*Originally published in 2011*
To discuss the place of the Natural Sciences in a curriculum of a free people one has to first understand what freedom is. I said earlier that we often make the mistake of thinking of freedom as ‘freedom from’. We think of freedom as freedom from restraint, which translates into (or at least often translates into) having many options. We think that we are less restrained the more possibilities there are to choose from. The free man then becomes one who has a plethora of possibilities. The difficulty with this view is that then once I choose and thus limit the possibilities, I am less free than before I chose. The very act of exercising freedom, in that view, destroys freedom.
This is not the right view of freedom. Freedom should be seen as ‘freedom to’ not ‘freedom from’. It is freedom to act. I am most free when I am most capable of
acting, and this is not primarily because of something outside of me, but because of my internal condition. I am capable of acting well when I am virtuous, clear minded, in control of my emotions, so that I can see what is best for me to do, and do it.
The man who thinks he is free because he does whatever he feels like doing is mistaken. He is actually a slave to his passions, not a free man. It is the man who does what he knows is best and what he truly wants to do who is a free man. When St. Paul says, “I can see that my body follows a different law that battles against the law my reason dictates. This is what makes me a prisoner of that law of sin which lives inside my body. What a wretched man I am!” He is talking about the lack of freedom one has when he does not do what right reason and the rightly ordered will intend.
Freedom, then, belongs to a man when both intellect and will are rightly ordered. To understand this proper ordination, one needs a little background. The order of the creature to his Creator is the fundamental order. We are ordered to God, He is not ordered to us. He is in authority over us, and we are to obey Him. This is for our good, not for His, a very important point I see more clearly as I get older.
As a race we were created in that right order. This right order was upset at the beginning when Adam disobeyed God. First, Adam’s sin changed the nature of our friendship with God. We no longer walked and talked with Him in the garden. Our ordering to God was changed, for we lost our original justice. Now, justice is obtained when each has its due. Original justice is the term by which we designate the right ordering of the creature to the Creator. When that was lost, the internal order among the parts of our nature was damaged. Before, each part of the person had what it was supposed to have in terms of control. There was a proper subordination among the parts of our nature. Before the Fall, the concupiscible and irascible appetites, namely the appetites in us that are moved to desire, love, hope, fear and anger, and the will, whereby we choose, were subordinated to the intellect.
When the intellect presented something as a good, the will and appetites would move to it, and when the intellect presented something as bad, the will and appetites would move away from it. We were free men. As a result of the Fall, we have lost that order, and both sin and a lack of true freedom is the consequence.
To regain that ordering we have to do a number of things. We have to first of all ask God for His help. We have to work on becoming more virtuous, which means to rightly form both intellect and will. Though education can’t make a man morally virtuous by itself, the right kind of education gives him the intellectual virtues that make the moral virtues possible. One can’t love rightly, unless he knows what the right thing is to love.
The natural sciences can be a real asset in developing this kind of virtue, both intellectual and moral. By the natural sciences I mean the experimental sciences concerned with natural things: physics, chemistry biology, and natural history, for example. (‘Experimental’ here signifies not only the doing or making of something in order to test a supposition, but also simple observation, as in natural history.)
Aristotle points out, in the Parts of Animals, Bk. I, Ch 5, “Having already treated of the celestial world, as far as our conjectures could reach, we proceed to treat of animals, without omitting, to the best of our ability, any member of the kingdom, however, ignoble. For if some have no graces to charm the sense, yet even these, but disclosing to intellectual perception the artistic spirit that designed them, give immense pleasure to all who can trace links of causation, and are inclined to philosophy.”
One sees here that such a study (and while Aristotle is talking about the study of animals, what he says is true of all the natural sciences, for they all reflect their Creator and they all bring a similar pleasure) will help man achieve both intellectual and moral virtue. He will learn more about the first cause of being, God, and he will have his will and appetites moved rightly, for he will be rejoicing in something worthy of his enjoyment.
If the objects of the natural sciences were not created by an intelligence greater than ours, this would not be true. We are perfected intellectually and morally in our study of these sciences because we are studying the divine art. If this were not true, there would be no point in knowing as such about these objects. The only point would be in manipulating them to do our will.
