Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

One of the major themes in the classical education renewal movement has been to challenge the utilitarianism of modern education. The purpose of education, the argument has gone, is so much broader and more far-reaching than modern educators are making it out to be. It is not merely job training or college preparation, but the formation of flourishing human beings. The cultivation of wisdom and virtue is the purpose of education. There is joy in seeking knowledge for its own sake and as an end in itself. 

Next Article in this Series: “Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s”

An example of this can be found in Leisure the Basis of Culture where Josef Pieper defended the role of leisure as a deeply human and transcendent experience. Leisure, for Pieper, is properly defined as a celebratory and worshipful stepping apart from the workaday world. It looks and feels more like contemplation or the philosophical act. More recently Chris Perrin, founder of Classical Academic press, has drawn from this idea to commend school as schole, returning us to the linguistic history of the word ‘school’ as leisure. 

The point here is that the purpose of education is something grander and wider than we often allow it to be when we focus on the needs and goals of the workaday world. It entails a sort of restful contemplation that does not have in view mere practical considerations. In this account, then, education is about stepping away from the utilitarian world and embracing the transcendence implied in our human nature. As the teacher of Ecclesiastes puts it, God “has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Eccl 3:11 ESV). 

David Hicks too in the classic Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education zeroed in on the crass utilitarian values of a technocratic state. As he pointedly expressed in the prologue:

The modern era cannot be bothered with finding new answers to old questions like: What is man and what are his purposes? Rather, it demands of its schools: How can modern man better get along in this complicated modern world? Getting along — far from suggesting any sort of Socratic self-knowledge or stoical self-restraint — implies the mastery of increasingly sophisticated methods of control over the environment and over others. Man’s lust for power, not truth, feeds modern education. But this fact does not worry the educator. From his point of view, the new question has several advantages over the old, the most notable being that it better suits his scientific problem-solving approach. Like the ancient Sophist, he is out to build his status by proving his usefulness; and like the Sophist, he appears unabashedly confident in the efficacy of his methods, which in a peculiar way bestow on him the power to bestow power.

In doing so Hicks struck a chord similar to C.S. Lewis’ masterful The Abolition of Man which defended traditional values against the modernist aim of creating “men without chests”. In analyzing the Green Book, an unnamed modern textbook, Lewis reveals how its authors, instead of teaching English, teach a questionable philosophy that is suspicious of human values. A modernist preference for so-called “objective facts” has pushed out of consideration–and therefore out of the educational project–human values like beauty and honor. Treating such things as merely personal subjective feelings, they have stripped education of its heart and turned it into a head game. 

This modern fallacy, Lewis said, has colossal implications that pave the way for the totalitarian state to make men of its own choosing. The men at the top of the power structure (the enlightened scientists and government bureaucrats) will inevitably feel the need to use their power to condition men according to their own schemes, since traditional and transcendent values have now become subjective preferences that they can manipulate for their own ends. Lewis closes his short tour-de-force with an appendix demonstrating the trans-cultural nature of certain moral values and principles, developing on his reference to the tao or moral law in his argument. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives

Less than a decade later on the other side of the Atlantic, a committee of American college and university examiners, headed by Benjamin S. Bloom, the University Examiner at the University of Chicago, set out on a project to classify the educational objectives of teachers. While we may not think of Bloom’s taxonomy as participating in this broader modern discussion of the purpose of education, their idea of creating a taxonomy for educational goals inevitably interacts with broader questions of purpose. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Six Categories of Objectives in the Cognitive Domain

