The Consortium • Volume 1, Issue 1 - A Journal of Classical Christian Education

THE CONSORTIUM

A Journal of Classical Christian Education

Promoting classical education and fostering human flourishing for generations to come.

Volume 1, Issue 1

The Consortium: A Journal of Classical Christian Education Volume 1, Issue 1.

Copyright © 2022 by Roman Roads Press

Published by Roman Roads Press in collaboration with Kepler Education and The Consortium of Classical Educators

Moscow, Idaho info@romanroadspress.com | romanroadspress.com

Editorial Advisory Board:

- Daniel Foucachon, Executive Editor

- Scott Postma, General Editor

- Dr. Robert M. Woods, Senior Editor

- Dr. Christy Vaughan, Contributing Editor

- Dr. Gregory Soderberg, Contributing Editor

Interior Layout by Carissa Hale

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by the USA copyright law.

Licensing and permissions: info@romanroadspress.com

ISBN: 978-1-944482-64-0

Version 1.1.0 June 2022

Introduction

What is a Classical Christian Education?

by Scott Postma

The Consortium is a journal of classical education published semiannually in June and December, offering readers a broad array of quality writing, research, and book reviews about all things related to Classical Christian Education. Each issue is published with parents and educators in mind, really anyone who wants to gain deeper insight into the education that created free human beings in Western civilization for the past two-and-a-half millennia.

Classical Christian Education expresses itself under a fairly broad tent of thought and there are likely as many micro-persuasions as there are eyes on Argos. This is true for at least three reasons.

First, what we call Classical Christian Education today has looked differently in epochs of history. So, depending on who is answering the question, “What is Classical Christian Education?,” one may get a slightly different answer if they are focusing on pre-Christian classical education, or classical education as it functioned during the Scholastic period, the Renaissance period, the modern period of clas-

sical Christian renewal that began in the early 1980s, or what some are now calling Christian Classical Education.

The second reason is during this modern age of recovering Classical Christian Education, educators have continued to grow in their understanding of what Classical Christian Education is. For example, in The Liberal Arts Tradition, written by Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain, the authors suggest there have been four periods of growth in the Classical Christian Education movement.

The third reason is directly related to the first two. As understanding has grown about what Classical Christian Education has been and how it was implemented in ages past, so have opinions about which historical expression is most important to recover in the modern world (i.e., do students in the modern world still need to study Latin to be classically educated? Wouldn’t studying modern languages do just as well?) Also, where does the study of subsidiary sciences like, biology and ecology, fit into Classical Christian Education?

In a nutshell, while Classical Christian Education is a historic tradition of education that stands in opposition to the modern progressivists’ pedagogy and agenda, this journal recognizes the tradition is mildly dynamic, developing over more than two millennia of Western civilization. Because of what has been noted in these prefatory remarks, The Consortium journal takes the position that a truly Classical Christian Education is one that strives to glean the best of Western liberal education in every epoch. Therefore, the journal’s editors strive to foster conversation and dialogue in the true spirit of the academy where the free exchange of ideas offered respectfully and in good

taste are welcome and put forth here for your consideration and contemplation.

How is Classical Christian Education defined? The Association of Classical Christian Schools provides one of the most concise definitions of Classical Christian Education:

Classical Christian education (CCE) is a time-tested educational system which establishes a biblical worldview (called Paideia), incorporates methods based on natural phases of student development, cultivates the seven Christian Virtues, trains student reasoning through the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric), and interacts with the historical Great Books.

The website, welltrainedmind.com, gives a far more expansive definition, then summarizes it this way:

A classical education, then, has two important aspects. It is language-focused. And it follows a specific three-part pattern: the mind must be first supplied with facts and images, then given the logical tools for organization of facts, and finally equipped to express conclusions.

While these definitions are both accurate and sound as far as they go, neither mention an essential aspect of Classical Christian Education, The Quadrivium, the second half of the seven liberal arts; further, what is accurately mentioned still requires some unpacking to more fully answer the question, What is Classical Christian Education? Consider these following seven characteristics that are shared by all expressions of Classical Christian Education.

Characteristic 1

The first characteristic of a Classical Christian Education is the development and cultivation of Paideia , a word whose etymology can be recognized in words like pediatrics or pedagogy. In his letter to the saints at Ephesus, St. Paul writes,

“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4, ESV).

The word translated discipline here is the Greek word, paideia , and is defined as the act of providing guidance for responsible living . . . upbringing, training, instruction . . . chiefly as it is attained by discipline, correction . 1 It is a word that is related to the word translated discipline in this verse, nouthesia , meaning counsel about avoidance or cessation of an improper course of conduct, admonition. 2

Definitions are noted here to draw attention to not only the denotation of paideia but also its connotation. It reveals the fundamental nature of education, the rearing of a young person in a proper view of the world; that is, a worldview that guides the way he should go (Proverbs 22:6). While the word worldview brings its own set of baggage to the conversation, it is used here to mean thinking Christianly about the world in which we live and move and have our

1 William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 748.

2 Ibid., 679.

being. A young person with a Christian worldview possesses a comprehensive vision of the cosmos as having been created and (still) being redeemed by God. He or she also possesses a moral imagination informed first by the truth of Scripture, but also by the noble traditions of the Church. This idea of Christian worldview falls into the stage of education that will later be addressed as piety.

Characteristic 2

The second characteristic of a Classical Christian Education is its focus on a liberal or humane education. In opposition to the modern and slavish approach to training mere workers for an institutionalized and crony-capitalist society, Classical Christian Education seeks to educate the whole person, human qua human. This is to what liberal (libere) in the liberal arts refers; a Classical Christian Education is the education of a liberated man (homo versus vir), or the education that makes for a full and free human being. Regarding education oriented to job training in a world where vocations ebb and flow like the tide, John W. Gardner, author of Excellence, noted, “We don’t even know what skills may be needed in the years ahead. That is why we must train our young people in the fundamental fields of knowledge, and equip them to understand and cope with change. That is why we must give them the critical qualities

of mind and durable qualities of character that will serve them in circumstances we cannot now even predict.”3

The ability to rightly cope with change can only be accomplished by receiving a liberal arts education. John of Salisbury, the secretary and counselor to Thomas Becket, the renowned Archbishop of Canterbury, published an influential treatise on education in 1159 titled Metalogicon. John of Salisbury stated, “The liberal arts are said to have become so efficacious among our ancestors, who studied them diligently, that they enabled them to comprehend everything they read, elevated their understanding to all things, and empowered them to cut through the knots of all problems possible of solution.”4

And to the point of educating the whole person, Robert Maynard Hutchins notably said, “Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining.”5

3 John W. Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1961), https://archive.org/details/excellencecanweb00ingard/page/34/mode/2up, 35.

4 John and Daniel D. McGarry, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2009), 36-37.

5 Robert M Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education , vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 5.

Characteristic 3

The third characteristic of Classical Christian Education is a pedagogical method that follows the order of the medieval seven liberal arts, mainly as it relates to a child’s development but also as an approach to teaching all subject matter. The seven liberal arts are described by the medieval divines as the trivium (three ways) and the quadrivium (four ways).

First, following the trivium, students learn grammar (language), then dialectic (logical thinking), and finally rhetoric (expressing oneself accurately and persuasively) before moving on to studying the quadrivium. The quadrivium treats four universal truths: number, geometry, harmony, and astronomy.

Early in the modern renewal of Classical Christian Education, those seeking to recover the classical model of education relied on an essay by Dorothy Sayers, titled, “The Lost Tools of Learning.” It was an extremely helpful essay and many schools adopted her pedagogical model. But the recovery didn’t stop there. In the midst of “repairing the ruins,” more about classical pedagogy was uncovered. Sayers’ pedagogical insights were just the tip of the iceberg, to lean on a worn-out metaphor. Recovery of classical pedagogy also revealed just how important poetic knowledge was to the formation of the whole person. 6

6 James S. Taylor, Poetic Knowledge (University of New York Press, 1998).

Today, most recognize a much fuller expression of Classical Christian Education that was first laid out by Ms. Sayers. Referred to by Clark and Jain as the PGMAPT paradigm (i.e., piety, gymnasium, music, liberal arts, philosophy, and theology), where the A stands for the liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium), and the seven liberal arts are bookended by poetic knowledge on one end and modern consummate studies on the other.

Characteristic 4

The fourth characteristic recognizes the pedagogical approach must be applied to something. In other words, Classical Christian Education is more than a pedagogy, it is a pedagogy applied to a specific pool of knowledge, the best of what has been thought and written in the last twoand-a-half millennia of the Western tradition. Sometimes this pool or “Western canon” of knowledge is referred to as the great books. When referring to great books, some may immediately recall Mortimer J. Adler’s 60-volume set published by the University of Chicago and Encyclopedia Britannica. His are merely a collection of the kinds of works to which the great books refer. While it is a good collection, it is also an incomplete collection. The president of Harvard College, Charles Eliot, suggested his own list of similar books which affectionately came to be called his “five-foot shelf” and published as The Harvard Classics.

Classical Christian Education makes a point of exposing students to these primary sources in an integrated fash-

ion, finding in both the classical and Christian traditions that all truth (i.e., reality) is part of the whole. In other words, knowledge of any subject is only a partial knowledge of the one truth.

Instead of studying textbooks of disintegrated subjects like social studies, history, or English, in a Classical Christian Education, students study the humanities in an integrated manner. This means they read and discuss in Socratic fashion the best primary literature, philosophy, theology, and history, often within a given historical period.

Characteristic 5

The fifth characteristic of Classical Christian Education is the study of classical languages, including Greek, and especially Latin. While a few have made a somewhat meritorious argument of substituting Latin with modern languages, there are many stronger arguments for the continued inclusion of classical languages in a Classical Christian Education. A few of those arguments are:

• Learning Latin gives students the ability to read many important primary sources in Latin, the language in which they were written; it also affords opportunity to read texts that have not yet been translated into English.

• Learning Latin provides students with a fuller understanding of the English language since about 40% of English is derived from Latin.

• Many of the professional vocations still do and probably always will rely heavily on Latin languages (e.g., law, science, medicine, theology).

• And one ancillary and pragmatic reason is that students who study Latin overwhelmingly score higher on standardized tests than students who have not studied Latin.

In any case, Classical Christian Education emphasizes the learning of not only modern languages but the classical languages as a fundamental staple of a person’s education.

Characteristic 6

The sixth element is teaching students with the goal of fostering virtue and wisdom instead of helping them merely accumulate disconnected facts or skills for the job market. While modern education takes what it claims to be a secular approach, wrongly believing education can only consist of the is and not the ought, Classical Christian Education emphasizes what a student ought to be, virtuous, by highlighting what David Hicks, in Norms and Nobility, calls the “Tyranny of the Ideal Image.” This Ideal Image is exemplified by the seven Christian virtues (i.e., prudence, fortitude, wisdom, justice, faith, hope, and love) and also as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ (Ephesians 4:11-16).

Characteristic 7

The seventh characteristic has already been alluded to in relation to at least two other characteristics, namely in that students read primary sources and classical languages are essential. However, it would be remiss not to emphasize the fact that Classical Christian Education is language-focused learning rather than image-focused learning. This does not mean Classical Christian Education excludes the plastic arts (i.e., painting, sculpting, etc.); quite the contrary. It simply means it emphasizes language-based learning. In other words, Classical Christian Education emphasizes learning through words, written and spoken, rather than through videos or other types of imaging. This short excerpt from Dorothy Sayers’s essay, “Lost Tools of Learning” is apropos, just as much to the entire enterprise of recovering Classical Christian Education in a world dominated by pixels as it is to this seventh characteristic. Sayers writes,

By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering

of “subjects”; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education—lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school—leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.

Scott Postma is the President of Kepler Education and has been an educator for nearly 30 years. He has earned degrees in Christian and Classical studies (M.A., Knox Theological Seminary), religion and English literature (B.S., Liberty University), and creative writing (A.A., College of Southern Nevada); and he is completing his Ph.D. in humanities at Faulkner University (est. summer 2022). Scott lives in the panhandle of Idaho with his wife, Tammy.

The Education of a Plenary Man

Fighting Leviathan

by Joffre Swait

To educate is to raise a plenary man To full maturity from infancy, in Christ; That space is far too wide for parents’ span.

Impoverished, the State machines its plan To offer its ghost unfinished antichrist, But to educate is to raise a plenary man.

A man in parts is the most the State will or can, Chimaeras of your half-waked sons already spliced, A hell that’s far too deep for parents’ span.

A man in full will war to break the band Of the State’s seduction surrogate and enticed, For to educate must be to free the man.

With child and parent unfruitful how may we stand? Must our sons unripe and unready pay that price? That cost is far too great for parents’ span.

Generously the Word has made his plan By Spirit to raise for whom he sacrificed; For to educate’s to raise a plenary man, A task too great for Man or State to span.

Joffre Swait is the Academic Advisor for students and parents at Kepler Education. He has spent 15 years teaching English as a Second Language, Spanish, and Portuguese, and he currently teaches Spanish, Latin, and poetry courses at Kepler. He and his wife, Kimberly, live in Moscow, ID with their five children.

A Brief History of the SAT

by Daniel Foucachon

The SAT was first administered in the Fall of 1926, a creation of Carl Bringham based on the World War I IQ tests. A mere eleven years later, a distraught yet wiser Brigham wrote, “It is probably simpler to teach cultured men testing than to give testers culture.”1 Concerned with the direction of his own early work in standardized testing, he held back the advance of standardized exams until his death in 1943. This was a turning point in the history of education in the United States.

Entrance Exams Before America

Throughout antiquity, education was a personal enterprise. There were few if any exams for entrance to schools at any level, much less anything resembling our modern

1 Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1999), 40.

standardized exams. This continued through the Roman period and into the Middle Ages, where education was most often organized and supervised by the Church (typically the local church, meaning it differed from region to region). Most education was oriented toward career students of some sort (teachers or clergy), or toward nobility and those whose vocation was governing and managing lands, towns, and people. As such, entrance to a school was more a question of position in society than one of knowledge or aptitude.

As Europe moved away from the feudal system and became more politically unified, many areas of life and culture began to follow this unification, including schools and universities; consequently a need for collaboration emerged. The first sparks of the Protestant Reformation began in the twelfth century among the Waldensians, who insisted on the necessity of the Scriptures in the common tongue. As their ideas kindled, culminating in the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the educational landscape changed. Where education had been emphasized primarily among clergy and nobility in leadership, now basic literacy (at a minimum) was expected among every worshiper of God. It was during the Reformation, partly under the influence of Luther and Calvin, that teacher certifications were first set in place. 2 The expectation of universal literacy came to the New World, so that years later John Adams, the second president of the United States (in a dissertation

2 R. Freeman Butts, A Cultural History of Western Education: Its Social and Intellectual Foundations (McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc: New York, 1955), 212.

discussing the American emphasis on schools and education), made the comment that an illiterate American is as “rare as a comet.”3

This basic, almost universal literacy is the backdrop to the founding of universities in America in the seventeenth century. While entrance exams as we know them today had not yet been established, expectations of what a student would know when entering a university were more or less set. Building upon the literacy expected of every man, an educated (university-bound) student was expected to have the foundation of a liberal arts education. A “liberal arts” education can be defined as the education suited to a free man based in the first principles of the Western tradition. There are two aspects to this liberal arts education: the liberal or free nature of the education, which has to do with “who” and “why,” and its content, the “arts” of the free man. In order to understand the redefinition of education that happened at the beginning of the twentieth century, we have to understand what education meant for the preceding centuries.

The word liberal has nothing to do with our common use of the word in politics and culture. Liberal means “free,” and historically described the kind of education expected of

3 Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams (Boston: Charles C Little and James Brown, 1851), 256.

a freeman–especially one in a position of leadership, like the nobility. What distinguishes the education of a “free man” and that of a non-free man, that of a vassal or serf or slave? After all, 2 + 2 = 4, and both a freeman and a vassal would need to know that. Our culture has so alienated itself from a historic education that it’s very difficult for us to think of education proper, and not to jump to the practical and objective aspect of education. When we think of education, we often think of jobs and vocational training.

Dr. Roy Atwood, founding president of New Saint Andrews College (a classical liberal arts college in Moscow, Idaho that follows the old Harvard model of education) tells of the time he was asked by a student, “Who are you”? His automatic response was to give his profession: “Uh . . . I’m a professor.” But the student responded, “No, I don’t mean what you do, but who are you?”4 We are programmed to answer that question with what we do, with our job title. We think of education in terms of answering the question, “Will this degree or college prepare me for a job?” This assumption about education is fairly recent. But the modern definition of education does more; it not only defines education in terms of usefulness, but in so doing defines human beings by our usefulness as well. This indoctrination starts at a young age. If you have young children, you may have sat with them and watched Thomas the Tank Engine. Have you noticed that in that children’s program the child’s entire worth is summed up in terms of how useful they are? “You’re a useful little train, Thomas.” These an-

4 Dr. Roy Atwood, Educating Royalty, Reformed Perspective: A Magazine for the Christian Family , Vol. 33, No. 6, April 2014.

thropomorphic characters tell our children a story, and instill at a very young age that our purpose as human beings is to be “useful.” Consequently, our children are not surprised as teenagers when they are told to think this way about college, or pressed for what major they will pursue, and much more importantly, what kind of job they think that degree will give them. And that job will define them. “I am a professor,” or “I am a dentist.”

Christians of previous generations viewed education, and themselves, differently. The opening lines of the Westminster Shorter Catechism would have been familiar to nearly every school-aged student in the New World: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” That is who we are: worshiping beings who delight in God. Or to use Dr. Atwood’s answer to the question “who are you?”: we are royalty, heirs of Christ. And we should educate our children as royalty in Christ.

Some may object that this identity has nothing to do with education. The founders of Harvard College would disagree. These are the “Rules and Precepts” of Harvard College, written shortly after its founding in 1646, defining precisely what education was all about:

Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisdome, Let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seeke it of him (Prov. 2:3).

Christ is both the source and the goal of education—He is the foundation of all learning.

“Who are you?” Our answer should be that we are free men and women, pursuing wisdom and virtue through the interwoven arts of theology (study of the knowledge of God) and humanities (study of ourselves and of mankind).

“Knowledge of God and knowledge of self,” is how John Calvin sets the stage in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and also how Harvard and other universities in the United States prior to the 1900s set the foundation for education.

The Arts

The term “liberal” points to the purpose of education and our identity, but does not answer the practical question of what this looks like. What are these “arts”? If classical education is an education in first principles, then what are those first principles?

To even the casual observer of the renewal of classical learning, the terms trivium and quadrivium (the seven liberal arts inherited from antiquity and developed in the Medieval period) are probably familiar. But why does this period get special treatment? The answer begins by returning to our assumption that education begins with knowledge of God and knowledge of self. If we are to know God properly, we must study His Word, the history of His people, and ourselves. The Western heritage of the classical liberal arts is the common inheritance of all God’s people. It is the cultural soil into which Christ was made flesh. It

was also the culture in which the Church grew. And it has been carried and preserved by Christians for 2000 years. Starting with the Apostle Paul, and continuing through the period of the early church fathers, the Reformers, and our American founding fathers, they all had in common a classical liberal arts education. We as a people are the product of this Western thought. A classical education returns to the source, to the roots of these Western ideas and works. In short, a liberal arts education is an education in first principles. This means an education which includes Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Dante, Augustine and Boethius, Cicero and Plutarch, Homer and Vergil, Milton and Shakespeare. It is a study of ourselves, and where we came from. We may have only recently re-discovered this birthright, but it is not presumptuous to receive this heritage as our own.

The founders of Harvard College demonstrate their devotion to the liberal arts in their early entrance examinations. Remember the goal of education that Harvard laid out, stated earlier, to “lay Christ at the bottom.” How did they expect their entering students to be equipped for this task?

In his Three Centuries of Harvard , Samuel Morison describes their early entrance exams:

The earliest entrance requirements were extempore translation of Cicero and the ability to write and speak Latin suo ut aiunt Marte (by one’s own skill), and a little Greek grammar. 5

5 Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636-1936 (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1963), 26.

