Love this post! My wife and I were actually just checking out Classical Conversations this week, and we had some similar reservations.
A note on games: I've used (for example) Kahoot! quizzes in a few different classes, both as a student and as a TA. They're actually pretty useful as a quick assessment tool. It can help you figure out if a class actually understands what's going on without needing to call on every person individually.
But as a study tool, I agree that gamification doesn't really work. To quote my favorite essay ever, _The Weight of Glory_ by C.S. Lewis:
"There are different kinds of rewards. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things... The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation."
Lewis mostly was interested in how we think about heaven when he wrote this, but I think his insight applies equally to education. The proper reward for studying a subject well is that you eventually understand and enjoy it. Shifting the focus of a class to some unrelated game risks undermining that proper reward.
However, Lewis continues with an example that is directly related to classical education:
"An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly a proper, and not a mercenary, reward for learning Greek; but only those who have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience that this is so. The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles... He has to begin by working for marks, or to escape punishment, or to please his parents, or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire."
Lewis himself was, of course, classically educated. So I'm assuming this last sentence accurately depicts the way that most classical educators think about motivation (or at least did historically - it may have changed in the last hundred years). Namely, making education more interesting for students is nice sometimes, but it's more important for students to learn the discipline to study a subject for months or even years before they receive any real payoff. And in the long run, the effort they put in will be worth it.
I think you (and Egan) would disagree with this. I've never tried to learn Greek, but I can quickly think of some easy ways to incorporate Egan's tools - e.g., illustrating vocabulary words using stories from Greek mythology.
It sounds like the main difference between you and someone like Leigh Bortins is that you would rework the whole curriculum to center around the stories, where she would just toss them in occasionally for a bit of flavor. Does that sound right?
> “It sounds like the main difference between you and someone like Leigh Bortins is that you would rework the whole curriculum to center around the stories, where she would just toss them in occasionally for a bit of flavor. Does that sound right?”
Good clarifying question. I’ll give the answer in two parts:
(1) Yes, and I remember how confused I was when I discovered that CC’s elementary school history curriculum lacks stories. (Like: hiSTORY, it’s right there in the name!) Instead they do dates and sentences — albeit memorized through a song, which is cool. (Pivoting from 🧙♂️STORY seemed so weird to me that I doubted this memory for years, but according to a sympathetic review I found online — tinyurl.com/2cveus86 — it’s true.)
(2) I’ve learned a little Greek, and I’d say that I wouldn’t necessarily teach the vocabulary using stories from Greek mythology. One of the temptations, when learning about these tools, is to just pump in more and more of them into teaching, even when something simpler would be more effective. But as Miyamoto Musashi said, “the primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy”, and the primary thing when you consider the tools is your intention to help someone understand. (This is actually a fail state of Eganism. We should probably come up with a 🧙♂️NAME for it!)
"Ever since then I have tended to use the Parthenon and the Optative as the symbols of two types of education. The one begins with hard, dry things like grammar, and dates, and prosody; and it has at least a chance of ending in a real appreciation which is equally hard and firm though not equally dry. The other begins in “Appreciation” and ends in gush."
Yes, that's a very representative quote! The full essay (and it's really only maybe 4 pages) is in the collection On Stories, if you have access to that.
There’s ALWAYS more Lewis to read, isn’t there? (And I say this as someone who has read “God in the Dock” and “Pilgrim’s Regress” in high school…) Anyhow, just put a hold at my library.
In a lot of myths and stories, knowing someone or something's real name gives you power over them. Naming things is a form of magic spell! The Bible is quite big on this too, from Genesis 2:20 "And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field" to Exodus 3:14 where Moses asks the Lord's name and gets the famous "I am that I am" back - one, admittedly unorthodox interpretation of this is that the Lord is not willing to share his true name with Moses, because magic. And in Jewish culture, the four-letter name is not spoken these days but paraphrased as HaShem (literally: The Name) out of respect. So yes, names matter.
(I think it was Scott Alexander who said when he was a child and learnt some Japanese words, he asked "Why don't the Japanese call things by their true names?")
