Tag: liberal arts

academy

Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World

In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, Cal Newport argues against the well-known Passion Hypothesis of career happiness. He describes the Passion Hypothesis as the idea that “the key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion” (4). It is well summed up by the ever-present, popular advice to “follow your dreams.” As Steve Jobs said in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, “You’ve got to find what you love….[T]he only way to

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On Deep Reading

In an age of misleading news articles, vicious discourse, and exponential ignorance, it is a curious fact that the skill of reading continues to take the backseat to other “practical” areas of study. Society, it seems, would rather have students master Microsoft Excel or how to program computers than they would become lectiophiles. Reading is discarded as an antiquated art, a skill for a bygone area, whose value is akin to a penny: sentimentalized yet basically obsolete. At the same time, no one explicitly endorses the excision of reading from the curriculum as they would the penny from U.S. currency.

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Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 3: Crafting Lessons in Artistry

In the previous two articles in this series exploring Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, I laid out a fivefold division of the arts and a teaching method for training in artistry. My guiding hypothesis is that rethinking education through the Aristotelian paradigm of intellectual virtues will combat some of the typical problems of modern education. Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives misses the traditional nature of the arts in its abstract goals in the “cognitive domain.” It also obscures the beauty of how Aristotle’s virtue of techne, which I define as ‘artistry’ or ‘craftsmanship,’ involves the head, heart and body in a holistic

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Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 2: A Pedagogy of Craft

In my previous article in this series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, I discussed the general nature of artistry or craftsmanship under the heading of apprenticeship. Aristotle’s virtue of techne, often translated ‘art’, points to our human capacity to make things, to produce things in the world. Words like ‘artistry’ or ‘craftsmanship’ help to convey in English the focus on a person’s trained ability to produce something. We noted that such abilities are trained through an apprenticeship process, rather than a simple knowledge-transfer approach. If a person desires to cultivate their ability to sing or paint beautifully, they rarely do so

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Expanding Narration’s History in the late Middle Ages: Bernard of Chartres from John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon

This is the third blog article expanding the short history of narration I laid out a year ago. In the last two I expanded my treatment of John Amos Comenius to engage in detail with the passages from The Great Didactic and the Analytical Didactic that recommend activities that Charlotte Mason would have called narration. As I have searched for teaching practices in the classical tradition, I have tried to be fairly precise in what would qualify as “narration”. In my book A Classical Guide to Narration I defined “narration” as a long-form imitative response to content that a teacher

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Educating to Transform Society: The Washington-DuBois Debate

The year was 1895. Two momentous events occurred that year that would lead to a heated rivalry between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois. The first event was the death of Frederick Douglass on February 20th of that year. He was the leading black figure of the time, speaking and writing with a level of rhetorical polish that revealed a great mind. Douglass was a towering figure in the social and political environment during the close of the 19th century. As such, his death called forth a new voice that would champion the cause of black suffrage. The

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The Human Brain and the Liberal Arts

For some Christians, brain science and talk of “caring for your brain” can be uncomfortable. It smacks of a physicalist conception of reality in which all we are is our physical bodies. As Christians, we believe in the reality of the soul and a transcendent immaterial world. To focus myopically on the brain may cause us to lose sight of the spiritual aspect of what it means to be human and the hope we have for eternal life. Moreover, some Christians fear, utilizing brain science to boost cognitive performance through strengthening the brain sounds like a mad scientist’s version of

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Liberal Arts and the Transmission of Culture

In classical circles, we speak often about the importance of the liberal arts, over and against mere career-readiness skills, but we do not always elaborate. The reality is that career-readiness skills–skills like analyzing data, applying information technology, preparing for an interview, and completing tasks efficiently–are immensely helpful. The problem is not their usefulness, but their limitations. Career-readiness skills fail to lead students outside the realm of function and into the world of value and meaning. What our world needs today more than anything is not faster internet or a new task-management system, but better stories injected with purpose. Telling better

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Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued

In my last article we explored the analogy between Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of artistry or craftsmanship (Greek: techne) and moral virtue, taking our cue from the Nicomachean Ethics book II. Along the way we discovered the foundation for these two types of excellence in habit development or the neural networks of the brain. Excellence, according to Aristotle, comes by the type of practice or exercise that works along the lines of nature. The modern Copernican revolution of neurobiology confirms this thesis by revealing the role of myelin, a white fatty substance that is wrapped around neural circuits that fire together.

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Insights on Education from the Life of John Adams

This past month I have been reading David McCullough’s biography on John Adams. Adams, as you may recall, was a key leader amongst the colonies throughout their concerted effort to gain independence from British rule. He experienced first hand the benefits of life in the British Empire as well as the eventual challenges. Adams would play a key role in the earliest meetings of the Continental Congress, debating loyalists, those desiring to stay loyal to King George III. Later on, John Adams would participate in the early governmental efforts of the colonies, serving as the first Vice-President and second President

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