Jumping ahead a few years, we can observe a more extensive example of this in the Harvard entrance exam of 1869. Here are a few example questions, as they were stated on the exam, from the History and Geography portion:

4. Describe the route of the Ten Thousand, or lay it down on a map.

5. Leonidas, Pausanias, Lysander.

6. Pharsalia, Philippi, Actium—geographically and historically.

8. Compare Athens with Sparta

9. Pericles: the Man and his Policy. And a longer question:

7. Supply the two names left blank in the following passage from the Oration for the Manilian Law: Non dicam duas urbes potentissimas, Carthaginem et Numantiam ab eodem ________ esse deletas; non commemorabo nuper ita vobis patribusque esse visum, ut in uno _________ spes imperii poneretur, ut idem cum Jugurtha , idem cum Cimbris, idem cum Teutonis bellum administraret.”

Who was Jugurtha? Where was Numantia?

Notice two things. First, like a well-worn joke which evokes laughter at the mere mention of the first line, the ideas represented on the exam were expected to be so familiar to these college applicants that the mere mention of single

words was all that was needed to prompt a student to write an essay about their significance. Leonidas is the author of the phrase “molon labe” or “come and take them.” He spoke this when he and his 300 men refused to surrender their weapons and held the entire Persian army at bay in a narrow pass at Thermopylae, fighting to the death. That one name would prompt an answer by a student, an essay which could include the actual story, but also ethics, philosophy, theology, or morality. These stories and ideas were the common possession of the educated American. Second, notice the longer example in Latin! This is not the language or Latin portion of the exam. It was expected that the student could converse fluently in Latin. We tend to marvel at the fluency required of these students, when our focus is merely on the language skill itself. But while this is impressive, and the knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary of these languages was an important part of their education, what is more remarkable is the content. They were not translating random texts to illustrate their mastery of the language, but demonstrating their use of Latin as a tool to interact with the ancient texts. In other words, the expectation of a student entering higher education was that he possessed the tools of learning, and knew how to apply those tools to the subject at hand: grappling with the ideas of “old Western culture,” as C. S. Lewis describes it. They had the tools to fulfill the definition of education given by G. K. Chesterton, who said that “education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one genera-

tion to another.”6 It was an education in the first principles of the West— a classical liberal arts education. This was what education looked like in America until the early 1900s. What happened after that point?

The Redefinition of Education and the Advent of the SAT

The “college boards,” introduced in 1900, were a series of essay examinations lasting an entire week. These exams thoroughly covered the knowledge one was expected to have when entering college, very much in line with the expectations of the past several hundred years. If you are familiar with Anne of Avonlea , you may recall an important part of the story involves the “boards” examinations that Anne is required to take. She studies extensively, and then goes to take them over several days. These exams were unique in that they represented a more standardized exam than had previously existed, monitored by the College Entrance Examination Board rather than by individual colleges. And for prestigious colleges they were the primary entrance exam until a precise date. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. “Within two weeks, the essay exams had been suspended for the duration of the war,” writes Lemann in The Big Test ; “They were never resumed.” He continues:

G. K. Chesterton, The Observer (London: July 6, 1924).

So all that had to happen was for the United States to enter the war—and the SAT immediately became the admissions device for the most prestigious private colleges in the country, something that would previously have been an unthinkably radical step.7

The SAT was developed by Carl Brigham, a Princeton professor, who was involved with the research from IQ testing of World War I soldiers. In 1923 Brigham wrote about his results in a book, A Study of American Intelligence, in which he “trafficked in the prevailing eugenicist theory of the day,” concluding that certain races were more intelligent than others, and that American intelligence was declining as the result of mixing races. 8 As the war ended he took what he learned from the Army IQ tests and turned his attention to education. In 1926, using the standardized exam format recently developed by Frederick J. Kelly, he upgraded the exam to suit the university context and wrote the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the SAT. As Lemann remarks, it has changed remarkably little since then. Instead of examining knowledge and one’s ability to use the tools of learning, the SAT now measured for intelligence. Peter Sacks, in his book Standardized Minds, explains how this shift to measuring IQ influenced our culture. We began to look for “potential” instead of experience or knowledge; we started to measure aptitude instead of accomplishment. Sacks wrote that “promoters of the IQ test

7 Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy , 54.

8 Ibid., 30.

succeeded in convincing policymakers and the public that the intelligence test amounted to a final, indisputable measurement of human performance.” 9 The SAT exam was an attempt to create a more pure class of intellectual elites. But it was thoroughly flawed because it was based on the assumption that intelligence was a biological trait, connected with race.10 Interestingly, the creator of the SAT soon became one of its harshest critics. The more Carl Brigham was involved in the development of standardized testing, the more he pushed back, even formally retracting his previous bestseller, A Study of American Intelligence, calling it “pretentious” and “without foundation,” and attempting to distance the SAT (which he still considered of value) from IQ testing.11 It came to the point that Brigham was the sole roadblock to the formation of a new, unified testing agency which would combine all the exams under one banner. Brigham wrote a critical (and eerily prophetic) letter to James Bryant Conant. Conant, president of Harvard at the time, was pushing for this unified testing agency, but more importantly for using the SAT to create a new elite based on intelligence, while (in his words) “wielding the axe against the root of inherited privilege.”12

9 Peter Sacks, Standardized Minds: The High Price of America’s Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It (Perseus Publishing: Cambridge MA, 2000), 27.

10 Lemann, The Big Test , 33.

11 Ibid., 33.

12 Ibid., 49

If the unhappy day ever comes when teachers point their students toward these newer examinations, and the present weak and restricted procedures get a grip on education, then we may look for the inevitable distortion of education in the terms of tests. And that means that mathematics will continue to be completely departmentalized and broken into disintegrated bits, that the sciences will become highly verbalized and the computation, manipulation and thinking in terms other than verbal will be minimized, that languages will be taught for linguistic skills only without reference to literary values, that English will be taught for reading alone, and that practice and drill in writing of English will disappear.13

While attempting to create a tool to select America’s elites, the SAT actually changed the nature of education. It led not to the cultivation of individuals, but the development of societal cogs. It answers the question, “In which station will you best fit in society?” But that is not the purpose of education. If a student is going to be an effective member of society, he must have an education in first principles of that society. Our students should not be viewed or treated as cogs in a statist machine. In his later years Brigham saw this danger stating, “A college being a humanitarian institution cannot afford to make mistakes against the individual.”14

Frederick J. Kelly, who invented the standardized exam format in 1914 which Brigham used for the SAT, has a similar story. After his work developing standardized

13 Ibid., 40.

14 Ibid., 34.

testing he too saw the danger it posed to the proper understanding of education. In his inaugural address as President of the University of Idaho in 1928, Kelly stated that “College is a place to learn how to educate oneself rather than a place in which to be educated.”15 In other words, education is about the tools of learning, or as he put it, education “should be confined to those fundamentals which serve best as a basis for subsequent learning.”16 Following these convictions, Kelly implemented a two-year, unified liberal arts curriculum at the University of Idaho. He was removed from office two years later. His primary goal as president was to go against the system he helped create, but his efforts were not appreciated.17

Conclusion, and a Recommendation

The shift represented by the advent of the SAT exam is a change in the purpose of education from cultivating a worshiping being to developing assets. Instead of evaluating students on the tools of grammar (language and words), logic (critical thinking), and rhetoric (eloquence and persuasion), and a capacity to understand and appreci-

15 Frederick James Kelly, Ph.D., The University in Prospect (University of Idaho: Moscow, Idaho,1928.), 21. Idaho Library Special Collections LD2312K441928.

16 Ibid., 19.

17 Cathy N. Davidson, Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century (Penguin Books: London, 2011), 123.

ate truth, goodness, and beauty, the modern testing system became a curator of potential, batch-testing for intelligence and aptitude.

Understanding how the SAT redefined education is a good first step in countering its effects. But even better, opt out of the SAT (and ACT) altogether, and choose a test that actually does reflect the true, good, and beautiful of a classical Christian education. And such a test does exist! The Classic Learning Test (CLT) is a countering step, acting against a culture which has not only redefined education, but tries to redefine us as humans. The CLT allows students to pursue true education and to be examined on that basis.

As Christian parents and educators seek to revive classical learning in our homes and schools, we are beginning to see a generation of well-equipped, culturally and professionally engaged students steeped in the liberal arts who are seeking higher education. We must not derail our efforts at the end of the K-12 education by allowing standardized exams like the SAT to redefine education. While a student can certainly take a standardized exam without ill-effect, what harms students is the importance we unwittingly place on these exams. Parents and classical educators should be particularly careful to not “teach to the test” if the test is the SAT. Instead, reinforce the purpose of education. Send students out into the world confident in who they are. They are not their job-skill, their resume, or their SAT score. They are heirs of Christ, inheritors of Western civilization, made in the image of God. They are sons of Adam and daughters of Eve.

Daniel Foucachon grew up in Lyon, France where his father was an evangelist and church-planter. He moved to Moscow, ID to attend New Saint Andrews College where he graduated with a BA in Liberal Arts and Culture. He is the founder and CEO of Roman Roads Press and the CEO of Kepler Education. He and his wife, Lydia, live in Moscow, ID with their six children.

A Musical Education: A Wonderful Foundation

by Timothy Knotts

More than six in ten adults said they are dissatisfied with the quality of education that students in the U.S. receive, and the approval numbers have done anything but improve in recent years.1 And this is not a new issue: for most of the last 20 years, this Gallup poll has shown more people dissatisfied than not. 2 Many solutions have been proposed for the current crisis in education in America. Some pundits claim that media literacy is fundamental in the internet age. Industrialists and economists put their eggs in the STEM basket, presupposing that the job market is the ultimate consumer of the educational goods. Mem-

1 Reid Wilson, “Majority believes public schools on wrong track: poll,” The Hill, last modified March 3, 2022, https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/599272-majority-believes-public-schools-on-wrong-trackpoll.

2 “Satisfaction With K-12 Education,” Gallup, accessed March 20, 2022, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1612/education.aspx#:~:text=46%25%20of%20U.S.%20adults%20say,survey%20conducted%20 in%20August%202021.

bers of former generations propose going back to a strict focus on the 3 Rs and a return to “simpler times”.

It is true that media literacy, STEM, and the 3 Rs are all laudable and even desirable outcomes for students. Certainly, the latter is a prime requisite to enter into the wider world of communication through books, articles, and even the internet. Nonetheless, not one of these solutions addresses the true needs of the student or society’s real needs in educational outcomes.

David Hicks argues that, “The supreme task of education is the cultivation of the human spirit to teach the young to know what is good, to serve it above self, and to reproduce it.”3 The formation of the soul was likewise the aim of the ancient Greeks. Twenty-four hundred centuries before Hicks, Plato stated that true education gives the student “true taste” that causes him to rejoice over the good and hate the bad.4

To that end, elsewhere Socrates says, “Shall we begin with the acknowledgement that education is first given through Apollo and the Muses?”5 Associating students with the arts engendered by the Muses prepares the student for the use of reason because then the student would know good without having to analyze why it is good, and then

3 David Hicks, Norms & Nobility (New York: University Press of America, 1999), 1.

4 Plato, The Republic , Book 3.

5 Plato, The Laws of Plato , trans. Thomas L. Pangle (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 654A.

“when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.”6

The nine Muses, born of the union between Zeus, father of the Olympian gods, and a titan were goddesses in their own right. Each had a sphere of influence, much as the gods of Olympus each ruled over aspects of the world or human endeavors. The great cataloger of Greek Myth, Hesiod, attributed his knowledge of the past to the Muses, in form of song,7 and the ancient epic poets call upon the muses for inspiration. 8

The muses and each individual area of influence were Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (love poetry), Euterpe (music), Melpomene (tragedy), Polymnia (hymns), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy) and Urania (astronomy). Notice that there was no Muse of logic or arithmetic. The liberal arts are not under the sphere of the Muses. Instead, the Muses inspired observation, contemplation, and recollection. Though each has a place in education, the focus of this conversation will be in story, which combines several of the Muses’ areas of influence, music, and dance. Though much more could be said, these three areas will suffice as an introduction to a Musical education.

Two classical teachers in the modern era describe the classical approach to the education of younger children this way:

6 Plato, Republic .

7 Hesiod, Theogony , trans. Richard S. Caldwell (Cambridge, Ma: Focus Information Group, 1987), 31-33.

8 Virgil, The Aeneid , trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 1.11.

It studied all the subjects inspired by the Muses (from epic poetry to astronomy) in a pre-critical manner . . . They taught passions more than skills and content. They sowed the seeds which would grow into a lifelong love of learning.9

As classical educators, the ultimate goal is the raising up of a generation of adults who love what is lovely, desire what is beautiful, and do what is good. Allowing the Muses to do their work beginning at a young age sets students on the course towards right judgments and affections before they reach the middle years of uncertainty and confusion when all maxims are automatically challenged or rejected.

Memory and Education

Before exploring the role of the Muses in education, it must be acknowledged that both childhood education and the Muses themselves have a relationship to memory. The titan upon whom Zeus begot the Muses was Mnemosyne, the immortal associated with memory.10 In fact, her name is the Greek word for memory. But to the Greeks, memory goes far beyond just remembering details of our own past or what a textbook said. Plato records Socrates as calling

9 Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education (Camp Hill: Classical Academic Press, 2021), 7.

10 Hesiod, Theogony , 915-7: “And again, he [Zeus] made love to Mnemosyne with the beautiful hair, from whom the gold-crowned Muses were born nine of them, who delight in festivals and the pleasures of song.”

the ability to take in sensory impressions and later recall them the “very gift of Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses.”11 And to Socrates, the memories impressed on the soul are the means by which we apprehend all true searching and learning.12

Pindar, the great poet of Thebes, attributes to Mnemosyne and her daughters the ability to pursue wisdom: “And I pray to the well-robed daughter of Ouranos, Mnemosyne, and her daughters, to give resourcefulness, for blind are the minds of men, whoever without the Heliconians seeks . . . the steep path of wisdom.”13 Pointing students to the path of the Muses and memory sets their feet on the path to maturity and discernment.

In our culture, we value novelty over memory. As C. S. Lewis points out in his book on the medieval period, the emphasis on originality is a thoroughly modern affectation.14 Students should be encouraged to linger over their memories, and then reinforce them with repeated exposure to the same stories:

We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given

11 Plato, Theaetetus , trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 191c-e.

12 Plato, Meno , trans. George Anastaplo and Laurence Berns (Newburyport, MA: Focus Pub./R. Pullins Co, 2004), 81c-d.

13 Pindar, Pythian Odes , ed. William H. Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), Paean 7b15-20.

14 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 210.

its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the ‘surprise’ of discovering that what seemed Little-Red-Riding-Hood’s grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia . 15

Whether or not the Muses are acknowledged as the root of learning, there are clear pragmatic reasons that we emphasize memory with our students beginning at a young age. One modern commentator points out that, “Even as recently as half a century ago, schoolchildren as young as eight would be expected to memorize as many as 40 lines of poetry.”16 The author goes on to state, without support but probably factually true, “Many academics now agree that forced rote memorization is a useless learning technique—that something memorized does not mean it is necessarily absorbed or understood.” Yet, other academics have recognized that, “there is tight correlation between IQ and working memory and

15 C. S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature , ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).

16 Jeva Lange, “The lost art of memorization,” The Week, last modified January 31, 2019, https://theweek.com/articles/820197/lost-art-memorization.

with problem-solving ability.”17 This was a concern of Plato’s as well, when he was discussing the invention of writing. As one of his Socratic interlocutors was lauding the new skill of writing as “an elixir of memory and wisdom”, another wisely points out “this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.”18 Anyone who has lived through the advent of the digital age will be forced to acknowledge that American adults have far less information stored in their heads now that it is readily at their fingertips.

The neglect of memory by modern educators has far reaching effects as students are both unwilling and unable to recall important facts upon which to draw judgments and conclusions. One author, Dr. Jim Taylor, points out that our distracted culture is not just robbing us of our ability to pay attention, but is doing more long-term damage:

“Without the ability to pay attention to something, kids are not going to be able to process [information]. They’re not going to be able to consolidate it into memory, which means they’re not going to be able to interpret, analyse, synthesise, critique and come to some decision about the information.”19

17 William Klemm, “What Good Is Learning If You Don’t Remember It?” The Journal of Effective Teaching 7, no. 1, 2007, https://files.eric.ed.gov/ fulltext/EJ1055665.pdf.

18 Plato, Phaedrus , trans. Harold Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925), 274e-275a.

19 Nicholas Mancall-Bitel, “How can a distracted generation learn anything?” BBC, last modified February 20, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/ worklife/article/20190220-how-can-a-distracted-generation-learn-anything.

The inability to remember takes away the ability we have to make connections between facts and observations. Instead of aiding us in growing in wisdom and understanding, the instant access of the internet search betrays us and weakens our ability to use the information we do have. Without an internal catalog of information, there is nothing for the Muses to work with to inspire a great poem or beautiful melody. The intellectual cupboard is bare. But all is not lost. What has been neglected as a society in search of “bigger, better, faster” can be regained with some effort. Scientists have confirmed what was already known: that by practicing memorizing students get better at it. 20 Ironically, the recent fad of “brain training,” as it is often called, is the very thing decried by the so-called “experts” who claim that there is no place for memorizing the Gettysburg Address or the names of the states and capitals, yet it is being advanced as a means of allaying or delaying dementia. 21

And so, the facility and capacity of memory are important areas for the educator to emphasize. By furnishing the mind with both ample material and plenty of room to grow, the student is set on a course whereby they begin to make connections between the items stored in the memory. The words and ideas they encounter stick, and the vocabulary of

20 “Attention & memory in childhood,” Centre for Attention, Learning and Memory, accessed March 20, 2022, http://calm.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/ brain-development/.

21 “Researchers identify first brain training exercise positively linked to dementia prevention,” Indiana University School of Medicine, accessed March 19, 2022, https://medicine.iu.edu/news/2017/11/brain-exercise-dementia-prevention.

the student, both the external communicative sort and the internal stock of ideas being named by the words that could be used, prepare the student to be a thinker and communicator: a useful receptor of the influence of the Muses.

Stories, Poetry, and History

Albert Einstein once said, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” The Muses inspire students to imagination and to inquire beyond themselves. Students, when they are young, are not engaged with stories about their mundane life circumstances. And rarely are life lessons very clear in stories that merely echo their hum-drum daily experience.

As teachers seek to elevate not just the intellect but the character of their students, stories of good and evil, right and wrong, courage and cowardice are necessary to build up that stock of ideas in the students’ memories. A plentiful store of incarnations and types will make good and evil familiar when they later encounter stories in less clear-cut settings or even in real life where wolves often wear sheep’s clothing.

This idea of right and wrong is a fundamental question heard echoing from every venue of children’s play as one calls out “It’s not fair” concerning the conduct of another. Stories that show fairness as desirable and often unobtained for the worthy build into children appreciation for righteous suffering. Tolkien stated that the question of

character was much more important to his young readers than truthfulness:

“Far more often [than asking the question ‘Is it true?’] they have asked me: ‘Was he good? Was he wicked?’ That is, they were far more concerned to get the Right side and the Wrong side clear. For that is a question equally important in History and in Faerie.”22

Dennis Quinn authored an excellent article about this stage of education and put it well when he said, “What excites the passion of wonder is the confrontation of mystery, the dominant domain of the Muses. Mystery is in the very root of their name, the Greek mu. The same syllable occurs in the Greek mythos, which means ‘story’ . . . It is deplorable that college students cannot write and read and work mathematics and speak well; but it is worse when they are blind and deaf, insensible to the ‘world so wide.’” 23 Dickens gives us an illustration of this wonder-free education in the school of Thomas Gradgrind: “Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.” 24

22 J. R. R. Tolkien “On Fairy-stories,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays , ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 109-61.

23 Dennis Quinn, “The Muses as Pedagogues of the Liberal Arts” accessed on March 18, 2022, https://www.angelicum.net/classical-homeschooling-magazine/second-issue/the-muses-as-pedagogues-of-the-liberalarts-by-dennis-quinn/.

24 Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004).

“Nothing but facts” is the twisted and misused form of education that caused modern educators to turn their backs on memorization as a valuable skill. Memorizing for no other gain than to gather facts is indeed an evil aim and stunts the growth of wonder in children, who need it desperately in this life. Now it is the STEM advocate who wants nothing to do with wonder, only more facts about science and computer code.

