Recovering the Manual Arts in Classical Education

If classical Christian education wants to form souls, it needs to learn to use its hands. I’ve been meditating on the need for American classical schools to embrace the “manual” or “common” arts for a while now, but the importance of doing so has struck me in a personal way in recent months. 

Late last year my wife and I moved back to the rural area we are from and bought a 19th century home. Learning to maintain it, and to do simple repairs myself, has been a learning curve (to say the least) after spending so much of my life around the academy and schools. But the moments of frustration have been vastly outweighed by the sense of fulfillment in what we’re restoring, the place we’re building for our family, and the virtues and knowledge it has forced me to grow in along the way.

My argument here is that American classical schools, particularly Protestant ones, should be teaching manual arts to their students. Not only is this allowed by the classical tradition, it is demanded by it in our current context. If Christians are to develop the down-to-earth know-how they’ll need to prosper in the coming years, and to overcome the gravitational pull of screens and disembodiment, they will need to embrace these incarnational arts. And we should remember that they are an essential part of the inheritance that has come down to us from our Protestant, and American, branches of the classical tradition.

Breaking Down False Dichotomies

The manual arts are experiencing something of a revival right now. Classical Academic Press published an excellent book on the topic a few years ago; the good folks at Educational Renaissance have done pioneering work recovering a classical pedagogy of craftsmanship. Christian Halls International is finding innovative ways of helping set up accredited but classical programs in the trades. Recently I had the pleasure of hearing Fr. Mark Perkins of St. Dunstan’s Academy speak about the pedagogical significance of following a Savior who was, after all, a carpenter. Things are moving in the right direction.

But there are still obstacles to overcome—or at least hesitations. Anyone who’s been around the classical movement for a while has heard something like this: “Education should be for its own sake, not job training or career readiness. It’s about forming the soul through truth, goodness and beauty.” 

I want to start by affirming the instinct here. People who say such things are understandably reacting to what Thomas Cole called the “meager utilitarianism” that reduces everything to profit (or to the test grades and college scholarships that lead to profit). I agree with them. In fact, it’s precisely because education is about “truth, goodness and beauty,” virtue formation and making us “more human,” that I believe manual arts must play a bigger part in classical schools.

The idea that education “for its own sake” necessarily excludes teaching the manual arts or preparing students for careers is a false dichotomy, and a misunderstanding of the classical tradition. As we’ll see, the tradition has always allowed teaching useful skills of one kind or another, when they’re taught for the right reasons. Even more importantly, though, the manual arts are not merely useful. Like grammar or astronomy they are actually a “via,” or path, to wisdom.

A Brief History of Manual Arts in the Classical Tradition

There can be no doubt that liberal education for the Greeks and Romans was about virtue formation for freemen who didn’t work with their hands. However, in Book VIII of his Politics, Aristotle himself admits that “useful arts that are indispensably necessary” to citizens in a particular regime, even manual arts, should be taught so that citizens can fulfill their duties. Care must be taken that they are not taught in a “servile” way that interferes with virtue formation. But they may be taught. 

The Romans were even more comfortable talking about liberal education’s usefulness. Recall Cicero’s De Officiis: the root word “officium” suggested both a moral “duty” and an “office.” To be virtuous involved having the skills to fill one’s office well. Quintilian argues both that the true rhetorician is a “good man,” and that his skill with words makes him the most useful man. This way of thinking helps explain why Varro—one of the key figures in the story of the liberal arts tradition—counted, not seven liberal arts, but nine: the seven we know, as well as architecture and medicine. 

Now, it is true that after the fall of Rome, Boethius and his heirs downplayed the earthly, hands-on usefulness of liberal education (there was no longer any Senate to influence through public displays of rhetoric, for example). But that’s not to say that they understood education to be “for its own sake” in the sense of excluding useful skills. Instead, they emphasized its usefulness in other spheres. Liberal education became “job training” for scholars and clergy, equipping them with the skills to study Scripture, philosophy and theology.

