On the liberal arts

"The utilitarian or servile arts enable one to be a servant-- of another person, of the state, of a corporation, or of a business-- and to earn a living. The liberal arts, in contrast, teach one how to live; they train the faculties and bring them to perfection; they enable a person to rise above his material environment to live an intellectual, a rational, and therefore a free life in gaining truth."

Sister Miriam Joseph, C.S.C., Ph.D.

The Trivium

The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric
Understanding the Nature and Function of Language

Cultural amnesia & the road to educational destruction

It may have been here at KTM that I first learned of the professor of Greek who lost part of his memory in an auto accident. One of the things that this professor could no longer remember, by an ironic twist of fate, was Greek. He ended up having to relearn the Greek language and used the textbook he himself had written to do so. The Editor of The Classical Teacher, Martin Cothran, draws upon the story of the Greek professor as a metaphor for our society’s own cultural amnesia.

What a fitting metaphor, I thought, for the plight we face in education today. As a civilization, we are the authors of a great and glorious educational tradition, one which took centuries, even millennia, to achieve. Yet here we sit, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, having forgotten what we knew, and having to relearn it from our own books. We have created a famine, to quote the Bard, “where abundance lies.”

Unlike the Greek professor who forgot Greek, however, our memory loss is self-inflicted. Our education establishment here in the United States spent the better part of the twentieth century throwing its heritage overboard in a mad rush to load up on the latest educational fads and gimmicks. And most of these innovations have themselves been discarded in their turn, only to give way to new ones equally transient.

No wonder the education reform ship never seems to get underway.

We can now look back on a long chronicle of failed attempts at "school reform," very few of which have even attempted to take a prudent look at our cultural heritage for instruction and insight. We have attempted instead to "build bridges" to future centuries, only to find out, once there, that we had been going down the wrong road in the first place.

Wide is the gate and broad is the way that lead to educational destruction, and there are many who go in by it. But we don’t need to be looking for a bridge to a future century; in fact, we might learn more by taking a look back at past centuries to see what our educational institutions were doing right.

“Progress,” said C.S. Lewis, “means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”

The civilization that had to teach itself with its own books, Martin Cothran, The Classical Teacher, summer 2008.

I also recommend many of the articles that are posted over at MemoriaPress.com such as Joe Knows Latin by Joe Paterno and Why Read Homer's Iliad? by Cheryl Lowe.

You can request your own free copy of The Classical Teacher, which is actually a catalog of Memoria Press material, by subscribing here.

Harry Potter & the classics

J.K. Rowling majored in Classics:

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
Harvard University Commencement Address
on video

C. is to read books 1-12 of The Odyssey this summer.

I've started the book.

The language is not easy.

reason, beauty, and errors of pragmatism

Much of the written history of Catholic schooling focuses on how its institutions developed in interaction with a politically dominant Protestant America. In some cases, Catholics directly imitated public initiative, often shaping schools out of a desire to accommodate. Sometimes, however, they took a different course in sharp rejection of the dominant culture. The debate over high school curriculum in the first quarter of this century exemplifies this dynamic.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Catholic secondary schooling, like public secondary schooling, was limited to a relatively small percentage of the population. As opportunities for Catholic secondary schooling expanded, a more comprehensive educational philosophy, with an expanded life studies curriculum, was increasingly espoused as an alternative to the academic curriculum found in the older boys' preparatory schools and girls' academies.

In considering a new high school curriculum, Catholics were responding to movements in the larger society. The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, published in 1918 by the National Education Association (NEA) conceived of the high school as a more universal institution with a different, more vocational, emphasis. Although some Catholic high schools embraced the philosophy of the Cardinal Principles, this bulwark of the contemporary comprehensive public high school was eventually rejected by Catholics owing to the interaction of several forces.

Much of the vigorous debate among Catholics [hark! did I just read the words "vigorous debate"?] about the purposes and methods of their high schools was played out in the proceedings of the National Catholic Educational Association. In the spirit of pragmatism, voices were raised in favor of eliminating Greek from the curriculum, reducing the amount of Latin, and adding commercial and vocational courses. Considerable discussion ensued about the merits of the classics and about the need for more industrial training to better prepare future workers.

