A Christian Approach to Chinese Classical Education

the six arts embody the Chinese classical tradition. Rites (li 礼) instruct a man in the formal principles of the universe established by Heaven, teaching him proper behavior and etiquette that are in keeping with these principles. It concerns every realm of human life from family to society to politics to religion. Music cultivates him inwardly, ordering his emotions and inspiring virtue. Script teaches language skills while instilling a love for beauty. Calculation trains him in mathematics and natural science, teaching him to think critically about the world around him and the sky above. Archery strengthens him physically while fostering mental acuity and moral resolve. Charioteering trains him in horsemanship, simultaneously sharpening his coordination and agility.

Confucius further enriched six arts education by emphasizing the study of wen (文) or classical literature, which culminates in the Five Classics, consisting of the Book of Poetry , the Book of Documents, the Book(s) of Rites, the Book of Changes, and the Spring and Autumn Annals. Although the Five Classics were sometimes thought to expound on the six arts, even sharing their name, in reality they significantly broadened the scope of six arts education, introducing the study of poetry, politics, social science, history, and metaphysics. Thanks to the tireless promotion of Zhu Xi during the Song Dynasty, four more books were added to the official canon, namely the Analects, the Mencius, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Great Learnin g.

If Chinese classical Christian schools want to redeem the Chinese classical tradition, the six arts and the Confucian classics must hold a central place in the curriculum. Chinese civilization was built around these studies. The emperors, philosophers, poets, and historians of the past who shaped the Chinese psyche all drank from this fount. Chinese Chris- tians cannot understand who they are and who God wants them to be without drinking from the same waters. What might a contemporary Christian curriculum designed around the six arts look like? Only the Chinese church can fully answer that question. I am not Chinese, and my knowledge of Chinese culture and society are very limited. My goal here, therefore, is only to present a general outline and then invite to Chinese Christians to flesh out the details.

Brent Pinkall is a Lecturer of Rhetoric at New Saint Andrews College. He holds an M.A. in Theology and Letters (2017) from New Saint Andrews College and a B.A. in Mass Communications (2010) from Kansas State University. Before joining the faculty at New Saint Andrews, Pinkall taught rhetoric at a classical Christian college in China for more than five years. In addition to rhetoric, he has taught college-level courses in logic, epistemology, history of classical education, classical pedagogy, astronomy, English, and English literature. He has ministered in China for more than twelve years, with a focus on promoting classical Christian education there.

Assessing the Pedagogical Power of Poetry for Poetic Knowledge

by Carrie Eben and Albert Cheng

Those who engage with poetry should be watched carefully because “imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind,” Plato admonishes.1 Regardless of whether or not Plato wished to ban poetry, he recognized its pedagogical power. Poetry massages the soul in a unique way. It creates imitative images with words that allow humans to experience reality through the eyes of another. It enables noumenal perception, a form of unarticulated intuitive knowledge, which James S. Taylor calls poetic knowledge. 2 By virtue of its focus on poetry in particular and musical education in general, classical pedagogy is distinctively situated to cultivate poetic knowledge in students—a claim we make not only for philosophical reasons but based upon our own empirical research.

1 Plato. (1990). The Dialogues of Plato; The Seventh Letter . (M. J. Adler & P. W. Goetz, Eds., B. Jowett & J. Harward, Trans.) (Second Edition, Vol. 6, p. 330). Chicago; Auckland; Geneva; London; Madrid; Manila; Paris; Rome; Seoul; Sydney; Tokyo; Toronto: Robert P. Gwinn; Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

2 James S. Taylor. Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education (Boulder, CO: NetLibrary, Inc., 1999), 6.

Defining Poetic Knowledge

Poetic knowledge, or intuitive knowledge, is not knowledge about poetry, even though interaction with poetry can engender this special kind of intuition. Rather, as Taylor explains, such knowledge emerges from “an encounter with reality that is non-analytical, something that is perceived as beautiful, awful (awefull), spontaneous, mysterious…when the mind, through the sense and emotions, sees in delight, or even in terror, the significance of what is really there.”