Enter Hugh of St. Victor, whose Didascalicon argues that there are seven “mechanical arts" (including agriculture, commerce and even hunting) parallel to the liberal arts. Perhaps because of his incarnational perspective, Hugh draws out an aspect of these arts the ancients had failed to emphasize—restoring the ancient Hebrew understanding of “wisdom” as not merely intellectual but practical skill (e.g. 1 Kings 7:14) along the way: these arts don’t just equip us for virtue by enabling us to fulfill our duties, they actually form virtue in us by helping us grasp the archetypal patterns of reality, restoring our souls to the divine image. This foreshadows Protestant educator John Amos Comenius’ pedagogy of craftsmanship, where students, like skilled craftsmen, “give form to ourselves and to our materials at the same time.

Luther’s doctrine of “vocation,” or “the priesthood of all believers,” pointed education even more decisively in this direction. By reminding farmers, laborers and craftsmen that their trades are as “spiritual” as the priest’s or scholar’s when pursued for God’s glory, the Reformation exalted these callings and the wisdom of their practitioners. And as Gene Edward Veith has shown, while Luther (like Aristotle) insists that occupational training and manual skills should not get in the way of teaching students the liberal arts, the reason he gives is that the liberal arts uniquely enable students to “serve God and the world.” In other words, education is about imparting wisdom and virtue; whatever is necessary to that end must be taught.

The Wisdom of the Hands: A Case for the Manual Arts

In our current cultural context, I would contend that the manual arts have become a necessary means to that end. Allow me to explain.

As classical educators know full well, we live in a disembodied age. Even those of us who don’t work in the “information economy” are enveloped in its smog. When we experience the world, it’s often mediated by screens—or filtered through them so quickly that in our memory there’s little difference. The result is alienation from our bodies and the physical world, hubris, abstraction, men without chests. Having shut nature out, our thoughts lack substance, authority; we express them with pale, drooping words transplanted from reality into the thin soil of our malnourished memories.

And it’s that last point that I want to focus on for a moment. There are many ways to defend the manual arts: how they teach us to be “sub-creators,” how they inculcate fortitude, manual dexterity, and so on. But, taking a cue from Hugh of St. Victor, I want to focus on a way they form wisdom. As so many of the tradition’s great voices remind us, the ability to think abstractly rests on metaphor and analogy; these rely on a firm grasp of words, and our words embody truth only insofar as they are rooted in experience of the nature of things, i.e. reality.

In other words, invisible and spiritual truths, as well as abstract concepts and principles, are only brought home to our minds by analogy to the physical reality we see and touch. If something is morally “right” it is literally “straight” instead of crooked. To “learn” originally meant “to follow a track.” Similarly, God veils himself in metaphors drawn from the physical world so our minds can approach Him: He is our “rock,” Jesus our “light,” a “lamb,” the “bread of life,” “the Way.” Jesus tells us time and again that “the kingdom of heaven is like” a field, yeast, a mustard seed, a fisherman’s net—all of which presumes visceral knowledge of farming, baking and fishing.

What follows is that our moral imagination, our reason, and even our ability to think about our Heavenly Father, is fed by our knowledge of the physical world and the laws governing it. And the farmer or craftsman has important advantages here. It’s no coincidence that Socrates the stonemason explored metaphysical truths by constant analogies to masonry, carpentry, horsemanship and other trades.  There’s no way to internalize nature and its immutable, inexorable laws quite like trying to take raw materials and grow or make something out of them. A rigorous, classical athletics program is essential as well, but it cannot substitute for the experience of making and growing — practicing one or more of Hugh’s “mechanical arts.”

Of course, we would not want to push this too far and say you have to be a carpenter or fisherman to understand the Gospel or to love wisdom. But clearly firsthand experience and observation of these crafts and trades helps a great deal. 