In the founding document of Thomas Aquinas College there is a discussion of this approach to the sciences. If nature were not the work of an intelligence superior to our, the effect of a divine art, we would not become more perfect just in understanding it. Our relation to nature would be only practical, and we would confront nature as the potter confronts his clay. Marx is thus consistent with his atheism when he says that “the philosophers have only interpreted the words in various
ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
This is not our view. We think that the study of the sciences that investigate the reflections of the divine found in nature is the proper work of a free man, and it leads to the discovery of an intelligible order that transcends nature. Through these sciences we come to know the order by which we are measured ourselves, and this will contribute in every way to our well-being. No one is happy in an order of which he is the measure.
Since our interest in the natural sciences is theoretical in nature, we approach them in a specific way. In the Founding Document of Thomas Aquinas College, the experimental sciences are addressed. “All-natural science is based on experience; but this experience is of two kinds. There is a spontaneous inescapable experience of nature which all men have, and which gives rise to a somewhat indistinct and general knowledge of nature. But this common experience does not reveal very many of the differences among natural things, so that in order to understand nature in detail there is need of more particular experience. To experiment is to seek out deliberately and even contrive such experience, especially when this involves altering the object studied in order to reveal certain of its features more clearly. Experiment is scientific when a reasonable account is given of the procedure followed; this involves an account of what is being sought, of why the method of the experiment contributes to the search, and of the reasons for conclusions drawn from the experiment. The Laboratory, therefore, will be devoted to the investigation of nature through experiment.”
We pursue these experiments so that we can come to an understanding of how the natural world works, and that gives us the matter from which we can reason to the universal causes of being. Philosophy, or the universal understanding of the causes of being, is the proper object of men as men.
There are steps in such an education. One can't begin by studying the very highest things. One doesn't begin by giving one’s second grader the argument for the development of the periodic table. Why not? Because the student won't be able to understand it yet. He needs to do some preliminary work. But that preliminary work is ordered to eventually understanding the very highest truths.
All learning is cyclical. We learn first on an introductory level and then we come back to the same objects at a deeper level. This is easiest to see, I think, in mathematics. When one first masters counting, the very next step is to learn the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) with respect to whole numbers. The rest of one’s mathematical career is spent learning the power of those operations. One adds, subtracts, multiples and divides fractions, then decimals and percents, then algebraic expressions, and then trigonometric functions. But when these concepts and operations have become familiar, one can return to the beginnings, and consider numbers and magnitudes again, this time scientifically, with a study of Euclid’s Elements, for example. This process is clearly a deepening of one’s understanding of what is first learned on a very simple level.
Additionally, we need to be aware, specifically, of the ends we are aiming for eventually. We need to know, with the natural sciences, that the end is an understanding of deep philosophic truths, and we need to know something of those truths ourselves. I was recently struck by an analogy to this in the physical order. One of my children teaches Irish Dancing. She was herself at one time an accomplished Irish dancer who danced competitively at the national level. She is now teaching beginners their ‘one, two, three, hops’. But as she teachers them she keeps reminding them to turn out their toes and cross their ankles. They can learn to do the hops easily, and if that is all that my daughter was interested in, her students would advance very quickly beyond those hops. But because she knows what will be necessary to be excellent later on, and she knows how important the habits developed now are, she insists that the students can’t graduate to the next steps until they are doing the hops with turned out toes and crossed ankles.
We follow the same process in every field, including the liberal arts and the universal sciences. What young children do, if those who direct them are knowledgeable of the ends of education, are exercises that will prepare their minds and hearts for the deepest level of natural, and, finally, supernatural, knowledge. Of course, not every one of us has done all those later sciences. But it is important to be aware of those later ends to which this information is leading.
In these preliminary exercises, the student becomes aware of change and contingency, which are very much the concern of a later, more philosophic study of nature. He is led to consider the difference between a mixture and a compound, which anticipates a later study of substantial change and its distinction from other kids of change. He is given opportunities to experience directly all four types of causality, so that he has experience to bring to bear when the four causes are discussed more explicitly and thoroughly later on. They lead him to ponder the difference between instinct and reason, which prepares him to a later, more thorough consideration of the powers of the soul.
