Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers

"The Lost Tools of Learning" by Dorothy Sayers is pretty much the Bible for the Classical Education movement. I may have read it or parts of it before, but I went back and read it again to make sure I was familiar with the whole thing. It's not that long. Just an essay, really. But this small piece of writing, helped inspire thousands and then millions of people. Including myself.

She starts off by discussing her qualifications, or lack thereof. She states, "There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or other, been taught. Even if we learned nothing — perhaps in particular if we learned nothing — our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value." Then she makes this shocking assertion, "...if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages." Pure educational heresy.

She laments the fact the even though we as a society are extremely literate, we seem prone to fall for whatever fallacy sounds good at the moment. She diagnoses the problem that we are good at teaching subjects, but bad at teaching how to think. She likens it to teaching a child to play a particular song on a piano, but no instruction in how to actually play any song on the piano.

She advises a return to the Trivium and the Quadrivium. She begins with the Trivium which teaches students how to learn any subject. The Quadrivium, then, deals with the actual subjects to be learned. Within the Trivium is Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, in that order. This is the way of the Middle Ages. "Modern education concentrates on teaching subjects, leaving the method of thinking, arguing, and expressing one's conclusions to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along; mediaeval education concentrated on first forging and learning to handle the tools of learning, using whatever subject came handy as apiece of material on which to doodle until the use of the tool became second nature."

She recognizes in children three distinct stages: the Poll-parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic. These stages can easily correspond to the three stages of the Trivium. The Grammar stage comes first and for this she recommends learning Latin. "I say this, not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labour and pains of leaning almost any other subject by at least 50 percent. It is the key to the vocabulary and structure of all the Romance languages and to the structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilization, together with all its historical documents." The student in the Poll-parrot stage of development learns by heart easily and for whom reasoning is hard. Use this time to teach Latin as well as 100s of other facts they can recite by rote back to the teacher.

Once the student moves into the Pert stage (about 5th through 8th grade), the age which "is characterized by contradicting, answering-back, liking to 'catch people out' (especially one's elders) and the propounding of conundrums (especially the kind with a nasty verbal catch in them), it's time to move to the Dialectic stage of the Trivium. This is the time of debates, arguments, and well-reasoned opinions. The student is ready and willing to use reason. The contents of the syllabus at this stage may be anything you like. The 'subjects' supply material; but they are all to be regarded as mere grist for the mental mill to work upon. The pupils should be encouraged to go and forage for their own information, and so guided towards the proper use of libraries and books of reference, and shown how to tell which sources are authoritative and which are not.

"It is difficult to map out any general syllabus for the study of Rhetoric: a certain freedom is demanded... Any child that already shows a disposition to specialize should be given his head: for, when the use of the tools has been well and truly learned, it is available for any study whatever. It would be well... that each pupil should learn to do one, or two, subjects really well, while taking a few classes in subsidiary subjects so as to keep his mind open to the inter-relations of all knowledge. Indeed, at this stage, our difficulty will be to keep 'subjects' apart; for as Dialectic will have shown all branches of learning to be inter-related, so Rhetoric will tend to show that all knowledge is one." This stage can be used in high school, but Sayers says the reason we have students in the past going to university at 14 is because they have mastered the Trivium which fully prepared them for the subjects offered there. She recognizes that at the end of the Dialectic stage a student will appear "behind" his modernly educated peer, but by the time he masters Rhetoric he will fly past the peer.

She believes, "The truth is that for the last 300 year or so we have been living upon our educational capital." That is, the vestiges of the Trivium exist in education but each generation gets farther and farther away from it. Some of it is passed down in the culture, but we are largely running on fumes at this point. It was the excitement of the post-Renaissance world that led scholars to abandon the Trivium and jump into an exciting, expanded Quadrivium.

She concludes with this: "The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing [teachers] to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain."

I have to admit that I am very partial to this way of educating our young people. I tried to do this myself with my own girls to a limited extent. After all, I had not been educated this way, so it is all foreign to me. (Literally... Latin?) I would love to see this methodology integrated into my classroom. I'm not sure how to go about that exactly. That is why I am immersing myself in Classical thought. I want to live and breathe this stuff until it comes naturally to me!