2.
If I had to choose between a full-on classical educator and a full-on "progressivist" as State Director of Education, I'd probably vote for the former, in the hope that then at least some children would learn something in school.
But that's just projecting everything down to one dimension. Just like politics doesn't live on the single axis from liberal to conservative - some models measure economic and social liberalism/conservatism separately, for example (which at least gets you that libertarians are a separate cluster in 2D space).
Since this is a serious discussion on education, it's time to mention one of my favourite Harry Potter fan pages - which came up in the back of my mind even before you said "Classical education just works for Ravenclaws". It's the "sortinghatchats" model where you are sorted into two houses: your primary is why you do things (Ravenclaw: because systems, Hufflepuff: because people, Gryffindor: because honour, Slytherin: because loyalty) and your secondary is how (Gryffindors charge, Ravenclaws plan, Hufflepuffs toil, Slytherins scheme/improvise). The primary/secondary distinction doesn't mean one is more important than the other, just that we have a 2-dimensional model and we needed names for the axes.
In this model, Ravenclaw secondaries are the ones who like lists and facts and would get most ecstatic at the thought of Learning in Depth, whereas Ravenclaw primaries are the ones who get something out of science experiments, I think? The kind of person who asks why fluoride and chloride have properties in common, and ends up inventing the periodic table.
The point here, to me, is that if we want school to work for people who are not double Ravenclaws, then we have to address both the "how" and the "why". Classical education has some gaping holes here, which the progressivists can legitimately contribute to filling, and Egan's suggestions (in my reading) touch much more on reaching people across both primary and secondary houses. Maybe Gryffindor primaries (intuitive "felt" morality) will be inspired more by the mythic and especially romantic, and Ravenclaw primaries more by the Philosophic, but they can all get something out of education in their own way.
However, a word of caution here. A big part of "modern science" includes areas where the ability to abstract and model formally is essential - the sort of thing that algebra and formal logic classes are useful for getting you started on. The hard part here is not the logic, but the level of abstraction involved. (Kids can reason logically just fine in domains they have interest and knowledge/experience in - to see this, just ask a 6-year old if a tyrannosaurus ever fought a triceratops.)
The subjects that need this abstraction include programming/comp sci for sure, most jobs with "data" or "machine learning" in the name, mathematics at university level, quant finance, and a lot of engineering. It's not a perfect overlap with STEM but it's close enough. The problem is to most people - even quite a few Ravenclaws (especially primaries), I'd guess - this is a profoundly unnatural and inhuman way of thinking about things. It can be learned and trained, but it's really hard to motivate. (The people who are naturally inclined to this are not a perfect overlap with autistic people, but again, close enough.) Why water in a pond in winter ends up freezing at the surface but stays around 4 degrees Celsius further down much longer, is a question with a lot of science behind it that's comparatively easy to make interesting. The scope of a variable in a recursive algorithm, not so much.
3.
And finally, a political grumble. The summary of The Core on the amazon page you linked to includes a lot of good arguments ("Without knowing the multiplication tables, children can't advance to algebra.", "Most curricula today follow a haphazard sampling of topics"). But it also dips its toe into tribalism by accusing these haphazard curricula of "a focus on political correctness instead of teaching students how to study". (I guess this was written before everyone was saying "woke".) To me, apart from being tribal, that misses the point of why I'm not on team "progressive". The problem for me is the "they don't teach students how to study" part. The focus on promoting some form of justice and equality - that's one of the things they get right! (At least in principle. There is no shortage of examples of cringeworthy bad implementations of this idea in practice.) Whenever someone tries to appeal to a conservative audience by saying that schooling today is "too much of a mess, and too woke", those are two separate dimensions. If you only focus on the second one, whatever your views on social justice, you won't build a better system - you'll just have a different kind of mess centered around the Bible or something.
Whether this problem is in the book or just in the review, I don't know - I haven't read the book yet but I'm going to buy a copy. But it's again a question of separating out the "why" from the "how" - whether you want to make your students become patriotic conservative citizens or anarchist progressive internationalists, might determine what content you put in your curriculum, but that's still a separate dimension from how you make your school engaging. If we could only treat the second question as a non-partisan one, we could get so much done.
