Common Arts That Matter

St. Dunstan’s Academy is the only high school in the Commonwealth of Virginia with a commercial building license. So long as that remains the case, the renewal of classical education in America will fall short of its aspirations, the sexual confusion endemic to our age will deepen and intensify, and acedia will remain firmly entrenched as our culture’s besetting sin. More precisely, without a radical transformation of our material and imaginative culture — the underlying conditions that make the notion of an educational institution literally building in its own buildings nearly unthinkable — modern and postmodern disembodiment will continue unabated.

Our building license enables us to work faster and more efficiently, but our primary reasons for securing it are pedagogical and theological. We modern Americans no longer provide for our own bodily needs, having off-loaded practically all of this work to corporations, robots, and professionals. We purchase tomatoes imported from India; clothes assembled in Bangladesh; houses built by strangers from supplies manufactured in factories the world over; phones designed in Silicon Valley and assembled in China from materials sourced via an intricate global supply train. These phones tell us how to get where we are going, so we no longer need to read maps — much less a compass, much less the stars. Our phones and all our other screened devices increasingly supplant face-to-face friendship as well as embodied work and play.

Whatever the gains of this system (and there are many), it should come as no surprise that a culture so alienated from creaturely embodiment is profoundly acedic and sexually confused. Consider the twenty-first century soul incurvatus in se: physically deformed from excessive sitting (“the new smoking,” we’re told); mentally enervated due to our cultural “ecosystem of interruption technologies,” as one writer puts it; quite literally curved over handheld mirror-like windows into unreality. Somewhere Screwtape snickers.

If we wish to reverse our long descent into disembodiment, we need to think differently about our relation to material reality, to our neighbors and children, and to our governmental authorities. More to the point, we need to do more than think. To once again embrace the truth of our creaturely embodiment, we need a deeper rebirth of the common arts — the means by which we meet our material needs in the world.

Inhabiting Tools, our Bodies, and Creation

Perhaps the most remarkable section of Matthew B. Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head (his 2014 followup to the 2009 surprise bestseller Shop Class as Soulcraft) concerns the delicate and intimate relation between ourselves — our souls and bodies — our tools, and our world. As Crawford demonstrates in a variety of contexts — a hockey player with his stick, a motorcyclist and his bike, a blind man and his cane — in our use of tools we progress from using them as foreign objects to using them deftly to using them, eventually, as literal extensions of our own bodies. An NHL player no longer attends to the reverberations passing through the stick into his hand. He no longer feels the stick at all. Rather, with and through his stick he feels the ice and the puck. Crawford goes further, positing a kind of “cognitive extension” through which one thinks with such wholly mastered tools. 

As strange as this may seem, it is not too far removed from what St. Thomas Aquinas calls “poetic knowledge” — the knowledge of things in themselves rather than things as vehicles for meaning. You can know about a hockey stick or a horse or a hand tool from books and from observation of others, but you can only know them poetically through repeated, deep, and intimate engagement with them — through participation, in short.

Crawford provocatively suggests that this is precisely how we come to inhabit, know, and think with our bodies — “embodied cognition” being the academic term for this theory. As anyone who has been around babies can tell you, an infant experiences his limbs as foreign objects only loosely and unpredictably under his control. By the age of mature reflectivity, we can no longer remember our toddling forays into bodily mastery. We simply are our bodies. But what if this early inhabitation of the body were inhibited? Crawford describes a fascinating and disturbing experiment in which a set of kittens were made passive spectators of their surroundings. As a result, these kittens failed to develop not only bodily mastery but also a sense of how space, time, and motion function. Such kittens were alienated from their bodies and, therefore, from the world.

The encounter with the world beyond your head is mediated through embodiment and through mastery of tools of all kinds. As tools become extensions of our bodies, we are drawn deeper into the world. Through his skates and stick, an NHL player knows more and more deeply of ice than we ever will. Paradoxically, it is through this ecstatic relation to the world that we become individuals. By being drawn into deeper relation with one another, into a fuller participation with material reality, and ultimately into the life of Christ made manifest in the sacramental and praying life of the Church, we become our true selves.