Paul Ryan's Catholicism and the Poor (Wall Street Journal)

Read this in the Wall Street Journal.

It's brilliant.

By ANTONY DAVIES 

AND KRISTINA ANTOLIN

Someone is twisting the Catholic Church's teachings on caring for the poor, but it isn't Paul Ryan. His controversial budgetary ideas demonstrate that he has a better grasp of Catholic social thought than do many of the American Catholic bishops.

The culmination of centuries of theological and philosophical thought, the church's teachings cannot simply be satisfied by a government edict to "feed the poor." Commanding "Let there be light!" works fine for God, but for mortal beings, edicts don't carry the same punch.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has long supported government interference in the economy as a means to help the poor. But we suspect the bishops haven't fully thought this through: If God really did favor a top-down approach to poverty reduction, why wouldn't He establish a government with the power to wipe away poverty on demand instead of leaving things to chance and the possibility that someone like Mr. Ryan would come along and mess up His plans?

Perhaps we dehumanize the poor when we treat them as nothing more than problems to be solved, and we dehumanize the rich when we treat them as wallets to be picked.

Wealth and poverty are catalysts for bringing the rich and the poor together in community, and community is the hallmark of the church's mission on Earth. Government is not community. Government is one of community's tools, a coercive one we use when it is necessary to force people to behave in ways they would not otherwise behave voluntarily.

But that word—voluntarily—is key, and it's where Mr. Ryan's religious detractors go awry: Charity can only be charity when it is voluntary. Coerced acts, no matter how beneficial or well-intentioned, cannot be moral. If we force people to give to the poor, we have stripped away the moral component, reducing charity to mere income redistribution. And if one really is as good as the other, the Soviets demonstrated long ago that it can be done far more efficiently without the trappings of church and religion.

All people have the moral obligation to care for those who are less fortunate. But replacing morality with legality is the first step in replacing church, religion and conscience with government, politics and majority vote. Coercing people to feed the poor simply substitutes moral poverty for material poverty.

The bishops dance with the devil when they invite government to use its coercive power on their behalf, and there's no clearer example than the Affordable Care Act. They happily joined their moral authority to the government's legal authority by supporting mandatory health insurance. They should not have been surprised when the government used its reinforced power to require Catholic institutions to pay for insurance plans that cover abortions and birth control.

To paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien (a devoted Catholic), the government does not share power. Paul Ryan knows this. The bishops would be wise to listen to him.

Mr. Davies is professor of economics at Duquesne University. Ms. Antolin is a Catholic theologian.

Living Life is better than Dying in College

I just read this post and I can't get it out of my head. James Altucher makes a lot of sense, but his revolutionary ideas take some thinking through. I'll repost it here:

I know I’ve been doing a lot on college lately. But I view it as a stepping stone for how the life we live now diverges from the life we could be living (and the life I hope my kids will live). I’m in the process of writing a book on this where I hope to give some more views not on just college but a better way to spend your entire life, every moment, being educated and learning from experience.  Here’s an interview I just gave to a newsaper which clarifies my views a bit more:

Q: When you say that parents should not send their kids to college, do you mean that they should not go to college indefinitely? Or come back to college later in life?

Kids at 18 have no idea what they want to do in life. The world is a very big place. Its bigger than five classes a day on philosophy or chemical engineering. Most kids at 18 don’t relish philosophy but they relish the experience of freedom and being out of their parents’ home for the first time in their lives. There is nothing wrong with this. Young adults have a lot of energy and should use it. But the problem is that college costs have risen 1000% in the past 30 years while healthcare has risen 700% and inflation has risen “only” 300%. Colleges have made use of the myth that you can’t get a job unless you have a college education. So young people feel a rush to get that college out of the way so they can get a job and “begin” their adult lives. I think kids should begin their adult lives at 18 by experiencing what else the world has to offer other (see my eight alternatives to college) than a classroom (which they’ve all just been locked in for the prior 18 years). A rose needs space to bloom.