Re: politics: yeah! I did my best to stay away from them in this situation (and will ask everyone else to do the same), but I’ll say that, for all politically progressive readers, one helpful thing to remember is that the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci was SUPER big into providing children classical education, because it cultivated critical thinking and cultural awareness that’d be necessary to transition to a classless society. So if imagining the politics of classical ed were flipped makes it easier to listen to its ideas, know that’s probably the case somewhere in the multiverse.
All of the things here (and more, actually) have been brewing around in my mind for quite a while. Years and years really. Finding the rabbit hole of Science is Weird, following it to an old tutoring post about WEAPONIZING ADHD, and then to The Lost Tools of Learning, and on and on, are things that have organically grown into a close semblance of what my homeschool "teaching" has become. To see it outloud and all together with additions of excellence...well... I am HERE for it. Some of the things are actually Waldorfy things. Waldorf 100% is not a very good fit for ND folk. Putting Geometry into art and the beginning, completely unaware, is a Waldorf gold star though. Physics IS geometry, in the end. I'll stop here. I'm gushing.
"Be honest: does it seem odd to you that she moves from “[s]cientists should learn to ask questions” to a list of types of volcanos to memorize?"
YES! This always drives me nuts.
I loved Ed Yong's An Immense World (https://amzn.to/3WGI4gq), and one thing I really appreciated about it was it didn't just catalogue animals unexpected senses (very cool), it tackled the EPISTEMOLOGICAL problem of studying senses we don't share.
One example that stuck in my mind—scientists can tape and play back audible birdcalls and see how birds react, but they were wondering about elephant communication, and wound up following around elephants, waiting for them to pee, digging up the pee filled dirt and basically chucking it on a wheelbarrow, then dumping it in the path of another elephant to see what they made of it!
When it comes to "three types of volcanos" I'm pretty curious about what features stood out/what problems classification solved for scientists/whether we knew about all three at once and why, etc.
Also, let me take a crack that the Pacific/volcanos riddle. I know the answer is about the plate tectonics/subduction zones, and I wonder if the riddling answer is something like—because the continents are invading and subduing the ocean, and the ocean is giving its death-cry through eruption.
Yeah! You mention epistemology, which makes me realize that one of the things that Yong is great at is using science to raise philosophical questions — which is the original POINT of science.
As for the Pacific volcanos riddle, it’s closer to the OPPOSITE, actually! Here’s a hint: https://tenor.com/sPGRS798d3Q.gif (And if you’d like the real answer, just message me.)
I've been thinking all year about how your substack shares a name with the Sayers essay, so I'm happy you finally got around to mentioning it. 😁 I haven't actually read it though.
I have always (at least since actually starting home educating) felt like it was too much trouble to be a classical educator. Even though I read Well Trained Mind before I had kids and thought it seemed theoretically perfect, the actual kids I had in front of me when I started homeschooling didn't seem well suited to it at all. My 6 yr old who was supposed to be a sponge for memorizing facts couldn't remember her address and my phone number, much less the dates of famous battles.
My favorite thing to do, especially when my kids were elementary age, was snuggle up and read aloud stacks of books, so many people suggested I should be a Charlotte Mason educator... But ultimately I'm bad at following any educational philosophy, forever confounding fellow homeschoolers I meet who thinks I should fit into one of the neat boxes you read about in the homeschool how-to books. 😁🤣😂
What I find extraordinary about classical education is how much mythology is used to prop it up, but also how much of that mythology seems to be deliberately hidden or occluded by its proponents. Classical educators in America, whether they want to be or not, are actually appealing to a form of classical education that was revived or retrieved by western imperialists in the late Middle Ages and early Modern Era. The idea that classically-trained students should learn Latin for Latin's sake and read Virgil and Homer because they're part of the "classical tradition" is a modern notion, not a classical one, and it owes its existence to the Eurocentric and imperialist worldview that created it. When ever I have met parents of a classically-educated student and I ask questions like "Why Latin in particular?" or "What's the connection between a 21st-century American and a 6th-century BC Greek?" they usually do some sort of rhetorical gymnastics to avoid saying what they're usually really thinking ("Because they're the best").