The Common and Liberal Arts: A Hierarchy of Knowing

If Crawford and St. Thomas are right about the relation between material reality and thinking, then the rest of us, by and large, are wrong when it comes to the common and the liberal arts. Our collective divorce from the common arts — our near-universal outsourcing of weaving, agriculture, commerce, cooking, navigation, hunting, metallurgy, warfare, and building — is typically portrayed as proof of progress, as a civilizational ascent up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. After all, one cannot attend much to rhetoric or music without reliable and secure shelter, food, and clothing. Far more of us than ever before have the leisure to study the liberal arts — those higher-order reflections on reality, traditionally available only to those who by vocation or privilege were freed from the needs of basic survival. And since the true ends of education are humane rather than utilitarian, we might feel justified in ignoring the common arts altogether.

If this were the whole truth, though, we should expect our postindustrial economy to have ushered in a golden age for liberal arts education. Instead, as more and more of us have been increasingly freed from attending to bodily needs, we have simultaneously witnessed the unmooring of the liberal arts from reality — the lurid spectacle of an increasingly insular, self-referential academy eating itself alive: artes liberales incurvatae in se.

Granted, the privileged in every civilization and culture have always outsourced some or all of the common arts to the less privileged, but until quite recently even the most rarefied elite would have had a more intimate connection to these arts than your average American today. According to an old family story, Thomas Jefferson’s first memory was of riding a horse, seated on a pillow and held in the arms of a slave, while touring the extensive Jefferson family holdings in Albemarle County, Virginia. A more privileged picture is hard to imagine. But what was toddler Thomas viewing? Agriculture, primarily. Around his family estate, he would have also seen (and eventually overseen) the construction of buildings, the commerce of the plantation’s products, and the weaving of clothes — Jefferson might wear imported silks from France, but Monticello’s enslaved population made their own clothing on site. His elite liberal arts education would have made room for navigation, armament, and hunting. Even apart from any formal education, by the time he — or any child of the past — was ready for a liberal arts education, he would have had profound and deep experiences of material reality and of his own embodiment, simply by being a human body at work and play in the world.

We should be grateful for how the modern economy frees us from the hardscrabble world of subsistence farming, from living always with the never-too-distant threat of death from accident, illness, or starvation. But there are costs. As it turns out, the relation between the common and the liberal arts is not only or even primarily a hierarchy of needs but rather an epistemological hierarchy — a hierarchy of knowing. It is not simply that we need secure food sources and reliable shelter in order to think more deeply; it is also that the liberal arts build upon the kinds of direct encounters with reality facilitated in the common arts.

There are some obvious ways in which common arts prepare students for the liberal arts. This is particularly so for the Quadrivium — the four numerical arts of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, which, together with the Trivium (the three language arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric), constitute the seven traditional liberal arts, as elaborated by St. Thomas and other medieval scholars. For instance, the common art of building prepares one for the liberal arts of arithmetic and geometry, while celestial navigation provides an obvious foundation for astronomy. But thinking about it in this way ultimately misses the point.

All the higher-order thinking in the liberal arts — like all thinking altogether — is fundamentally rooted in tangible experiences of reality. As St. Thomas puts it in his peripatetic axiom, “Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.” Ensouled bodies that we are, we cannot get to intellectual principles, much less spiritual realities, without attending to materiality. If, therefore, our experience of materiality and of our own bodies is attenuated, it follows inevitably that all our thinking will be adversely impacted. 

It is no wonder that we have become like Crawford’s poor disembodied kittens, flailing about in the foreign object that is our flesh, limbs resistant of and offensive to our control, muscles unused and unknown. 

Restoring Wonder

The Roman Catholic educational pioneer John Senior saw the real-world impact of these principles in his attempt to create a Great Books program at the University of Kansas in the 1970s. As Senior suggested in an unpublished essay, his college students were unprepared for the classics because they never read Shakespeare in high school. Meanwhile, he wrote, 

...the high school teacher found his freshmen coming up from elementary school with no desire to read Shakespeare because they had not first loved Stevenson. And the grade school teacher found his students coming up from home without Mother Goose. And more important still, the love of literature at any stage supposes love of life — grounded in acute sensation and deep emotion. 