I often talk about stages of formation. These stages of intellectual formation for young children are natural, they follow the development built into the student’s natural inclinations. In the earliest years one helps the student strengthen and make docile his imagination by exercises in observation, memorization and sequential ordering. One does this with a matter that also prepares the mind and heart for those later deep truths. They learn the basis of all arithmetic, develop an acquaintance with the geometric figures, are exposed to great music, and study God’s effects in nature, including in the heavens. These are the beginnings of the arts of the Quadrivium. They learn the basis of all language arts, reading and writing, which constitutes the beginning of the Trivium.
As the student matures, he continues to perfect these methods and his understanding of subjects; he keeps coming back to them at a deeper level, developing his habits of thought. Further, young students work on argumentation, so that they can eventually use rhetoric in the service of the truly noble. We teach our students to summarize, which is to order items according to importance instead of chronology, we teach them to identify an argument and then construct their own arguments. We teach them to develop their thoughts in paragraphs, so that they can develop them later in essays and papers using the rhetorical modes: exposition, argumentation, description and narration.
We prepare for the universal sciences, both practical and theoretical, too. We do that by exposing them to great literature from which they receive a kind of vicarious experience as do the great works of history. These prepare the student well to read the more difficult things, such as Plato’s Dialogues, and then the Ethics and the Politics of Aristotle, at the right time. We introduce our children to the arguments our Founding Fathers had regarding the nature of the republic, and the particular “incarnation” of the form of mixed government that was appropriate to us, in this new land. This is the beginning of the study of the Politics. We have the children study natural science, particularly animal behavior, as a beginning to the study of the soul.
As regards the highest object of the classical curriculum, God Himself, the end of natural and supernatural theology, we are preparing our children for that knowledge from the moment they are born. We do that by the way we live, by the example we give them of fatherhood, and of sacrificial love, and by the doctrine we teach them as soon as they are able to reason. We also do it by making sure they are aware of the natural world as the revelation of God’s divine art, which leads us to know more of Him. All of this is their first introduction to the greatest truths, and to the object they will, with God’s grace, contemplate in eternity.
In such an education the idea is to educate the man as man. All of his faculties are used. He develops all the powers of his soul. There are at least three reasons for this: first, because the soul has different powers that are used in diverse disciplines. Neglecting one of them would be like letting the leg muscles atrophy while building up the arm muscles. We should strive for both physical and intellectual balance.
Further, each discipline is interesting in itself. If we don’t think so, it’s almost certainly because the way in which the material was presented to us was deficient. I never liked mathematics, especially geometry, in high school. Then I went to Thomas Aquinas College, where the thirteen books of Euclid’s Elements are studied in the freshman year. I was amazed at how wonderful learning geometry was when the teacher was Euclid himself. The order and clarity of the subject was breathtaking. The difference was in the manner of presentation. All subjects are interesting in themselves, and while most of us are not going to be experts in all subjects, we should be enough acquainted with each subject area to see the order and thus the beauty of the discipline.
Lastly, if a discipline is learned well, in itself, and for its own sake, it can dispose him and prepare him for the higher sciences, and even the highest science, theology. For example, in geometry one learns that ratio involves inequality in its definition. For two things have a ratio to one another “which are capable when multiplied, of exceeding one another.” Thus, the term ‘triple’, which is a particular ratio, necessarily involves inequality. To say that this is the ‘triple’ of that is to say that this exceeds that. For this reason, when St. Thomas Aquinas discusses the Holy Trinity in the Summa Theologiae, he denies that the Three Persons are the triple of one Person, for this would put inequality in God.
This is the meaning of the phrase: “Theology is queen of the sciences, and all other sciences are her handmaidens”. Since this is true, theology should not be the handmaid of the lower sciences. Mathematics classes don’t need to be composed of problems that incorporate religious objects. Science classes don’t have to be organized around moral principles (e.g. studying animals based on which animals remind us of courage, temperance, fortitude and the like). In these disciplines the internal order of the science should be respected, and it is by following that internal order that the science can be truly learned, in its own integrity, such that it can eventually serve theology.