Christopher, how well am I restating you if I’m getting that originally, classical education had pragmatic goals — but when it was revived, its goals became quasi-mystical?
Classical education is ostensibly retrieving a pragmatic method from the ancient world but is actually constructing a new paradigm that has very little to do with what it refers to and has much more to do with upholding the sensibilities of a subset of the culture that values a romanticized view of Western civilization. Short summary: classical education is a dog whistle for Eurocentric, rad-trad, conventional education.
I'm very grateful for your viewpoint, Christopher. The other day, I asked Brandon whether I should have my son (from China) and my future son (from Taiwan) focus on Mandarin or Latin in their elementary years. I mentioned to him that I am currently reading Brent Pinkall's Redeeming the Six Arts: A Christian Approach to Chinese Classical Education, and Pinkall has given me hope that at least for non Western countries, classical education does not have to be Eurocentric. His focus is on a Christ centered education and learning from the sages of our own culture who point to truth. Since our own homeschool is Christ centered, our challenge is how to incorporate both Western and Eastern classics in the elementary stage since we live in the US but have ancestral ties to China. Also, your response reminds me of a podcast I listened to where a Mexican American guest mentioned she received a classical education in Texas as a child. During a field trip, several of her classmates were mocking the Mexican laborers they saw and expressing relief that they were not Mexican. I was appalled and wondered what in the world they were learning in their classical school.
Or what they were NOT learning. Some of the dark aspects of humanity are deep, and it's not enough for an education to merely avoid strengthening them — it needs to actively eradicate them. My hunch would be that this is one.
Could your 27th pattern, spiral history, be a start? Phillip Campbell, a Catholic history teacher, wrote a book on how to teach history at different ages, and that book convinced me to use Pandia Press that starts with the paleolithic times. There is no mention of Greece until the 14th unit. It allows my son to see humanity through a lens of what we have in common rather than our differences.
My sister lived in Beijing for thirteen years and raised her third culture children there. She wondered the same thing: should I teach my children Latin or Mandarin? In the end she taught them neither and they know bits of each.
I remember visiting, with my wife, one of her cousins and their family many years ago. And their kids were in a classical Christian educational setting. And the mom of the family trotted out the oldest two and they were made to recite the paragraphs-long poems that they had learned to remember the facts of American history. This is what they understood to be the "grammar" portion of the trivium. I was quietly appalled. The mom said to me something to the effect that she was pleased that she had found education that was "for us." And then I was even more appalled, because I understood her to mean that a natural throughline could be drawn from the Aegean and Italian cultures three millenia ago to the upper-middle-class northern European white American culture she inhabited. And if that "classical" culture was the "best," then it stood to reason that her culture was the best. And there really is just a short hop to be made from those suppositions to unfavorable comparisons about other cultures and other races, and, as I would extend something that Brandon has said below, then the education has not merely avoided strengthening the "dark aspects of humanity" but has actually supported them. It's not simply important that a classical education drop the idea that Greeks and Romans were the best. It must drop the idea that any one culture, including one's own, is the best.
>> “classical education… must drop the idea that any one culture, including one's own, is the best.”
Thanks for communicating so vividly how gross cultural supremacy can be. Ironically, if I have any resistance to what you’re saying, it’s that I experience it as an uncompromising cultural value — that’s to say, as the thing it’s trying to do away with! As an aspiring cultural pluralist, I think I have an acceptance of most culture’s pretensions to being the GOAT. Anyhow, we’re probably steering into dangerous waters for what an online comments section is able to contain.