3 This kind of sensory-emotional perception is not new. It has merely been buried and lost because of the positivist tradition of the last two centuries. It can be considered “intuitive reason” which is included in the five areas of knowledge articulated by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics : “…art, scientific knowledge, practical wisdom, philosophical wisdom, intuitive reason.”4 Taylor, however, makes plain that the ancients held poetic knowledge sacred and essential for the basis of all learning and moral development.

The early twentieth-century Catholic Thomistic scholar, Jacques Maritain, adds that intuitive knowledge is the act of becoming self-aware and knowing in such a way that is neither scientific nor philosophical. Therefore, poetic knowl -

3 James S. Taylor. Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education , 6.

4 Aristotle, The Works of Aristotle , ed. M. J. Adler and P. W. Goetz, trans. W. D. Ross, 2nd ed., vol. 8 (Chicago; Auckland; Geneva; London; Madrid; Manila; Paris; Rome; Seoul; Sydney; Tokyo; Toronto: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1990), 387

Assessing the Pedagogical Power of Poetry for Poetic Knowledge edge comprises reality perceived through the experience of the beholder, whether it radiates from nature, story, art, or any received encounter with beauty, uniting him with the beheld in love. It is a first knowledge that understands particular givens about the cosmos, the spiritual, and right living. 5 When one discovers something true during a poetic moment, a delicious wave of understanding clears a path where a fog once hung. It is the experience of “Truth’s superb surprise,” as Emily Dickinson penned, or the resulting pleasure of the heart when memories “flash upon that inward eye / which is the bliss of solitude,” as William Wordsworth described.6

Assessing Poetic Knowledge

Yet, if poetic knowledge is unarticulated, how can others outside of the apprehender’s body know of its presence? Can classical school educators, for instance, detect it in their students? Can classical school leaders cogently claim to parents that their pedagogy fosters poetic knowledge? Modern ears more attuned to measurement, data, quantity, and scientific facts might be vexed because poetic knowledge seems difficult to assess. Although the ancient philosophers professed the value of poetic knowledge, as liberal arts advocates do today, how can the unpersuaded become more aware of its full worth for directing students to truth and virtue without empirical evidence? If one cannot measure poetic knowledge,

5 Jacques Maritain and William Sweet. Natural Law: Reflections on Theory and Practice (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001), 18.

6 Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant;” William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely.” how can one verify that educators can even teach it to students, much less discover how it can be taught effectively?

We recently set out to address these questions by conducting an empirical study at a classical Christian school in Northwest Arkansas and found that engagement with poetry affects poetic (intuitive) knowledge of the natural world. Although empiricism is not the only way to know something, it is a way. Consistent with Taylor’s philosophical assertions about poetic knowledge, the findings of our study suggest that poetry, as an experience, integrated with a science curriculum, introduces students to other dimensions of knowledge that are beyond scientific.

We found evidence that students can, to cite an example used by Taylor, come to know a horse not only as “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive” as Bitzer knew in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. 7 Rather, like Bitzer’s classmate Sissy Jupe, whose father took care of horses, students can also come to know horses as something to be loved and cherished through kinship not only with particular horses but also with the poets and immersion in poetic language. While a poem about a horse is not a substitute for an actual experience with a horse, it is an experience in itself which can help students receive another dimension of knowledge about the nature of horses. A poem about a horse can introduce a student to more than disparate facts. It can expose a student to the way a horse smells, runs, neighs, paws the ground, feels under the saddle, or snorts through its soft whiskery nuzzle with words of imagery, highlighting aspects of prior encounters with a particular horse. Perhaps poetry propels pupils to participate

Assessing the Pedagogical Power of Poetry for Poetic Knowledge in the “new Natural Philosophy” or “regenerate science” that C. S. Lewis tried to articulate. 8

Cultivating Poetic Knowledge through Poetry

Poetry might have a pedagogical power to foster poetic knowledge because of the way it touches the imagination and memory. In Confessions, Augustine argues that the external senses enable synthesis of ideas in the memory:

In [memory] are stored away all the thoughts by which we enlarge upon or diminish or modify in any way the perceptions at which we arrive through the senses, and it also contains anything else that has been entrusted to it for safe keeping, until such time as these things are swallowed up and buried in forgetfulness.9

Poetry, in particular, can arrest someone with beauty and a sense of wonder which, in turn, helps her see things as they are. At the same time, poetry creates placeholders and categories for new sensory experiences to rest as those experiences are synthesized into the memory.