In other words, if we want students to read the great books, they must first read the good books. And, to read those, they need a stock of children’s stories and nursery rhymes, whose power, in turn, relies almost entirely upon the wonder that comes from profound experiences of material reality. As Senior put it elsewhere when discussing poetry, “I have found that my students don’t so much have trouble understanding the meaning of words as the meaning of things.” What followed from Senior’s insight was the short-lived but deeply influential Pearson Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) at the University of Kansas, which sought to restore embodiment and reinstill wonder — through stargazing, calligraphy, waltzes, the memorization and recitation of poetry, and more — before (and while) embarking on the study of the classics.

This emphasis on what classical educators call gymnastic and music proved powerfully remedial, and the long-term impact of that short-lived program speaks for itself — but the underlying cultural ills against which Senior struggled have only worsened since the 1970s. If we want our churches and schools to raise up young people who do not need a remedial reorientation to their own embodiment, the wonder-instilling model of the IHP must be grounded in a broader renewal of the common arts.

The Promise of the Common Arts

To begin with, more of us should provide for at least some of our bodily needs without recourse to professionals, corporations, or robots. More of us should garden, build, hunt, and navigate. The true test, however, is not about what individuals do for themselves, but rather what we choose to do together, in community.

Some schools and churches are taking the lead in this area. In a recent essay for Plough Quarterly titled “Schools for Philosopher-Carpenters,” Alex Sosler gives a number of examples, including St. Dunstan’s. The still-rapidly-growing world of classical education is starting to take notice too, prompted in part by Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft. Chris Hall’s 2021 book Common Arts Education: Renewing the Classical Tradition of Training the Hands, Head, and Heart is the preeminent example. But the clearest demonstration of this growing emphasis is the revision history of one of the standard texts on classical Christian education, Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition. The first edition of that text, published in 2014, emphasizes the formational priority of embodiment in the vein of Senior’s IHP — gymnastic and music precede the liberal arts — but the common arts go unmentioned.

Further editions in 2020 and 2024, however, include new and robust sections on the relationship between the liberal, common, and fine arts. Here the common arts are explicitly described, and they are understood not only as vocational training subsequent to a classical education but as a critical part of the cultivation of wonder in early childhood. (The fine arts, meanwhile, bring the common and liberal arts together in the service of beauty — Hall’s book uses the image of a Möbius strip to indicate the interconnected nature of the three.)

Clark has been putting theory into practice in his Ecclesial Schools Initiative in Orlando, Florida, where students spend about two hours a week on common arts, much of it in school gardens. In addition to gardening and natural history, students study the fiber arts of sewing, cross-stitch, and crochet; clay and paper modeling in the vein of Charlotte Mason; and — as an accompaniment to reading Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain in fifth grade — fire-building, outdoor cooking, and first aid. More is planned for high school.

Meanwhile, Redeemer Classical School — just up the road from us near Harrisonburg, Virginia — has been exploring a novel partnership with a nearby farm-based Anglican parish to give their older students an introduction to the skilled trades and to agriculture. The common arts form a small but integral part of their curriculum from 6th grade onwards. Students learn cooking, sewing, fly-fishing, navigation, gardening, and a whole range of traditional common arts.  Their juniors and seniors, meanwhile, spend Wednesday and Friday afternoons on the parish farm, learning the basics of agriculture and getting an introduction to the electrical, plumbing, and HVAC trades, with the intention of adding welding and small-engine repair in the future.

As Headmaster Ron Hoch told us, “We want every single student, whether they’re going to go to college or not, to have some interaction or experience within the common arts. It’s not an extracurricular or elective. We look at it as a core part of what we’re doing to shape the lives of our students.” Though the bow-tie-wearing Hoch has the bearing and mind of an intellectual, he grew up in a decidedly blue-collar home — his father is a general contractor — and he recognizes the gains that background gave him, and what his students were missing. 