Yes, I suppose that statement is susceptible as any pluralist statement if it is taken to mean that valuing many or all cultures is better than valuing one over another, but I do think one could take it to mean simply that any one particular culture, perhaps especially one's own, ought not to enter into a value comparison of other cultures with any arbitrary or self-evident positive biases. In other words, valuing all cultures equally doesn't necessarily follow from the premise that one culture is better than all the others. But I agree, perhaps this forum can't sustain the digression.
So you casually mentioned that there is a beta-testing of your HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM!! Can we be a part of this journey and how?! We already Science is weird with our 7.5 YO, but love the thought of more!!
Glad someone noticed the casual reference, just thrown in there! ;) I'm spending this week working on launching a Kickstarter to join the journey — look for that soon!
I… I don’t think I did! [grinning broadly, if a little nervously] Could you shoot me an email and be explicit as to what you’re talking about? (I don’t want to accidentally spoil anything here.)
> I’m not alone — historically, classical schools are famous for graduating people who say they found schooling horribly dull. (This was the grounds for Progressive reformers to create the “practical” curriculum that de-emphasized academic content.)
However, those graduates did in fact turn out well educated, certainly much better than what we have now.
I had three reactions to this, and the order that I had them in probably tells you something important about me. First, I thought: yes, absolutely, because classical education is more restrained in its goals. (Classical goals like “learn good handwriting” and “be familiar with the ancient Greeks” are easier than “help kids find their passion”.) Then, I thought: I’d love to see good data on this… because my bias is definitely toward classical ed. And then, I thought, hey wait, what definition of “well educated” are we using?
That last one is the most Egan of those reactions. He’d point out that part of the difficulty of arguing education is that progressivism and traditionalism have different goals. A progressivist might look at graduates of a classical education and say, wow, no, they’re uneducated in everything that matters: they’ve been so busy studying the ancient world that they don’t understand anything about their local context, they’ve been so busy aping the “proper” way to do handwriting that their own desire to create has been squashed, etc. (This is what Montaigne was pointing at when he spoke of “asses loaded with books”.)
Of course, we could hypothesize that when you compare graduates from both traditionalist and progressivist education, the traditionalists are STILL more creative, more interested in their local environments, and so forth.
And my suspicion is that that’s true. But actually determining it would require a bunch of difficult studies. (How DOES one properly measure “creativity”? There are many who try, but should we have faith that their numbers mean much? Egan thought not.) Then, we’d need to suss out how much of the outcome came from the schooling versus from genes and parenting.
It was for reasons like this that Egan was so closed to ed psychology. This was a mistake (probably his greatest), but it’s important, at least, to recognize that he was right to be suspicious of simple statements about which kinds of education are better.
(That this was my third reaction tells you that I’ve yet to fully internalize this message.)
Hi there. I don’t often get a chance to comment but I really appreciate this post, and your whole blog. I was semi-classically homeschooled myself and have studied classical ed a little bit in my academic research as well. (I have a PhD in philosophy of education.) I’ve landed on something of a “two cheers for classical ed” position, for some of the same reasons and some different ones.
I wish I could comment/contribute more often. This project is very exciting to me, especially as I start to think about my own son’s education. (At eleven months, he’s a major reason I can’t engage more here!) I’ll be on the lookout for the Kickstarter, at least! Onwards!
Having not read Egan beyond your writings and appearances, my interior map of the Triuvium / Wings split was "verified/validated by words in a particular form."
And the degenerate habits of industrial schooling come from compressing to narrower and narrower channels for that v/v process to accommodate scale?
You have a Euler diagram called the Trivium in section four, representing the Grammar/Logic/Rhetoric pillars of classical education pillars.
Then later in section 5, you have another chart of 5 rectangles (I assume representing some of Egan's categorizations) showing the Mythic/Romantic/Philosophic center colored in.
Your line under that, "In place of this, classical ed just has the Trivium." I read as a comparison between the thought patterns and habits expressed in the Trivium with the M/R/P. I was referring to the two blank rectangles in that chart as the "Wings."
Later in the article, you fill out the "left wing" of the rectangle document with Somatic. I read this as an implication that these Egan categories are not adequetly represented within the core conception of Classic Education. I assume there is also another component that completes the other "wing" of that chart, and provides another set of learning habits that are somehow skew/orthogonal from the Trivium.