This is a principle to be followed in choosing materials for your science courses. You should use texts that respect the natural order of the particular science. Additionally, you should make sure that the method you use in teaching the materials follows the natural development of the intellect.
Since learning is cyclical, it is important to understand that every course done in the early years is a preparation for classical education in its perfection. This is true for all the areas of study, so it is true for science curricula as well as the other disciplines. Thus, we have two principles by which we can choose science materials. The materials should respect the integrity of the discipline itself, as I just mentioned, and they should be suited to the level of intellectual formation of the student. There is a third principle that will also help us choose the right resources: the materials we use ought to arouse wonder.
Wonder is necessary for true learning to take place. If you have ever sat up at a sermon and said to yourself, “Oh! I’ve wondered about that for years,” you’ll know what a difference it makes to teach children who have been wondering, as compared to those who haven’t. Chances are good that you will remember what the priest said in the sermon when he talked about something you had already wondered about. Similarly, if your student has wondered about the material being presented, he will be prepared to hear and understand the answer he is given.
It is my opinion that an early science curriculum should arouse wonder, rather than give premature and unnecessarily complicated information. In the earliest years, up to third grade, the best curriculum is found in nature. Trips to the zoo and natural history museum, walks around the neighborhood, looking at the natural features of your particular environment, raising animals, and helping in the garden are all simple, natural ways of becoming familiar with the physical world.
This ‘curriculum’ meets our criteria because it respects the integrity of the objects of study, as it lets them be themselves. The student becomes familiar with the natural things as they are found in nature, not forcing these objects into some schema that comes from another discipline.
Further, such a method of study encourages wonder. Looking at creation, as it is ordinarily found, always provides food for thought. Why is the animal doing that? How does this work? Where can you find these? These are good questions to raise, and the child who wonders about them now will be ready, eventually, to discover the answers.
Once reading has become more or less effortless, good texts can help the student direct his attention to additional facets of nature or information about things that are hidden from ordinary observation: animals that he won’t meet in his native environment, physical principles such as how a lever works, or how a wave moves through a medium without moving the medium as a whole.
It is my opinion, that though there are tests and worksheets provided for many science texts, such things should be used sparingly. Some children need the focus that a test provides to help them learn, and some parents want their students to learn how to take tests, and like the measure of learning that a test provides. Those are good reasons for using tests, but it seems better to help the student learn the material because it is interesting in itself, and to measure his comprehension through conversation. One does not want to teach science in such a way that the details eclipse the natural interest the whole arouses.
These years are a good time to use the ability of young children to enjoy memorization. Flashcards provide an easy way to memorize classes of animals, and particular species of birds, insects and flowers. Nevertheless, direct observation should not be abandoned, and texts should be used alongside the kind of approach described earlier.
In fifth, seventh and eighth grades it is best to use a science textbook that is easy to follow and does not include large amounts of detail. Rather, they should concentrate on basic formation in the areas of biology, physics, chemistry and earth science. Before I realized the importance of principle driven science formation, I used other texts that were more impressive in terms of the detailed information conveyed. Unfortunately my students tended not to remember the concepts past whatever comprehension check we used. I want a text that helps them retain the information through concerning itself with the principles in each of the fields studied.
One of the years between fifth and eighth grade, usually sixth, is set aside in my curriculum for hands-on science exploration. In that year we use one or two of the TOPS units, magnetism, electricity, the balance beam, or the pendulum. (Another option listed in the syllabus for this grade is the Exploring the Building Blocks of Science Textbooks) These units are particularly good for this time of life because they encourage both analysis and wonder. Also, each unit follows the natural order of learning in that particular subject area. They give the student a direct and focused experience of moving from the particular to the universal. When he encounters the notion of induction in logic, he will have a specific experience to draw upon in understanding that notion.
In high school the curriculum should give the children a chance to review, solidify, and expand the information they have gained in the preceding years, begin to answer some of the questions that have been raised by the material previously covered, emphasize the order and design to be found in nature, and do all of this according to the appropriate level of intellectual formation.