Meanwhile, that farm-based parish, Church of the Lamb at Rockingham Abbey, aspires to become a local economic hub, inspired by the Celtic and medieval abbeys’ rhythm of devoted prayer and ennobling work. In addition to their partnership with Redeemer, they have planted an orchard, started a coffee-roasting business and an event space, and they are developing a community garden and other local-business initiatives.

Another farm-based parish in Virginia — St. James On-the-Glebe in Gloucester — has accomplished impressive work maintaining and expanding their parish hall, chapel, outbuildings, and three-hundred-year-old rectory, all while relying almost entirely on the know-how of their parishioners. St. James is “on the glebe” because their 65-acre farm is part of what was, in the early 1700s, a vast “glebe” — land dedicated to the use or support of the local clergyman. The historic glebe system reminds us that the Church needs the common arts. (Indeed, the marriage of the common, liberal, and fine arts climaxes in the Eucharistic liturgy.) Today, the parish’s fields produce hay that feeds cows from which many parish families get their milk. And meat too. The farmer who pays the parish for their hay does so not with cash but with cattle — a butchered steer.

At Church of the Lamb and St. James On-the-Glebe, we have witnessed firsthand how engaging in the common arts together forms a deeper, more intimate community. We are inspired by these communities — but our vision for the building arts draws on an older American story.

Building a School in the Jim Crow South

In 1882, a former slave set out to build — literally — what would become one of the landmark institutions of the Jim Crow South: the Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama. As Booker T. Washington wrote in his 1901 autobiography Up From Slavery,

From the very beginning, at Tuskegee, I was determined to have the students do not only the agricultural and domestic work, but to have them erect their own buildings… so that the school would not only get the benefit of their efforts, but the students themselves would be taught to see not only utility in labour, but beauty and dignity; would be taught, in fact, how to lift labour up from mere drudgery and toil, and would learn to love work for its own sake.

Washington acknowledged “that our first buildings would not be so comfortable or so complete in their finish as buildings erected by the experienced hands of outside workmen,” but he was confident that the benefits “in the teaching of civilization, self-help, and self-reliance… would more than compensate for any lack of comfort or fine finish.”

After two decades — filled with a fair number of naysayers and setbacks — Tuskegee’s campus had grown to “forty buildings, counting small and large… and all except four are almost wholly the product of student labour.” Hundreds of graduates, he triumphantly concluded,

are now scattered throughout the South who received their knowledge of mechanics while being taught how to erect these buildings. Skill and knowledge are now handed down from one set of students to another in this way, until at the present time a building of any description or size can be constructed wholly by our instructors and students, from the drawing of the plans to the putting in of the electric fixtures, without going off the grounds for a single workman.

Washington faced challenges we can hardly comprehend. At the same time, he had never heard of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or the United States Environmental Protection Agency or Uniform Statewide Building Codes. He had never heard of contractors’ licenses or properly graded and stamped number-two-or-better lumber. When his teachers and students wanted bricks, they made a brick kiln. When they wanted a building, they built it. Put differently, the manner in which Washington and his students built the Tuskegee Institute a century and a half ago would be almost wholly illegal today.

For the Tuskegee model to be restored today — and for our own approach to the building arts at St. Dunstan’s to be more generally plausible — we need, finally, a wholesale reconsideration of bureaucratic rule at local, state, and national levels.

The Strange World of Contemporary America

The building-industry professionals we talk to are invariably surprised to learn that a school holds a building license. They are sometimes skeptical, sometimes admiring — but always surprised. School administrators, meanwhile, are often bewildered. It is indeed unusual, and perhaps unique, for a school — or for any institution, whether church, school, nonprofit, or for-profit — to build its own buildings under its own license in contemporary America.

But it fits with our vision for a boys’ boarding school dedicated to Christian formation in the Anglican tradition, alongside an education in the classics, the skilled trades, and agriculture. We want to graduate young men who read, think, and pray — and who produce, who contribute tangibly and meaningfully to their communities. If we are to send out such graduates, their high school formation must include much more than the good and great books. In our agricultural and culinary arts programs, our boys will grow and harvest fruits and vegetables; raise, butcher, and slaughter animals; and cook their own meals. They will construct their own buildings in our building arts program.

