When Bloom’s Gets Ugly: Cutting the Heart out of Education

In my previous article I endeavored to break down the bad of Bloom’s taxonomy by showing its extreme focus on objectivity and measurability. In essence, Bloom’s taxonomy was an effort to model testing in education on the taxonomies of the hard sciences. This led Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues to overreach in their attempt to create clarity and precision for educators in their course goals or objectives. 

Also, instead of looking at the purpose of education holistically and accepting a tradition of values, they aimed at neutrality in their framework to make it widely acceptable to educators with different philosophies. This tactic worked successfully, ushering in the wide adoption of Bloom’s taxonomy in the world of education. However, they had to use teachers’ own terminology for their goals, simply sharpened up a bit to be more precise. In so doing they capitulated to a lowest-common denominator view of the human mind and of education itself. 

While I already laid out the philosophical problems with this approach in the last article, I have not yet shown exactly how this gets ugly in real life. I alluded to the grade-focused anxiety or disengagement of many students. But there is more to it than that. What goes wrong in schools, when Bloom’s Taxonomy is built into the architecture of education? 

The answer to that question is simple, if controversial. When Bloom’s Taxonomy is fully embraced and practiced in an educational setting, the beating heart of education gets cut out. 

By this (rather dramatic) statement, I mean at least two things. The first is a reaffirmation of C.S. Lewis’s core argument in The Abolition of Man: that training “men without chests” devolves ultimately into propaganda. The second is a more subtle claim about human beings as agents and producers, and not just knowers, for which I will rely on Mortimer Adler’s Aristotle for Everyone. 

Earlier Articles in This Series:

Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s

Breaking Down the Bad of Bloom’s: The False Objectivity of Education as a Modern Social Science

The Ugly of Bloom’s, Point 1: Bloated Heads and Shrivelled Chests

I have already referred to the argument of C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man in the introduction to this series. And while Bloom and his colleagues do not seem to be as obsessed with debunking traditional values as the authors of Lewis’ unnamed Green Book, nevertheless their neglect of the heart comes under the same sharp knife of Lewis’ critique. It is all the more ironic that Lewis’ short treatise predates Bloom’s by just about a decade, since it almost seems as if it was written to challenge their project as much as the English text book he quotes from.

At the climax of his first chapter, Lewis draws from Plato’s Republic to draw attention to the holistic nature of human beings as rational, emotional and animal. The kicker for our purposes is not just that human beings also need education of their “affective domain”, as Bloom would put it, but that the interrelationships between these elements of human nature must be educated or trained. As he explains,

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. 

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Deckle Edge, 2015), 24

The problems of life often pose themselves as a proper ordering of intellect, emotions or sentiment, and bodily desires or instincts. Where Bloom’s project is endorsed, even with completed affective and psychomotor domains, there is no principle of integration, no overarching purpose or set of values to govern the relationships between cold logic, hot feeling and bodily pains and pleasures. Lewis goes on, drawing from his classical sources,

We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment — these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

If Lewis had been directly critiquing Bloom’s Taxonomy, he likely would have said, “It would have been better if you had begun with the affective domain, and left the others to take care of themselves.” In fact, this is precisely the focus of Plato in the Republic as well as his Laws, where he emphasized the importance of music and gymnastic training in songs, dances, and poems, that are good and worthy of imitation from a moral perspective (see Patrick’s recent article on Human Development, the section on Plato). This is the core of primary education. 

Now we may believe with Charlotte Mason that since children too are persons, their intellects are also capable of proper education at the earliest levels. But that is aside the point of this present issue. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy aims only at the head or bare intellect with its abstract abilities of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. It is true that “application” and “evaluation” at least seem promising as education for life and not just academics. But when we read their explanation of “evaluation” as an educational objective, our hopes are soundly dashed and the spirit of the Green Book comes through:

Evaluation is defined as the making of judgments about the value, for some purpose, of ideas, works, solutions, methods, material, etc. It involves the use of criteria as well as standards for appraising the extent to which particulars are accurate, effective, economical, or satisfying. The judgments may be either quantitative or qualitative, and the criteria may be either those determined by the student or those which are given to him….