They should be more directly preparing for and developing the philosophical understanding of reality to which the education of the free man is ordered. For example, in their study of natural bodies in Earth Science they will have the opportunity to prepare for the study of nature as Aristotle undertakes it in his Physics. They will think about substantial change as they learn about igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock. The Earth Science course explores elements of the natural world that are already known to the student: usually geology, oceanography, meteorology, and astronomy. Though the student has done these subject areas in the past, he deepens his understanding of these areas. He also anticipates a more in depth biological and chemical study in the upcoming years. These areas (biology and chemistry) are areas in which the student does not have a firsthand experience in the same way. We do not experience the cellular level, or
even the inner workings of the digestive system, in the same way we experience metamorphic rock.
Natural Science, or Natural History, is a course particularly suited to a liberal education. I recommend two delightful books, King Solomon’s Ring by Konrad Lorenz and The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre edited by Edwin Teale. Both of these books contain entertaining accounts of scientific investigations with animals designed to help the observer come to an understanding of the cause of animal behaviors. After reading these books, students can undertake a project involving living animals. In the project, the student should observe animal behavior, raise questions about some aspect of that behavior, and change the environment in a way that may affect the behavior. He then observes again, drawing at least a tentative conclusion in answer to his original questions. Such a course helps students learn about the living creature as living, seeing the animals performing their proper operations. It is a philosophic course as it prepares the student to do the De Anima of Aristotle, or any psychology course. One learns about the soul by observing its proper operations. It also encourages wonder.
Further, this approach also prepares the student for the study of biology. Students appreciate biology more if they have considered the proper operations of living animals before they start dissecting dead ones. Even if students do not dissect specimens, most biology texts consider living creatures without reference to the end to which they are ordered, namely, the life of a living being. Natural history supplies for that deficiency.
One can see that this study demands leisure, as the student must make observations, reflect on those observations, and then make a judgment about how to change the environment to answer the questions raised by the observation. This requires mature critical thinking.
Having done natural history, the student is ready and eager to do the study of biology that will answer some of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions raised by his natural history course. For those who intend to liberally educate their children, a good addition to the standard biology texts is Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, which constructs an argument for intelligent design on the microbiological level. This is interesting in itself, and helps prepare the student to eventually do the Fifth
Proof for God’s existence in St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae.
It is appropriate to do biology before chemistry, as biology is more familiar to most students. Our first knowledge of natural things is knowledge of ourselves, and we are living. One can see this in the nomenclature. We describe elements as non-living. That means we are comparing them to the living as the more known.
Now, the study of chemical change as it is done in chemistry courses is important. Thoughtful inquiry on the questions like: “When do you have a new thing, and when just the same thing in a different condition?” prepare the student for a deeper philosophic study later on. The study of physics as an experimental science, with vectors and forces, prepares the students for the study of the principles of motion and rest. I would like to recommend a text that can be used to supplement any standard chemistry course. It is The Chemical History of a Candle by Michael Faraday, a truly delightful book that lays out a step by step argument showing the relation between the combustion of a candle and the living kind of combustion that goes on in a human being. It is good preparation for what is to come in the student’s education. Dr. Faraday says of this study, “...were it left to my own will, I should prefer to repeat it almost every year—so abundant is the interest that attaches itself to the subject, so wonderful are the varieties of outlet which it offers into the various departments of philosophy. There is not a law under which any part of this universe is governed which does not come into play, and is touched upon in these phenomena. There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy, than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.”
In all of these suggestions for science curricula there is an underlying assumption. As believers, we know that there is no dichotomy of opposed truths within reality. There is one truth, of which God is the author. The truth of the natural and the truth of the supernatural cannot be in conflict, for they both reflect the One Actuality Who is God. Once we are clear about the oneness of all truth, once we see that all truth belongs to the one reality of which God is the Creator, we can see that to learn about the natural world is a good thing in itself and that it leads to a clearer understanding of the highest reality, God Himself. The natural sciences contribute to that goal of the free man.