education – Christian Leithart

An Ambassador from the Transcendent World

Teacher: The modern world isn’t the only world there is, though. There is another world and it is at play right now—it’s a world behind the modern world, beneath it, beyond it—and you might need to walk around in this world “for more than ten minutes” in order to understand how things work there. [This book] is an artifact from this other world, and the way I’m interpreting it for you is a skill born of this other world. Every day during class, I do my best to present this world to you—to create entrances into it, so you can spend a little time there and see “how they do things there.” But, it’s difficult.

Student: Why?

Teacher: Because it’s not a physical place and I can’t force you to go there. It’s an intellectual place, a spiritual place, and the only way to enter this place is to genuinely want to be there—and you have to want to be there before you fully understand what it is.

Student: I’ve never heard anyone say anything like this before.

Teacher: That’s because it’s a bit alarming to hear it stated in such terms, even though it’s the most accurate way of describing it.

Student: What is it? What is this other world? Does it have a name?

Teacher: Yes. Your world, the modern world, is the immanent world. The other world is the transcendent world.

Student: And what’s your relationship to the transcendent world?

Teacher: As a classical teacher, I’m an ambassador of the transcendent world. My job is to present the transcendent world to you in such a way that you’ll want to take up residence there, be naturalized, and become a subject.

~Gibbs

Obviously a conscious choice to use “subject” instead of “citizen” in the final sentence.

Taming the Tongue

James’s writing on the tongue suggests that taming it is part of the dominion mandate:

For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and creature of the sea, is tamed and has been tamed by mankind. But no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.

Even though he says here that taming the tongue is impossible, a few verses earlier he says this:

If anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle the whole body.

In other words, the perfect man rules himself as he rules horses (v. 3), ships (v. 4), and all other created things. I don’t think it’s going to far to say that self-governance is one of Adam’s original tasks.

Informed Patriotism

Understandably, we’re interested in the economic well-being of our society and we want our kids to be able to get good jobs, but we’ve sidelined citizen formation in the process. We should aspire to make our students more than consumers and workers—we should strive to make them citizens, too.

In view of all of this, it is worth reminding ourselves why civics matters. Simply, the goal of a good civic education is to have thinking citizens. We’re all in charge in this self-governing society. We share the responsibility for this shared experiment in human freedom. We must learn how to talk about politics with one another, how to make sense of the Constitution, and why the American creed of equality and liberty is worth defending.

America is built on the radical notion that every citizen can and should be a good thinker—and the first step to developing the right habits of mind is a knowledge of our Constitution’s first principles. Civics is more than just teaching people that they should vote at election time. It is also more than just factual knowledge, like how many justices sit on the Supreme Court or the functions of the three branches of government. Civics is about reflective knowledge, or what Ronald Reagan called “informed patriotism.”
Hans Zeiger

While I don’t dispute that every citizen should be a good thinker, or that education should improve a person’s reflective knowledge, I do dispute the idea that the two ought to be grouped together. A good education will improve reflective knowledge. A knowing person will be an informed patriot. But it does not follow that the goal of education should be to create good citizens. That’s a side benefit.

In fact, creating “good citizens” has been the goal of American public education for almost two hundred years, and look where it’s gotten us.

As Chesterton said, the true patriot is not the one who says, “My country right or wrong.” No one who loves his country would say that. A true patriot wants his country to be right because he wants what’s best for his country. Of course, in order to believe that, the patriot must know what is right and what is wrong. And there we have the goal of a good education.

Ideas in Education

The art is greatest which conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas; and I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind, and as it more fully occupies, and in occupying, exercises and exalts, the faculty by which it is received.

If this, then, be the definition of great art, that of a great artist naturally follows. He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.
John Ruskin

Put this together with Charlotte Mason’s statement that the mind feeds on ideas (and is thereby educated) and you may conclude that great art is the best tool of educating the mind.

I’ll have to return to this later.

Engineering and Liberal Arts

— Everyone gets a double major: engineering and history. That’s it. That’s all we offer. There are some required history survey courses that you take in a sequence, and then a bunch of electives. The capstone is probably a history of technology course, but it comes after and in addition to the macro- and micro-histories you’ve been studying all along. You wouldn’t have to do a bunch of integrated “context and ethics” in a technology course if you just said: Everybody studies these two things, period. There’s no complementary “rounding out” in some vague hand-wavey form. You just don’t get prepared unless you have history, full stop.

— Everyone does a 2 + 1 + 2. Instead of students cycling out from liberal arts colleges to engineering programs for a year, it’s the opposite: You come to engineering school, spin out for a deep immersion in a liberal arts environment, maybe one that also serves as your study abroad, then come back and finish.