Man is apparently so constituted that he cannot refrain from evaluating, judging, appraising, or valuing almost everything which comes within his purview. Much of this evaluating is highly egocentric in that the individual judges things as they relate to himself. Thus, ideas and objects which are useful to him may be evaluated highly, while objects which are less useful to him (but which may be extremely useful to others) are evaluated less highly. 

Bloom et al., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, 185.

Man’s judgments, values, and evaluations are, in the main, dismissed as “highly egocentric” (Do I hear the shadowy ghost of Christian charity calling out in the background in spite of Bloom’s goal of neutrality?), but no solution is given other than training of the bare intellect: students should be taught to evaluate poems and data based on both internal and external criteria. As with many cases, this sort of intellectual solution may sound good in theory, but it is woefully ineffective in practice. 

Lewis explains why near the close of his first chapter:

The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Deckle Edge, 2015), 25.

The proper work of the intellect itself relies on “trained sentiment” and cannot ultimately do without it. As the Greek tradition discovered, it is philosophy, the “love of wisdom”, and not mere wisdom, as the Sophists so arrogantly claimed for themselves, that characterizes the truly educated person. The holistic education of the whole human person requires not just training every part, but the proper ordering of a person’s loves, thoughts and actions. 

But how does this dilemma practically affect teachers today, who have been born and bred in Bloom’s? That question can be answered by an illustration from Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0 in a section on lesson objectives. Notice how Lemov goes one step further than Bloom’s Taxonomy technically did, to rule out “affective domain” objectives altogether:

Setting measurable lesson objectives disciplines you in other ways. For example, it forces you to think through key assumptions. If your goal is to have students know something or understand something or think something, how will you know they have reached it? Thoughts are not measurable unless they are described or applied. Do your lessons rely on a balance of methods for describing and applying understanding?

If your goal is to have students feel, think, or believe something, how appropriate is that? Is it sufficient to read and understand poetry without enjoying, appreciating, or loving it? Are students accountable for accepting the judgments and tastes of others—or for learning skills that can help them make up their own minds? 

I am a pretty fair case study of this. Although I have a master’s degree in English literature, I do not enjoy reading poetry. In fact, I usually find it almost unreadable. I’m sorry to say (to all my fantastic professors and teachers) that I have almost never achieved the objective of loving a poem. Nevertheless, having learned to analyze and sustain arguments about poetry, and having had to critique those of others, has helped me to become a more effective thinker and writer and, occasionally (I hope), a more insightful person. So, in the end, I am truly glad to have studied and read poems in my literature classes. My point is that my best teachers held themselves accountable for what they could control (the quality of my thinking and the sustainability of my arguments), not what they couldn’t (whether I like reading the stuff). Even though their love for the things they taught me was probably their reason for doing the work, passing that love on to me fell into the realm of what they couldn’t control. They eschewed loving poetry as an objective, even if it was their motivation—an irony, to be sure, but a useful one.

Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0, 138-139.

Lemov has an interesting personal anecdote to support his point—one that many of us, I would imagine, can resonate with. It may not be reading poetry, but surely we all have something that we simply did not take to from our education… some skill or activity that we could never develop a taste for. And how often have we wanted something for our students in the feeling, enjoying, believing domain, and failed to reach this objective? Perhaps, we should just give up. Perhaps, simply focusing on “academic” and “intellectual” goals is enough.

But what if Lemov’s experience was ineffective because of improper methods and unhelpful timing? And not because it is impossible to train someone to love reading poetry? What if Lemov had not been introduced to this “love of poetry” later on in high school, college and grad school, through analysis, arguments and critique? But instead what if Lemov had had poetry read to him while sitting on his father’s or mother’s lap? And then gone to a classical grammar school, where good poetry was read aloud by the teacher animatedly and relished by the class daily, without any attempt at critical or literary analysis, or any fear of a grade hanging over his head? What if then he also memorized word-for-word select poems over the course of his early education, and learned to perform them dramatically as recitations amidst a group of excited, warm-hearted students, to the natural satisfaction of an audience’s applause? 