Then, later, if they’ve thought about the debt burden they will place themselves and their parents in, they can choose to go to college. Right now student loan debt is greater than homeowner debt and credit card debt in this country. Thats a lot of debt. Whereas previously we’ve created generations of innovators and creators, now we are creating a generation of young people mired down in hopeless debt. When will they get to live life?

Q:  When did you come up with your theory? How did you come to think of your theory?

A lot of people say, “Oh, James Altucher went to college so he shouldn’t be talking about this”. Well, why not? I saw what people were doing in college. I know now how much I learned in college and how much I learned in other experiences in life and which is more relevant to me now at the age of 43. And, btw, it was much cheaper when I went to school than it is now. So when did I develop this theory? Almost immediately when I realized college had nothing to do with any successes or failures that I had in life (and I had A LOT of failure despite college). And also, it took my 8 years to pay back my student loan debt. Now it takes kids 30 years to pay down that debt. Its not fair to the youth of our country.

To summarize:
A) you learn very little that you use in real life
B) you are so burdened by debt that you can’t use your new-found
knowledge to create real freedom and joy for yourself
C) a young person can use their energy in many other ways than just college.

Q:  Do you think that nothing well worth learning is taught in college? Or is it the fact that students might not be willing to learn?

There are many things worth learning in college. And not every person in the world should avoid college. But the best colleges cost a lot of money and its a burden for young people. And most things that you can learn in college you can learn for free outside of college thanks to the Internet. For instance, computer programming is best learned on the job. English literature is best learned by reading the books you are passionate about. Writing is best learned by having real experiences, writing every day, and reading the great writers who inspire you. Philosophy is learned by having real experiences and reading the philosophers or religious practitioners who inspire you. Imagine learning all of these things because of real world experiences, and then not having any debt. Also, when learning is not force-fed to you you develop a real love and knowledge for how to learn on your own and thats something you keep for the rest of your life. Most young people don’t learn this.

Q:  Do you think you learned anything when you went to college? Or do you think you could have learned more if you chose not to go to college?

I went to college from 1986-1989. I was paying for it with debt so i graduated in 3 years. I took six courses a semester so Icould graduate early. And I took courses every summer. I also worked about 30-40 hours a week at jobs so I could afford my expenses outside of tuititon. Even then i graduated with enormous debt. I majored in
Computer Science and learned how to program.  I thought I was a very good programmer when I graduated college. I prided myself into thinking I was the best since I was sure I was better than any of my classmates. While I was in college I programmed computers to play chess, I wrote papers that were published in international conferences on artificial intelligence, I got As in every practical programming-related class (other than Fortran, ugh!), and then, by the way, I got a full scholarship to go to graduate school for two years. Then, when I finally had a job in the “real world” at HBO, the television network, my programming was so bad (awful!) I had to go to courses offered at AT&T for two months in order to get my programming in shape. And even then I was still nowhere near ready to do real programming in the real world. It probably took about another six months of daily effort to learn how to really program. I had the passion for computers and I’m sure if all I had done were those AT&T courses right from the beginning I would’ve been fine.

Sometimes you have to throw a kid in the water to teach them how to swim (or let them drown). Thats the way to learn. Not being force-fed from textbooks written twenty years ago and being taught by professors with little real world experience. Its a shame also that unless you have a PhD a college won’t let you teach (in most cases). PhDs are often the most intellectual but have the least real world experience. And for that great experience we have to go into massive debt now.

Q:  Do you have any advice for students who are in college right now and feel like they aren’t getting anything out of their education?

Yes, take a year or two off and try some of my eight alternatives. I’m writing a book now with over 40 alternatives and explaining my views in greater depth.

Q:  Are there many people who disagree with your thoughts? Agree? How do people react when they first hear what you have to say?

