In Aristotle’s writings, the philosopher famously articulates four causes, or explanations, for why a thing exists:
- The material cause is the physical “stuff” that makes up a thing’s composition.
- The formal cause is the design, shape, or arrangement of a thing.
- The efficient cause is the agent that brings the thing into existence.
- The final cause is the purpose or end for which the thing exists.
Together these causes serve as the foundation for whatever knowledge we can know about anything that exists.
In this article, I will explore the final cause, or purpose, of teaching. It practically goes without saying that there is great confusion in the world today about what the purpose of education is, broadly speaking, and teaching in particular. What precisely is the teaching act and what is its end goal?
Let us take a modern primer on teaching as an example. Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion series of primers on teaching techniques provide excellent advice for equipping teachers to lead effective, efficient, and dynamic classrooms. From implementing tactics like “Cold Cold” to “Least Invasive Intervention,” new teachers can quickly take charge of their classrooms and provide an environment for inspiring learning to occur.
But the underlying problem with Lemov’s approach is that it fails to provide a satisfactory final cause, or purpose, of teaching. The subtitle for his books continues to point to “putting students on the path to college” as the goal. This objective, though important, is outdated, shortsighted, and paints an incomplete picture of what it means to be human. It is outdated because college is decreasingly the primary target for high school graduates. With the exponential increase in the cost to go to college and the growing attractiveness of trade schools, the traditional college route can no longer be taken for granted as sufficient motivation for PreK-12 education. Second, Lemov’s implicit purpose for teaching is shortsighted because even if college is, or should be, the sole target for high school graduates, it is only preparing them for the next four years. But what about life after that? What about the early years of one’s career? What about marriage and family? What about church membership, community involvement, and civic participation? What about navigating life’s challenges as a son or daughter, uncle or aunt, husband or wife, father or mother? With this wide range of stages and challenges for people to navigate, how can PreK-12 education only focus on college?
This leads to my final point: these techniques, though useful in some respects, paint an incomplete picture of what it means to be human. Not only do they only aim, at best, to prepare students for a four-year phase, the focus on the cognitive domain of a student’s development generates confusion about what it means to be human. To put a sharper point on it, Lemov’s work is not merely a myopic focus on the cognitive domain to the neglect of say, the moral. It is ultimately an economic, or careerist, approach to human development. In our secular world, the focus is on living one’s best life now: on experiencing as much pleasure as possible, accumulating as many possessions as one can, earning as much status as possible, and living with optimal comfort. In this sense, we could just as easily rephrase the Teach Like a Champion subtitles to “putting students on the path to an affluent and comfortable life.”
This is a sorrowful and depressing vision for the good life indeed. God created our students for so much more than to merely pursue a comfortable life. Made in the image of God, humans are created with the unique capacities to reason, to create, to cultivate beauty, and, ultimately, to steward their lives, including the people and duties they are responsible for, with excellence. If our students are to fulfill this vocation, their teachers need to grab hold of a bigger vision for the goal of what they do. They need a final cause, as Aristotle would put it, that is worth true dedication to their craft.
Let us explore, then, some alternative ways to think about the great cause of teaching.
Putting the Puzzle Together
In The Idea of a Christian School (Cascade Books, 2024), Educational leader Tom Stoner argues that education is one of the most powerful influences in our lives. A key reason, writes Stoner, is that education aids a child in her constructed understanding of the world. The formation of this understanding is like putting together a puzzle. Each piece represents a different bit of information children receive, including ideas, emotions, experiences, facts, and knowledge (2). Schooling plays a major role in the assembly of this puzzle.
So it seems that one way dimension of the goal of teaching is to help a child develop a coherent understanding of the world, one in which all the pieces fit together. Note that even with this cognitive focus, the goal is not college; it is human development. In addition, Stoner will go on to demonstrate that behind the scenes of helping a child “put the puzzle pieces together,” lies a particular vision of the good life. The puzzle, when put together, makes a big picture. What is that picture? Drawing from the classical tradition of the ancient Greeks, Stone believes that this picture, or vision, inevitably dictates a school’s priorities, including what teacherse expected to accomplish in the classroom.
In other words, teaching possesses a cognitive aim, helping a child make sense of her world, and a moral one. The moral aim is to help students grasp a particular vision for human flourishing and desire it. In this way, the goal of teaching, we could say, is not only educational, it is formational.