One modern psychologist opined, “It hardly requires emphasis at this moment in our history that children need a moral education . . . [that teaches] not through abstract ethical concepts, but through that which seems tangibly right and therefore meaningful . . . the child finds this kind of meaning through fairy tales.” 25

Observing the utter dearth of understanding of the mythos of culture in his students, James Taylor designed a program to address the lack and educate his college students. He said, “. . . there can be no real advancement in knowledge unless it first begin in leisure and wonder, where the controlling motive throughout remains delight and love.” 26 The students enrolled in Taylor’s program were unable to remember, whether they had been previously exposed to it, the necessary foundation of stories and experiences to make meaningful further instruction. The remedial work focused on the recovery of knowledge that should have been already possessed, the knowledge present

25 Bruno Bettelheim, “The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales” ( New York Times , May 23, 1976), 1.

26 James Taylor, Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), 153.

in every person, rather than the acquisition of new facts: “[I]t is . . . knowledge from the inside out, radically different in this regard from a knowledge about things.” 27 Stories reveal truths, not just about the story and its meanings, but about the reader.

The stories of the ancient heroes of Greece were the basis for Greek culture and were repeated over and over again to children not just to teach them theology, but to show them what it meant to be Greek. The word for this child training was ‘paideia’ which was the process aimed at cultivating virtue, or excellence, which summed up in the word ‘arete’. “Greek paideia and Greek philosophical theology were the two principal forms in which Greek thought influenced the world in those centuries when Greek art and Greek science lay sleeping. Both were originally united in Homer, as human arete and the ideal of godhead.” 28 Beyond the mythic and character-driven interest of narrative, stories connect us to, and perhaps even create, culture. For the ancient Greeks, the fountainhead of Greek culture was found in Homer. For the Jews, God told them (through Moses), “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up . . . In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?” Tell him: ‘We were slaves of 27 Taylor, Poetic Knowledge

28 Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture , trans. Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), 261.

Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.’” 29 For the Babylonians, it was the Epic of Gilgamesh. For the Romans it was Virgil.

No matter where one is from, these origin stories, these myths of the heroes of the land, these tales of self-sacrifice for the good of others are what bind people together. Stories like that of Lewis and Clark, or Washington’s refusal to lie about the cherry tree, or the heroic Minute Men standing up against a superior force shape and form our corporate national identity. The stories, poems, and histories weave together a cloth of culture that teaches children what is good, what is honest, what is upright in the context of our culture. Educating children without these kinds of stories sows the seeds of disintegration of the society as it looses the ties that bind the members of the culture together in a common vision of what society should be.

Music

If stories are powerful unto the mind, music speaks in a unique way to the heart and soul. Before a mother begins to instruct her child, she sings to it and rocks it in her arms, binding hearts together even without words. Even at the subconscious level, music can impact our stress levels while sedated. 30 This sort of passive listening speaks to the direct

29 Charles Caldwell Ryrie, Ryrie Study Bible: New American Standard Bible, 1995 Update (Chicago: Moody Press, 1995).

30 “Effects of Music Listening on Cortisol Levels and Propofol Consumption during Spinal Anesthesia,” Front Psychol, 2011, 2:58.

sort of communication that music has with the soul, to soothe or excite it depending on its nature. Plato understood the power of music when he discussed it in his great dialog, The Republic, saying “because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way into the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it.” 31 Beyond its undisputed ability to sway the emotions, there is also a relationship between music and the memory. Music and memory are intricately linked. Though perhaps with some degree of embarrassment, upon request every young (or even more mature) adult can sing the complete theme song to a favorite serial television show that was popular in his or her youth. A 2013 study in the journal Memory & Cognition showed that listening to phrases set to music amplified the mind’s ability to recall phrases later. 32

Like pure memory practice, learning music during early life makes the brain more connected, which bears fruit in other areas of making connections. What another recent study found was that musical brains produce more structural and functional connections when compared to those who don’t learn music, and that the earlier the musicians had started with musical practice the stronger these connectivities. 33 This practice sets up the young person

31 Plato, Republic .

32 “The power of music: how it can benefit health,” Medical News Today, accessed March 12, 2022, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/302903#Music-and-memory.

33 Geoffrey James, “Want Smarter Kids? Teach Music, Not Coding, According to MIT,” Inc.com, accessed March 19, 2022, https://www.inc. com/geoffrey-james/want-smarter-kids-teach-music-not-coding-accordingto-mit.html.

for success when presented with more complicated chains of causation and circumstance the future study of history, chemistry, or mathematics.

In the second century AD, the Greek historian Pausanias reported that the sons of Aloeus held that the Muses were three in number, not nine, and they gave them the names Melete (Practice), Mneme (Memory), and Aoide (Song). 34 The connection between memory, practice, and song is a powerful one. Repetition is the act that embeds information into our memory, and rarely does that come without hard work except by the empowering of song that somehow secures the words and ideas in a nearly indelible manner.

Though helpful to aid memory, music itself has other impacts on the brain. The study of music varied in its effectiveness based on what music was studied and how. Abstract ideas behind the music bring the brain more stimulus. Longer pieces or music that take time to resolve discord and have more variation in working with musical rules leads to greater pleasure in the brain. 35 The delayed outcomes in the music help students to expect and endure longer delay in gratification, resulting in a heightened mo -

34 Pausanias, Description of Greece , trans. W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod, (London: W. Heinemann, 1918), 9.29.2.

35 Valorie Salimpoor, “Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music,” Nature Neuroscience, accessed March 18, 2022, https://www.nature.com/articles/ nn.2726.epdf?sharing_token=AsBHZGVWJXWxYZZ5xgkkE9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NX0PZtqxFT4f2iuroCfbRuG8pFHCeMf74HXf1U7LaW_V0zwYU1_t8E4UW9sf5UjsiLNjg4Rdj_1CV029xubNe8BcYS9cGKoMwdRpjhSD2y1HOomhk7CJcZ_6z11tV3tJeL-Mp3gw9J24heQ39JcNtB&tracking_referrer=qz.com.

tivation for completion. 36 In a similar study, it was shown that following the flow of complex but ordered musical forms develops the predictive functions of the brain, and that the breaks between musical sections allows the brain the rest it needs to process, catalog, and store the information received during active listening to the music. 37 This enhanced ability to hold tension for longer by being exposed to this complex music allows the brain to make more connections while holding in dialectic multiple seemingly-contradictory ideas. By training up children to manage these tensions, we expand their capacity to engage successfully in dialectic when they enter into that study later in their education because the engagement with a dialectic requires holding onto contrary ideas while exploring them both and not demanding an immediate resolution. Music is an important part of the education of young people. Not only does it have capacity for enhancing good or evil impulses, it serves to cement information in the memory and train our spirits to endure discord. Neglecting the training of students with music may leave them open to continuing in their base desires, and poor taste in music opens them to the inhumane content that frequently accompanies such music. As the failure to teach children to

36 Valorie Salimpoor, “Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music,” Nature Neuroscience, accessed March 18, 2022.

37 Mitzi Baker, “Music moves brain to pay attention, Stanford study finds,” Stanford Medicine, accessed on March 22, 2022, https://med. stanford.edu/news/all-news/2007/07/music-moves-brain-to-pay-attentionstanford-study-finds.html.

eat healthfully yields a weak and sickly body, serving musical junk food leads to a spirit that fails to thrive.

An ancient Greek child would be expected to sit and listen to an epic poem sung at great length. Waiting for Achilles to resolve his differences with Agamemnon would take days of listening. Just the middle part of the Odyssey, as Odysseus recounts his journey from Troy to Phaiakia, would take hours to unfold. Training children to attend and engage with long-form stories and songs prepares them to read longer books as they graduate up to the literary arts. Plato required that children study music to “become more balanced, more capable in whatever they say or do, for rhythms and harmonious adjustment are essential to the whole of human life.”38 Training students’ taste in music is an important part of helping them order their souls and making music useful to them in exciting or tempering the appropriate emotions.

Dance

Dance, much like music, is seen as purely social today. Most people, if they think of dance at all, likely think of Dirty Dancing, or some club scene, or perhaps (at best) a Jane Austen courtship moment. Though dancing used to be a thoroughly admirable skill, it has fallen into disrepute amongst the ‘in crowd’ as effeminate or weak.

38 Plato, Protagoras , trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 326a-b.

For the ancients, dance served a number of purposes. While there were some dances that were definitely meant for women or girls, other dance forms were manly and even bellicose. In the Iliad , Hector boasts of his great skill, “I know how to charge into the melee of swift chariots, and how to do song-dance to furious Ares in close battle.”39 In other places, battle is called the “song-dance of dogs.”

Upon Achilles’ shield, as forged by the god Hephaestus, depicting the very culture for which Achilles fought, “The dance of the youths and maidens is distinctive. It is a ritual dance performed with great care, by dancers scrupulously dressed in their best garments. It is made up of a crisp, rapid, circular figure, followed by a movement of two lines in opposition to one another.”40 Celebratory feasts and ritual dancing were important to the local community and to broader Greek culture. There were roles, distinct ones, for both the young men and young women. To the Greeks, dance was inseparable from music. The name of the Muse, Terpsichore, means “delight in the dance”. As expected then, the Greek word for “dance” is broader than our English word. For young men, dance education was much more like the study of Tai Chi. It was a deliberate practice of forms and movements, sometimes even armed, to imitate and ingrain movements common in battle.

“A pyrrhic dance, a form of weapon dance in which the dancers executed movements like those used in

39 Homer, The Iliad , trans. Robert Fagles (1998), 7:241.

40 Ibid., 18:478–608

battle, was part of all Spartan boys’ training, beginning at age 5. Youths wearing helmets and carrying shields and spears practiced these movements and postures to prepare themselves for military service. The pyrrhic was part of a larger ritual that prepared warriors for battle. Originally dedicated to Apollo, it began with hymns of praise for the god and included a magic dance to protect against sickness and death.”41

This physical training done with rhythm and perhaps even set to music connected the strengthening of the body with the strengthening of the soul.

While we have interesting cultural phenomena like jazzercise or cardio dance classes, the strengthening and control that comes with classical dance training has long been recognized. But the easy accessibility and low investment of a few local (or online) classes is attractive, giving the illusion of conveying some of the benefits of ballet training. But without the hours of hard work, focus on precise form, and hardening of the body, the true benefits of the dance training will never be realized. Plato argues that physical training, if left to run its own course without a relationship with the Muses (and particularly music) may go too far. “Yet surely, I said, this ferocity only comes from spirit, which, if rightly educated, would give courage, but, if too much intensified, is liable to become hard and brutal.”42 And yet, without the proper

42 Plato, Republic .

41 Gayle Kassing, History of Dance (Champaign, Il: Human Kinetics, 2018), 46.

physical training, a man might become too weak. “It must also be given gymnastic in many studies to see whether it will be able to bear the greatest studies, or whether it will turn out to be a coward.”43 These forces must be balanced and tempered to make a young man rise up with strength and moderation.

It was not only Socrates who held to this view that the training of the intellect and body must go hand in hand. A generation later, Isocrates of Athens wrote, “Give careful heed to all that concerns your life, but above all train your own intellect; for the greatest thing in the smallest compass is a sound mind in a human body. Strive with your body to be a lover of toil, and with your soul to be a lover of wisdom, in order that with the one you may have the strength to carry out your resolves, and with the other the intelligence to foresee what is for your good.”44

Training the body to move with precision, disciplining the flesh to endure hardship prepares the child to enter into adulthood. When the physical form is subjected to the will, the mind can also be pressed into service when the days of study grow long and hard. Just as the study of music helps the soul to sustain the tension of a long discord, the study of gymnastics, wrestling, and dance strengthen the body to press on through challenging tasks. By this, the gap between spirit and flesh shrinks and some of the inability is lost that is wrapped up in the maxim “the spirit is willing

43 Plato, Republic .

44 Isocrates, Isocrates , vol. 1, trans. George Norlin (New York: G.P. Putnam’s sons, 1928), 29.

but the flesh is weak.” When the time comes for the student to have to die to self, this training bears its fruit in self control and even self sacrifice.

Conclusion

Beginning with the premise that an education will “teach the young to know what is good, to serve it above self, and to reproduce it,”45 it should now be apparent how a Muse-inspired early childhood education lays the proper foundation. Truly, a classical early childhood education serves that mission, giving the students the tool of memory, the foundation of stories, the tempering of music, and the strengthening of dance.

Plato’s greatest student, Aristotle, posited that, “someone who is not brought up well in good habits cannot listen intelligently to lectures on political science, or about what is noble and just.”46 Building the habits of bodily strength, experiential knowledge of good and evil, attention and memory prepare a child to step into the role of the student in earnest as they mature.

As children become friends with the Muses they are being readied to engage with the written word and the wide world that it opens to them. More than that, they are prepared to embark on the study of the liberal arts—to see meaning in grammar, connection in dialectic, and persua-

45 Hicks, Norms .

46 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics , ed. Lesley Brown, trans. W. D. Ross, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4.1094.

siveness in rhetoric. The students who first have a musical education enters into these studies with heads full of knowledge and the self knowledge and self control to surmount the challenges that await them.

But beyond that, as Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain put it, “Education is not merely an intellectual affair, no matter how intellect-centered it must be, because human beings are not merely minds. As creatures made in God’s image, we are composite beings—unions of soul and body.”47 This musical education, though couched in ancient pagan terms, works in alignment with the way God made us. Moses told stories, Christ told parables, David wrote poems and music to teach that which is good and the way to wisdom. Can we believe that there is a better way than the way mapped out by both the men who founded Western culture and the godly men of the Scriptures?

Timothy Knotts is a reader of books, an apprentice to a master teacher, an amateur poet, and a lover of the beautiful. He is the co-founder of the Classical Learning Consortium for New England and lives with his wife, Cynthia, and his four children in Windsor, Connecticut. Occasionally, he has the opportunity to contribute to the Everyday Educator podcast and the CiRCE Institute blog.

The Awakening of Miss Prim and John Senior:

An Embodiment of the Reclamation of Culture in Early Education

by Tracey Leary

Iread The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera for the second time this summer. The first time I read this novel, I thought it was an enjoyable, Austenesque romance between opposite personalities in an idyllic setting, with a title character who experiences great personal growth and self-recognition. However, upon my second reading, I found myself fascinated with Fenollera’s vision, one that I was able to recognize this time because I also recently read another book: The Death of Christian Culture by John Senior. I realized that Fenollera was attempting to embody Senior’s ideas in a narrative form, and to communicate what it might look like for those ideas to be enfleshed in an actual community. She has said in a recent speech, “His imprint, the imprint of what he believed and

taught, runs through my novel.”1 In particular, I found Fenollera’s interpretation of Senior’s ideas on the education of children to be worth closely examining.

John Senior wrote The Death of Christian Culture in 1978, and since then, other writers such as Rod Dreher in The Benedict Option and Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes have addressed the larger cultural issues now coming to fruition which Senior starkly outlined forty year ago and have articulated their own vision of how a community desiring to reclaim a practice more consistent with the beliefs of Christendom in the midst of the rapid paganization of our world might operate. Fenollera addresses many of these issues in her novel as well, and Rod Dreher has even called Miss Prim a novelization of his own book. 2 In addition to this, in Fenollera’s imagined village of San Ireneo, Senior’s philosophy as it concerns the early education of children is for her a theme of prime importance. One of her main characters is the nameless Man in the Wing Chair, who we are told underwent a spiritual awakening after attending a seminar at the University of Kansas, a detail which Fenollera says is a “passing reference to Senior”.3 He is responsible for the raising and instruction of his four nieces and nephews, and Fenollera spends a good portion of the novel in describing how he undertakes this task.

1 Rod Dreher, “Miss Prim at Clear Creek,” American Conservative , August 2017, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/miss-primclear-creek/.

The Awakening of Miss Prim and John Senior:

One of John Senior’s foundational ideas of early education is that the reading of Good Books ought to precede the study of Great Books. He says, “Taking all that was best in the Greco-Roman world into itself, Western tradition has given us the thousand good books as a preparation for the great ones—and for all studies in the arts and sciences. Without them all studies are inhumane.”4 Senior explains that the reason for this is to replenish the cultural soil in order that students in Great Books programs such as the one he himself developed at Kansas may “grow up like an undernourished plant suddenly fertilized and watered”. The Man in the Wing Chair likewise insists that his small charges read Good Books first. He says to Miss Prim, “I’ve carefully chosen not only which books but when and how they become part of my nieces’ and nephews’ existence . . . They’re being brought up with good books so that later they can absorb great books.”5 Senior has included in The Death of Christian Culture an appendix entitled “The Thousand Good Books”, which lists the books that in his opinion are most appropriate for certain ages, and he has categorized them into those for The Nursery (ages 2-7), School Days (ages 7-12), Adolescence (ages 12-16), and Youth (ages 16-20). The Man in the Wing Chair appears to have paid close attention to this list in curating his own for his children, as he says, “It’s no coincidence that they read Lewis

4 John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture (Norfolk, VA: IRS Press, 2008), 181.

5 Natalia S. Fenollera, The Awakening of Miss Prim (New York, NY: Simon and Shuster, 2013), 155.

Carroll before Dickens, and Dickens before Homer.”6 John Senior places Lewis Carroll on the Nursery list, Dickens beginning on the School Days list and extending various of his works through the Adolescence list and to the Youth list, and Homer, who does not appear on any of these Appendix lists, must of course be considered as one of the Great Books to be studied after the Good Books have been absorbed. Ironically, one of the many disagreements between Miss Prim and the Man in the Wing Chair is over whether Little Women ought to have a place in his nieces’ early education. Miss Prim insists that every girl ought to visit “that little corner of Concord” before her education is complete, arguing that the book teaches “beauty, delicacy, security” and that when adult life becomes difficult, “they will always be able to look back and take refuge for a few hours in that familiar sentimental story”.7 It is the sentimentality to which she refers that The Man in the Wing Chair takes issue. He declares that although he hasn’t read it himself, he believes Little Women to be a “prissy, syrupy book” full of “cloying sentimentality”. Their disagreement is in part a matter of the defining of terms, as the Man in the Wing Chair later distinguishes between sentiment and sentimentality, saying, “Sentimentality is a pathology of the mind, or of the emotions, if you like, which swell up, outgrow their proper place, go crazy, obscure judgment.” 8 In this line of 6

argument, The Man in the Wing Chair again follows John Senior, who in decrying the effect of sentimentality in religion quotes Cardinal Newman in saying, “There is in the literary world just now an affectation of calling religion a ‘sentiment’ . . . It is not a religion of persons and things, of acts of faith and of direct devotion; but of sacred scenes and pious sentiments.” Senior believed this sentiment to have become dangerous since “What had been a mere slipshod sentimentality . . . was formulated and defined as the established religion of England and America a century later and called Liberalism. Its theologians and philosophers count among them some of the most famous men and women of letters in the nineteenth century: John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold” and apparently for The Man in the Wing Chair, the Alcotts.9 This inherent Liberalism, however, does not preclude John Senior giving a place to some of these books in his Thousand Great Books list. George Eliot’s works at least can be found on the list for Adolescents. Similarly, the Man in the Wing Chair does finally agree, after reading the book himself, that Little Women has enough merit to give the book a place in the girls’ education, if not the boys. Perhaps he also stole a glance at John Senior’s list and discovered that it does in fact include all of Louisa May Alcott’s works there as well. Another of the main tenets of Senior’s ideas on youth education is the early introduction of Greek and Latin. He believes that “the reforming of education, which must begin with the study of the classics, will be sterile and meaningless without a return to the animating principle of 9 Senior, Death of Christian Culture , 137.

our civilization”.10 He decries the removal of Greek and Latin literature from the schools at any level except that of the collegiate specialist and says that without this classical foundation, it is impossible to truly understand any literature, no matter what language. He goes on to say, “We read English in translation because we have lost all reference to anything. Not only outside the words we use by reference to history of other literatures, but even inside the words themselves . . .”11 How should this idea be practically applied? Senior is very specific: “Anyone who cares seriously about education will simply unplug the television set, burn most of his ‘Modern Library,’ learn at least some Latin and a little Greek, read the best vernacular literature . . . The shameful state of culture can be improved as soon as we want to improve it . . .”12 In accordance with this belief, the Man in the Wing Chair begins his instruction of the Classical languages in the earliest years of education. “He is teaching them Greek, Latin, and some Aramaic, the latter more for sentimental than academic reasons . . .”13 Miss Prim’s earliest encounter with the Man in the Wing Chair interrupts a lesson in which he is reading lines of Latin poetry and asking the children to identify the author, which turns out to be Virgil. They can’t quite place the lines from the Fourth Eclogue, but readily respond correctly to the “easier” lines from the Aeneid . Underlying both these em10