I may be misinterpreting the content here, and appreciate the corrections.
Love this post! My wife and I were actually just checking out Classical Conversations this week, and we had some similar reservations.
A note on games: I've used (for example) Kahoot! quizzes in a few different classes, both as a student and as a TA. They're actually pretty useful as a quick assessment tool. It can help you figure out if a class actually understands what's going on without needing to call on every person individually.
But as a study tool, I agree that gamification doesn't really work. To quote my favorite essay ever, _The Weight of Glory_ by C.S. Lewis:
"There are different kinds of rewards. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things... The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation."
Lewis mostly was interested in how we think about heaven when he wrote this, but I think his insight applies equally to education. The proper reward for studying a subject well is that you eventually understand and enjoy it. Shifting the focus of a class to some unrelated game risks undermining that proper reward.
However, Lewis continues with an example that is directly related to classical education:
"An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly a proper, and not a mercenary, reward for learning Greek; but only those who have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience that this is so. The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles... He has to begin by working for marks, or to escape punishment, or to please his parents, or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire."
Lewis himself was, of course, classically educated. So I'm assuming this last sentence accurately depicts the way that most classical educators think about motivation (or at least did historically - it may have changed in the last hundred years). Namely, making education more interesting for students is nice sometimes, but it's more important for students to learn the discipline to study a subject for months or even years before they receive any real payoff. And in the long run, the effort they put in will be worth it.
I think you (and Egan) would disagree with this. I've never tried to learn Greek, but I can quickly think of some easy ways to incorporate Egan's tools - e.g., illustrating vocabulary words using stories from Greek mythology.
It sounds like the main difference between you and someone like Leigh Bortins is that you would rework the whole curriculum to center around the stories, where she would just toss them in occasionally for a bit of flavor. Does that sound right?
> “It sounds like the main difference between you and someone like Leigh Bortins is that you would rework the whole curriculum to center around the stories, where she would just toss them in occasionally for a bit of flavor. Does that sound right?”
Good clarifying question. I’ll give the answer in two parts:
(1) Yes, and I remember how confused I was when I discovered that CC’s elementary school history curriculum lacks stories. (Like: hiSTORY, it’s right there in the name!) Instead they do dates and sentences — albeit memorized through a song, which is cool. (Pivoting from 🧙♂️STORY seemed so weird to me that I doubted this memory for years, but according to a sympathetic review I found online — tinyurl.com/2cveus86 — it’s true.)
(2) I’ve learned a little Greek, and I’d say that I wouldn’t necessarily teach the vocabulary using stories from Greek mythology. One of the temptations, when learning about these tools, is to just pump in more and more of them into teaching, even when something simpler would be more effective. But as Miyamoto Musashi said, “the primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy”, and the primary thing when you consider the tools is your intention to help someone understand. (This is actually a fail state of Eganism. We should probably come up with a 🧙♂️NAME for it!)
Lewis elaborates this whole approach to motivation in an excellent and vastly under appreciated little essay, “The Parthenon and the Optative.”
Ah, that's one of his few essays that I haven't read!
I can't find the full essay online, but from John Piper's review it sounds perfect for the subject of this post:
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/c-s-lewis-the-dinosaur-the-parthenon-and-the-optative
"Ever since then I have tended to use the Parthenon and the Optative as the symbols of two types of education. The one begins with hard, dry things like grammar, and dates, and prosody; and it has at least a chance of ending in a real appreciation which is equally hard and firm though not equally dry. The other begins in “Appreciation” and ends in gush."
Yes, that's a very representative quote! The full essay (and it's really only maybe 4 pages) is in the collection On Stories, if you have access to that.
There’s ALWAYS more Lewis to read, isn’t there? (And I say this as someone who has read “God in the Dock” and “Pilgrim’s Regress” in high school…) Anyhow, just put a hold at my library.
Yes, yes there is. :D And always a Lewis reading for whatever topic you’re thinking about!
There's so much to like here!
1.
