We began this series with a proposal to replace Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives with Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues. While Bloom and his fellow university examiners aimed to create clarity in teaching goals through a common language, their taxonomy of cognitive domain objectives may have done more harm than good. In rejecting the traditional paradigm of the liberal arts and sciences, they privileged the bare intellect and isolated acts of the mind as if they were the whole of education. When we compare these bite-sized pieces of “analysis” and “comprehension” to the artistry of grammar and rhetoric, for instance, we
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