— Everyone gets an engineering degree, but the other requirement is a Cultural Life Program, such as the one at Furman. Over four years you attend lectures, concerts, and museum exhibitions, a lot of which are your choosing, but they add up to something like 60 hours of cultural education and a required thesis course.
Sara Hendren, “ways you could remake an engineering school”

An Argument Against Abridged Versions

In covering The Social Contract, we will do close reads of a few passages. Some of those passages will be easy and some will be hard. However, learning to speak philosophy requires not only the close work of interpretation but prolonged general exposure to it. Put another way, learning to read difficult books requires not only quality time but quantity time.

If there are long passages in today’s reading that you don’t get, don’t tell yourself, ‘I don’t get this book’ and give up. The truth is, you’re not going to get many parts the book, but this book is worth reading for the portions that you do get. If we didn’t cover the difficult parts, you would never get to a place that you could understand them.
Josh Gibbs

This is why, in my 7th grade Humanities class, I assign the entirety of the Odyssey.

What Dorothy Sayers Really Said: Grammar Stage Curriculum

This is the third of a series of posts about Dorothy Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” I think that’s sufficient introduction for anyone who reads this blog. Here are the first and second installments.

Also, I’m going to call her Dottie throughout, because I want to.

Some in the world of classical Christian education disparage Dottie because of her emphasis on teaching the “tools of learning,” which the educated student can apply to anything he pleases. They insist that the quality of an education depends on what is taught as well as how it is taught, and they believe that Dottie’s approach doesn’t take this into account. True, Dottie is somewhat agnostic about content. She says that the teachers must look upon their classes “less as ‘subjects’ in themselves than as a gathering-together of material [her emphasis] for use in the next part of the Trivium. What that material is, is only of secondary importance.”

As we’ve seen already, Dottie comes close to contradicting herself at various places in the essay, and this may be one of those places. After all, she spends quite a lot of time talking about what should and shouldn’t be studied in the Grammar Stage. But I think the operative phrase in the quote above is “less as.” The teachers will teach subjects, truth, stories, facts, information, but they must see these things as all of a piece. Everything they teach can be used later on, which means nothing memorized is completely useless. It does not mean that the teachers should break advanced subjects into pieces and get the kids to memorize the pieces. But that will have to wait for another post. First, let’s look at Dottie’s curriculum recommendations for the Grammar Stage.

Grammar

To master Grammar itself, students should learn the grammar of an inflected language. (This rules out English, as we saw earlier.) Dottie is ok with Russian, Sanskrit, and Classical Greek, but she recommends Latin—Medieval Latin, that is, not Classical. I don’t know of any classical school that starts with Medieval Latin, but that may be due to a lack of textbooks.

Dottie also suggests starting a contemporary foreign language at this age. She recommends French or German. Honest question: Do any classical schools teach modern languages in the Grammar Stage?

English (Literature)

Dottie recommends memorizing (and reciting) poetry and prose and telling many, many stories, including ancient myths. Do not, says she, do not use ancient myths to practice Latin grammar. I suppose she doesn’t want young people to spend time poring over the unfiltered words of pagan authors.

History

I don’t want to point fingers, but I want to emphasize here that Dottie recommends History consist of dates, events, anecdotes, and personalities. Memorizing a timeline of dates and events does no one any good unless those dates and events are tied to real people and what they did. The particular dates, she says, don’t matter. What matters is having a historical framework of some kind—accompanied by “pictures of costumes, architecture, and other ‘everyday things.” Got that? Worry less about memorizing five hundred dates and more about getting a full picture of one or two historical time periods.

Geography

Geography, like history, is presented as facts associated with visual presentation: “customs, costumes, flora, fauna, and so on.” She encourages memorizing capitals and collecting stamps.

Science

Dottie recommends teaching science through “the identifying and naming of specimens.” Notice that word “identifying.” How is a student going to identify a devil’s coach-horse, Cassiopeia, a whale, or a bat without observing them? There is nothing in her description of Science that would require a student to even be inside a classroom. Excursions into nature seem like an obvious extension of her suggestions.

Math

I know people who scoff at the phrase “the grammar of Mathematics” because they view “grammar” as a linguistic term. But if we take Dottie’s own definition of grammar as “learning what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works,” then we can easily see how the term applies to math. She recommends memorizing multiplication tables, geometrical shapes, and “the grouping of numbers,” followed by simple sums in arithmetic. I’m not sure that these activities by themselves will result in a student’s understanding “what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works,” but then, I’m not sure that any of Dottie’s Grammar Stage recommendations fulfill that promise.

Theology

Here, more than anywhere else, Dottie emphasizes that the student does not need to fully understand the material, merely to be familiar with it. She recommends teaching the Biblical narrative as a complete story of Creation, Rebellion, and Redemption, as well as the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. I think she underestimates the students here. A nine-year-old can easily understand all of those things—not fully, perhaps, but sufficiently.

What Dorothy Sayers Really Said: Grammar

This is the second of a series of posts about Dorothy Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” I think that’s sufficient introduction for anyone who reads this blog.

Also, I’m going to call her Dottie throughout, because I want to.