In a lot of myths and stories, knowing someone or something's real name gives you power over them. Naming things is a form of magic spell! The Bible is quite big on this too, from Genesis 2:20 "And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field" to Exodus 3:14 where Moses asks the Lord's name and gets the famous "I am that I am" back - one, admittedly unorthodox interpretation of this is that the Lord is not willing to share his true name with Moses, because magic. And in Jewish culture, the four-letter name is not spoken these days but paraphrased as HaShem (literally: The Name) out of respect. So yes, names matter.
(I think it was Scott Alexander who said when he was a child and learnt some Japanese words, he asked "Why don't the Japanese call things by their true names?")
2.
If I had to choose between a full-on classical educator and a full-on "progressivist" as State Director of Education, I'd probably vote for the former, in the hope that then at least some children would learn something in school.
But that's just projecting everything down to one dimension. Just like politics doesn't live on the single axis from liberal to conservative - some models measure economic and social liberalism/conservatism separately, for example (which at least gets you that libertarians are a separate cluster in 2D space).
Since this is a serious discussion on education, it's time to mention one of my favourite Harry Potter fan pages - which came up in the back of my mind even before you said "Classical education just works for Ravenclaws". It's the "sortinghatchats" model where you are sorted into two houses: your primary is why you do things (Ravenclaw: because systems, Hufflepuff: because people, Gryffindor: because honour, Slytherin: because loyalty) and your secondary is how (Gryffindors charge, Ravenclaws plan, Hufflepuffs toil, Slytherins scheme/improvise). The primary/secondary distinction doesn't mean one is more important than the other, just that we have a 2-dimensional model and we needed names for the axes.
In this model, Ravenclaw secondaries are the ones who like lists and facts and would get most ecstatic at the thought of Learning in Depth, whereas Ravenclaw primaries are the ones who get something out of science experiments, I think? The kind of person who asks why fluoride and chloride have properties in common, and ends up inventing the periodic table.
The point here, to me, is that if we want school to work for people who are not double Ravenclaws, then we have to address both the "how" and the "why". Classical education has some gaping holes here, which the progressivists can legitimately contribute to filling, and Egan's suggestions (in my reading) touch much more on reaching people across both primary and secondary houses. Maybe Gryffindor primaries (intuitive "felt" morality) will be inspired more by the mythic and especially romantic, and Ravenclaw primaries more by the Philosophic, but they can all get something out of education in their own way.
However, a word of caution here. A big part of "modern science" includes areas where the ability to abstract and model formally is essential - the sort of thing that algebra and formal logic classes are useful for getting you started on. The hard part here is not the logic, but the level of abstraction involved. (Kids can reason logically just fine in domains they have interest and knowledge/experience in - to see this, just ask a 6-year old if a tyrannosaurus ever fought a triceratops.)
The subjects that need this abstraction include programming/comp sci for sure, most jobs with "data" or "machine learning" in the name, mathematics at university level, quant finance, and a lot of engineering. It's not a perfect overlap with STEM but it's close enough. The problem is to most people - even quite a few Ravenclaws (especially primaries), I'd guess - this is a profoundly unnatural and inhuman way of thinking about things. It can be learned and trained, but it's really hard to motivate. (The people who are naturally inclined to this are not a perfect overlap with autistic people, but again, close enough.) Why water in a pond in winter ends up freezing at the surface but stays around 4 degrees Celsius further down much longer, is a question with a lot of science behind it that's comparatively easy to make interesting. The scope of a variable in a recursive algorithm, not so much.
3.
And finally, a political grumble. The summary of The Core on the amazon page you linked to includes a lot of good arguments ("Without knowing the multiplication tables, children can't advance to algebra.", "Most curricula today follow a haphazard sampling of topics"). But it also dips its toe into tribalism by accusing these haphazard curricula of "a focus on political correctness instead of teaching students how to study". (I guess this was written before everyone was saying "woke".) To me, apart from being tribal, that misses the point of why I'm not on team "progressive". The problem for me is the "they don't teach students how to study" part. The focus on promoting some form of justice and equality - that's one of the things they get right! (At least in principle. There is no shortage of examples of cringeworthy bad implementations of this idea in practice.) Whenever someone tries to appeal to a conservative audience by saying that schooling today is "too much of a mess, and too woke", those are two separate dimensions. If you only focus on the second one, whatever your views on social justice, you won't build a better system - you'll just have a different kind of mess centered around the Bible or something.
