{"id":2903,"date":"2022-04-09T06:55:56","date_gmt":"2022-04-09T11:55:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educationalrenaissance.com\/?p=2903"},"modified":"2023-04-29T19:46:19","modified_gmt":"2023-04-30T00:46:19","slug":"apprenticeship-in-the-arts-part-4-artistry-the-academy-and-the-working-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educationalrenaissance.com\/2022\/04\/09\/apprenticeship-in-the-arts-part-4-artistry-the-academy-and-the-working-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In his book So Good They Can\u2019t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love<\/em>, Cal Newport argues against the well-known Passion Hypothesis of career happiness. He describes the Passion Hypothesis as the idea that \u201cthe key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you\u2019re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion\u201d (4). It is well summed up by the ever-present, popular advice to \u201cfollow your dreams.\u201d As Steve Jobs said in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Buy the book through the EdRen Bookstore<\/a>!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got to find what you love\u2026.[T]he only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven\u2019t found it yet, keep looking, and don\u2019t settle.\u201d (as qtd in Newport, So Good They Can\u2019t Ignore You<\/em>, <\/em>3) <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

There are few premises more ubiquitous in our career counseling world than this passion mindset; and, as Cal Newport demonstrates, there are few ideas more misleading and damaging. Stories of people who quit their day-job to pursue their dreams often end in financial ruin, as well as the dashing of those same dreams. Interviews of people like Jobs who have \u2018found their passion\u2019 actually reveal that \u201ccompelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion\u201d (13). This is because passion for a career often coexists with quite a bit of drudgery and comes as the result of a great deal of effort expended in developing rare and valuable skills or what we might call arts. In fact, it is the \u201ccraftsman mindset,\u201d Newport explains, that is the surest route to work you love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the craftsman mindset? It is to focus on a job as an apprenticeship in a tradition of artistry<\/a> as a means to offer some valuable good or service to the world at a high degree of excellence or mastery. Perhaps you can see how his insight connects with the apprenticeship process<\/a> that leads to Aristotle\u2019s intellectual virtue of craftsmanship or artistry (in Greek techne<\/em>). <\/em>Newport contrasts the craftsman mindset with the passion mindset this way:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world<\/em>, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you<\/em>\u2026. When you focus only on what your work offers you<\/em>, it makes you hyperaware of what you don\u2019t<\/em> like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy\u2014these come later\u2026. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions [like]…. \u201cWho am I?\u201d and \u201cWhat do I truly love?\u201d (38, 39)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Ironically the advice to pursue your passion in work ends up resulting in a hyper-critical and self-focused spirit that makes it almost impossible to enjoy your work. Instead, if a person allows their consciousness to get lost in the hard work of creating value through deliberate practice<\/a> of their craft, they are more likely to experience flow<\/a> and over time earn the career capital needed to negotiate the details of their work to their own liking. Newport draws on the research of Anders Ericsson on deliberate practice and applies it to the professional world of not-so-deliberate pathways to excellence<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This excursus on career counseling paradigms has a purpose in our overall evaluation of apprenticeship in the arts. Newports\u2019 compelling case for the craftsman mindset sets in stark relief the modern school\u2019s marginalization of artistry and craftsmanship, for all our elite stadiums and flashing performing arts centers. One of the major effects of Bloom\u2019s Taxonomy<\/a>\u2019s abstraction of intellectual skills is that it has severed the life of the academy from the artistry of the professional career world. In addition, the passion hypothesis is one of the plagues of the postmodern buffet of potential selves that students are being subtly and not so subtly indoctrinated into in our contemporary schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article we will explore how to restore this link through a recovery of artistry in our schools without embracing either utilitarian pragmatism on the one hand, or the ivory tower separation characteristic of many modern and postmodern schools, whether they call themselves classical, progressive or otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Liberal Arts as Pathways of Professional Preparation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In endorsing Newport\u2019s craftsman mindset, I am very aware that I will sound like a utilitarian pragmatist to many classical educators. What, after all, hath Career to do with the Academy? Isn\u2019t the entire purpose of the classical education movement to throw off the tyranny of the urgent and the capitalistic reduction of education to career preparation? The Academy should focus on the timeless and perennial things, not STEM and training for the jobs of tomorrow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While I understand and acknowledge the importance of this type of polemic against K-12 education as mere college and career preparation (in fact, we have engaged in it on EdRen from time to time<\/a>, even or especially at the opening of this series countering Bloom\u2019s Taxonomy<\/a>), this argument in its bare form ultimately resolves itself into a false dichotomy. It is not either the case that education is all career preparation or that it involves no career preparation at all. In actual fact, a proper education ought to prepare a student for many different careers: as John Milton said in his tractate, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI call therefore a compleat and generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publick of Peace and War.\u201d (see \u201cOf Education\u201d in the John Milton Reading Room<\/a> managed by Dartmouth College) <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Just performance might correspond to Aristotle\u2019s intellectual virtue of prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis<\/em>), while magnanimous might gesture toward the enlargement of mind or soul characteristic of a person who has attained some measure of philosophic wisdom (sophia<\/em>) through the long cultivation of intuition (nous<\/em>) and scientific knowledge (episteme<\/em>). But skillful performance corresponds to apprenticeship in those arts which undergird all the professions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While training in artistry is, then, not the whole of a \u201ccompleat and generous Education,\u201d it constitutes a fundamental core of training in productive intellectual virtue. This can be illustrated further through recovering the liberal arts themselves as pathways of professional preparation. In our zeal for the ivory towers of the Middle Ages and Classical Era, we too often forget the origins of the liberal arts themselves as professional arts. It may be true that the liberal arts are used to discover and justify knowledge (see e.g. Clark and Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition <\/em>3.0, 39-43), yet they began their traditional life as practical skills for prominent professions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n