The reaction against these pragmatic voices was vigorous and forceful. Critics argued that the classics were the languages of Western civilization. Their study had moral and aesthetic value; they provided intellectual discipline and encouraged inventiveness.^* The overwhelming response from NCEA members was that the study of classical humanism served every student well.

This rejection of life studies and vocationalism was predicated on fundamental philosophical premises. Developing the student's ability to reason was a central tenet of Catholic educational philosophy, beginning with the Ratio Studiorum and further affirmed in Neoscholastic thought...Such intellectual development was deemed necessary in order to grasp fully the established understandings about person, society, and God. Although universal secondary education had expanded the base of people to be educated, the purpose of education should not change. Practical education deviated too far from the central moral aims of schooling.

Institutional status and social class dynamics were also at work in the debate. The NCEA had grown out of the Association of Catholic Colleges of the United States, and these institutions of higher education exerted a major influence on Catholic secondary education through the 1920s. The colleges maintained close relationships with the boys' preparatory schools and girls' academies and tended to deprecate the weak academic programs in parochial and diocesan high schools. The latter schools were determined to prove their worth before the Catholic educational elite: the higher educational institutions. To secure such recognition and respect, diocesan schools increasingly put the college-preparatory curriculum first, with life studies offerings becoming ancillary. Catholic colleges themselves added to this pressure in 191 by instituting strict academic admissions requirements, including 16 credits in specific academic subjects.

The value of education as a vehicle for social mobility was also increasingly apparent to both Catholic educators and immigrant parents. This idea was raised in early discussions of the Association of Catholic Colleges, as leaders "cried out that Catholic youth should not be the 'hewers of wood and drawers of water,' but should be prepared for the professions or mercantile pursuits." The classical curriculum was the curriculum for the attainment of status. Catholic educators were urged to point out to parents the greater earning power of students who finished high school. An academic education in high school and then college paved the way for social position, the professions, and Catholic leadership in society.

Last, Rome placed its seal of approval on a conservative educational philosophy in 1929 in a statement by Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri (On the Christian Education of Youth). Arguing that true education is directed toward the ultimate ends, Pius XI cautioned against errors of pragmatism in the curriculum. The Church was a conserver of humanity's cultural heritage.^** Though supporting efforts to discern what is of worth in modern systems, Pius XI cautioned against "hastily abandoning the old, which the experience of centuries had found expedient and profitable." Two important features were signaled out and affirmed by the Pope: the teaching of Latin and single-sex rather than coeducational schooling.

Although Catholics made some accommodation to the philosophy of the Cardinal Principles, they never moved as far or as firmly in that direction as did the public schools. The end result was to reaffirm the position articulated at the third Baltimore Council in 1884: "The beauty of truth, the refining and elevating influences of knowledge, are meant for all, and she [the Church] wishes them to be brought within the reach of all. Knowledge enlarges our capacity both for self-improvement and for promoting the welfare of our fellow men; and in so noble a work the Church wishes every had to be busy." Catholicism's uneasy relationship to secular society thus continued. Much but not all of the modern world could be embraced by Catholic liberals. Practical concerns would increasingly enter its debates and be given their due, but ultimate principles could never be compromised.

Catholic Schools and the Common Good by Anthony S. Bryk, Valerie E. Lee, & Peter B. Holland
p. 30-31

The Church was a conserver of humanity's cultural heritage.

reason

beauty

errors of pragmatism

It is inconceivable that a public school would speak of conserving humanity's cultural heritage. When I read this passage, I think I should forget about the public schools and put my energies into figuring out how I can help save urban Catholic schools.


^* Howard Gardner agrees.

Thomas Jefferson Education Consortium

Concerned Parent left this link -- hadn't heard of these folks.

Thomas Jefferson Education Consortium

I'm going to be reading....

Susan Wise Bauer on the Young Writer

I have to jump on Silly Old Mom's post about Susan Wise Bauer's new writing program, Writing With Ease: Strong Fundamentals. As Susan so aptly pointed out in the comments, "She just nails it."

Written language is an unnatural foreign language, an artificially constructed code. Compare written dialogue with any transcript of an actual conversation, and you’ll see that written language has entirely different conventions, rules, and structures than spoken language. The rules of this foreign language must be learned by the beginning writer—and they have to become second nature before the beginning writer can use written language to express ideas.