The Trivium, as Dottie explains it, is a way to “teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning.” It means mastering a language in three stages: Grammar (the structure), Dialectic (the reasoning), and Rhetoric (the expression). So does the Trivium only apply to language? Well, yes and no. All three parts of the Trivium are language arts, but as Dottie says, “language itself is the medium in which thought is expressed.” Human beings need language to think, which means that mastering language can aid us in mastering thought itself. This paves the way for mastery in any subject whatsoever, whether geometry, music, astronomy, medicine, theology, or law. That’s the idea, anyway.

I won’t take time here to talk about whether there can be such a thing as “the grammar of math.” I know people have strong feelings about that. Instead I want to ask whether any classical Christian schools are actually following Dottie’s suggestions when it comes to the Grammar stage.

Dottie defines the Grammar stage as learning what a language is, how it’s put together, and how it works. She matches this onto what she calls “the Poll-Parrot Age,” in which “learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable.” (Later in the essay she gives an age range of nine to eleven years old.) Many classical educators treat the Grammar stage as a time of pure memorization. “Don’t worry about whether the students understand,” they say. “They’re just gathering material.” In general, kids like to memorize stuff, so everything appears hunky-dory. Grammar—check.

But pure memorization doesn’t teach a student what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works. To do that, you must teach actual grammar. Some classical schools teach English grammar in the early years, so that students know what direct objects and subordinate clauses are before they leave elementary school. But Dottie’s actual suggestion is teaching Latin grammar. Because Latin is an inflected language, its grammar is better than English grammar for teaching “what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works.” In the Grammar stage, then, Latin should be more than chanting declensions and conjugations. Students should know what direct objects and subordinate clauses are in Latin before they leave elementary school.

Again, according to Dottie, the Trivium is a three-tier system: you must master the first stage before you ascend to the next. If you want to study Dialectic (the study of argumentation), you have to understand Grammar—which means Latin grammar. But nearly every classical school moves students to the “Logic Stage” based on age, not ability. Doesn’t that blow the entire system apart? How can a student learn to use language, to define terms and make accurate statements, to construct an argument and detect fallacies without knowing what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works? And forget about Rhetoric! How can a teenager who hasn’t mastered the structure of language and arguments to express himself well?

To be fair, Dottie is a little inconsistent here. When she describes the Trivium, she emphasizes its tiered structure (Rhetoric is built on Dialectic, which is built on Grammar). Later, when describing the “Pert Age,” she says it begins “so soon as the pupil shows himself disposed to Pertness and interminable argument” or “when the capacity for abstract thought begins to manifest itself.” These benchmarks seem more tied to a child’s psychological development than how far he’s progressed in Latin.

If the Trivium consists of three stages laid firmly atop one another, and if we follow Dottie’s definition of Grammar, a student must study enough Latin to understand “what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works” before moving on to Dialectic. How many classical schools actually operate this way?

Ignorant of Greatness, Historically Alone

This means that typical freshmen entering college lack the texts of their potential humanity, even their spiritual survival. They will also face, possibly before they graduate, surely before they are thirty or forty, the loss of close friends or a family member, the loss of love, disappointed hopes. Ignorant of those heroes of ancient Greece, ignorant of Biblical heroes, ignorant of greatness, they will think themselves historically alone, confronting a new condition unaccompanied.
John Silber, Straight Shooting

I hope that one day even these ignorant will realize they don’t have to face the future unaccompanied. They will want, and will find, words to suit the moment.

What Dorothy Sayers Really Said

This is the first of a series of posts about Dorothy Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” I think that’s sufficient introduction for anyone who reads this blog.

Also, I’m going to call her Dottie throughout, because I want to.

One of the first things Dottie does in her speech is propose “to deal with the subject of teaching,” for the purpose of producing “a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society.” Like every thirty-two-year-old academic, she aimed high, at no less than an overhaul of modern education, to correct the woefully slack thinking that ran rampant through the England of her day. She helpfully lists some examples of the problem she wants to solve:

People are susceptible to propaganda.
Professional writers fail to define their terms.
The average educated person can’t tackle a new subject for himself.
The average educated person can’t make connections across subjects.
Academics can’t distinguish between material and final causes.
Academics assume what they are trying to prove.

Serious problems, these. Worth addressing.

Here’s where things get sticky. Does the average graduate of a classical school fare any better than his public school peers when it comes to:

Susceptibility to propaganda?
Defining his terms?
Tackling new subjects?
Making connections across subjects and disciplines?
Distinguishing between material and final causes?
Begging the question? (Or misusing the phrase “begging the question?”)

I’m sure Dottie would agree that, even in her day, exceptional students avoided these pitfalls. Her proposals weren’t meant to improve the lot of the exceptional, but of the average. We’re talking about the typical CCE student, the Classical Child-Not-Left-Behind.

If average graduates of classical Christian schools routinely make the mistakes Dottie lists above, then either a) her proposal doesn’t work or b) we haven’t implemented it correctly.