I have cultivated a tiny garden at the front of our home. This garden has grown and changed while I myself have grown and changed. What began as a cutting bed— because I planted for color, form, and texture so I could make flower arrangements— has slowly transformed into a native pollinator garden. I swapped loosestrife for mountain mint, cornflowers for anise hyssop, and lavender for wild bergamot. My small plot has less color and fewer flowers (that I am willing to cut) but it is teeming with bees and beetles and butterflies. I admire exotic flowers when I see them at nurseries but I would not trade them for the bustling biodiversity and flourishing stewardship of creation that we now enjoy.

How did I get here? My conversion started through observation, first delighting in the fauna that visited my flora, particularly bees. Then I read Wendell Berry’s “Think Little” essay and began conversations with a friend who cares about local conservation.¹ My fascination trickled over into my visual arts classroom, where I had students drawing bees, painting bees, and printmaking bees while reflecting on the wonder of God’s good creatures in our shared ecology and simultaneously lamenting harmful human impact on creation. These interactions led the student board of my middle school to became impassioned about designing a pollinator garden on campus, and they soon began campaigning and fundraising for it. It was thrilling to witness the story I was telling them become their story. The project eventually merged into a joint effort between art, science, and outdoor learning teachers. That was two years ago. Last spring, we broke ground and a rotation of students, parents, and teachers watered and weeded all summer. It is a little labour of love that is bursting with ongoing inter-disciplinary potential.

This vignette holds within it a narrative for how fine and common arts fit into the liberal arts tradition. It is an example of dynamic, poetic education—a story arc in pursuit of beauty, truth, and goodness as students are mentored to see, to think, and to wisely decide for themselves how to respond to their learning. They are admiring creation, understanding complex ideas across disciplines, and engaging the world restoratively. A whole person with aesthetic, practical, and moral concerns is starting to emerge. Conditions such as this that foster the habit of attention, unity of knowledge, and action abound in our learning communities when we allow the visual and applied arts to co-labour in their unique ways alongside the trivium and quadrivium.

Habit of Attention

Possessing a habit of attention is beneficial in every discipline and the skill is learned in the visual and applied arts through the embedded practice of drawing. John Ruskin, prominent polymath of the 19th century, has long been my tutor regarding the importance of drawing for learning to see, for creative and moral formation, and for associative learning. As a young art teacher, I was convinced of his claims that by drawing students “obtained a power of the eye and a power of the mind wholly different from that known to any other discipline”² and that valuable drawings were those that produced “the most precious results for his understanding and his heart.”³ Drawing possesses this power because it requires slow looking. Over the years I have witnessed again and again the ability that slow looking has to render not just skill but also imagination and affection in the hearts and minds of my student—whether through life drawing or the sustained attention of a Charlotte Mason picture study. I see it when drawing a “still life" leads students towards wonder: sometimes about the nature of light and color, other times asking why fish scales shimmer, and still others imagining what made the first Mediterranean try to eat an artichoke. I have watched students make profound theological connections after a long, fixed gaze on Winslow Homer’s Life Line or Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Crafting pottery by hand makes them discontent with mass produced objects, thus changing the kind of consumers they become. Studio classes, by virtue of their slow pace and sustained habit of attention, enlarge students’ scope of moral and aesthetic vision, opening up vistas for them to experience love and delight while they build skills to create aesthetic artifacts for either contemplation or common use.

Unity of Knowledge

In his seminal art instruction text, Elements of Drawing, Ruskin writes, “I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at Nature that they may learn to draw.”⁴ Ruskin understood that good education does not silo knowledge into specialized fields but instead reveals the inherent relations between facts in order to nurture a “unity of knowledge.” His emphasis on “seeing" was a far more complex endeavor than the mere training of visual perception, instead, he desired his art pupils to look into things sharply so as to fully understand all things in relation to each other. “The system of the world is entirely one,” he wrote in Modern Painters V, “small things and great are alike part of one mighty whole.”⁵ Several years ago, I picked up an instructive phrase from the photographer Edward Weston that describes composition as “the strongest way of seeing.” On a larger scale, it seems like a fitting description of a well-educated human—one who has developed “the strongest way of seeing” (and connecting) many things. Charlotte Mason calls this expansive view of educating students “setting their feet in a large room."⁶ Arts courses offer schools a “larger room” for connected learning, for seeing the “one mighty whole” in the “strongest way”: theater and literature can cross-fertilize through exploring narratives of the spoken and written word, verbal arts can overlap with music or culinary classes to make cultural connections, visual arts can open space for students to explore difficult topics that arise in a history or philosophy class, drawing can support investigation in the sciences, observing harmonious patterns of beauty in numbers can unlock wonder in math or astronomy, and translating theology into embodied images or objects in studio classes can reveal the truths of theology to some students for the first time. Suffice it to say, the fine and common arts make “unity of knowledge” between disciplines uniquely possible.

Action

Finally, the fine and common arts are integral to a liberal arts education because they also provide opportunities for applying knowledge in practical, moral, and aesthetic ways. The common arts do all three as they allow us to flourish in our daily lives—pursuing goodness, truth, and beauty in what and how we eat, how we are clothed, how we curate a home, how we conduct our leisure, and on and on. Thinking back to my student’s pollinator garden, they were led by beauty to affection and gratitude, by truth to understanding and concern, by goodness to moral agency and action. They needed to respond to what they now knew, they needed to do something practical, something that allowed them to participate in and nurture the flourishing of creation. And it did not seem outside the scope of their arts education to help them make their garden a reality.

Again and lastly, Ruskin captures for me the essence of educating a whole person, by all means ready to hand: “Well, my friends, the final result of the education I want you to give your children, will be, in a few words, this. They will know what it is to see the sky. They will know what it is to breathe it. And they will know, best of all, what it is to behave under it, as in the presence of a Father who is in heaven."⁷

Works Cited:

(1) https://berrycenter.org/2017/03/26/think-little-wendell-berry/

(2) John Ruskin, “The Value of Drawing: Address to the St. Martin’s School of Art (April 3, 1857),” 6 in The Works of John Ruskin vol. 16, p. 440.

(3) John Ruskin, “Inaugural Address at the Cambridge School of Art (1858),” in The Works of 7 John Ruskin vol. 16, p. 181-2.

(4) John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, in Three Letters to Beginners, Preface, viii.

(5) John Ruskin, Modern Painters, in The Works of John Ruskin vol. 7, p. 452. 

(6) Charlotte Mason, School Education, p. 231

(7) John Ruskin, “Fors Clavigera, Letter 9 (September 1871): ‘Honour to Whom Honour’,” in The Works of John Ruskin vol. 27, p. 164.

Kim Williams, BSE, AA, is trained as both artist and educator. She has taught early childhood - 12th grade students and in many contexts including public and private schools and in parish ministry. Early on, she taught at a private classical Christian school, where she designed the K-6 art curriculum and developed a passion for classical education and writing curriculum. She currently teaches art to middle-schoolers at Delaware County Christian School in eastern Pennsylvania.

Kim Williams, BSE, AA

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