Last year, we built our first modest timber frame with the help of a hundred volunteers and no hired professionals. We are working on our second now (third, if you include our timber-framed outhouse) — a dormitory which will enable us to welcome our first cohort of students, who will in turn help us build our Great Hall. Although the scale of these projects and the local building code requires us to outsource some of the work — particularly excavation and electrical — we are our own general contractor and are supplying the bulk of our own labor.

Our model may be strange in contemporary America, but this just shows how strange we modern Americans really are. Our forebears would be mystified and perhaps appalled to realize how little any of us do to build or even maintain our own spaces — how much of that work is outsourced to independent contractors and unknown subcontractors. Even stranger, when institutions want to buck these trends, they are not even allowed to do meaningful work without jumping through seemingly endless bureaucratic hurdles. 

Of course, we all want sound buildings, but even if the current regulatory system were a reasonable means to achieve that end, many present regulations are only loosely related to safety, if at all. The most onerous ones are those dressed up as sacrifices to appease the great god Carbon — insulation and HVAC measures that purport to reduce CO2 emissions but seem more designed to increase corporate bottom lines and stifle competition by raising the price of entry into the building industry.

For instance, the 2021 Virginia Uniform Statewide Building Code prohibits the use of woodburning stoves as the sole means of heating homes. Virginians can still heat with wood, but only if they also purchase a secondary, pointless heating system. How such a requirement does anything other than increase the profitability of HVAC manufacturers — and carbon output along with it, through the manufacture of superfluous systems — is beyond us. That same code increased ceiling insulation requirements for residential building to a whopping R60, nearly doubling what was required in 2015. Insulation brings diminishing returns as thickness increases, so it is not as though almost doubling the insulation requirement in six years doubles the insulation’s effectiveness — but it certainly doubles the cost. 

As it turns out, the controversial and somewhat opaque body responsible for developing these requirements — the International Code Council (ICC), whose recommendations are adopted by most jurisdictions in the United States but, despite the misleading name, few other countries or localities — is created and funded by the real estate and building industries. The ICC, and the jurisdictions that adapt the codes they promulgate, are subject to lobby interests, none of which meaningfully represent owner-builders, small-time contractors, or your average homebuyer. There are few incentives, in other words, to de-escalate requirements.

Navigating the byzantine complexity of these modern building codes — not to mention the bureaucratic apparatuses (and, occasionally, apparatchiks) of local, state, and federal government — is a full-time job requiring a specialist’s expertise. Professionals must be hired, not so much for their competence in the building arts as for their gnosis — their shrouded knowledge of bureaucracy and building codes. Without such a code whisperer, you might be perfectly capable of building a sound structure, but you will not be permitted to do so.

Fighting the Spirit of Bureaucracy

Getting a building license is not a reasonable goal for most schools or churches. Undoubtedly, schools and other institutional leaders save time, tension, and heartache by hiring outside experts instead. But these efficiencies come at great cost. For one thing, they strengthen the bureaucratic spirit’s dominance of our social imagination — a spirit so deeply entrenched that it never even occurs to most school leaders that their work in building a school could entail actual, literal building. The great catastrophe, in other words, is not so much that communal building is difficult or even impracticable but that it has been rendered unthinkable.

That must change. In the long term, in our politics, we must fashion less restrictive, less onerous bureaucratic regimes. But, in the shorter term, in our local communities, more of us must decide that the theological and formational power of the common arts — namely, a poetic restoration of creaturely embodiment — is worth the challenge. 

A building license is not the answer to our collective problems, but it is an effective sign, symbol, and symptom. When it comes to combating disembodiment, we will know that we are getting somewhere when schools and other institutions no longer see the construction and maintenance of their physical spaces as irrelevant inconveniences to be offloaded to outsiders — in short, when St. Dunstan’s Academy is no longer the only high school in the Commonwealth of Virginia with a commercial building license.