Arts and Sciences in the Classical School
I had a great chance this summer to talk with some fellow classical educators about a topic near and dear to my heart – poetry, and the teaching of poetry. Over the years, I have developed an approach to the discipline that is rather different than the approach typically taken in most high school classrooms. Commonly, students who study poetry in their English classes will read a poem, and then do the work of “analysis” or “interpretation” with their teacher; if some form of assessment follows, it is most often an “analytical” essay, which asks the student to perform a sort of “close-reading” on the text. When approached in this manner, the poem becomes an object of study, and the student’s mastery demonstrated if he or she can make true statements about the meaning and structure of the work.
What I have invited students to do over the years is to read poems as models, and to respond to their reading not through analysis but imitation. They read a sonnet, and then they write a sonnet, on the assumption that poetry is a kind of practice, which needs to be experienced from the “inside” before a young person can grasp its significance. In the course of examining any particular poem, we will discuss the generic structure and figurative devices the students will be asked to replicate; this discussion inevitably encompasses the thematic thrust of the poem, as it is nearly impossible to discuss the form of a specific poem without referencing its content. It is a strange, unfounded prejudice to think that poems reveal nothing of their meaning until they are subjected to a rigorous analysis. But by approaching the meaning of the poem through the oblique path of considering it as a model, it allows the students to consider the work as something other than a dead object that needs to be poked and prodded before it gives up its information.
The fact is that young people naturally take an interest in virtuosi performances of practices they are engaged in. A young man who pitches for his Little League team will watch more keenly than his friends as the big league pitcher tosses a no-hitter. A young woman who rides equestrian at a local farm will stay up late to watch the Olympic athlete complete a far more challenging course. Students who play chess or carve wood will pay attention to adults carrying out these activities at far greater rates than students who have never put their hand to them. Having encountered the complexities involved in performing these feats, they can better appreciate the masters who have overcome them. We do not hand a child the Encyclopedia of Baseball, and expect that alone will make him a fan of the game. We do not show a child diagrams of the most famous opening gambits, and hope that will make her sign up for chess club. We let the children do these things, and in doing them develop an appreciation for the activity itself. This appreciation naturally begets a special curiosity to see others do these things well. The same principle can be applied to the teaching of poetry.
The distinction I am driving at is the one that Aristotle makes in the Nicomachean Ethics between a science and an art, or between an organized body of knowledge and a “state of capacity to make involving a true course of reasoning.” What is relevant about this distinction for the educator is the way in which knowledge in these respective spheres might be expected to manifest itself in the student’s powers. “Scientific knowledge,” writes Aristotle, “is a state of capacity to demonstrate.” In order to determine whether students have gained mastery over a given set of information, we ask them to “demonstrate” a command of that information; hence the common assessment regime of quizzes, tests, and essays. But a grasp of an art reveals itself far differently for a student; in this case, it is a capacity to make something that is reflective of mastery in this sphere. A student knows poetry when he can write poetry, when he can create the sort of thing that is his object of study.
The matter is more complicated than this, however. There is in fact a science of poetry, a body of information that includes generic and figurative conventions, rules of prosody, as well as a history of schools of style. To know these things is to know poetry in a way as well; to be able to distinguish between a line of blank verse and a line of anapestic tetrameter, or to grasp the manner in which Pope’s “Letter to Dr. Arbuthnot” embodied certain ideals of neoclassical craft, is to possess real and substantial knowledge of the discipline. It is in fact a common boast of the critics that they themselves truly understand poetry, whereas the poets only create out of an instinct or intuition that they themselves do not really grasp. Plato’s Ion is the locus classicus for this claim, and there is much to it. The ideal state of knowledge in regards to poetry would look something like the capacities of a Coleridge or an Arnold, the capacities to create extraordinary poetic works joined to a compendious grasp of the history and technical repertoire of the art form - that is to say, an intimate familiarity with the art and science of poetry.