I think many people agree and don’t say anything. But the people who disagree get very very upset. Its like I’m questioning their religion. I can go right now in the center of Times Square in NYC and shout, ”Jesus is Satan!” and people would just walk around me and think, “ok, its free speech”. But if I shouted, “don’t send your kids to college”, WHOAH!! Lock this guy up! Take away his kids!

I’ve even had death threats based on this opinion. People have a huge life attachment to the fact that college is a part of life, the same way that birth, marriage, parenting, and death are. Its not. Its a relatively modern invention (for the mainstream American, its about fifty years old the idea that most kids should go to college, after 6000 years of civilization). Unfortunately this modern invention has been so abused by college administrators that the next generation of kids we graduate will be mired down in debt, and STILL need to learn the skills required for basic jobs that they want to do. Lets not forget, nobody learns how to be a doctor in college. Thats pre med. They learn a little in one or two years of medical school, but then they really learn when they are a resident in an actual hospital. And then between debt, insurance, and the burdens government is now placing on doctors, how will they ever pay down their burdens? The entire system needs to change but the discussion has to happen somewhere. Hopefully it will be here.

Q:  Anything else you’d like to add?

I began my career at the age of 23, after I left graduate school. And then I began a career from scratch again when i was 26, and then 28, and a totally new career when i was 33. And then a completely new career when i was 36. And now I’m 43 and I’m still open to changing careers and doing new things in life. There’s no rush to start a career at the age of 22. Life changes as you go out in the world and experience things. Failures happen, seeds grow and take years to turn into a tree. Give yourself time to plant those seeds, to learn from your failures, to experience new things in life. The earlier you start to do this, the wiser, healthier, and more balanced you will be. You will be more capable of making decisions on career, family, and life in general.

Its also important that people stop using the statistic: people who went to college make more money. This is a very true statistic but anyone who takes Statistics 101 in college should know that correlation is not cause-and-effect. It could quite possibly be that over the past 30 years, people who are more achievement oriented (and hence more likely to make more money) were more likely to go to college. A better test would be if we take 2000 people who got accepted to Harvard today and divide them randomly into 2 groups: one that goes to college, the other that doesn’t, and see what they are earning 5, 10, 20, 30 years from now. (Some people will then say, “but money isn’t everything” and I strongly agree, but this is just to counterbalance that one statistic that seems to suggest money is everything)

Don’t discount the value of spending time experiencing the world before you make the enormous financial committment of going to college. It will teach you the beginnings (and JUST the beginnings) of what might be important to you. It will teach you how to survive, it will teach you about people other than from your own age group and socio-economic demographic, it will teach you about the 99% of opportunities that happen in the world that have nothing to do with college, it will teach you how to stretch your mind to learn how to sell and communicate, and finally it will show you at an early age that failure, choices, and life is a spectrum and not a ladder. Take advantage of that when still young and I can guarantee you all of life will bend down and support your endeavors.

Teen's dad spends school year waving at bus, embarrassing son

This is hilarious! When a dad finds out the his son's school bus will be passing by his house every morning, he makes it a point to come outside and wave as it goes by... in costume!

And my personal favorite...

No Clowning Around on This Issue

Esther Cepeda takes issue in her latest article with those who would go after McDonalds for using a child-friendly clown to sell junk food. She doesn't believe the clown is the problem since "No child give a hoot about clowns. Thsee days, clowns' grotesquely frightening imagery belongs to John Wayne Gacy, hard-core hip-hoppers the Insane Clown Posse and "The Simpsons" Krusty the clown."

On this point, we are in agreement. Clowns top the list of my "Seven Irrational Fears."

She does take McDonalds to task however for making their food appeal to children, decrying their mareketing campaigns "aimed at seducing children into 'lovin'' food that should be allowed to pass their lips only as a very special treat."

Good grief! Has this woman ever fed a child on a regular basis? Does she limit her children to lean meats and veggies at EVERY meal with the exception of the very rare fast-food junket? Really?

For those of us that actually feed children regularly, I for one, do not disparage the overworked, overtired, harried, on-the-go mom who makes a quick stop on her way to some sort of practice for a Happy Meal.

Go mom!