This is why so many young writers panic, freeze, weep, or announce that they hate to write. Try to put yourself in the position of the beginning writing student: Imagine that you’ve had a year or so of conversational French, taught in a traditional way out of a textbook, with practice in speaking twice a week or so. After that first year, your teacher asks you to explain the problem of evil in French. You’re likely to experience brain freeze: a complete panic, a frantic scramble for words, a halting and incoherent attempt to express complicated ideas in a medium which is unfamiliar. Even another year or two of study won’t make this kind of self-expression possible. Rather, the conventions of the French language need to become second nature, automatic—invisible to you—so that you can concentrate on the ideas, rather than on the medium used to express them.

The same is true for young writers. Ask a student to express ideas in writing before she is completely fluent in the rules and conventions of written language, and she’ll freeze. She can’t express her thoughts in writing, because she’s still wrestling with the basic means of expression itself.

I have become convinced that most writing instruction is fundamentally flawed because children are never taught the most basic skill of writing, the skill on which everything rests: how to put words down on paper.

Susan Wise Bauer
"Why Writing Fails"

Looky what I got on pre-order!

In addition to the upcoming FLL4, I've put in a pre-order for Susan Wise Bauer's new writing curriculum series, The Complete Writer. It's designed to work with the First Language Lessons series. Woo hoo!

Climbing Mt. Parnassus

I had never heard of this book until Myrtle left this comment:

Tracy Lee Simmons "Climbing Parnassus" is even more divergent. It traces the history of classical education throughout the centuries and chronologically speaking should be read before Diane Ravitch's "A Century of Failed School Reforms" which picks up about in 1900 where Simmons leaves off.

The difference between Simmons and Wise Bauer is that Simmons gives you the "whys" of classical education and Wise-Bauer gives the "hows." I would summarize her hows as being for non-expert parents. Her area of expertise is writing and English, not physics and math and while her recommendations in those areas certainly won't send anyone into an educational death spiral, they also aren't nearly as clever and insightful as what she has to say about English, composition, history, and foreign language.


and here is an excerpt from Well-Trained Mind: left by Concerned Parent:

The Parrot Years:

Houses rest on foundations. Journalists gather all the facts before writing their stories; scientists accumulate data before forming theories; violinists and dancers and defensive tackles rely on muscle memory, stored in their bodies by hours of drill.

A classical education requires a student to collect, memorize, and categorize information. Although this process continues through all twelve grades, the first four grades are the most intensive for fact collecting.

This isn't a fashionable approach to early education. Much classroom time and energy has been spent in an effort to give children every possible opportunity to express what's inside them. There's nothing wrong with self-expression but when self-expression pushes the accumulation of knowledge offstage, something's out of balance.

Young children are described as sponges because they soak up knowledge. But there's another side to the metaphor. Squeeze a dry sponge, and nothing comes out. First the sponge has to be filled.

[snip]

So the key to the first stage of the trivium is content, content, content. In history, science, literature, and, to a lesser extent, art and music, the child should be accumulating masses of information: stories of people and wars; names of rivers, cities, mountains, and oceans; scientific names, properties of matter, classifications; plots, characters, and descriptions. The young writer should be memorizing the nuts and bolts of language-- parts of speech, parts of a sentence, vocabulary roots. The young mathematician should be preparing for higher math by mastering the basic math facts."


If you haven't noticed yet, Amazon has a dandy new rotating-books carousel feature that lets you scroll through all the other related books people who purchased the book you're looking at purchased. What a fantastic research shortcut. If I know a book is good -- or, more importantly, that it's considered good by the experts whose work I'm writing about^* --- I can instantly learn what other books are in its category.

I found Animals in Translation in the carousel for The Psychology of Learning and Behavior by Barry Schwartz, which is causing me to contemplate purchasing it just to find out what the connection is specifically.

Back to Mt. Parnassus; the carousel there has one book I own and like very much: The Laurel Wreath and Harp: Poetry and Dictation for the Classical Curriculum.

Another 3 I'm interested in:

• Composition in the Classical Tradition
  

• Fifty Famous Stories Retold
  

• Increasing Academic Achievement with the Trivium of Classical Education

^* make that trying to write about