1. Knowledge

1.1 Knowledge of Specifics

1.2 Knowledge of Ways and Means of Dealing with Specifics 

1.3 Knowledge of the Universals and Abstractions in a Field

2. Comprehension

2.1 Translation

2.2 Interpretation

2.3 Extrapolation

3. Application
4. Analysis

4.1 Analysis of Elements

4.2 Analysis of Relationships

4.3 Analysis of Organizational Principles

5. Synthesis

5.1 Production of a Unique Communication

5.2 Production of a Plan, or Proposed Set of Operations

5.3 Derivation of a Set of Abstract Relations

6. Evaluation

6.1 Judgments in Terms of Internal Evidence

6.2 Judgments in Terms of External Criteria

Bloom’s taxonomy is virtually ubiquitous in contemporary educational circles. One of my first years teaching at a classical Christian school, a list of all the verbs associated with Bloom’s cognitive domain of educational objectives was handed to me and my colleagues, with the instruction: “Be sure to ask discussion questions and give assignments that involve students in higher order thinking, and not just low level knowledge!” Colorful charts and diagrams of Bloom’s taxonomy abound on the internet, especially on teacher websites. Many reflect the revision published by a group of cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists and instructional researchers in 2001, which renamed and slightly restructured the 6 major objectives of the cognitive domain. 

Bloom’s taxonomy has become one of those fixed touchpoints in contemporary education that simply falls into the assumed architecture of the discipline. Everyone accepts Bloom’s or revised Bloom’s. Everyone implicitly practices Bloom’s methodology when they identify learning objectives, whether for their course, unit plan or an individual lesson. Virtually no one, as best as I can judge, has actually read the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals: Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. Nor has anyone seriously questioned the underlying assumptions on which it is based. 

I began with the lead-in references to Pieper, Lewis and more contemporary classical education advocates, because their critiques have relevance for the educational project of Bloom et al. Arguably their classification of educational objectives suffers from the same modernist privileging of “objective facts” over human values. To be sure, they envisioned a project that embraced educational objectives in three domains: cognitive, affective and psychomotor. In this way, they attempted to signal the importance of the heart and the body, as well as the mind. But the way they construed the affective domain handbook (finally published a decade later) and their sharp divide between these areas ultimately ended up reinforcing the popular neglect of these domains, rather than reviving them. Ultimately, whether or not it was their fault or intention, almost no one uses Bloom’s taxonomy of the affective domain in any significant way, and the psychomotor domain was not even addressed by them, though a few other educators have proposed their own subcategories since.

For all intents and purposes then, Bloom’s taxonomy has privileged the cognitive over the affective and psychomotor; the head is focused on, to the neglect of the heart and the body. This is an outcome we would have expected of a generation of educators bred on curricula like the Green Book that Lewis so eloquently deconstructed in The Abolition of Man. Besides, their vocation as college examiners and their purpose for creating the taxonomy in the first place inevitably privileged the types of goals that could be easily measured on a modern test. Such goals too easily overlook the broader and deeper purposes of education that classical educators have tried to recover.

The outcome of Bloom’s taxonomy, then, was the contemporary privileging of the bare intellect in school settings, even if athletics and arts are still sometimes the dog that wags the tail of specific educational institutions. In his book Desiring the Kingdom James K.A. Smith has traced this modern emphasis on human beings as “thinking things,” primarily cognitive intellects at their best, back to Descartes’ philosophical project in search of objective truth and the Enlightenment as a whole. But rather than simply blaming Bloom and his committee or Descartes and his ilk–educators and philosophers who, after all, may have had the best of intentions–we may simply acknowledge that it is our modern way of thinking about ourselves and education that has poisoned the stew. 

After all, Bloom and his compatriot’s goal was relatively modest. They sought to articulate a taxonomy of generally accepted educational objectives to provide clarity for teachers, curriculum writers and examination writers. The point of the taxonomy was to gain widespread acceptance of a common language, thereby avoiding the vague, ambiguous and equivocal statements of educational objectives that were already in use at the K-12 and collegiate level. So Bloom’s taxonomy merely categorized and standardized the language that was already in use and reflected the popular trickle down of an earlier era’s philosophical trends. 

A Classical Taxonomy of Educational Objectives

The contention of this series is that, as Lewis famously quipped in Mere Christianity, we must go back to go forward. Having taken a wrong track, the quickest way forward is to turn around. Progress sometimes requires regress. 

But backtracking is more effective if one knows where one has gone astray. Otherwise we may find ourselves wandering back aimlessly with simply a regressive spirit that assumes that anything earlier or more traditional is better. We cannot ignore the real educational advances of the modern era. And so a simple tossing aside of Bloom’s Taxonomy will not do either. We must propose some account of the value of the project of classifying educational objectives, even if we reframe the enterprise in different terms. 