The Awakening of Miss Prim and John Senior:

phases in the education of the children is the indispensable foundation of Christian faith. Senior unequivocally states, “If God is Christ, and Christ is truth, then truth is a Person to be believed in, not an idea.”14 The Man in the Wing Chair prioritizes above all the instruction of his children in the Christian faith. He and the children attend daily mass at the nearby Benedictine abbey, the presence of which seems to have been his initial draw to San Ireneo. He doesn’t only take the children to be instructed in the faith by the church, however. Miss Prim briefly has this mistaken belief when one of the children, Teseris, tells her that her favorite fairy tale is the Redemption. She is aghast to think that the Man in the Wing Chair “hadn’t succeeded in instilling even the most basic rudiments of the faith that was so important to him . . . How could this be? All those morning walks to the abbey, all that reading of theology, all that ancient liturgy . . . and what had he achieved? Four children convinced that the texts he so loved were just fairy tales.”15 She quickly realizes her error when Teseris goes on to explain, “The Redemption is nothing like a fairy tale, Miss Prim. Fairy tales and ancient legends are like the Redemption. Haven’t you ever noticed?” The Awakening of Miss Prim contains many other examples of the instruction of the children in accordance with Senior’s explicit directions for fertilizing the cultural soil. He states, “The next time my colleague the chemist says his students cannot read and write, I shall say, ‘You teach him Latin and Greek, the Bible, Classical history, something of the medieval world and the history of

14 Senior, Death , 141.

15 Fenollera, Miss Prim , 78.

modern Europe through World War II—and then I’ll teach him to read and write!”16 We are told in the novel that in addition to their study of Greek, Latin, and the tenets of the Christian faith, the children of San Ireneo also stage productions of Antigone, learn medieval staff fighting along with the principles of chivalry that govern such contests, and regularly travel across Europe to see for themselves the great art and architecture of past ages. It is clear that as the children mature, the Man in the Wing Chair intends to extend their education as depicted by Senior in his description of the famous medieval picture which has a schoolboy entering a tower on the ground floor, which contains a book by the Latin grammarian Donatus, and ascending to Aristotle’s Logic, and then Cicero’s Rhetoric, beyond that to the higher stories of the quadrivium, and then even further to the study of philosophy, metaphysics, and finally theology.17 At the end of the novel, we see Miss Prim contemplating a newspaper advertisement placed by the Man in the Wing Chair for a “heterodox teacher for an unorthodox school, able to teach the trivium—Greek and Latin grammar, rhetoric, and logic—to children aged six to eleven.”18

In the midst of the wealth of learning that occurs in this book, both academic and otherwise, one notable absence is any use of technology. None of the inhabitants of San Ireneo seem to use iPhones, email, or any sort of video content. Of course, all of the characters are either primary

16

18

school aged children or adults, without exception. In Fenollera’s imaginary world, almost all of the educational needs of the children can be met by the adults in the community and when a need arises, ads are placed in newspapers in large cities to fill those positions. All correspondence is carried on through traditional mail. This seems to be in accord with Senior’s injunction to “unplug the television set.” Practically speaking, however, as students mature, it becomes less likely that a small community can provide for all of their educational needs. Had Fenollera included older students or young adults in her community, it might have been more difficult to omit all technology from her world, which does appear to be set in the present day. As Senior himself says, “That you cannot turn back the clock is no answer at all to the question of what time it is.”19 One possible criticism of Fenollera’s book is that she does seem to answer the question by trying to turn back the clock. As much as her vision of reverting to a simpler time has great value, we must live in the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. It would be fascinating to see a follow-up to this novel which carries the attempt to answer the question of reclaiming culture through education into the years when it is a little trickier to do so today without incorporating technology, which can be of great value in providing educational opportunities for students who either cannot travel to great teaching or whose resources are limited in the community in which they live, while balancing and preserving the character of the town which she has so beautifully created. In our culturally impoverished day, there are

not many teachers who can lead students through those upper levels of the quadrivium and the higher sciences that lie at the top of the medieval tower that Senior pictures, and technology can provide an invaluable resource for students who want to ascend that tower as far as possible. The novel ends ambiguously, but it seems that Miss Prim, who has left San Ireneo, will return to help to further this project. I hope she does, and that we are given the privilege of watching her do it.

Tracey Leary attended Huntingdon College on a piano scholarship and graduated with a B.A. in music and English. She also received her Masters degree in Education at the Auburn campus in Montgomery, AL and has over 10 years of experience teaching in private school, homeschool, and co-op environments. She is currently teaching two Humanities courses and a Jane Austen elective for the 2022-2023 school year at Kepler Education. She and her husband live in Alabama with their three boys.

Reuniting the Trivium and Quadrivium

by Dr. Louis Markos

Within a few days of watching the Chuck Jones animated film version of The Phantom Tollbooth (1969), I had purchased and devoured with delight the Norton Juster novel (1961) on which it was based. In that most madcap of novels, our child hero, Milo, is transported to the divided Kingdom of Wisdom where he must find and rescue two princesses named Rhyme and Reason. Unfortunately, his quest is impeded by a civil war that has been raging between the citizens of Dictionopolis (who value letters above numbers) and Digitopolis (who value numbers above letters).

The idea of there being a feud between letters and numbers made a deep impression on me; however, rather than seek to reconcile the two in my soul, I chose the path of the English professor, leaving all those algebraic and geometric numbers to fall by the wayside. When, some dozen years ago, I began to write and speak for classical Christian schools and conferences, I was challenged to rethink Juster’s call to reunite the domains of Dictionopolis

and Digitopolis and so restore Rhyme and Reason to our own divided Kingdom of Wisdom.

The architects of classical education, I quickly learned, advocated a system by which the letters-driven trivium of grammar, logic (or dialectic), and rhetoric was to be followed by the numbers-driven quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Well, that’s how it had been explained to me, but in nearly all the books and speeches I read or heard on the subject, the trivium took center stage and the quadrivium was relegated to the margins. The reason for this soon became clear: most of those books and speeches had been written or delivered by folks like me, letter-lovers who didn’t really know what to do with all those pesky numbers.

And then I came upon The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education by Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain. What makes Clark and Jain’s book unique is that it not only fixes its attention on the quadrivium— what it is and why it is vital—but it positions the trivium in the midst of a coherent educational track that they dub PGMAPT: Piety, Gymnastics, Music, (the seven liberal) Arts (that make up the trivium and quadrivium), Philosophy, and Theology.

Clark (DLS, Georgetown) and Jain (MA, Reformed Theological Seminary) are longtime faculty members at the Geneva School of Orlando, Florida, one of the finest classical Christian schools that I have spoken for. Jain teaches calculus and physics, Clark served as academic dean until 2019, when he founded the Ecclesial School Initiative to help underserved families in Florida receive better access to Christian liberal arts education.

Whereas most educators tend to think of Math in more practical, utilitarian terms than they do English, Clark and Jain demonstrate that “the original role of the Quadrivium [was] to lead the mind to the realm of eternal and unchanging truths.”1 Although this Pythagorean-Platonic understanding was later “displaced by the amazing power of mathematics to describe the physical world” (think Galileo and Newton), Clark and Jain insist that a proper understanding and execution of the quadrivium “ought to strike a balance between wonder, work, wisdom, and worship.”

2 Many classically-minded teachers, myself included, have felt that sense of awe before the Great Works of the intellectual tradition, and it has led us to put in the necessary labor to master that tradition, to extract from it rich nuggets of Truth, and to give praise to the Source of that Truth. Clark and Jain would encourage us to extend that same wonder, work, wisdom, and worship to the world of numbers, partly by reminding us that the list of those who did just that includes philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Descartes. Remember that Plato treated geometry as the second closest discipline to the Forms—philosophy, of course, was first—for it points to universal ratios and not just to this or that particular cube or right triangle.

Throughout their book, Clark and Jain warn their readers against the dangers of nominalism, of the belief

1 Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education (Camp Hill, PA: Classical Academic Press, 2014, 2019), 68.

2 Ibid., 68-69.

that words like Justice and Truth are just names that do not point back to any universals. What makes their warning unique is that they mount it, not in their discussion of the trivium, where I would have expected it, but in their defense of the centrality of the quadrivium to a full liberal arts education. This came as something of a shock to me, for I have, along with other apologists, often used Owen Barfield, Michael Polanyi, and the theories of quantum physics—not to mention the closing chapter of C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image !—to critique the way in which the modern world has cut off nature from man’s perception of it, thus stranding us in a cold, dead universe that has little to do with us.

The Liberals Arts Tradition has challenged me to open my eyes to the danger of severing not only words but numbers from a real connection to universal truths and patterns. As Clark and Jain explain, most of the scientific advances since Galileo have rested on the belief of these early modern scientists, nearly all of whom were Christians, that the universe runs on fixed laws that operate apart from our perceptions of those operations. “[T]he mathematical realism of Kepler and Galileo is one of the key Christian contributions to the Quadrivium. These Christians, unlike prior generations of Platonists, believed that mathematics really predicted something true in nature. Kepler, Galileo, and Newton believed that their calculations represented how the world truly was. They didn’t think that their work was just intellectual accounting.”3

That this is the case for math, geometry, and, especially, astronomy should be clear to most readers . . . but music? As it turns out, Clark and Jain argue, the seventh liberal art of music “is far more powerful and mysterious than most would guess.”4 That is why, in his Harmonies of the World , Kepler includes “dozens of staves of music to describe the mathematical relationships among the planets. Kepler believed that God, the great artisan, had not just functionality in mind when creating the universe, but beauty as well.”5 Indeed, Clark and Jain make the even stronger claim that “all the heroes of the Scientific Revolution were mathematical and scientific realists . . . [who] believed as a presupposition that a perfect God had woven perfect mathematical harmonies into the world that reflected the truth of reality.”6

The Liberal Arts Tradition is well worth reading merely for its section on the quadrivium, but Clark and Jain give their readers so much more. By carefully sifting through the history of classical education, starting with Plato and Aristotle, they uncover something vital that has often been missing from classical curricula that begin their educational track with the trivium. What the ancients and Medievals knew, but we have forgotten, is that the seven liberal arts must themselves rest on a foundation of piety—which they define as “the duty, love, and respect owed to God, parents,

4 Ibid., 88.

5 Ibid., 90.

6 Ibid., 96.

and communal authorities past and present” 7—and gymnastics and music, which two disciplines unite body and soul and cultivate the affections, making them receptive to goodness, truth, and beauty.

If piety, gymnastics, and music, in Clark and Jain’s helpful metaphor, form the roots of the tree of wisdom, then philosophy and theology form its branches. Just as the former three prepare the ground for the liberal arts tree, so the trivium and quadrivium so train the mind as to enable it to press on to the higher pursuits of the latter two. Traditionally, philosophy was divided into three branches, with one each taking up the truths about God, man, and the universe. “The area of philosophy devoted to comprehending the eternal and spiritual truths was called divine philosophy (its synonym was ‘metaphysics’). The branch of philosophy that pursued man as God’s image, both in his being and his relationships, was termed moral philosophy. Finally, the kind of philosophy devoted to exploring causes in the realm of nature, the world of God’s creation, was natural philosophy.” 8

While, in the past, these branches were united, today, sadly, they have been broken up into various specialties, most of which are cut off from any source of divine wisdom. Meanwhile, “the specialized academic discipline that we now call philosophy bears little resemblance to its historical namesake.” 9 But Clark and Jain do not let them-

7 Clark and Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition , 15.

8 Ibid., 104-105.

9 Ibid., 105.

selves give in to despair. They know the possibilities inherent in a return to the full liberal arts tradition and are bold to imagine what such a full return could bring. “What might it look like to once again comprehend in a single vision what modernity has separated into the objective and merely quantitative realm of scientific knowledge and the radically subjective qualitative realm of love, meaning, and value? It is time that the West once again had a vision for the whole of reality, where God, his image, and his creation are the interpenetrating centers.”10

As for theology, if she is to regain her position as the queen of the sciences, then she must be honored as the discipline which gives unity to all the others and in which all the others find their consummation and reason for being.

“Theology orders our knowledge to its proper end in the worship and service of the Lord Jesus Christ.”11 Or to put it another way, if we are to recover a true paideia —which Greek word the authors translate as “the transmission of the entirety of the loves, norms, and values of a culture”12 —that begins in wonder and ends in worship, then we must commit ourselves to taking our students through the full PGMAPT curriculum that Clark and Jain lay out in their book. And if we do that, we just might raise up a generation of Milos who can restore Rhyme and Reason to our warring, fragmented education system.

10 Ibid., 106.

11 Ibid. 209.

12 Ibid, 211.

Dr. Louis Markos, Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities; his twenty-two books include From Achilles to Christ, The Myth Made Fact, From Plato to Christ, Literature: A Student’s Guide, C. S. Lewis: An Apologist for Education, and three Canon Press Worldview Guides to the Iliad , Odyssey , and Aeneid . His son Alex teaches Latin at the Geneva School in Boerne, TX, and his daughter Anastasia teaches music at Founders Classical Academy in Lewisville, TX.

On Creating Meaningful Art

by Scott Postma

“Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.”1

Tolstoy wrote, “Art is that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” 2 This statement of Tolstoy’s seems like a noble definition of art. It appears to have all the elements for which artists tend to create: human activity, consciousness, external signs, feelings, experience, others. He describes art as a human activity whereby the feelings of

1 Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 99.

2 Leo Tolstoy, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky, What is Art? (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 40.

one person about a particular experience infects the feelings of other people about that experience. What is more human than experiencing the satisfaction of sharing your most profound feelings about a personal experience in a way that you know there is nothing left to share because it has all been creatively expressed on the canvas, or in the composition? To put it in sports terminology, it is satisfying to the artist because he has left it all on the field, or on the court, or in the ring, or on whatever venue he has played. The artist has in some manner emptied himself of the feelings of that experience for the purpose of infecting others so they too can feel them. Also, what is more human than being on the receiving end of actually experiencing those most profound feelings of another human being— most often from another culture or epoch in history—in all its otherness? For example, who contemplates the early Christian drawing painted on the walls of the catacombs, or the reliefs sculpted on the Column of Trajan, and fails to wonder at the connection to such a people to whom he will never verbally speak or never physically touch? Who views Anton Losenko’s 1773 oil on canvas, Farewell of Hector and Andromache, and is not moved by the profundity of such a simple domestic scene of a noble warrior’s unwitting family soon to be torn, literally to shreds, by the horrors of war? And how does one not experience the stately rapture of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, and not feel as if he is transcending his particular human circumstances for a few moments of incorporeal imperturbation? Alas, who does not carefully read Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn and find himself caught up with the otherness of its existence and finish the poem sure of the urn’s declaration: “Beauty

On Creating Meaningful Art

is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” even without fully comprehending its meaning? These are examples of fine art or what Francis Schaeffer calls, “‘high art,’ that is, painting, sculpture, poetry, classical music.”3

Works of fine art move us because they are beautiful. And they are beautiful, partly because they mean something. They convey to us a perennial human experience in a both unique and universal way. Yet, they are also beautiful in themselves, and for their own sakes. They are pleasant to look at, pleasant to listen to, and pleasant to read. And, in some instances, they are so captivating, our attention cannot be pulled away. To paraphrase Horace, they delight and enlighten us, and say what is “both amusing and really worth using.”4 Of course, some things called art can be meaningful without ever being beautiful, but something can never be beautiful without also being meaningful. And by all means, works that are neither meaningful nor beautiful, like those of Andres Serrano, Annie Sprinkle, Andy Warhol, or Robert Mapplethorpe, for instance, should never be called art, let alone fine art. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to offer a conceptual basis for art and beauty that is rooted in truth and goodness, and one that provides a foundation for creating meaningful art that is also beautiful. No doubt, this is an ambitious goal for a paper this size. Nevertheless, if recovering meaning and beauty in art

3 Francis A. Schaeffer, Art and the Bible (InterVarsity Press, 2006), 49.

4 David H. Richter, ed., T he Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2007), 91.

is as important as it seems to be, then any progress made toward that end should be valuable.

Given the history of aesthetics and the nature of the transcendent, finding a conceptual basis for art and beauty that everyone will agree on is obviously impossible, so it would be futile to even try. At best we might be able to describe or name some of the characteristics and/or effects, but the definition of beauty’s essence eludes us—even though we are not then left unknowing what it is at least in some measure. Instead, it will be more fruitful to lay a course which takes into consideration the merits of some of the more influential voices in the great conversation on aesthetics. From there it may be possible to develop a foundation for those who value truth and goodness. The project will be akin to the idea that if you build it they will come, but with a caveat. Build it and know that not everyone will come—but the right ones will.

To begin with, there is such a thing as art, per se, as when one speaks of the art of negotiation, or the art of juggling, which is something altogether different than studying the liberal arts, or practicing the servile arts, or critiquing the fine arts. Each of these are an entirely different kind of thing; yet, they share some significant commonalities and are therefore rendered arts, only being distinguished in name by their adjectives. Our English word art is an anglicized transliteration of the Latin ars, artis, f. [v. arma], meaning skill in joining something, combining, working it, etc. 5 The Romans lifted the idea from the Greeks whose use

5 Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, Harpers’ Latin Dictionary (New York; Oxford: Harper & Brothers; Clarendon Press, 1891), 166.

On Creating Meaningful Art

of the term τέχνη (cf. τίκτω, τεκεῖν) referred to art, skill, device, craft, cunning. 6 As each subsequent epoch borrowed from the previous, this Greek lemma maintained its influence on human thought throughout the development of the Western tradition. It communicated a variety of ideas, such as skills in producing any material form, handicraft, trade, occupation, or employment; and, it eventually made its way into our English vernacular in the form of words like technical and technique. In any case, as the dialogues of Plato indicate, τέχνη already carried with it a semantic range of its own early in our human experience. For example, in Euthydemus, Socrates’ philosophical pursuit creates a need to distinguish between the various nuances of art when he attempts to make a distinction between the art of lyre-making and the art lyre-playing (he does this with a variety of other arts as well). From his discussion with Crito, Socrates concludes the art they are looking for is actually a third kind of art, one that “uses as well as makes.” 7 As this example illustrates, before there is adequate technical language to discuss the idea, in some of its earliest recorded usages, art (τέχνη ) is innately loaded with a variety of meanings. It may be helpful to digress, briefly, to point out that when discussing any topic, particularly topics of great nuance, one must depend on the curious medium of language to accomplish the task. On the one hand, the ability to use language to articulate nuanced ideas is one of

6 Georg Autenrieth, ed. Isaac Flagg, trans. Robert P. Keep, A Homeric Dictionary for Schools and Colleges (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895), 268.

7 Robert Maynard Hutchins, Great books of the Western World: Plato , vol. 7 (Chicago: W. Benton, 1952), 74.

the primary attributes separating human beings from the non-rational animals; yet, as many philosophers have discovered, it is very often a lousy medium for communicating these ideas. It is quite the paradox, for certain. Hans Gadamer, the elusive German philosopher, noted in his famed academic work on hermeneutics, Truth and Method : “The human word is essentially incomplete. No human word can express our mind completely . . . the human word is not one, like the divine word, but must necessarily be many words.” 8 Thus when it comes to articulating an idea or concept—especially if it is an abstract or complicated one, like art and beauty—it is usually necessary to assign modifiers, employ metaphors, or even create neologisms to help distinguish between all the related ideas that might fall within the spectrum of meaning assumed in any given word or expression. But, even then, language is such that adding any number of modifiers, metaphors, or neologisms may only get us barely closer to an adequate definition or understanding of a concept under consideration. To return to the task, this is precisely the case with art, beauty, the concepts related to them.

During the epochs subsequent to the Athenian philosophers, the Romans advanced the idea of τέχνη or ars “beyond the sphere of the common pursuits of life into that of artistic and scientific action.” 9 Said another way, the idea of art was extended to include even more relat-

8 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 442.

