February 15, 2006
Boomershine’s Summary and Justification of Classical Education, Part I
PART I of a paper by Ryan Boomershine
Tremors are shaking the field of Christian education. Some ministries do not notice, some have heard of the shaking, some have felt it, some have felt it hard, and then some are the ground-stomping tree-shakers. The shaking is starting to grow larger and broader and noisier every year. The shaking has inspired Gene E. Veith, Jr. and Andrew Kern to write a book entitled Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America. Despite the fact that it is called a “sweeping” or “shaking” movement, it is making its way fairly quietly and, especially within the education realms of Fundamentalism, the movement is practically unknown.
It is a good and proper thing for the honest educator to consider at least a general introduction to the history, figures, and reasoning of this rebirthed movement gaining momentum across the evangelical Christian landscape.
Classical education has its earliest roots in Greek and Roman history. Their philosophy and practical genius led the way for Cassiodorus’ systematization of learning into the seven liberal arts (A.D. 480) composed of a trivium and a quadrivium. The trivium was primarily interested in the grammar, dialectic (logic) and rhetoric, and the quadrivium centered on the arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and music. The learning of the trivium was a springboard, Cassiodorus purported, into the quadrivium, whose extent went far beyond the scope of our modern notions of their meanings. He intended to include the entire scope of learning under these seven liberal arts, and the labels were much broader than they first appear to us.
After the time of the Greeks and Romans, several centuries ensued which are commonly referred to as dark—there was bedlam and barbarism. During this time the medieval church put practice onto the Greek and Roman theories of learning as meat clings onto bones. They founded the first universities and their much learning led to the Renaissance and Enlightenment in which there were explosions of learning and profitable excursion in nearly every field. Bacon, Copernicus, Wycliffe, Luther, Knox, Columbus and all the others were taking advantage of this organized system of learning. During the 1800s, the glut of much learning was beginning to subside (as men again began to rest on their laurels as had the Romans). As a result, skepticism, relativism and modernism began chewing away at society, leaving it in the generally dingy blight in which we now exist.
Dorothy Sayers was born in 1893 England into a ministerial family. A bright spirit, she carried the potential of genius. After graduating first in her class at Oxford in 1915, she became well-known as a crime-writer, a translator, and an apologist of the faith. Miss Sayers was contemporary to and friends with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and while she was never strictly an educator, she developed and maintained strong and intelligent stands on matters of education. In 1947, Miss Sayers gave a lecture entitled The Lost Tools of Learning. This lecture was transcribed and printed and is now available widely. In printed form, it is the approximately twelve to thirteen pages of fodder fueling the revived modern classical education movement. The lecture is a sort of magnum opus for all classically-minded educators, acting as a springboard into a wide array of classical possibilities.
Sayers’ focus was entirely on the trivium stage of learning. She characterized the trivium as a preparation for learning. She considered the trivium to be all the education that needs to take place on a pre-college level.
Because this lecture so dramatically encapsulizes this modern incarnation of classical education, it would be important to consider what was written. Sayers begins by arguing that, though not an educator, she is qualified to speak on the matters because “we have all, at some time or another, been taught” (1947, p. 1). She continues on by listing some of the key problems being faced in her day, beginning with our prolonging of education. She asks, “The modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjects [than their medieval counterparts]—but does that mean that they actually know more?” (1947, p. 2). Second, our populace is very naive and susceptible, especially to propaganda and advertisement. Third, we have an inability to center on the core issue of problems. Sayers says,
Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side? (1947, p. 2)Fourth, we offer little regard to the proper place of grammar, logic flow or definitions. Fifth, we are becoming more and more incapable of learning on our own and have a decided lack of discernment. Sixth, we make “watertight bulkheads” between subjects and find ourselves incapable of noticing unity between them. Seventh, we hold practically no ability to reason logically. Eighth, we show a decided lack of preciseness in thinking and speaking, and lastly, we fail to understand the process of learning how to learn.
Miss Sayers then encapsulizes the problems we face with,In a similar vein, she also says,
Is not the great defect of our education today—a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning (1947, p. 4).
We let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of “subjects”; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education—lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it (1947, p. 7).Sayers then progresses on to assume hypothetically that she should be able and free to design a curriculum to suit these regresses. She begins by assigning her own labels to the different ability levels. She calls the first stage the Poll-Parrot stage. It is the time when students relish memorizing and chanting and reciting and accumulating. The next stage is the Pert stage, in which the child is found to be inquisitive and contradictory, eager to argue and know. The last stage is the Poetic stage, in which the child longs for independence and seeks to unify his thinking and be able to express what he thinks in an appealing way.
While there is nothing like a fixed mandate about where each stage begins and ends, there is a general consistency in how these stages are viewed. Generally the Grammar is what we know as the elementary years. The Logic stage corresponds to junior high, and the Rhetoric stage is associated with the senior high years.
The Grammar stage is not referring to the learning of English grammar, but the grammar of each subject—the facts and meat associated with a subject. According to Sayers, the most important subject to be learned during this stage is Latin. It is here that Miss Sayers makes her most bold claim of all:
I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar. I say this, not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least fifty percent (1947, p. 9).This dramatic statement may still be unproven, but the advantages of Latin are presented as stupendous.
The second stage is the Dialectic stage, in which the core subject to be confronted is formal logic. It is an attempt to draw the student into an understanding of the subjects that were confronted in the Grammar stage. Sayers says of logic,
The disrepute into which Formal Logic has fallen is entirely unjustified; and its neglect is the root cause of nearly all those disquieting symptoms which we have noted in the modern intellectual constitution. Logic has been discredited, partly because we have come to suppose that we are conditioned almost entirely by the intuitive and the unconscious. There is no time to argue whether this is true; I will simply observe that to neglect the proper training of the reason is the best possible way to make it true (1947, p. 12).The doors open wide for the student to explore in the Rhetoric stage of learning. Having been acquiring knowledge all along and then learning how to understand and defend in the Logic stage, the student is ready to explore the possibilities that abound. They are given full-meals of learning—with weightier subjects on which to chew. Students will be bent toward their predispositions and asked to unify their learning. In Sayers’ school, there would be a formal thesis in the last year of learning. This would entail a large degree of study, research and writing on a particular topic, and then an oral defense of the topic to a large crowd, including a committee of questioners. The thesis process is meant to be an intense process that caps the trivium.
Sayers concludes her educational proposition with another lament for the need for such a reform as this. She says,
But one cannot live on capital forever. However firmly a tradition is rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies…. We have lost the tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work….” It is not the fault of the teachers—they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them 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 true 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.
Part II of Ryan Boomershine’s paper will be available on Pensees later this week. If you would like to download a printable version of Part I, please do:
A SUMMARY AND JUSTIFICATION OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION — Part I
(click to download and print)
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