Augustine then exclaims his wonder about the ways his internal senses organize things inexplicable to the external senses:

8 C. S. Lewis. The Abolition of Man (Quebec: Samizdat University Press, 2014), 39.

9 Augustine. The Confessions , in Great Books of the Western World , eds. M. J. Adler and P. W. Goetz, trans, R. S. Pine-Coffin, J. F. Shaw, and M. Dods, vol 16, 2nd ed (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990), 93.

But I must go beyond the power by which I am joined to my body and by which I fill its frame with life. This is not the power by which I can find my God, for if it were, the horse and the mule, senseless creatures, could find him too, because they also have this same power which gives life to their bodies. But there is another faculty in me besides this. By it I not only give life to my body but also give it the power of perceiving things by the senses.10

The other faculty of which he speaks is the imagination. It draws on the senses to define and synthesize what they perceive into a fuller picture of truth. The imagery and metaphor lining the lines of poetry stirs this imaginative potential.

Evidence of Poetry’s Influence on Poetic Knowledge

We conducted our study to assess the effects of poetry on poetic (intuitive) knowledge in the fall of 2021 through the Classical Education Research Lab at the University of Arkansas and in partnership with kindergarten through second grade classes at Sager Classical Academy in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. This research occurred during a two-week science unit in which kindergartners studied the weather, first graders studied birds, and second graders studied the moon. We divided all sixty-six students into two groups. For two weeks, teachers of one group of thirty-six students—the treatment group—taught poetry aligned with their nature study. For instance, first graders in the treatment group covered the usual

Assessing the Pedagogical Power of Poetry for Poetic Knowledge curriculum about birds but also studied poems about birds, such as Emily Dickinson’s “A Bird, came down the Walk.” Meanwhile, teachers of the other thirty students—the control group—covered the same curriculum, except without poetry. Both before and after the two weeks, we held individual interviews with each student to assess them in three areas: attentiveness, curiosity, and affinity for what they studied as well as enjoyment of poetry. Attentiveness is the extent to which students notice and pay attention to the topic of study in their everyday lives. For instance, how often do first graders notice birds flying, birds hopping, or their colors when they spot one? Curiosity is defined as the extent to which students want to learn more about the topic. Finally, affinity refers to the degree to which students are delighted by the topic. For example, did first graders find birds beautiful? Did birds make them happy? How much did they enjoy listening to them sing? All of these measures constitute a sensory-emotional aspect of poetic experience or indicate some facet of poetic knowledge. Taken alone, none of these measures represent the whole of having poetic knowledge, but together they sketch a partial picture of the kinds of persons into which the students are being shaped. Researchers could undoubtedly add other measures to assess student growth in poetic knowledge.

Across all four of our measures, we found greater levels of growth among students who engaged with poetry in conjunction with their nature study (see Figure 1). To illustrate, the control group increased from 2.76 to 3.35 scale points on the measure of affinity, while the treatment group increased from 2.94 to 3.65 scale points. Critically, however, we cannot confidently conclude whether the relatively higher growth rate in affinity among the treatment group students was mate - rial or occurred by random chance. In other words, the 0.12point difference between the 0.59 points of growth among the control group and the 0.71 points of growth among the treatment group is not statistically significant. Nor could we conclude with confidence that the difference in growth rates in a second outcome, curiosity, between the treatment and control groups was material, even if the growth rate was slightly higher for the treatment group.

Note: * Indicates that differences in growth rates between treatment and control groups are statistically significant at the 0.05 level. ** Indicates that differences in growth rates between treatment and control groups are statistically significant at the 0.01 level.