9 Ibid., 74.

On Creating Meaningful Art

ed concepts, and by the time the Renaissance came along, art referred to “any physical or mental activity, so far as it [was] practically exhibited; i.e., a profession, art (music, poetry, medicine, etc.)”10 Further designations based on these Roman notions eventually created the categories of liberal arts and servile arts —the arts of free men and the arts of slaves or the lower class. Since distinctions between the nuanced ideas contained within the meaning of the word arts had been developing in various forms since the classical epoch, it should not come as any surprise that further distinctions were made along the way, particularly at crucial periods within the evolution of human thought, like that of the Enlightenment, when the epistemological category of aesthetics came into proper use. On this point, Roger Scruton aptly notes,

It is true that the word ‘aesthetic’ came into its present use in the eighteenth century; but its purpose was to denote a human universal. The questions I have been discussing in this book were discussed in other terms [e.g. art, beauty] by Plato and Aristotle, by the Sanskrit writer Bharata two centuries later, by Confucius in the Analects and by a long tradition of Christian thinkers from Augustine and Boethius, through Aquinas to the present day.11

Scruton makes his observation in the context of his explaining the development of aesthetics as a discipline, par -

10 Robert Maynard Hutchins, Great books of the Western World: Plato , vol. 7, 74.

11 Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction , 54.

ticularly where a distinction is drawn between Kant’s idea of universal taste in the judgment of natural beauty and the aesthetic judgment of art as works of man which “interest us in part because they represent things, tell stories about things, express ideas and emotions, convey meanings that are consciously intended.”12 Really, Scruton’s is a simplified culmination of “the difficult, often flamboyant, argumentation” about the ideas of aesthetics called by different names beginning with Plato (who dismissed any real value of art as mere imitations of imitations of truth) and Aristotle (who defended the arts, e.g., poetry as being more valuable than history because it reveals truths universally relevant to humanity).

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, even though the ideas had been being argued for two millennia, “The philosophical discipline of aesthetics did not receive its name until 1735, when the twenty-one year old Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced it in his Halle master’s thesis to mean epistêmê aisthetikê, or the science of what is sensed and imagined (Baumgarten, Meditationes §CXVI, pp. 86–7).”13 This being the case, the use of the term fine arts as it is relates to aesthetics seems to come into use in the same early modern period. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary dates its introduction to the early eighteenth century (e.g., 1739). This same reference defines the fine arts as “(1) art (as painting, sculpture, or music) concerned pri-

12 Scruton, Beauty , 54.

13 Paul Guyer, “18th Century German Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, January 16, 2007, accessed June 16, 2017, https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetics-18th-german/.

On Creating Meaningful Art

marily with the creation of beautiful objects—usually used in plural. Or, (2) an activity requiring a fine skill.”14 The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines the fine arts as “those arts which chiefly depend on a delicate or fine imagination, as music, painting, poetry, and sculpture.”15 Finally, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica , Fine Arts is

the name given to a whole group of human activities, which have for their result what is collectively known as Fine Art. The arts which constitute the group are the five greater arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry, with a number of minor or subsidiary arts, of which dancing and the drama are among the most ancient and universal. In antiquity the fine arts were not explicitly named, nor even distinctly recognized, as a separate class. In other modern languages besides English they are called by the equivalent name of the beautiful arts (belle arti, beaux arts, schöne Künste). The fine or beautiful arts then, it is usually said, are those among the arts of man which minister, not primarily to his material necessities or conveniences, but to his love of beauty; and if any art fulfills both these purposes at once, still as fulfilling the latter only is it called a fine art.16

14 Inc Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2003).

15 E. Cobham Brewer, ed., Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London; Paris; Melbourne: Cassell and Company, Limited, 1895), 462.

16 “Fine Arts,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 10, Slice 3: “Fenton, Edward” to “Finistere”, March 12, 2011, accessed June 15, 2017, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35561/35561-h/35561-h.htm#ar209.

What is common in these three definitions—the human creation of beautiful objects which depend on an artist’s fine imagination and that are appreciated primarily for their own beauty’s sake—is not only on par with Scruton’s treatment of the term aesthetic, but it rightly shows the connection between its development and that of the term fine arts.

A brief treatment of Kant’s aesthetic philosophy in his Critique of Judgment will demonstrate in closer detail how these distinctions were developing and what implications they had on how art would be created and viewed. He writes,

Art is distinguished from nature as making is from acting or operating in general, and the product or the result of the former is distinguished from that of the latter as work from effect . . . By right it is only production through freedom, i.e. through an act of will that places reason at the basis of its action, that should be termed art . . . Art, as human skill, is distinguished also from science (as ability from knowledge), as a practical from a theoretical faculty, as technic from theory (as the art of surveying from geometry) . . . Art is further distinguished from handicraft. The first is called free, the other may be called renumerative (sic) art. We look on the former as something which could only prove purposive (be a success) as play, i.e. an occupation which is agreeable on its own account; but on the second as labour, i.e. a business, which on its own account is disagreeable (drudgery), and is only attractive by means of what it results in (e.g. the pay), and which is consequently capable of being a compulsory imposition.17

17 Immanuel Kant and Nicholas Walker, Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 132-133.

Kant makes distinction between art, nature, science, and handicraft—all of which have in previous epochs bore the name art. But that was another era. In the Age of Enlightenment, humanity needed clearer distinctions to be able to properly discuss the faculties of the mind, particularly the abilities of human reason to contemplate beauty, which is in fact what Kant is doing in his treatment of aesthetics. For Kant, art is not a product of nature, but the skillful creation of the human will acting freely, e.g. without the burden of accomplishing some necessary business or working as a means of employment.

Art is not science in the sense that science is theoretical and art is a practice. Art is not remunerative in that it is not created for what it can do, necessarily, but for its own inherent beauty—even if that means the beauty is contained in what it does, i.e. the blades on a water mill are painted to be properly trimmed for its purpose. Though Kant’s technical distinctions prove helpful in articulating the nuances of the growing field of aesthetics, his approach is epistemological, not ontological, meaning he is interested in how humans know things. This means, for Kant, how one knows what is beautiful is the most important thing to decipher. His treatment of aesthetics will require further distinctions, and so he separates fine arts from art in general, writing,

Where art, merely seeking to actualize a possible object to the cognition of which it is adequate, performs whatever acts are required for that purpose, then it is mechanical. But should the feeling of pleasure be what it has immediately in view it is then termed aesthetic

art. As such it may be either agreeable or fine art. The description ‘agreeable art’ applies where the end of the art is that the pleasure should accompany the representations considered as mere sensations, the description ‘fine art’ where it is to accompany them considered as modes of cognition.

Agreeable arts are those which have mere enjoyment for their object. Such are all the charms that can gratify a dinner party (etc.)...Fine art, on the other hand, is a mode of representation which is intrinsically purposive, and which, although devoid of an end, has the effect of advancing the culture of the mental powers in the interests of social communication.18

This is a mouthful, but it is a significant mouthful. The fine arts, in Kant’s view, are more closely associated with feelings of pleasure involving the beautiful, and are more than simply mechanical. Yet, they are not merely pleasurable in the sense they are simply agreeable to the senses; rather, they are cause for contemplation. In other words, the pleasure is not a pleasure that arises out of “mere sensation,” says Kant, but a pleasure “of reflection.”19 Additionally, in Kant’s view, the fine arts must also appear to be like nature, not made with a “laboured effect” as it were, even though to the one who looks upon the art it is apparent that it is art rather than nature. Kant is a little clumsy explaining this concept, but the idea is that fine art will demonstrate a consistency within itself that is natural to its likeness. For example, an evergreen tree will be rep -

18 Kant and Walker, Critique of Judgement , 134-135.

19 Ibid.

On Creating Meaningful Art

resented in terms of its natural aspect, ratios, colors, and proportions. It will not be purple, wider than it is tall, or larger than the mountain it is growing on. It will be natural in its representation. What may be the most significant statement here, however, is that Kant sees fine art as intrinsically purposive, as that which advances the culture intellectually. It uplifts society, and does not tear it down. John Gardner seems to be reflecting on Kant’s aesthetic when he writes in his book, On Moral Fiction :

The traditional view is that true art is moral: it seeks to improve life, not debase it. It seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us. I do not deny that art like criticism, may legitimately celebrate the trifling. It may joke, or mock, or while away the time. But trivial art has no meaning or value except in the shadow of the more serious art, the kind of art that beats back the monsters and, if you will, makes the world safe for triviality. That art which tends toward destruction, the art of the nihilists, cynics, and merdistes, is not properly art at all. 20

Though Kant is helpful in holding a high standard by setting limits around the idea of fine arts, his view is incomplete as the final word. Because Kant applies his categorical imperative to aesthetics, he places beauty in the subject of the aesthetic experience, and not in the object. In other words, he believes beauty is universal and subjective: that every rational human being who has a developed taste will have a similar aesthetic experience: such a one will see the

20 John Champlin Gardner, On Moral Fiction (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 5-6.

beautiful in the senses, and contemplate it in the intellect. As one might imagine, Kant’s expectations are too high, and ultimately they are unreasonable. Therefore, his aesthetic falls short of providing a viable conceptual basis for art and beauty by itself.

Hegel, however, is helpful when he romanticizes Kant’s aesthetic philosophy and thus provides some promising insights that liberates the fine arts from mere universal subjective human contemplation. Hegel seeks to synthesize the subject and the object by allowing for the Platonic Ideal, or the Absolute beauty, to be a divine spirit on an incarnational journey to reveal itself, to give itself expression in art. 21 Thus, in his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel ascribes to the fine arts a cultural and educational function akin to religion and philosophy. He writes,

Fine art is not real art till it is in this sense free, and only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy, and has become simply a mode of revealing to consciousness and bringing to utterance the Divine Nature, the deepest interests of humanity, and the most comprehensive truths of the mind. 22

21 Technically, Hegel asserts the divine spirit expresses itself in all of history and in part through art and then more completely in religion, especially the Christian religion, and then finally in philosophy.

22 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Bernard Bosanquet, and Michael Inwood, Introductory lectures on aesthetics (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 9.

In Hegel’s view, fine art is actually prophetic, not in the sense of prognosticating, but in the sense of divine truth re-

On Creating Meaningful Art

vealing itself to the world through history. Absolute beauty, or the “ Platonic Idea,” he explains, has been on a journey to reveal itself more fully through the various art forms beginning with symbolic art, moving to classical art, then to romantic art, and finally to modern art. And even within the arts, the Idea has progressed to a fuller expression of itself as it moved within the arts from architecture, to sculptures, to paintings, to music, and finally to poetry. Hegel’s aesthetic philosophy is robust and fairly complicated, but simply put, it gives fuller insight to Percy Shelley’s claim that the poet is the unacknowledged legislator of the world. Thanks to Kant and the Romantics, the world has been given broader, more helpful definitions with which to treat fine arts and its manifestation of the beautiful. Though these two influential views on aesthetics will likely never be reconciled, or completely synthesized, they can be helpful in seeking a higher subjective standard for art in the former case, and a higher objective standard for it in the latter. The problem is, however, because they cannot be reconciled, neither of them provide an absolute objective standard (in the sense of absolute truth and without bias) on which to build a viable conceptual basis for beauty and the fine arts. On this point, they both fail. They also fail to provide any insight into the reasons for some of the modern trends in art, though Hegel did foresee the arts being liberated from religion and becoming entirely secular. In any case, he was onto something in that regard. The more modern concepts of fine art, i.e. either of Pablo Picasso’s The Three Musicians or Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans appear to affirm Hegel’s prophecy in that they seem to challenge all of the traditional concepts of beauty. Even

the Encyclopaedia Britannica acknowledges concerns about the boundaries of the definition of fine art:

But this, the commonly accepted account of the matter, does not really cover the ground. The idea conveyed by the words “love of beauty,” even stretched to its widest, can hardly be made to include the love of caricature and the grotesque; and these are admittedly modes of fine art. Even the terrible, the painful, the squalid, the degraded, in a word every variety of the significant, can be so handled and interpreted as to be brought within the province of fine art. A juster and more inclusive, although clumsier, account of the matter might put it that the fine arts are those among the arts of man which spring from his impulse to do or make certain things in certain ways for the sake, first, of a special kind of pleasure, independent of direct utility, which it gives him so to do or make them, and next for the sake of the kindred pleasure which he derives from witnessing or contemplating them when they are so done or made by others. 23

While the article does raise the issue at the heart of the controversy in theory, it would seem the idea of a “special kind of pleasure” implies there are now new questions to ask. Should art be reduced to the pleasure one receives from creating something? When a craftsman completes the construction of a high-quality chair, for example, certainly there is aesthetic satisfaction in some measure. But

23 “Fine Arts,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 10, Slice 3: “Fenton, Edward” to “Finistere”, March 12, 2011, accessed June 15, 2017, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35561/35561-h/35561-h.htm#ar209.

On Creating Meaningful Art

does such satisfaction constitute art? John Dewey seems to think so. Explaining how art does not lose its aesthetic value because it possesses some utility, he asserts, “An angler may eat his catch without thereby losing the esthetic satisfaction he experienced in casting and playing. It is this degree of completeness of living in the experience of making and perceiving that makes the difference between what is fine or esthetic in art and what is not.” 24 According to Dewey, it is the experience of casting and playing just for the experience of it that is fine art. Eating the fish is just an added bonus. Or, in returning to Britannica’s definition, is it the kindred pleasure which one derives from witnessing or contemplating what one, or another, has made that is fine art? Would it be considered fine art to watch an angler cast and play in the water? Would it be fine art to hear the angler recount his fishing experience? Again, it can certainly be conceded that there is some aesthetic pleasure in watching an experienced angler cast and play, or hearing the story of how the “big one” was finally caught, but it seems a stretch to call this fine art. Perhaps, there is room to acknowledge the aesthetic experience within the τεκνη of fishing, but if experience is art, where are the boundaries? Is all experience that is complete enough to be called an experience, as Dewey would assert, considered fine art? To relate a personal story, I once visited an art exhibition where one artist created numerous familial scenes under glass globes. (Think of a larger version of a snow globe without the snow.) Each scene was created with children’s

24 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, NY: Perigee, Penguin Group, 2005), 27.

plastic toys and depicted an experience that would be considered typical of a nuclear family—but with a twist. The colorful plastic toys gave each scene a sense of cheap American consumerism. The twist was that each happy scene included the gruesome murder of one of the family members. For example, one scene depicted a family barbecue in the backyard: a modestly dressed mother placed utensils next to the paper plates on the picnic table, children played ball in the grass next to the tree with a tire swing, and a casually dressed father cooked on the grill. The twist was an eviscerated baby being barbecued on the grill. A horrific scene if it had not been for the cheapness of the plastic toys. The aesthetic value was supposed to be in the reaction—in the experience of the viewer. It was meant to be a collision of morals, the cheapening and profanation of that which was conventionally considered sacred. The political statement could not have been more clear, and the expected reaction was achieved, but fine art was nowhere to be found. As Scruton notes, “Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.” 25 How are works like the one just described, or like that of Andres Serrano, or like that of Robert Mapplethorpe, for instance, classified as “fine art” when they not only lack beauty, but are clearly ugly? It might be argued that they are meaningful in the sense that they communicate a message, but what if the message is equally as ugly as the work?

On Creating Meaningful Art

To start with, in order to maintain any ground gained in the attempt to define the boundaries of what constitutes the fine arts, namely that which is both meaningful and beautiful, one thing that seems to be necessary is to retain the adjectival designators thus claimed, e.g. “fine” in the fine arts. This will at least provide a distinction between that which manifests the beautiful, and the aesthetic pleasure that is derived from an experience, or from one’s τεκνη. However, this does not go nearly far enough in providing a conceptual basis for art and beauty that is rooted in truth and goodness, and one that provides a foundation for creating meaningful art that is also beautiful. Though Kant and Hegel offered meaningful insights, their aesthetics did not get us far enough either. To accomplish this, it will be necessary to finish tracing out the fall of art, if it can be so called, to reveal what line of thinking led to its postmodern demise. This will hopefully afford a view of the aesthetic landscape that can be built on properly.

As stated previously, Tolstoy’s definition appears, at first glance, to communicate a noble definition of art: “Art is that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” 26 On closer inspection, however, it falls considerably short of those examples offered at the beginning of the paper. This is because Tolstoy’s definition of art excludes beauty outright. To Tolstoy, art is nothing more than a communion of feelings between people via external signs. Perhaps this

seems to be an unfair indictment against the famed author of the classic novels, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina . But a brief look at his work on aesthetics, What is Art?, will most certainly demonstrate otherwise. Following his aforementioned definition of art, he summarizes his position on aesthetics, writing,

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the mysterious idea, beauty, God; not, as the aesthetician-physiologists say, a form of play in which man releases a surplus of stored-up energy; not the manifestation of emotions through external signs; not the production of pleasing objects; not, above all, pleasure; but is a means of human communion, necessary for life and for the movement towards the good of the individual man and of mankind, uniting them in the same feelings. 27

In what he affirms, his is not necessarily a bad definition of art, as far as it goes. The problem is his affirmations do not go far enough; and in what he denies, he goes much too far. For example, there is merit in his assertion that art is a means of human communion. Recall, art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. Additionally, Tolstoy is correct in saying art is necessary to life. At the very least, it is the manifestation of creativity innate in every human. As Tolkien noted in Mythopoeia , because humans have been created in the image of God, humans are sub-creators, expanding God’s creative genius, as it were, in obedience to the “dominion

commission.” 28 And at its very best, art is a mirror into the soul of humanity. Art is what humans work for, what humans war for, and what humans wish for. Finally, art does move us toward the good, and transcendently unites humanity in a way nothing else can. All that Tolstoy affirms here is true, yet his affirmations fail to go far enough; and, in what Tolstoy denies, he deprives art of its essence—that which manifests beauty.

Perhaps Tolstoy was a curmudgeon. But his view on aesthetics was not developed overnight. He spent a lifetime thinking about them. In his published work, he comes to his definition by first working his way through a fairly unabridged bibliography of aestheticians, taking each one to task for what he believes are their errors. Ultimately, he boils down all aesthetic concepts of beauty to two fundamental views: “one, that beauty is something existing in itself, a manifestation of the absolutely perfect—idea, spirit, will, God; the other, that beauty is a certain pleasure we experience, which does not have the personal advantage as its aim.” 29 In other words, he demonstrates how all theories of beauty either fall into the category of subjective beauty, where beauty is “in the eye of the beholder,” so to speak, or the category of objective beauty where beauty is some intangible perfected thing that exists in the object of art itself. One can certainly hear echoes of Kant and Hegel

28 Genesis 1:26-30 records the command God gave the first man and woman to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. The word dominion implies something more than stewarding the earth, but fashioning it in relationship to human flourishing.

29 Tolstoy, Pevear, and Volokhonsky, What is Art? , 31.

in his summary. Yet, in Tolstoy’s estimation, both of these ideas fall short because they both mean beauty is “nothing other than the recognition as good of what has been and is found pleasing by us—that is, by a certain circle of people.”30 In other words, if art must be defined as manifesting beauty, which is another name for the pleasure of certain upper class people, it is an inequitable aristocratic construct in Tolstoy’s view of things. Tolstoy is not a friend of beauty in the aesthetic sense of the word because, in his estimation, it is a two-fold enemy of humanity. First, beauty is the enemy of the good:

The good is the eternal, the highest aim of our life. No matter how we understand the good, our life is nothing else than a striving towards the good—that is, towards God . . . the beautiful is nothing other than what is pleasing to us. The concept of beauty not only does not coincide with the good, but is rather the opposite of it, because the good for the most part coincides with a triumph over our predilections, while beauty is the basis of all our predilections. 31

If the good is the highest aim of the human life, then beauty is the biggest adversary of humanity’s striving toward it. As Tolstoy saw it, it is the good that leads mankind to triumph over his predilections (i.e., desire for worldly pleasures). Since beauty is pleasure, then it is the opposite of the good, and the very foundation of those predilections mankind 30 Tolstoy, Pevear, and Volokhonsky, What is Art? , 34.. 31 Ibid.,

On Creating Meaningful Art

must overcome to strive toward the good. Second, beauty is the enemy of the common people. He explains why:

Refined art could emerge only on the slavery of the popular masses and can continue only as long as this slavery exists; and that the specialists—writers, musicians, dancers and actors—can reach that refined degree of perfection only on condition of the hard work of labourors, and that only on these conditions can there exist the refined public to appreciate such works. Free the slaves of capital, and it will be impossible to produce such refined art. 32

As mentioned previously, Tolstoy saw an inequitable segregation of the wealthy upper class from the common working people as being at the heart of an aesthetic where beauty is the manifestation of art. Nearly twenty years before the Bolshevik revolution, Tolstoy was seeking to democratize art by ridding it of beauty. Obviously there are too many implications in this aspect of his aesthetic to track down, but suffice it to say that democratization always seeks the lowest common denominator of that which is being democratized. Art, especially, is not excluded from this curse. An abbreviated summary of Tolstoy’s aesthetic argument would go something like this. True art is not meant to be a manifestation of beauty because beauty is nothing more than a euphemism of the upper class for selfish pleasure. From the time of the Renaissance to the time of the Reformation, the upper class Europeans, having left their faith in the Church’s teaching (and not turning to the true

teachings of Christianity as it is supposed), pursued their artistic pleasures on the backs of the common people under the guise of manifesting the beautiful. This separation of the upper class’s refined art from the arts of the common people resulted in an injustice against the common people; a specialized, refined art that was not really art, competed to replace the real art that would lead mankind forward toward the common good. Of this, Tolstoy writes, “And the consequence of this absence of true art has proved to be the very one it had to be: the depravity of the class that avails itself of this art.”33 Therefore, to believe Tolstoy, artists should not strive to create beautiful art lest they continue to contribute to the degradation of society. In a single sleight of the pen, Tolstoy has reduced art to meaning any creative work that communicates one’s feelings to another without the presence of beauty. All that is left now is to dislodge meaning from art, or at least change its fundamental characteristics, and then the ordinary, vulgar, and profane can be included to fit the definition of fine art.