This will look different in different schools, and ought to. Which manual arts should be taught, how should they be taught, and by whom? Since we learn hands-on skills best by doing, should the school be teaching these arts within its own walls, or apprenticing its students part-time to classically-minded craftsmen out in the field? All of these considerations are matters of prudence that must be decided by each school to fit the needs of its students. A school might choose to teach physics through simple machines used in real construction projects. Another might orient its curriculum and liturgies around running a farm. One could design a course that teaches basic wood or mechanical work, along the lines of old school “shop class.”

All of these ideas are already being pioneered by classical schools across the nation; these leaders have far more wisdom than I do about the ups and downs of how this or that idea might fit your school. Paths will differ, but as long as the end of wisdom and virtue stays the same, so much the better. The governing question for schools should always be, “What do our particular students need in order to be built up in wisdom and virtue, so that they can best love and serve God, their nation and the neighbors they’re likely to have?”

A Few Strategic Points to Consider

The manual arts don’t just augment a liberal arts curriculum’s ability to foster virtue, they come with many strategic benefits for the larger Christian community. Let me briefly touch on a few of these.

First, the manual arts are radically incarnational, and a beacon of light in our increasingly Gnostic culture. Cultivating the virtues of the hands will stand out to our unbelieving neighbors who are hungry for a way of life that ennobles and gives purpose to their bodies. Over time this will attract them to our churches, our schools and the Gospel.

Second, to successfully navigate “the conditions of modernity,” students need practical, hands-on skills like never before, and the manual arts are the best way to teach them. The Great Books are no longer enough in the “negative world." Students should be graduating already embedded in their local communities, attuned to their neighbors’ needs and equipped to begin serving them with hands as well as hearts and minds. This is the Protestant, and American, way. If they go on to college, an education of this kind will keep their years of study tethered to reality. Above all, we have to radically rethink “classical” programs that prepare students with a set of skills that are only useful if they attend a college, and one far away from their home at that. 

I’d like to add one more thought here. Over the years many graduates of classical schools have privately told me that, as excellent as their educations were, they felt boxed in by them to low-paying teaching jobs, becoming a strain on their growing families over time. Many have begun noticing the same trend. It’s not something that’s openly talked about among the leaders of the classical renewal, but it is a real (and, I suspect, growing) reality for many graduates.

Third, and finally, more students learning the manual arts means more graduates going into the trades. This is a win-win for everyone, especially as churches recalibrate for the negative world. More classically-trained craftsmen means more Christian “owned space,” cultural leverage, congregants better able to care for each other’s needs, and, crucially, larger endowments for new and existing Christian institutions, thus preparing the soil for a Christian counter-elite. 

Conclusion

I started this piece by talking about the way home ownership has reminded me that wisdom comes in many forms: practical as well as intellectual. I’d like to end by sharing one of the most striking metaphors for the pursuit of wisdom in all literature, from Alfred the Great’s preface to his translation of St. Augustine’s Soliloquies, where the good king compares reading the ancients to a lumberman’s journey into a forest of choice trees:

I then gathered for myself staves and props . . . and crossbars and beams…the finest timbers I could carry. I never came away with a single load without wishing to bring home the whole of the forest, if I could have carried it all—in every tree I saw something for which I had a need at home. Accordingly, I would advise everyone who is strong and has many wagons to direct his steps to that same forest…and to fetch more for himself…so that he may weave many elegant walls…and so build a fine homestead…. He who instructed me may bring it about that I may abide more comfortably both in this temporary dwelling…and also in the eternal home that He has promised us….

Here we see Alfred’s obvious love of forests, trees and his knowledge of the lumberman’s craft. But we also see how his practical wisdom formed and enlivened his moral imagination, preparing his heart and mind to better receive the teachings of Scripture, Augustine, Gregory and Boethius. 

If our goal as classical Christian educators is to point souls to their “eternal home,” let us boldly teach the manual arts, confident that as our students make “temporary dwellings” with their hands, their hearts are becoming fit to dwell in a temple made without them.