To this end I am proposing a return to Aristotle’s classification of Five Intellectual Virtues, as a replacement for Bloom’s six orders of cognitive domain goals. The five intellectual virtues are introduced and explained in their relation to one another in Book VI of the Nichomachean Ethics:

Let us begin, then, from the beginning, and discuss these states once more. Let it be assumed that the states by virtue of which the soul possesses truth by way of affirmation or denial are five in number, i.e. art, knowledge, practical wisdom, philosophic wisdom, comprehension…. (1139b.14ff.)

From The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2 (Princeton: 1984), 1799

In successive articles, I will cite Aristotle’s discussions of each of these intellectual virtues in turn and explain his distinctions between the intellectual virtues and how that initiates a seismic shift in our understanding of the broader purpose of education, as well as our lesson by lesson objectives. However, since Aristotle’s description of the intellectual virtues in Book VI of his Nicomachean Ethics is not as detailed with sub-categorization as Bloom’s Taxonomy, it will need to be developed and re-appropriated in light of contemporary Christian educational concerns, in order to serve as a rival taxonomy. Therefore, this series could properly be called a neo-Aristotelian Christian taxonomy of educational goals, since it represents a Christian development from within the Aristotelian tradition. 

While a fair amount of this project will involve reading and interpreting Aristotle, there will be times where his assumptions and language will have to be challenged or updated, either from broader Christian philosophical considerations, practical educational circumstances, or recent developments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. I will endeavor to signal when and how my proposal differs from Aristotle’s viewpoints, as best as I can understand them. In addition, I must confess to giving a layman’s reading of Aristotle’s ethics, as myself a lover of wisdom but without the specialization to wade into the discipline’s detailed criticism of the whole Aristotelian corpus. When my views differ from the consensus interpretation of Aristotle or there is a major division in schools of thought on an issue pertinent to my proposal, I will alert the reader in a note. 

Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues

1. Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship
   1. Common and domestic arts
   2. Professions and trades
   3. Athletics and sports
   4. Fine and performing arts
   5. The liberal arts of language and number
2. Episteme — (Scientific) Knowledge
   1. Natural
   2. Human
   3. Metaphysical
3. Phronesis — Prudence or practical wisdom
   1. Personal
   2. Household
   3. Managerial and Political
   4. Understanding and Judgment
4. Nous — Intuition or comprehension
   1. Of Universals
   2. Of Particulars
5. Sophia — (Philosophic) Wisdom
   1. Mastery of induction and deduction
   2. Knowledge and intuition combined
      • Natural
      • Human
      • Metaphysical

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of reviving Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues is the light it sheds on the subsequent history of classical education. The curriculum and pedagogy of the liberal arts tradition, as recovered by Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain (and others), appears in a new clarity and radiance, when seen through the magnifying glass of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. 

While it may seem like proposing the “intellectual virtues” of Aristotle hardly solves the issue of privileging the intellect over the heart and body, Aristotle’s concepts contain within them a proper integration of body, heart and head. For instance, techne or artistry often involves clear bodily connections that would qualify under the psychomotor heading of Bloom. In a similar way, phronesis or prudence involves the heart and Aristotle details and explains its specific connection to the moral virtues (which deserve a book of their own). This solves the problem of privileging one over the other better than Bloom’s original scheme, because what we really need is not just an account of educational objectives in each area, as if they were all equivalent and interchangeable, but also a principle for integrating the excellences or virtues that are proper to the different spheres of the human person. 

The task set before us, therefore, begins with analyzing where we have come: the good, the bad and the ugly of Bloom’s taxonomy. Next, it will be necessary to explain in some detail each of Aristotle’s five virtues as an alternate set of educational objectives. Lastly, we will work out what it might look like for our schools, our curriculum and our courses to aim at the intellectual virtues in a modern setting, including what shifts in focus and pedagogy that would entail. Such an endeavor promises to be a bumpy ride, so buckle your seat belts and hang on for this new series on Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues as a classical taxonomy of educational objectives.

Next Article in this Series: “Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s”