Tolstoy was not alone in the proletarian effort to democratize art, and rob it of transcendent beauty. John Dewey, recall, similarly followed this line of thinking when he reduced art to any experience that possessed mere aesthetic pleasure. Dewey opined, “It is customary, and from some points of view necessary, to make a distinction between fine art and useful or technological art. But the point of view from which it is necessary is one that is extrinsic to the work of art itself. The customary distinction is based

On Creating Meaningful Art

simply on acceptance of certain social conditions.”34 The social condition he speaks of is aristocratic in nature; or, if one could ask him personally, he might say the Bourgeois. When everyday experiences are lived so fully that they become an experience, Dewey argues, we attempt to recreate the aesthetic experience by creating art. The point here is not to offer a treatment of Dewey’s aesthetic, per se, but to demonstrate the modern vein of thought in which art was wanted to exclude beauty as its purpose and instead settle for the manifestation of meaning. Aesthetic philosophy in this vein sees art as simply representing the common human experience through a communion of shared feelings. To this end, Dewey asserts, “An object is peculiarly and dominantly esthetic, yielding the enjoyment characteristic of esthetic perception, when the factors that determine anything which can be called an experience are lifted high above the threshold of perception and are made manifest for their own sake.”35 So, in laymen’s terms, art, in Dewey’s estimation, is the making of some representative work that makes a presentation of a special experience in an exalted manner. As has already been demonstrated, the potential harm implicit in this vein of thought does not exist in the abstract. It is not an idea to be contemplated only in the realm of the Muses. Like the fire stolen by Prometheus, this low view of art was brought down to man, and ever since, he has been on a slippery slope to aesthetic ruin. The attempt to democratize art, has, as they say, brought the

chickens home to roost in the likes of much of the modern and postmodern art.

To this point, it has hopefully been demonstrated in some measure that the concept of aesthetics has had a long and eventful history that started with τεκνη in the classical epoch. As the various meanings innate within the concept of art were fleshed out, language was employed to discriminate one nuance from another. During the Enlightenment, the concept of fine arts, or aesthetics was adopted for further discrimination between art in the technical sense and art as the manifestation of beauty. It is at this point where the whole theory of aesthetics becomes complicated. Of course, if beauty were a simple concept to define, there would be little to discuss. But as Tolstoy recognized, “The notion of art as the manifestation of beauty is not at all as simple as it seems, especially now when our senses of touch, taste, and smell are included in it, as they are by the latest aestheticians.”36 In the philosophy of modern aesthetics, the controversy is in determining if there is such a thing as beauty, and if there is, how should it be defined? Where does it exist, in the object observed or heard or experienced, or in the subject experiencing the art? Also, how do we experience beauty? Is it in the senses or the intellect? And finally, what does it ultimately mean for the future of the arts?

To answer these questions, and ultimately to accomplish the purpose of providing a conceptual basis for art and beauty that is rooted in truth and goodness, one that provides a foundation for creating meaningful art that is

also beautiful, it is finally time to investigate the historic transcendent triad: truth, goodness, and beauty. Truth is the objective of knowledge, particularly that which relates to properly functioning human reason and empirical evidence. It is possible to strive for objectivity in truth by distinguishing between objective facts—for which sound argumentation and appeals to evidence can help facilitate agreement—and subjective taste for which minimal agreement should be expected. For example, some people prefer the color red to the color green. De gustibus non disputandum est. But drivers in the U.S. ought to stop when the traffic light is red and go when the traffic light is green. Goodness, in similar fashion, is the objective of the will, particularly as it relates to human satisfaction. Happiness, being the chief good, is that for which all other goods are desired. One can strive toward objectivity in goodness by distinguishing between what Mortimer Adler calls real and apparent goods. He explains,

Real goods . . . are relative not to individual desires, but to desires inherent in human nature and so are the same for all human beings. To the extent that human nature is everywhere and at all times the same (this is, as long as the species persists in its specific characteristics), real goods have the universality and immutability that gives them objectivity . . . Apparent goods are relative to individual desires and are, therefore, subjective. 37

37 Mortimer Jerome Adler, Six Great Ideas (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 100.

Because of the relationship of goodness to truth, some human desires, those based on taste and not truth, are subjective, not prescriptive. One person’s taste for seafood is not something that ought to be desired by everyone. Some people prefer steak. All humans ought to desire a healthy diet, however. The need and desire to eat food (assuming one is not in the hospital on an NPO), is universal to all humans, therefore it is a good. Depending on which philosopher or authority one consults, the highest good is happiness (i.e., eudaimonia), or God. The highest good is an end in itself, and it is for this good all other goods are sought. Beauty, however, while related to goodness and truth, is a bit of a different thing. It is, in fact, a kind of goodness in that it is something to be desired. Also, it is related to truth in that it is something to be known. Yet beauty is still elusive; in a day where extreme skepticism seems to rule, one can plausibly argue an objective orientation for truth and goodness, but arguing an objective center for beauty is not nearly as easy. That is why Scruton says that even though you may not be able to explain why exactly, “You want the table, the room or the website to look right, and looking right matters in the way that beauty generally matters—not by pleasing the eye only, but by conveying meanings and values which have weight for you and which you are consciously putting on display.”38 There is something intangible about beauty, something transcendent that one cannot put her finger on. It is something everyone recognizes when it is there, but no one knows how to describe it. Again, Scruton is insightful: “The status of beauty as an ultimate value is questionable,

in the way that the status of truth and goodness are not.”39 Adler notes this as well, saying, “There is less that can be said about beauty with clarity and precision than can be said about truth and goodness.”40 In any case, challenging as it may be, it does not preclude a thorough treatment of what can be known, and what cannot be known about this transcendent concept. One of the first to treat the idea of beauty in the context of an aesthetic philosophy—even before this category of inquiry was given the name “aesthetics”—was Thomas Aquinas. In his Summa Theologica , he posited, beauty relates to the cognitive faculty; for beautiful things are those which please when seen. Hence beauty consists in due proportion; for the senses delight in things duly proportioned, as in what is after their own kind—because even sense is a sort of reason, just as is every cognitive faculty. Now, since knowledge is by assimilation, and similarity relates to form, beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause. 41

In its most fundamental essence, Aquinas relates beauty to the sense of sight and to the cognitive faculties. He even posits that the senses—seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting—are themselves a sort of cognitive faculty. A distinction will be made between the senses and the cognition

39 Ibid., 3.

40 Mortimer Jerome Adler, Six Great Ideas , 104

41 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica , trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, n.d.).

in the Enlightenment epoch, but for purposes here it is noteworthy that Aquinas relates one’s ability to see form and proportion in an object and reason whether such is pleasing or not. It further appears that Aquinas assumes some measure of the universal subjectivity in what will later become Kant’s aesthetic formulation. Aquinas continues his treatment of the beautiful as a concept that is related to goodness:

The beautiful is the same as the good, and they differ in aspect only. For since good is what all seek, the notion of good is that which calms the desire; while the notion of the beautiful is that which calms the desire, by being seen or known. Consequently those senses chiefly regard the beautiful, which are the most cognitive, viz., sight and hearing, as ministering to reason; for we speak of beautiful sights and beautiful sounds. But in reference to the other objects of the other senses, we do not use the expression beautiful , for we do not speak of beautiful tastes, and beautiful odours. Thus it is evident that beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that good means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the beautiful is something pleasant to apprehend. 42

In Aquinas’ expanded definition, the beautiful is related to “being seen or known,” in the same way goodness is related to “desire.” They are, in essence, the same thing, but differ only in one aspect. In the same way all seek the good (whether real or apparent) to satisfy a desire, all seek the

42 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica , trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province.

beautiful to satisfy a desire. What is different is the means of satisfaction. Satisfaction, or pleasure, is something all people seek naturally. When it is cold, humans seek the good of shelter or clothing. When someone is hungry or thirsty, he seeks the good of food and drink. There are other pleasures people seek as well, like wealth, health, knowledge, and friendship. When people obtain or possess those things which calm the desire, they are pleased or satisfied. As previously mentioned, the only difference between goodness and beauty is the means of satisfaction. Aquinas explains that the desire for the beautiful is calmed by that which can be seen or known. In essence, the good is something pleasant to the appetite, whether base or noble; the beautiful is something pleasant to apprehend, whether by seeing it or contemplating it.

Aquinas further provides qualifications to his definition of the beautiful. In other words, not everything is beautiful just because it might seem pleasant to look at or apprehend. He explains, “For beauty includes three conditions, integrity or perfection, since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due proportion or harmony ; and lastly, brightness, or clarity, whence things are called beautiful which have a bright colour.”43 It is noted that Aquinas presupposes ugliness to establish qualifications for his definition of beauty, but it should also be noted that his treatment of beauty is not an aesthetic treatment in the way aesthetics have been treated since the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Aquinas is deriving his definitions effectual of his treatment of the good. Recall, goodness is

the objective of the will, particularly as it relates to human satisfaction. The good is what humans universally desire because it is inherent in human nature to desire such. To have two legs for example is what all rational human beings desire. It is true that there are some, small in number, who find pleasure in pain or have some sort of body dysmorphic disorder, and thus find pleasure in mutilation. These are abnormal circumstances, and anomalies and mental-illness should not define what is normal. Aside from such abnormality, no one desires only one leg—or a malformed face, or an extra appendage. Any of these would be considered bad. Granted there are degrees of goodness and degrees of badness, speaking rationally of the human species, one can confidently say, one leg is bad; two legs are good. It is in this context that Aquinas discusses beauty. There is a sense in which beauty is subjective if we distinguish between enjoyable beauty and admirable beauty, but what Aquinas has in mind is what Adler calls admirable beauty. Enjoyable beauty is related to taste. One person prefers red wine to white wine, and another prefers whiskey to beer. These are matters of taste in the realm of goodness. One person prefers the Van Goghs to the Cezannes, and another person prefers landscapes to urbans. This is enjoyable beauty. Admirable beauty, however, is concerned with the integrity of the painting, or the poem, or the architecture. Integrity refers to the inner consistency of a thing, as well as its possessing and displaying all of the requisite parts consistent with the nature of its being. Admirable beauty is also concerned with the harmony or the proportions of an object. Proportion is an object’s intrinsic approximation to itself, or the “correspondence between inner and outer

reality, appearance and essence, matter and form.”44 Finally, admirable beauty is concerned with the radiance of an object, its brightness or clarity. In a sense, it is related to the Greek idea of δοξα , meaning splendor or glory.45 Again, it is in the context of admiral beauty and not enjoyable beauty that Aquinas provides this definition. On this particular conceptualization of beauty, Scruton rightly observes, “According to this idea beauty is an ultimate value—something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given.”46

On the foundation of what has been said, here is a viable conceptual basis for art and beauty that is rooted in truth and goodness: simply put, true beauty is in the qualities that give rise to our delight. It is an admirable beauty in the objective sense (it rests in the object itself). Additionally, as an ultimate good, it is desirable of our rational senses (cognition acting on that which is perceived by the sense) the same way truth is desirable of reason and happiness is desirable of the will. To desire ugliness would be as unnatural as desiring unhappiness or fallacy. On the other hand, enjoyable beauty, as it has thus been designated, is simply a matter of taste. It is subjective (it rests in the observer, listener, etc.). There is no point in arguing about matters of preference where the admirable qualities of beauty are not in question. As with goodness, so with enjoyable beauty: De

44 Robert E. Wood, Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Series in Continental thought ; 26 ) (Ohio University Press, 1999), 109.

45 Ibid., 105.

46 Scruton, Beauty , 2.

gustibus non disputandum est. Where the admirable qualities are in question, reason and empirical facts can be used in rational dialogue among those with superior faculties of judgment to achieve some degree of consensus. This, of course, brings up a new set of questions: is that not an aristocratic concept and does it not fly in the face of democratic sentiments? Does this not bring the argument full circle against Tolstoy’s and Dewey’s proletarian view of art? If there are superior judges, who decides they are superior? What is the standard for that?

In what remains, some effort will be given to answering these questions, and to show that an active pursuit of educating oneself in a particular context can lend to developing a higher standard of taste and objective judgment. So far, many of Scruton’s insights have been helpful in developing the viable conceptual basis this paper has sought. His assertion that art moves us because it is beautiful, and that it is beautiful in part because it means something; and further, that it can be meaningful without being beautiful, but it can never be beautiful without being meaningful, has guided much of the thought in this paper. There is an acknowledgement in such a statement that a trajectory for art is in play. To get off that trajectory is to lose something valuable and set art on a collision course with destruction—ultimately, to set culture on a collision course with destruction. There is also a sense in which Scruton’s observation seems to reflect the wisdom of Keats’ Grecian urn: because beauty presents itself to us as a transcendent mystery, there is much about beauty that will never be known on earth, but every rational human being knows it is true when it presents itself—when it is seen. Beauty is a pow-

On Creating Meaningful Art

erful force in shaping the culture of humanity, as Scruton again rightly observes: “Beauty . . . is a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature, and the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world.”47

In a democratic society, aristocratic convictions are blasphemous to the demos because a democratic culture seeks the lowest common denominator and tears down anyone or anything that dares to raise its head above the status quo. But that is exactly the risk that must be taken to save art from the double ditches of profanation on one side and kitsch on the other. Two things are necessary and neither will be easy. Both will be like taking a fat person to the gym or a heathen to the church. Maybe a better analogy is that it will be like trying to send the philosopher back down into the cave.

In any case, the first thing that must be done is to recognize that there are experts in art, as there are in every field and industry, and it is possible to make progress in developing a higher standard of objective judgment. Seldom is there push back when an architect explains to the new contractor building a house why the foundations must be laid a certain way. Sometimes there is push back when an Olympic judge offers a less than desirable score, but not too often. Most frequently, it will be the umpire or referee who receives push back from coaches and fans at a sporting event. In each case, it is acknowledged there are gradations in the prerequisites, gradations in the expertise of the experts, gradations in the expertise of the non-ex-

perts, and gradations in accuracy of the analysis and perspective of the experts and the non-experts. In the case of the architect, there is physics involved, and building codes—hopefully based on universal empirical truth related to physics. These analyses and criteria are less forgiving than the analyses and criteria for the Olympic judges, and these are still less forgiving than those of the non-Olympic sporting event. In other words, even though there are objective standards in each of these scenarios, there is room for error and disagreement among experts. Also, as one might imagine, there is more room for error and disagreement in the sporting event than there is in the construction project, because of the nature of the variables in each of those examples. It is unnecessary to belabor the point by working through each possible opportunity for error or disagreement, but what this means is there is a lot of room for disagreement and for mistakes to be made even when considering things by a standard of objectivity. While this is true, and universally acknowledged, it should not go unnoticed that it is also universally acknowledged that there are always experts in any respective field. These are not experts by accident; they are experts by means of demonstrable knowledge and personal experience in the given field. It is the task of the expert to exercise his or her knowledge and experience to make an objective analysis of the situation within a prerequisite set of rules and criteria. This is fundamental, and universally accepted. And it is just as true for art and beauty. The goal and purpose of an art expert is to critique the art’s approximation to the objective

On Creating Meaningful Art

reality using experienced reason and the prerequisite rules and criteria—namely integrity, proportion, and clarity. The second thing is there must be a personal re-acquaintance made with the gospel, as well as an attempt to educate oneself in the implications the gospel makes about art. In the first place, there is a sense in which the Christian life itself is a work of art. Paul wrote to the Ephesian church that they were God’s ποίημα , God’s workmanship, his magnum opus, his masterpiece: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”48 The Greek word means to create or make something and shares a root with our word poetry. From a gospel perspective, those who are in Christ have not only been created in the image of God, even the fallen nature has been redeemed and is being redeemed, for God’s glorious purpose. This purpose is not to huddle and cuddle and speak in religious tones to one another. Neither is this purpose to wave around a proverbial ticket to heaven where the redeemed will be happy one day in the future. The purpose is to be human, and to glorify God by enjoying him now and forever in the fullness of our humanity. It is in this context that art can really be meaningful and beautiful. The gospel gives truth, goodness, and beauty a meaningful and objective center. Even taste has a moral element, as Scruton explains: “The standard of taste is fixed by the virtues of the critic, and these virtues are tried in the moral

life.”49 As a Christian grows in his or her knowledge of the Creator himself, he or she will grow in taste as well as objective judgment.

In the second place, because of the gospel, there is a real sense in which the Christian life is the most viable conceptual basis for art and beauty. Gospel Christianity does not stifle, sanitize, or “prudify” art. In fact, it liberates art to be what it is supposed to be. One can say in a meaningful way that the gospel redeems art, not the way it redeems humans, for sure, but in a meaningful way, nonetheless. With the gospel as the conceptual basis for art and beauty, art can be art for art’s sake. This does not work outside of the gospel, say in the context of Oscar Wilde’s worldview; but in the gospel context, art can be simply enjoyed for no other reason than that the art is meaningful and beautiful and brings one pleasure. This is because God created mankind to create, and as a creative enterprise by those created to create, art glorifies God. Further, with the gospel as the conceptual basis for art and beauty, art can be an opportunity to express a worldview, and idea, a feeling, or a truth without it becoming propaganda. Recall, Horace who said art delights and enlightens us. This does not mean art is reduced to creating religious symbols, scenes, or tracts. That would likely be kitsch anyway. It means that because of the gospel, artists can see the world as it really is, tell stories, paint pictures, and create music that tells the truth.

Thomas Kinkade, for example, was known as “the Painter of Light.” But his art was a lie. There were not any

On Creating Meaningful Art

dragons threatening his villages. In real life there are dragons, Chesterton reminded us. Furthermore, his life was a lie; it was full of darkness, and his worldview came out in his paintings—not in the form of dark scenes, obviously, but in the form of a lie. The gospel frees artists to tell the truth about the world they live in, to write love songs and paint dragons. Finally, with the gospel as the conceptual basis for art and beauty, art can communicate the sacred, contemplate redemption, and explore transcendent mystery. Scruton posits, “Works of art stand as the eternal receptacles of intensely intended images.”50 In other words, high art, admirable art, or fine art, however it is designated, is pregnant with meaning about the realm of the Forms, about the divine, about God—and it is beautiful.

