to science instruction is to open up to non-professional scientists (likely the majority of our students) the possibility of ongoing amateur scientific investigation. As our psychologist observes, “If flow, rather than success and recognition, is the measure by which to judge its value, science can contribute immensely to the quality of life” (138). Their science education should train our students for a life-long love of science, just as much as it prepares our future scientists for college.
Science as the Love of Wisdom
However, merely rediscovering the joy in science, as if it were only a fruitful hobby, doesn’t get us all the way to a fully orbed, Christian, classical vision of science. Instead, the tradition viewed natural science as one branch of philosophy, the culmination of years of training in the liberal arts.
Now by ‘philosophy’ we don’t mean just the ivory tower study of obscure points, like whether or not we can actually know that we exist; based on the Greek roots a philosopher is a ‘lover of wisdom’. Wisdom encompasses not just the realm of metaphysical ideas, above most of our heads, but also the realm of humanity and the realm of nature; natural philosophy is what science was once called. In fact, science, which is from the Latin for ‘knowledge,’ and ‘philosophy,’ were once virtual synonyms. As Clark and Jain point out, “not until the turn of the twentieth century did the term ‘scientist’ begin to entirely replace the term ‘natural philosopher’” (The Liberal Arts Tradition, 2nd ed., 108).
Charlotte Mason gestured toward a recovery of this ancient three-fold division of philosophy in her final volume Towards a Philosophy of Education when she structured her treatment of the curriculum under the headings: Knowledge of God, Knowledge of Man, and Knowledge of the Universe. As the tradition would have called it, scientia divina, scientia moralis, and scientia naturalis.
To give you an example of how important it is for us as Christians to recapture this idea of wisdom including natural science, think for a moment of the wisest king in Israel’s history: King Solomon. When God came to him in a dream and offered him anything he wanted, long life, riches, victory over his enemies, he asked instead for wisdom:
“29 And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore, 30 so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt. 31 For he was wiser than all other men, wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol, and his fame was in all the surrounding nations. 32 He also spoke 3,000 proverbs, and his songs were 1,005. 33 He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish. 34 And people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and from all the kings of the earth, who had heard of his wisdom.” (1 Kings 4:29-34 ESV)
Notice! Solomon’s wisdom included the humanities, proverbs and songs, but also the knowledge of trees and animals, birds, reptiles and fish. King Solomon was a scientist! He spent his free time in the flow of scientific investigation and discovery. He was wise in the ways of science.
As Christian, classical educators we need to affirm the BOTH/AND of the classical tradition, rather than the EITHER/OR our thinking often gets stuck in. We want our students to be philosophers, wise in matters natural, human and divine, by God’s grace. Too often we get stuck in labelling ourselves and our students math and science people, or humanities people: jocks, nerds or drama queens.
Perhaps this common problem illustrates more than anything I have said so far the importance of recovering a love of science as wisdom for our students. Wisdom is holistic and humans are too. While it is not wrong to have expertise, especially in our complex world, that should not come at the expense of being well rounded.
We could all love and enjoy science a little bit more. Perhaps seeing it as God-given wisdom will send us on our own personal journey of recovering a love of science for ourselves and our children.
New Book! The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow Through Classical Education
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Previous articles in this series, The Flow of Thought:
Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake; Part 2: The Joy of Memory; Part 3: Narration as Flow; Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games; Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians.
Final installments: Part 8, Restoring the School of Philosophers, Part 9, The Lifelong Love of Learning.