One Goal in Seven Laws
John Milton Gregory, author of The Seven Laws of Teaching, seems to agree. In the opening pages to his book, Gregory puts forward a vision of human flourishing that find its culmination in “the full grown physical, intellectual, and moral manhood, with such intelligence as is necessary to make life useful and happy, and as will fit the soul to go on learning from all the scenes of life and from all the available sources of knowledge” (11). The goal of teaching, for Gregory, is the work of transforming a child into a mature and intelligent human.
Interestingly, however, Gregory does not stop there. In his exposition of the seven laws of teaching, Gregory offers clues for the ways the different elements of the teaching process fit together to achieve this purpose. For example, the first law focuses on knowledge and the importance of the teacher knowing that which she would teach. The second law focuses on the role of learner, a pupil who attends with interest.
If we put all of Gregory’s laws together into a singular formulation of the goal of teaching, it might go something like this: The goal of teaching is to cultivate a student’s growth in wisdom and virtue through the dynamic interrelation of teacher and student as they conjointly pursue knowledge for ever-deepening understanding.
Tried and True
So far in this article, I have examined one primer on teaching, the Teach Like a Champion series. More recently, Daniel Coupland, professor of education at Hillsdale College, published his own primer: Tried and True (Hillsdale College Press, 2022), “a teaching manual of best practices for sound pedagogy.” This book seeks to introduce the fundamentals of teaching for a new teacher through fourteen “imperative statements.”
Interestingly, Coupland himself does not articulate an overarching goal of teaching. He therefore does not align with Lemov on a college-preparation approach, but nor does he offer an alternative. No doubt, in interest of his primer remaining brief and practical akin to Strunk and White’s grammatical primer The Elements of Style, he avoids the philosophical. The result, however, is that the book comes across as overly focused on the cognitive, that is, the head knowledge without the heart (moral and spiritual formation).
To his credit, Coupland does spend a chapter on connecting one’s teaching to the broader purpose of one’s school. His first imperative statement is to “Follow the School’s Mission.” Certainly whatever the goal of teaching is, it is inextricably linked with the purpose of the school in which it occurs. Insofar as the school’s mission does articulate a purpose for what happens in the classroom, this could provide a satisfactory goal for teaching.
Another way the primer points to a broader goal of teaching is Coupland’s seventh imperative, “Plans Lessons Purposefully,” in which he advises teachers to focus on student learning. Here he distinguishes between the nebulous phrase “covering content” and actually teaching it. Coupland encourages teachers to craft objectives for each lesson regarding the knowledge, skill, or experience they are aiming for their students to obtain. This emphasis on the cognitive aspect of teaching is not dissimilar from Gregory’s. The chief difference is that while Gregory goes on to articulate a moral dimension of the goal of teaching, Coupland remains focused on the cognitive.
What Bloom Gets Wrong
Here, of course, I cannot help but think of Jason Barney’s recent work on Bloom’s taxonomy. In Rethinking the Purpose of Education (Educational Renaissance, 2023), Barney offers a critique of Bloom’s organization of the cognitive aims of education and proposes a replacement through retrieval of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. In doing so, Barney helpfully points out that the training of intellectual abilities and skills is at best an incomplete picture of what it means to educate humans.
In Chapter 4 specifically, Barney maps out a correspondence between Bloom’s six objective categories in the cognitive domain with Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues, including the seven liberal arts. After commenting on this correspondence and then offering a restructured approach in which Bloom’s is filtered through Aristotle’s virtues, Barney writes, “In summary, then, Aristotle’s intellectual virtues restore the intellectual virtues of the body and heart, the educational importance of beautiful craftsmanship and skill, as well as the moral wisdom of a life well lived. In addition, the virtue of philosophic wisdom clarifies a new crowning achievement of true education that Bloom’s Taxonomy does not have the resources to grasp” (72).
In this way, through returning to an Aristotelian framework, Barney proposes a profound and deeply human purpose of education, and by extension teaching, that will prepare students for a life, not mere college experience, of flourishing.
Conclusion
In this article, I have explored various ways to think about the final cause, or goal, of teaching. If we are to train teachers well in the craft of teaching, they need to understand the purpose for this craft. While teaching primers are valuable for providing techniques and practices for immediate implementation in the classroom, if they are disconnected from the final cause of teaching, the work will grow stale. In this way, we could say these primers address the material and formal cause of teaching, but do not address the efficient cause (the teacher) or the final cause (the goal). My hope is that through reading this article, you have gained an expanded vision for what this goal could be and the implications teaching possesses for helping students experience a full and flourishing life. In the end, the cause of teaching is not merely final, it is truly great.