It is remarkable how many of the subjects taught in school, outside the traditional fine arts, might be regarded as both a science and an art. Think about grammar, for instance: grammar is a science insofar as it constitutes a body of terminology and rules that need to be memorized by the student, but it is also an art insofar as that knowledge can be applied to the making of sound sentences – to sentences that display, for instance, proper subject-verb agreement, or deft stylistic exploitation of the appositive. The study of Latin incorporates many of those same grammatical rules, along with an entirely unique lexicon, and this body of material constitutes the science of Latin; when students master this body of material and apply it to the task of creating translations, there is an artistry to doing so. Even so called “hard” sciences have an artistic aspect to them: Physics and Chemistry both encompass massive sets of facts and laws, but a student’s command of this information can be demonstrated in the lab when they make machines or compounds based on this information. There is a sense in which one does not just learn Chemistry, one does Chemistry, and that doing belongs to the art of the discipline.
In a more significant sense, though, I think I want to say that every discipline is an art, or has an artistic aspect to it, insofar as a child’s application to learning that discipline cultivates – or creates – in him or her a set of intellectual and moral virtues necessary for the building up of character. So a student absorbs the major events of the Peloponnesian War or the Civil War, and in doing so absorbs the lessons in political psychology revealed through those events; in time, from a systematic exposure to such lessons, a student ought to be able to attain at least a rudimentary form of the prudence and sense of justice that make for fruitful civic engagement. Or a student applies himself to working out a page of differential equations, and the elegant coherence of the equations as they unfold beneath his pencil instills in him an instinctual association between truth and beauty when they appear. A young person learns a discrete body of knowledge that comprises the science of the discipline at hand, and in doing so realizes ennobling habits of heart and mind that lay dormant heretofore. She becomes an artist in the disciplines of literature or science or mathematics, and the thing she creates is her soul.
It is not enough to say that every discipline might be regarded under the category of an art and a science. The relationship between these aspects is teleological. The reason we should teach all those past events to students is in order to cultivate in them the virtues of civic engagement. The reason we should teach Calculus to students is in order to cultivate in them an adequacy between their minds and the phenomena their minds encounter. The reason we should present the sciences they study to our students is to build up in them the power to live more flourishing lives. Of course, there are other and more specialized applications of that knowledge; Calculus is useful for building bridges and a knowledge of the Civil War for writing books about Gettysburg. Far too often, both teachers and students in modern schools go to their work with only such specialized applications of their discipline in mind.
Might we say then that the special trait of a classical school is that, within its walls, students are invited to study whole ranges of information in order to apply it to their own flourishing and to the flourishing of their communities – that they learn the sciences of the subjects they study in order to become the artists of their own lives. The classical educator, whether at work in the science lab or the music room, whether teaching about DNA or Dostoyevsky, always has the final end of his discipline in view, and ensures that his students do as well. In this way, those students are constantly refreshed and pushed onward in their oftentimes tedious studies by a glimpse of the enhanced manner of living that is the destination to be gained through all their toil.
It is important to emphasize that if this conception of classical education provides a rationale for asking students to absorb bodies of facts and information, it does not provide any justification for supposing that content will be slighter or less substantial than what a student might be expected to master elsewhere. It is a misconception I have encountered more than once – sometimes from folks outside the world of classical ed, sometimes from those within – that students in a classical school are asked to learn less than their peers because all the focus is on arousing wonder or inculcating virtue in the classroom. These latter ends belong to the artistry of a subject, which provides the ultimate justification for memorizing content, but there is no reason to suppose that because this justification is provided the content will be less. The superiority of the classical approach is by way of addition, not subtraction; the demands in terms of mastery of content need not be one jot slighter than those placed upon students enrolled in even the most rigorous courses of study.
It is only too common for students presented with the challenges of such mastery to moan, “why am I learning this?” What the classical approach provides to those students is a constant reminder of the great ends to be pursued through all the labyrinthine course of quizzes, essays, labs, and research papers they must traverse on the way to a complete education. It refreshes their labors with a steady cognizance of the humanizing power of their coursework. We can ask as much of our students – we can ask far more of our students – because everything we ask of them, we ask with a purpose. And those are happiest, and go to their work with the greatest readiness, who understand the ends of their labors.