The point seems so obvious that it is hardly worth pressing: the methods we choose must be adapted to the objectives we have in mind, certain means are appropriate for certain ends. And certain educational goals are easiest to attain at particular times in a child’s development. 

The Ugly of Bloom’s, Point 2: Man as Maker and Doer, as well as Knower

You see, the human person cannot be analyzed and dissected into different parts that can then be trained to excellence separately. The harmony of an individual’s life is the ultimate goal of education, and must be attended to all along the way. Proper methods must be suited to proper times in a child’s harmonious development toward virtuous and wise adulthood. 

All this is assumed in the background of a more robust anthropology or understanding of human nature. In his book Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy, Mortimer Adler, the famous advocate of the Great Books and a democratic, moral classical education (though not necessarily Christian) provides the grounding for our second point on human nature. Adler divides his exposition of Aristotle’s thought into three sections on Man as Maker, Doer and Knower. He introduces these three aspects of humanity as “three dimensions” clarifying that they are not fully separate from one another. His explanation of each will be foundational for our later exploration of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, so I will reproduce it in full here:

In the first of these three dimensions, making, we have man the artist or artisan—the producer of all sorts of things: shoes, ships, and houses, books, music, and paintings. It is not just when human beings produce statues or paintings that we should call them artists. That is much too restricted a use of the word art. Anything in the world that is artificial rather than natural is a work of art—something man-made.

In the second of these dimensions, doing, we have man the moral and social being—someone who can do right or wrong, someone who, by what he or she does or does not do, either achieves happiness or fails to achieve it, someone who finds it necessary to associate with other human beings in order to do what, as a human being, he or she feels impelled to do.

In the third dimension, knowing, we have man as learner, acquiring knowledge of all sorts—not only about nature, not only about the society of which human beings are a part, not only about human nature, but also about knowledge itself.

In all three of these dimensions, man is a thinker, but the kind of thinking he does in order to make things differs from the kind of thinking he does in order to act morally and socially. Both kinds of thinking differ from the kind of thinking a human being does in order just to know—to know just for the sake of knowing. 

Mortimer J. Adler, Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1978), 17

In this passage, Adler has outlined for us something very unique about Aristotle’s intellectual virtues: they include each of the three dimensions. The intellectual virtue of art or craftsmanship (Greek: techne) is concerned with man as maker. The intellectual virtue of prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) is concerned with man as a doer, a moral agent. The other three virtues, scientific knowledge (episteme), intuition or perception (nous), and philosophic wisdom (sophia) concern man as knower. One of the central problems with Bloom’s Taxonomy is that man as maker and man as doer are virtually left out, neglected, and despised. The focus is placed on Homo Academicus with the same ugly result that Lewis so eloquently described. 

But more than that, it should be noted that Aristotle’s three dimensions of what it means to be human cut across the divisions of Bloom’s proposed domains (cognitive, affective and psychomotor). Man the Maker is involved intellectually, affectively and bodily in the creation of some new product in the world. Likewise, Man the Doer must think well about potential courses of action, even as his trained affections come into play to help or hinder him as he acts bodily in the world. Finally, Man the Knower must have body trained and heart attuned to the pursuit of wisdom, or else his thought will be unfruitful. In a way, Bloom’s Taxonomy has attempted to separate what God has joined together. 

It is not that it is wrong or impossible to distinguish between head, heart and hands as an intellectual exercise, but we never do actually make, act or know without the cooperation of each of these domains. The disorder, manipulation and motivational failures of modern education are the natural results of isolating school from life. In life we create, and creating has its own natural rewards; we act, and natural and relational consequences in the actual world are the result; knowledge for its own sake is the proper flowering of a life well lived and natural human curiosity. But when Bloom’s tries to put the cart before the horse, it crashes and makes a mess. 

In the next post we’ll explore in more detail what exactly Bloom’s Taxonomy leaves out from an educational program built on Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues. We’ll also explore the ways that Bloom’s objectives in the cognitive domain would interact with the goals of a classical liberal arts curriculum, viewed through an Aristotelean lens. Share your questions and thoughts in the comments!