Art is universally beautiful because it is objectively admirable. It can be subjectively beautiful because taste allows for individuals to enjoy different kinds of goods (real or apparent). A person’s taste needs to be cultivated morally and experientially to be an expert in admirable beauty; similarly, a person’s tastes for enjoyable beauty will also have, to some degree, a moral and experiential dynamic to it. It too can be cultivated. And the gospel is the very best conceptual basis for art and beauty because it is the gateway to the ultimate truth, the power to secure the greatest good, and the very paradox of beauty. Jesus was not beautiful, as Joshua Gibbs notes,

paradoxically, most readily understood in Isaiah’s teaching that Christ had “no Beauty that we should

desire Him.” Christ might have been born Beautiful, but then Beauty would be revealed as necessity, not surplus. Christ could not reveal the nature of Power without becoming Weak, and He could not reveal the gratuity of Beauty had He not been born Average. 51

51 Joshua Gibbs, “On Human Beauty,” Circe Institute, accessed July 30, 2017, https://www.circeinstitute.org/blog/human-beauty.

Differences in Mean Scores PSAT

by Dr. Christy Vaughan

[This is a summary derived from an original manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Research on Christian Education on 10 Feb 2020 available at: http://www.tandfonline. com/ https://doi.org/10.1080/10656219.2019.1704326]

Abstract

This causal-comparative quantitative study compares mean scores on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT) between Classical Christian schools and non-Classical Christian schools using data randomly selected from survey responses. The sample consisted of 4,486 mean scores from 2003-2004 through 2012-2013. Welch’s t-tests for unequal variances was used with an alpha set at .05 and .017 for Bonferroni correction and returned statistically significant results for all three academic areas. Effect size measured by Cohen’s d and eta squared indicated Classical Christian methodology should have a large, positive

effect on PSAT scores. Future research and associated correlational studies is recommended.

Differences of Mean Scores on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT) for Classical Christian Schools Compared to Non-Classical Christian Schools

While the Classical Christian education movement has appeared recently in both Christian and secular media as an instructional method new to the scene, it really is a look back at what the Essentialists of the 1920s saw as a tried and true method in Western culture for inculcating youth while preparing them for participatory citizenship.

Background

Recently, the Gospel Coalition published an article touting amazing academic progress made in an inner city school (where most had not graduated high school and the ones who did read at an eighth-grade level) utilizing the Classical Christian education method which had been “sprouting up” all across America in the past 25 years (Zylstra, 2017). Similarly, in a secular magazine, author Owen Strachan (2013) wrote an article entitled “Why Classical Schools Just Might Save America.” Strachan (2013) wrote that those who “value truth, morality, the unfettered pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, and the Western canon” should look to the Classical Christian education movement

with its “study of Latin and Greek, the development of analytical and critical faculties (over against a narrowly defined body of facts),” as “exactly what is missing from the modern American public school” (para. 4).

The first Evangelical Protestant Classical and Christian school which became the model for others in the Association of Classical and Christian Schools (ACCS) was started in Moscow, Idaho in 1981 (Logos School, 2014) by Pastor Douglas Wilson, Shirley Quist, and Larry Lucas. The ACCS has grown to an organization of more than 236 member schools with a more than 40,000 student enrollment, including international schools from The Bahamas to Indonesia, South Korea, and Africa (Association of Classical and Christian Schools, 2017). There are also Christian schools following the Classical method within the Association of Christian Schools International, or ACSI. Wilson wrote, “Within the last generation, hundreds of thousands of parents have walked away from the free public school system. A significant number of them are pursuing Classical Christian education” (D. Wilson, personal communication, January 10, 2014).

While the Classical Christian education movement looks back to the Trivium method of Greco-Roman education, it also incorporates more modern understandings of child development as espoused by Piaget (1976). The ACCS’ Classical Christian philosophy is based in part on a definition of “Classical” drawn from Sayers’ (1947) essay and Wilson’s (1991) book, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning. The Classical Christian methodology assumes students move through developmental stages in three broadly defined categories correlated to the Trivium, which were re -

named by way of illustration in Sayers’ essay (1947). What Sayers called the Poll-parrot stage, in which young children like to memorize and chant various bits of information, coincides with the Grammar stage of the Trivium (Association of Classical and Christian Schools, 2001). As children grow into their pre-teen and early teens, they become more argumentative and questioning; this is what Sayers called the Pert stage and coincides with the middle school years and the Dialectic or Logic stage of the Trivium, according to the ACCS (2001). In their mid to late teens, children are more vocal and expressive; this is termed the Poetic stage by Sayers, labeled the Rhetoric stage of the Trivium and coincides with the high school years (Association of Classical and Christian Schools, 2001).

The purpose of education from the Classical Christian theoretical framework encompasses how to learn, when and what content is to be learned, as well as the worldview from which to interpret and apply all knowledge (Association of Classical and Christian Schools, 2012c). According to 1 Thessalonians 5:23, human beings are body-soul-spirit, and as such, require a theoretical framework to understand the three-fold nature of mankind (Fausset, 1871). “The ‘spirit’ links man with the higher intelligences of heaven, and is that highest part of man which is receptive of the quickening Holy Spirit” (Fausset, 1871, para. 4). The Bible also teaches that there are maturational stages in the process of learning, as Henry (1706b) pointed out in his commentary on 1 Corinthians 3:1–2 and 13:11. The Apostle Paul tells the conceited, immature Corinthian believers that he has not deemed them adult and ready for the weightier or meatier matters of doctrine because they have

only limited knowledge of the things of God and are not mature enough in their understanding. Henry (1706b) further explained the Apostle’s message in terms of instructional method, “It is the duty of a faithful minister of Christ to consult the capacities of his hearers and teach them as they can bear” (lines 15–16). Henry (1706b) noted that the Apostle compared the Corinthians to children in speech and actions, since a child’s capacity to learn more difficult concepts grows as he grows and develops into a man, so spiritual understanding in younger Christians should grow, in knowledge and understanding, as they develop more spiritual maturity. In his commentary on Hebrews 5:12–14, Henry (1706c) confirmed the central metaphor Paul used to compare the learning of children—first the simple, plain truths to be learned, understood and exercised before the more sublime and mysterious concepts were to be tackled and grasped—to the state of Christian doctrinal teaching and learning within the church. Such maturational stages of learning and development in children need more investigation and analysis. While areas such as cognitive and moral development as well as public/private test score comparisons have been studied and theorized, there is a lack of research and analysis in this area of acquiring a knowledge base prior to introducing more abstract concepts, as promoted by Essentialists, compared to Progressive pedagogical methods which are more child-centered and student directed in curriculum choices (Kessinger, 2011). According to Nehemiah Institute’s Smithwick (2014), “Many, if not most teachers in Christian schools receive their education degree from state universities,” and are “often humanist in mind” due to the

worldview inherent at institutions granting state teaching certificates (p. 9). This causes a heart/mind worldview disconnect, Smithwick (2014) stated, between humanistic or man-centered educational philosophies, coupled with child-centered pedagogical practices being placed into what educators had intended to be a God-centered education.

Decades-long studies performed by the Nehemiah Institute (Smithwick, 2013) show that fewer than 10% of students from Christian homes graduate with a biblical worldview, regardless of whether or not they attend Christian private school or public school. The exception to this trend, stated Smithwick (2013), or students retaining a Christian worldview, are those who attended Classical Christian schools such as those accredited by the ACCS, or those who used The Principle Approach curriculum (Foundation for American Christian Education, 2018). Recent research by Brickhill (2010) supports Smithwick’s findings among middle school aged students.

Classical Christian schools develop skills to equip students to be lifetime learners by teaching students that every subject is comprised of certain defining facts with an orderly organization of information and by providing a concise and persuasive way in which to present the acquired material (Association of Classical and Christian Schools, 2013). This method of instruction has been in use for hundreds of years; it is the new “old-way” of educating students (Association of Classical and Christian Schools, 2012c, para. 2).

Another component of Classical Christian education, reminiscent of Comenius’ thorough list of subjects (Sovocol, 1932), is the idea of a topically integrated curriculum, including emphasis on reasoning, poetry, litera-

ture, and presentation skills. The idea of integrating information, learning methodologies, and Christian worldview in the Classical Christian method is similar to what Van Brummelen (2002) described as the soup approach. The soup analogy assumes that the end product has an overarching purpose, method, and recipe in mind that guides the creation of a whole, far exceeding the individual parts in excellence. Littlejohn and Evans (2006) claimed such an emphasis on both thinking and learning content corresponds well to Plato’s pedagogical hierarchy of sensory, intellectual, and intuitive learning. The difference from the much maligned “rote learning” is contextual and developmental applications (Littlejohn & Evans, 2006, p. 164). On this point, Bagley and the Essentialists agreed with the Progressives that simply repeating back information is not enough—rote learning without connecting “prior knowledge to current lessons” was just “stupid, parrot like learning” (Null, 2001, p. 46).

In the tradition of Western culture, immersion in the great books of civilization with the Bible illuminating all knowledge and wisdom had been in use for hundreds of years until recently, and it “is the means which produced most of history’s great thinkers; it is the new ‘old-way’ of educating students with a long history of success,” (The Association of Classical and Christian Schools, 2012c, para. 3). In Jeremiah 6:16, as explained by Henry (1706d), God calls to a wayward generation to return to the old good ways, the tried and true ways outlined in God’s word, and to walk in them.

The Essentialist movement, which started in about 1940 and re-emerged in the 1980s, hearkened back to these

old good ways and was founded by teacher trainer and educational theorist Bagley (Kessinger, 2011). Bagley “believed that there were essentials for all to learn” in formal instruction governed by “tried and true” methods (Ediger, 2012, p.176). The Essentialists emerged in response to a call for universal student centered education by “Progressives,” such as Dewey and Kilpatrick, who divorced the liberal arts tradition in favor of child interest-directed or purely vocational curriculum choices “instead of advocating for a . . . liberal arts curriculum for all” (Null, 2007, p. 1015). Kohlberg and Mayer’s (1972) emphasis on cognitive-psychological development of the self as the driving force in education and the Progressive educators’ emphasis on “child-centered” social reformism (Gutek, 1995, p. 488; Ediger, 2012, p. 176) stand in contrast to Essentialist thinking, according to Null (2008). The Essentialists, led by Bagley, argued for education’s end outside the realization of the self, that the moral purpose of molding children’s lives is inseparable from academic instruction (Null, 2008). Bagley valued the “fundamental and thoroughgoing” approach with a “penetrating program” of study having “virtues” (Bagley, 1917, p. 624). Rankin (1876), an educator and doctor of divinity, earlier pointed to biblical truth as the foundation of civil education as well as the lamp illuminating all history in his sermon titled, The Bible the Security of American Institutions. In arguing against removing the Bible from public classrooms, Rankin (1876) stated the Bible is “the standard by which we determine the character of our civilization” (para. 22). Henry (1706a) argued that Christians should utilize reason as a tool under

the subjection and direction of the Scriptures in his commentary on Acts 17:1–9.

Bagley also emphasized that teaching is a profession; educators should have a thorough knowledge of what was to be taught as well as how to teach and reach young people “for the common good” (Null, 2008, p. 210). Bagley formed an “Essentialist” committee to study Progressive ideas and classroom applications (Null, 2001, p. 46). Bagley’s work in the 1920s through 1940s was “somewhat opposite of Dewey’s thinking” (Ediger, 2012, p. 176) as he emphasized what was tried and true in his quest to professionalize the art of teaching as well as improve classroom instruction (Null, 2001). While Dewey emphasized problem-solving for its own sake, Bagley emphasized “a somewhat changeless curriculum” comprised of disciplined study in literature, arithmetic, science, and social sciences which would enable students to think critically, once mastered (Ediger, 2012, pp. 176–177). Fellow Essentialist Bestor, along with World War II war hero Admiral Hyman Rickover, felt that schools should be developing the ability to think clearly so American K-12 students could better enter rigorous and technical programs of study as adults (Kessinger, 2011).

Comparing instructional methods is a tried and true exercise with current applications. Hobbs and Davis (2013) found that comparing pedagogies is useful in raising the level of analysis while evaluating different methods of K-12 instruction. Hobbs and Davis (2013) compared results from two independent studies looking at narrative as an approach to math, science, and technology instruction. Similarly, Miyazaki (2011) compared two pedagogies within the Japanese School of the Dialogue of Cultures—one

more student centered and the other teacher centered— then contrasted both with the American “teacher as a facilitator of student-initiated inquiries” (p. 5). Dai (2013) saw comparing pedagogies as a path to determining best practices in adult business education. Su, Yang, Hwang, Huang, and Tern (2014) found ways to improve elementary school students’ learning after comparing annotative and problem-solving instructional methods related to computer programming language concepts.

The present study sought to isolate and identify any difference in results of such an Essentialist philosophy of education, evident today in the resurgence of the Classical Christian method of instruction, in terms of academic achievement based on the standardized PSAT.

Problem Statement

Within the faith-based education field, others have studied spiritual formation (Dernlan, 2013), the effects of educator worldview on students (Brickhill, 2010; Fyock, 2007; Smithwick, 2014; Wood, 2008), and even headmaster job satisfaction (Dietrich, 2010) as differences between the Classical and non-Classical Christian schools.

Aside from areas already studied, including theological issues such as faith development (Boerema, 2011) and worldview (Brickhill, 2010; Fyock, 2008; Smithwick, 2014; Wood, 2008), no study has looked at pedagogical differences between Classical Christian schools and non-Classical Christian schools as far as performance on standardized tests measures.

Whether students attend private or public schools, charter, college prep, or religious schools, the standardized tests for college admission are considered a reflection of academic achievement (The College Board, 2011). Jeynes’ (2012a) extensive meta-analysis of 90 studies found that while charter school students performed no better than their public school counterparts, private Christian school students outperformed public school students on standardized tests.

Jeynes (2008) found that Evangelical Protestant schools make up an increasing percentage of all religious schools in America. Additionally, Jeynes (2003, 2008) found that private school students perform better on standardized tests than public school students even when social and economic variables were accounted for. Jeynes (2008) also compared Catholic and Protestant schools within the private school realm and found that Protestant students scored higher on several measures in the National Educational and Longitudinal Survey (or NELS) than Catholic school peers. Researcher Jeynes has not published a direct comparison, however, between Classical Christian schools and non-Classical Christian school student scores on standardized assessments. Such standardized tests instituted under the impetus of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (2002) were intended to ensure higher academic achievement and are Essentialist in design, according to Kessinger (2011).

The problem is there are no current studies comparing academic achievement of students in Classical Christian schools and non-Classical Christian schools.

Purpose Statement

The purpose of this quantitative causal-comparative study was to compare academic achievement mean scores on the standardized PSAT from students educated through the Classical Christian method to mean scores from non-Classical Christian schools to see if there were any significant differences. The present study proposed to address the gap—there are no comparisons of academic performance on the PSAT between Classical and non-Classical Christian school students. The ACCS (2001) and the ACSI (2012a), by virtue of specific standards and rigorous accrediting protocols, made up the comparison groups in the present study from which random samples were drawn and then statistically analyzed. The population was all high school students attending private Christian schools affiliated with the ACCS or the ACSI who took the PSAT. The independent variable was the type of school, either a Classical Christian or non-Classical Christian. The dependent variable was the PSAT mean scores by school.

Significance of the Study

While public education reached near-universal expression in the 1960s, that decade also marked when the Bible and prayer were removed from public schools and public school test scores fell dramatically (Jeynes, 2012a). Researchers such as Jeynes, as well as authors in the field of Christian education, see a need to identify and publicize

educational methods that are proving fruitful: “In my view it is important not only to distinguish between traditional public schools, charter schools, and Christian schools, but the various kinds of Christian schools as well” (W. Jeynes, personal communication, June, 2015). In a meta-analysis, Jeynes (2012a) found that the positive effects of Christian education have been persistent over time as well as remaining consistent during the more than half century he studied. Jeynes also noted in another article that attending a private Christian religious school decreased the achievement gap for minority Hispanic and African-American students compared to their majority white counterparts by more than 25% (Jeynes, 2012b).

According to the ACCS (2016), students from its schools consistently score in the top tier of all students in America on standardized tests. There are several reasons why educators should be interested in how a Classical Christian education may affect students’ PSAT scores, not the least of which is the awarding of National Merit Scholarships (2014) based on these scores. Admittance to the college of choice would be another reason to consider the type of K-12 school students attend. On a combined benchmark of three SAT tests, the ACCS (2016) reported students from its member schools scored 237 points above the benchmark for college and career readiness compared to 99 points for private schools, 46 for religious schools, and minus 88 for students attending public schools.

Classical Christian schools use a “particular pedagogical approach” (Wilson, 2003, p. 84–85) which is distinctly Christian in worldview. In addition to the ACCS, there are many Classical Christian homeschools, as evidenced by the

dozen or so suppliers of curriculum and services found by a cursory Internet search (Classical Christian Homeschooling, 2015). Sherfinski (2014) reported the Classical Christian homeschooling “resurgence” as most evident among evangelical mother-teachers (p. 1).

Another larger association of Christian schools which accredits conforming member schools, the Association of Christian Schools International or ACSI (2012), like the ACCS (2001), stated that its mission is to promote, establish, and equip schools (including homeschools and coops) committed to education from an Evangelical Protestant Christian worldview. Both the ACCS (2012) and ACSI (2012) support instruction grounded in the Old and New Testament Scriptures. The ACCS (2012) added its Classical philosophy of teaching to both its mission statement and accrediting standards as a distinction from other Christian school methods.

Hobbs and Davis (2013) as well as Su et al., (2014) found comparing pedagogies fertile ground for educational research in search of best practices. Based on the groundwork laid by cognitive-developmental theorists and current researchers such as Jeynes (2012a), the current study sought to examine any differences in achievement from students in Classical Christian schools and non-Classical Christian schools.

Dietrich (2010) observed that Classical Christian methodology “differs significantly from postmodern American education” in that “children are taught how to think and learn rather than viewed as great silos that need to be filled to capacity with information” (pp. 28–29).

Differences in Mean Scores PSAT

The present study sought to compare mean scores from private Christian schools between those that utilize the Classical method and those that do not in order to help determine if this method of instruction is still effective and worthy of implementation today.

Conclusions

This study indicated that students who are educated utilizing the Essentialist philosophy of acquiring a base of knowledge before moving to higher cognitive levels of analysis, synthesis, and application as illustrated by the developmental model of the Greco-Roman Trivium utilized in Classical Christian schools scored significantly higher on the PSAT than students who were educated utilizing non-Classical methods in Christian schools.

Discussion

The purpose of this quantitative study was to compare mean scores on the PSAT between Classical Christian schools and non-Classical Christian schools to see if there was any difference in academic performance. A statistically significant difference was found after analyzing the data, indicating both a positive effect of the independent variable of instructional method on the dependent variable of PSAT mean score as well as a need for further research to

determine which variables correlate to the significant difference found.

As Ritchie et al. (2013) found, traditional methods for memorization of facts indicated superior recall results, which agrees with the developmental design of the Trivium. Edicer (2012) promoted metacognitive exercises (thinking about thinking) as well as integrated and cross-curricular lessons to deepen context. Edicer (2012) also argued that students should master the base knowledge of topics before moving to higher levels of analysis. Nasrollahi-Mouziraji and Nasrollahi-Mouziraji (2015) agreed, stating that younger students should master a base of core knowledge by memorization. These methods are included in the developmental design of the Greco-Roman Trivium practiced by Classical Christian instructors.

The statistically significant difference found in academic performance on PSAT mean reading, math, and writing scores for Classical Christian private schools compared to non-Classical Christian private schools attributed to instructional method supports what Yuksel (2014) posited about both prior knowledge and reading ability contributing to substantial gains in mathematics knowledge. Additionally, higher levels of both reading and writing skills combine with a sufficient base of knowledge to aid in development of inferential and critical thinking/higher level cognitive skills (Cervetti and Hiebert, 2015). Wagner and Perels (2012) agreed, arguing that translation skills acquired in Latin instruction transfer to cross-curricular problem solving skills including analysis and synthesis. Acquiring a sufficient base of knowledge prior to developing

analytical skills as well as instruction in Latin are hallmarks of the Classical Christian method. Specifically, the study results of statistically significant higher PSAT mean reading scores for Classical Christian private schools compared to non-Classical Christian private schools supports the findings of Cervetti and Hiebert (2015) that reading skills underlie both inferential reasoning and assessment competencies as well as Edicer’s (2012) call for deeper context across disciplines in reading instruction. Similarly, the statistically significant higher PSAT mean math scores for Classical Christian private schools compared to non-Classical Christian private schools supports the findings of Yuksel (2014) in both prior knowledge base and reading ability contributing to higher performance in mathematics as well as the findings of Purnomo et al., (2014) that math is best taught to children in procedural order, that is the ordering of instruction from concrete to abstract.

