Tag: The Liberal Arts Tradition

Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions

The previous two articles have paved the way both for our discussion of Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of techne, artistry or craftsmanship, as well as the intellectual virtue of phronesis, practical wisdom or prudence. In a strict sense, the analogy between artistry and morality is aside from our central argument, which consists in working out the implications of each of Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues as educational goals for school, curriculum, classroom, and pedagogy. The moral virtues are therefore outside the purview of our main purpose, even if they are organically connected to phronesis or practical wisdom. In addition, the moral virtues’

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Bloom's Taxonomy

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

In the first two posts of this series (which I am reviving after a 6 months long hiatus) I proposed replacing Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives with Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. The major flaw in Bloom’s taxonomy, which is a hierarchical categorization of educational goals in the cognitive domain, is that it privileges the bare intellect over the heart, like so much of modern education. Even if Bloom and his university examiner colleagues proposed an affective and psychomotor domain as well, and had the modest goal of improving clarity and communication among teachers, curriculum planners and educational researchers, still they codified

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scientist performing experiment in laboratory

The Problem of Scientism in Conventional Education

Scientism is precisely not a focus on the importance of learning all that we can about the natural world in school. This we applaud, and classical education has a lot to tell us about how we can teach our knowledge about nature, our scientia nātūrālis as the medievals would call it, better than we currently do. Instead, scientism is the trend in the social sciences, like the field of education, to conform to the pattern of the wildly successful hard sciences by proving themselves through data and pure reason alone. If we can prove it through an experiment and logic

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Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition, Part 2: Educating the Whole Person

What has Charlotte Mason to do with classical education? In my first blog in this series, I began exploring this question through a close reading of Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education. In this book, Clark and Jain offer a paradigm for understanding classical education as it exists within the broader liberal arts tradition. According to these thinkers, the purpose of classical education is to cultivate virtue in body, heart, and mind, while nurturing a love for wisdom under the lordship of Jesus Christ. This is a comprehensive purpose statement to

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Socrates in front of the Academy in Athens

The Flow of Thought, Part 8: Restoring the School of Philosophers

In my last article, The Flow of Thought, Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom, I made a case for the value of re-envisioning natural science as philosophy. While science might never come to mind today when philosophy is discussed, this was not always the case. The association of Solomon with the type of wisdom that includes nature lore provides a biblical example. Likewise, the great philosopher Socrates was mocked in his own day by the playwright Aristophanes for having his head in the clouds of speculation about the natural world. Although this claim was untrue—Socrates was almost

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Charlotte Mason and the Liberal Arts Tradition, Part 1: Mapping a Harmony

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” the church father Tertullian skeptically asked. Tertullian was writing at a time in which church leaders were weighing the pros and cons of mining the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition for insights they could utilize in the development of a distinctively Christian philosophy.  Similarly, within the Christian classical school movement, some have asked, “What has Charlotte Mason to do with Dorothy Sayers?” In other words, can the pedagogical insights of the British educator Charlotte Mason be conducive for classical education today? Where is there harmony? Where is there discord? While a full treatment of this

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scientist with chemicals in flasks

The Flow of Thought, Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom

In this series we’ve been finding arguments for a classical education from the unlikely realm of positive psychology, particularly Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s classic Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. After connecting the concept of flow with Aristotle’s link between virtue or excellence and eudaimonia (happiness or flourishing), we’ve been racing through aspects of the liberal arts tradition, in a sort of running commentary on Csikszentmihalyi’s chapter, entitled The Flow of Thought. I’ve already treated science briefly under the heading “The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games.” That’s because the quadrivium, or four mathematical arts, included not only arithmetic and geometry, but

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