In writing, the statistically significant higher PSAT mean scores for Classical Christian private schools compared to non-Classical Christian private schools supports the findings of Cervetti and Hiebert (2015) and Coker and Erwin (2010) who found that direct instruction in writing logical arguments improved both cognitive and written language skills. Bandini et al., (2013) argued that reading and writing skills are interdependent in nature, as supported by similar findings in the present study of statistically significant higher mean scores in both of these academic areas for Classical Christian schools.

Results of the statistical analysis of PSAT mean scores also support Henry’s (1706b) explanation of the Apostle

Paul’s instructional method “to consult the capacities of his hearers and teach them as they can bear” (lines 15–16). Henry (1706c) stated that Paul used the illustration of how children learn, first simple precepts and then more difficult concepts as he grows and develops, in his commentary on Hebrews 5:12–14. Bagley’s (1911b) Essentialist theory posited that a command of essential basic knowledge frees one’s mind for higher level thinking and analysis; results of this study seem to support that theory with significantly higher mean scores on the PSAT college entrance exam as a measure. More investigation is needed into the Essentialist theory of acquiring a core knowledge base prior to introducing more abstract concepts as compared to Progressive pedagogical methods which are more child-centered with student-directed curriculum choices (Kessinger, 2011).

Implications

The implications of this study reach beyond the classroom to include improved teacher training, more institutions training classroom teachers in the Classical Christian methods and philosophy, and more research to identify which variables may hold the most promise as correlated to standardized test performance. Secular teacher training programs should also take note and investigate where techniques, methodologies, and philosophies might be incorporated into current thought or replace current paradigms completely.

Jeynes (2012a, 2012b) found that students scored higher when attending Christian private schools, these associated academic benefits were stable over time, and these associated academic benefits improved minority student scores, closing the perceived gap between majority race counterparts. Classical Christian schools are a subset of Christian private schools and scored significantly higher on the PSAT standardized test in this study. In light of these qualities, it would be important for education policy makers, parents, and educators to consider or reconsider the merits of the Essentialist-based developmental approach of the Trivium practiced in Classical Christian schools.

Limitations

Limitations of this study included both internal and external validity as well as researcher bias. Internal threats to validity included the maturity, state of mind, health, and attentiveness of each student taking the PSAT as well as the common practice of taking the PSAT more than once in preparation for the SAT (Testmasters, 2017). The present study received averaged scores from school headmasters to allow for the utmost in privacy (no student names can be attributed to any reported score) with scores covering a 10year period. The researcher had no way of identifying how many times each student took the tests that made up the averaged scores. While teacher preparation was controlled to some extent due to the use of only accredited member schools polled in the ACSI where a minimum of a bach-

elor’s degree is required, the ACCS schools had no such requirement. Similarly, the schools polled for data included all accredited ACSI schools internationally while the only ACCS schools with students old enough and offering the PSAT were located in the United States. While this study utilized real, classroom-generated scores, generalizing the results of the present study to all grade 11 students or another defined population would be an overgeneralization, or a limitation of external validity, according to Gall et al., (2007, p. 389). The researcher in this study has used rigorous statistical measures (existing mean scores provided by schools, coding for confidentiality, Bonferroni adjustment) to ensure bias would not affect the outcome or reporting. The researcher disclosed that she serves as treasurer in a public charity that aids homeschools and parent groups starting schools who wish to investigate and possibly implement the Classical Christian method.

Recommendations for Future Research

Since Jeynes’ (2012a) meta-analysis of 90 studies found that charter school and public school students fell behind their private Christian school counterparts on standardized tests, and this study suggests that the Classical Christian method shows promise in raising standardized test scores, more research should include other standardized test measures to corroborate findings. While Jeynes’ (2003, 2008) accounted for social and economic variables, this study did not receive enough returned data to analyze de -

mographic information (16 out of 32 non-Classical and 12 out of 23 Classical Christian schools returned limited demographic data). Most schools reported they did not have such data on hand since private schools are not required to report demographics to the federal government. Field work in a future study could reveal such data from school files. A correlational study would be appropriate at that time to try to identify which variables within the Classical Christian method may hold the most promise for future classroom implementation.

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The College Board. (2015). Compare PSAT/NMSQT specifications. Retrieved from https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/psat-nmsqt-psat-10/inside-the-test/compare-specifications

The National Association of Evangelicals. (2012). What is an evangelical? Retrieved from http://www.nae.net/churchand-faith-partners/what-is-an-evangelical

United States Department of Agriculture. (2013). National school lunch program. Retrieved from http://www.fns.usda.gov/ sites/default/files/NSLPFactSheet.pdf

Differences in Mean Scores PSAT

Van Brummelen, H. (2002). Stepping stones to curriculum (2nd ed.). Colorado Springs, CO: Purposeful Design Publications.

Wagner, D., & Perels, F. (2012). Evaluation of an intervention program to foster self-regulated learning and academic achievement in Latin instruction. ISRN Education, 1–9. doi:10.5402/2012/848562

Wilson, D. (1991). Recovering the lost tools of learning. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.

Wilson, D. (2003). The case for Classical Christian education. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.

Wood, M. K. (2008). A study of the biblical worldview of K–12 Christian school educators (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest. (Order No. 3330608).

Yuksel, I. (2014). Impact of activity-based mathematics instruction on students with different prior knowledge and reading abilities. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 12, 1445–1468. doi: 10.1007/s10763-013-9474-0

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Dr. Christy Vaughan holds an Ed.D. from Liberty University in Educational Leadership and serves as Secretary for Classical Christian Education International, Inc. (www.2CEI.ORG) and Head of Curriculum and Instruction at Brown County Christian

Academy in Ohio. She has more than 10 years of experience in public and private education in both online and brick-and-mortar classrooms, and she currently offers courses in preparation for a career in Christian education through Kepler Education.

Redeeming the Social Sciences

Why Custom Must Still be Considered

by Dr. Robert Woods

Ihad long been a closet admirer of the Social Sciences, traditionally understood, but like so many had become increasingly troubled with the heightened anti-traditional, anti-Christian, and even ironically anti-humane worldview of too many applications of the social sciences. Academic disciplines and intellectual schools of thought should go through an occasional reexamination to ensure that they have not become blind to certain dispositions and tendencies that may diminish their positive role in assisting with human understanding. As with most machinery that needs a periodic inspection to ensure that all is properly aligned, the self-reflective scholar should seek to do the same within her discipline.

All people who have lived any length of time and all ideas that have been around for a period of time have both a history and a philosophy. This is true of the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. The influ -

ence of the social sciences in our everyday lives is manifested in both the academy and within mass society. “The concepts and terminology of the social sciences pervade almost everything we read today.”1 This imprint affects everything from public discussions of social justice and equity to the way we experience freedom, exhibit manners and morals, and most keenly manifested with the omni-present triumph of the therapeutic. It is with this fact in mind that the nature and function of the social sciences need to be reconsidered.

A clear point of demonstrating the occasional need for reconsidering the origins and orientation of an academic discipline would be specifically the social science of sociology. “The descriptive science of sociology or comparative ethnology thus tends to replace normative science of ethics—or moral philosophy.” 2 Strictly speaking, the historical roots of sociology can be traced back to the theory and practice of ethics or moral philosophy. The difference being that today, Sociology is less explicit in its ideological orientation when historically, moral philosophy was explicit in its prescription of the good life to be lived by good people. Despite this key shift from explicitly prescriptive to overtly descriptive, the social sciences continue to ask questions and seek answers that are central to our self-understanding. Why do we form ourselves, as humans, into the various social formations? Why do we have the social

1 Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 289.

2 Mortimer J. Adler, ed., The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas , Second Edition., vol. 1, Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1990), 212.

Redeeming the Social Sciences

customs and conventions that we do? Why do we form the social habits that we form? The social sciences are oriented at asking and seeking the answers to such questions. The social sciences have historically focused on human beings as social creatures living in social settings.

One may need to begin with the initial exercise of delineating the practices deemed social sciences. “Which, in fact, are the social sciences? One way to answer the question is to see what departments and disciplines universities group under this name. Social science divisions usually include departments of anthropology, economics, politics, and sociology . . . The social sciences proper focus on cultural, institutional, and environmental factors.”3

Is it possible, then, to define what we mean by the term social science? “Such fields as anthropology, economics, politics, and sociology constitute a kind of central core of social science, which almost all social scientists would include in any definition. In addition, we think it would be conceded by most social scientists that much, though not all, of the literature of such fields as law, education, and public administration, and some of the literature of such fields as business and social service, together with, a considerable portion of psychological literature, falls within the confines of a reasonable definition.”4

Humans, by nature, are capable of both changing our social environments and changing ourselves to fit our social environments. The term autoplastic is descriptive of the molding or shifting of ourselves to adjust to our phys-

3 Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book , 290-291.

4 Ibid., 292.

ical and social setting. While the term alloplastic describes the human propensity to adapt our setting or environment to fit our biological, religious, and existential needs. The primary goal of society, when acting in its own good and self-interest, is to establish certain social habits5 and then to refine those civic habits 6 to establish and retain social order. This human propensity for order is most assuredly reflective of the image of God humans bear. More specifically, while customs, conventions and habits are not set in stone, they are projections and reflections of the human longing for order within a needed context. The human need for social order is evident. This is where the social sciences have the potential to best assist with our self understanding as, “the social sciences proper focus on cultural, institutional, and environmental factors . . .”

7 The relationship between custom and habit may best be described in symbiotic terms. Collective social customs are shaped by actions that are habitually recurring. These recurring collective actions become social customs. In other words, “custom is both a cause and an effect of habit. The habits of the individual certainly reflect the customs of the community in which he lives; and in turn, the living customs of any social group get their vitality from the habits of its members. A custom which does not command general compliance is as dead as a language no longer spoken or a law no longer observed. This general compliance con-

5 Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America” in Gateway to the Great Books: Man and Society (Chicago: Britannica, 1990), Volume 5: 686.

6 Ibid., 651.

7 Adler, How to Read , 291.

sists in nothing more than a certain conformity among the habits of individuals.” 8

It has been observed that customs, conventions, and social habits act to order human life and can even come to exercise pressure calling for acculturated compliance or blind conformity. In other words, “. . . so custom works in opposite directions as a social force. It is both a factor of cohesion and a division among men . . . [peoples] are excluded by a social, not a geographic, boundary line, the line drawn between those who share a set of customs and all outsiders. When the stranger is assimilated, the group does not adopt him: he adopts the customs of the community. The very word ‘community’ implies a multitude having much in common. More important than the land they occupy are the customs they share.” 9

Historians, the caliber of Xenophon, are attentive to the ways that social customs, ranging from religious practices, housing, food, drink, gestures, and festivals act as a means of conveying the social lives and ways of various people.10 Specifically, regarding dwellings of a particular people and how their houses embody certain customs, Xenophon observes that, “the houses here were built underground; the entrances were like wells, but they broadened out lower down. There were tunnels dug in the ground for the animals, while the men went down by ladder. Inside the houses there were goats, sheep, cows and poultry with their

8 Adler, Syntopicon , 216.

9 Ibid., 216.

10 Xenophon, “The Persian Expedition,” in Gateway to the Great Books: Man and Society . (Chicago: Britannica, 1990), Volume 5: 209-212.

young. All these animals were fed on food that was kept inside the houses.”11

It is by considering the daily, ordinary habits of life that we come to understand people. Human customs are not monolithic, neither are they totally arbitrary. Customs function primarily as ordering phenomena for humans who need such ordering, especially when living in community. While considering the various ways that customs are manifested, attention will also be given to the underlying and myriad ways that customs order human existence. “There was also wheat, barley, beans and barley-wine in great bowls. The actual grains of barley floated on top of the bowls, level with the brim, and in the bowls there were reeds of various sizes and without joints in them. When one was thirsty, one was meant to take a reed and suck the wine into one’s mouth. It was a very strong wine, unless one mixed it with water, and, when one got used to it, it was a very pleasant drink.”12

Human communities are knit together by the social interactions that are, in part, shaped by the very customs that enable smooth and fluid engagements. Imagine even a small community that lacked shared habits, manners, and customs that provided the preordained guidance for verbal and physical exchanges. Again, Xenophon provides an anecdote as to how this functions within a military camp setting. “Everywhere he found them feasting and merrymaking, and they would invariably refuse to let him go before they had given him something for breakfast. In 11 Ibid., 211.

12 Xenophon, The Persian Expedition , 211.

every single case they would have on the same table lamb, kid, pork, veal and chicken, and a number of loaves, both wheat and barley. When anyone wanted, as a gesture of friendship, to drink to a friend’s health, he would drag him to a huge bowl, over which he would have to lean, sucking up the drink like an ox.”13

Customs and social habits have the ability to affect behavior as well as the internal intimations and longings. Clearly, customs can and do impact practices of the external surroundings as well as the internal landscape of the human heart and mind. Take for example, the inclination some have toward patriotism. Tocqueville notes that “there is one sort of patriotic attachment which principally arises from that instinctive, disinterested and undefinable feeling which connects the affections of man with his birthplace. This natural fondness is united to a taste for ancient customs, and a reverence for ancestral traditions of the past; those who cherish it love their country as they love the mansion of their fathers.”14 It is worth noting that Tocqueville in this passage recognizes that customs and traditions can be as substantive in their formation and affections as physical, and geographical places can be on the actions of the collective public.

It has been noted by many social scientists that customs serve as ordering forms for the social self, but are not immutable. For the determinist who contends that the masses are mindless drones who simply conform to all customs, “the ancient customs of a people are changed, public 13

morality destroyed, religious beliefs disturbed, and the spell of tradition broken . . .”15 How and why this happens is a reflection for another time, but the reality is that customs change. In truth, customs that are longstanding can change rather quickly given the right social shift. One example in contemporary American society is the traditional gesture of meeting or greeting being a handshake. The Covid pandemic has drastically and rather quickly altered that custom. No doubt, other gestures, such as the fist-bump or elbow-tap, may take the place of the handshake, regardless, our social interactions will establish a means by imposing order to the social situations of meeting and greeting one another. It has also been observed that customs are not merely for ordering our social lives but there are also customs and habits for private life. Functionally, “the habits of private life are continued in public . . .”16 according to Tocqueville. By extension and even expansion of societal conditions, social settings, and governing laws are all intertwined with domestic habits of the wider ethos of democracy.17

A final observation about custom as ordering forms, one can see that similar to family heirlooms, many customs and opinions are passed down from generation to generation. These are inherited in a parallel manner and often received without any questions.18 These familial customs and opinions can be so strong that even after a family member

15 Ibid., 642.

16 Tocqueville, Democracy in America , 621.

17 Ibid., 676.

18 Ibid., 601, 65.

Redeeming the Social Sciences

leaves the immediate influence of one’s biological family, “the sway of custom and the tyranny of opinion,”19 still have influence in our social engagements as they may also be worked into the fabric of the larger communal order that has already established the “ordinary customs of civil bodies.” 20 Or to put in other terms, “the will of the majority is the most general of laws, and it establishes certain habits which form the characteristics of each peculiar class of society . . .” 21 In simplest terms, there is often, but not always an intricate link between private formation, public practices, liberty, morality, and the religious habitation informing public and private customs. 22

It is important to understand that custom as socially given convictions and behavior is not always of a weighty social or moral nature. At times it is simply a prescription for practical action. Whether it is the socially prescribed costumes employed while navigating a river boat down the Mississippi river, 23 Henry David Thoreau learning the craft of pencil making, 24 or an inaugural address delivered by

19 Ibid., 606, 684.

20 Ibid., 601.

21 Ibid., 592.

22 Ibid., 573.

23 Mark Twain, “Life on the Mississippi” in Gateway to the Great Books: Man and Society (Chicago: Britannica, 1990), Volume 5: 63, 68.

24 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoreau” in Gateway to the Great Books: Man and Society (Chicago: Britannica, 1990), Volume 5: 150.

President Lincoln, 25 each of these manifestations of adherence to customs is more of a practical matter of fact than a moral admonishment.

Custom as the establishment of normative behavior or social mores commonly has laws, rules, ordinances, that run parallel to the wider social intimations. Laws, rules, and ordinances are more formal strictures with established formal and legal consequences for violation. One case in point would be how Americans, as described by Tocqueville, experienced their longing for self-governing authority within their everyday social habits. 26 According to Tocqueville, one particular characteristic that was common among the Americans, he observed, was patriotism. Distinct from today, he observed that this particular quality was rooted in “ancient customs” “ancestral traditions” and seemed to function as a kind of civil religion. 27 By extension, while there are no laws currently in America requiring patriotic expressions, there are varying degrees of social censure for disrespecting the pledge of allegiance to the American flag at civic events, and specific laws against public flag burning. Custom is a primary means of establishing a social or civic order that is conducive to humane interactions governing any and all social occurrences. 28 Additionally, scholar John Bury, reflecting on the writings of Herodotus, ob -

25 Abraham Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address” in Gateway to the Great Books: Man and Society (Chicago: Britannica, 1990), Volume 5: 747.

26 Tocqueville, Democracy in America , 577.

27 Ibid., 641.

28 François Guizot, “History of Civilization in Europe” in Gateway to the Great Books: Man and Society (Chicago: Britannica, 1990), Volume 5: 313.

serves the full nature and the full power of customs. Using the example of cannibalism of one people and the practice of cremating the dead of other people, it is observed how difficult it is to get people to see beyond their customs. By way of explanation, the customs of a people can become so ingrained within the ways of a people the customs take on an indisputable authority. 29 In truth, one could argue that we actually live in, with, and through our customs. In other words, we do not merely comply to social customs—it is much deeper and more meaningful than simple adherence. Customs come to be a part of who we are and how we live. Tocqueville uses the example of the idea and adherence to the sovereignty of the American people as being so “recognized by the customs and proclaimed by the laws” as to be beyond question. 30 Tocqueville later argues that it is actually the “customs and manners’’ of the people to freely associate with one another that acts as a guard against the “tyranny of the majority.” 31 This tyranny of the majority is a particular pernicious presence in America, according to Tocqueville.

Tocqueville also makes an observation about the nature, essence, and practice of custom in America that is of the greatest importance. Contrary to the assumptions of some regarding the apparently fixed nature of customs,

29 John Bury, “Herodotus” in Gateway to the Great Books: Man and Society (Chicago: Britannica, 1990), Volume 5: 373.

30 Tocqueville, Democracy in America , 584.

31 Ibid., 598.

the reality is that custom is unstable or “fleeting.” 32 It is this observation that leads to the inevitable and obvious conclusion that social orders can and do change when “its habits are changed, its manners corrupted.”33 With any social setting, or communal order, there will always be the contrarian who asserts that customs stand as imposition of expected behavior that should be challenged. Possibly the best example of this in American history would be Henry David Thoreau. It seems that it would not be a gross exaggeration that Thoreau sought to challenge and question nearly every custom he encountered. 34 Socially, it is not normative for there to be large numbers of the membership of a social order that would consistently question the day to day customs of the masses. As a matter of truth, one could go so far as to say, in agreement with Tocqueville regarding social changes in his homeland of France, that, “our recollections, opinions, and habits present powerful obstacles” to social change. 35 However, in contrast, Americans, Tocqueville asserted of those living in America at the time of his study that “they brought neither customs nor traditions” to this land. 36 If this is true, it may go toward understanding why Americans seem to have few customs that have stood the test of time.

32 Ibid., 678.

33 Ibid., 659.

34 Emerson, Thoreau , 151.

35 Tocqueville, Democracy in America , 580.

36 Ibid., 643.

Redeeming the Social Sciences

In truth and practice, “much social science is a mixture of science, philosophy, and history, often with some fiction thrown in for good measure.” 37 There is an imperative correction needed within the social sciences to make certain that the study of humans and social behavior remains humane. By having a clearer self-awareness that the social sciences unknowingly rely upon its humane roots, they would be better served. By simply being attentive to the everyday habits and customs of humans, much can be inferred from a synthetic consideration of the meaning of these to best understand the amazing human being.

Dr. Robert Woods has long enjoyed the Great Books and the education found within them. He has been an educator and Headmaster within Classical Christian institutions for more than 20 years, and has degrees in religious studies (B.A.), religion (M.A.), and Humanities (Ph.D.). Dr. Woods lives in North Carolina with his wife and children.