Whether this problem is in the book or just in the review, I don't know - I haven't read the book yet but I'm going to buy a copy. But it's again a question of separating out the "why" from the "how" - whether you want to make your students become patriotic conservative citizens or anarchist progressive internationalists, might determine what content you put in your curriculum, but that's still a separate dimension from how you make your school engaging. If we could only treat the second question as a non-partisan one, we could get so much done.
Re: politics: yeah! I did my best to stay away from them in this situation (and will ask everyone else to do the same), but I’ll say that, for all politically progressive readers, one helpful thing to remember is that the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci was SUPER big into providing children classical education, because it cultivated critical thinking and cultural awareness that’d be necessary to transition to a classless society. So if imagining the politics of classical ed were flipped makes it easier to listen to its ideas, know that’s probably the case somewhere in the multiverse.
All of the things here (and more, actually) have been brewing around in my mind for quite a while. Years and years really. Finding the rabbit hole of Science is Weird, following it to an old tutoring post about WEAPONIZING ADHD, and then to The Lost Tools of Learning, and on and on, are things that have organically grown into a close semblance of what my homeschool "teaching" has become. To see it outloud and all together with additions of excellence...well... I am HERE for it. Some of the things are actually Waldorfy things. Waldorf 100% is not a very good fit for ND folk. Putting Geometry into art and the beginning, completely unaware, is a Waldorf gold star though. Physics IS geometry, in the end. I'll stop here. I'm gushing.
"Be honest: does it seem odd to you that she moves from “[s]cientists should learn to ask questions” to a list of types of volcanos to memorize?"
YES! This always drives me nuts.
I loved Ed Yong's An Immense World (https://amzn.to/3WGI4gq), and one thing I really appreciated about it was it didn't just catalogue animals unexpected senses (very cool), it tackled the EPISTEMOLOGICAL problem of studying senses we don't share.
One example that stuck in my mind—scientists can tape and play back audible birdcalls and see how birds react, but they were wondering about elephant communication, and wound up following around elephants, waiting for them to pee, digging up the pee filled dirt and basically chucking it on a wheelbarrow, then dumping it in the path of another elephant to see what they made of it!
When it comes to "three types of volcanos" I'm pretty curious about what features stood out/what problems classification solved for scientists/whether we knew about all three at once and why, etc.
Also, let me take a crack that the Pacific/volcanos riddle. I know the answer is about the plate tectonics/subduction zones, and I wonder if the riddling answer is something like—because the continents are invading and subduing the ocean, and the ocean is giving its death-cry through eruption.
Yeah! You mention epistemology, which makes me realize that one of the things that Yong is great at is using science to raise philosophical questions — which is the original POINT of science.
As for the Pacific volcanos riddle, it’s closer to the OPPOSITE, actually! Here’s a hint: https://tenor.com/sPGRS798d3Q.gif (And if you’d like the real answer, just message me.)
I've been thinking all year about how your substack shares a name with the Sayers essay, so I'm happy you finally got around to mentioning it. 😁 I haven't actually read it though.
I have always (at least since actually starting home educating) felt like it was too much trouble to be a classical educator. Even though I read Well Trained Mind before I had kids and thought it seemed theoretically perfect, the actual kids I had in front of me when I started homeschooling didn't seem well suited to it at all. My 6 yr old who was supposed to be a sponge for memorizing facts couldn't remember her address and my phone number, much less the dates of famous battles.
My favorite thing to do, especially when my kids were elementary age, was snuggle up and read aloud stacks of books, so many people suggested I should be a Charlotte Mason educator... But ultimately I'm bad at following any educational philosophy, forever confounding fellow homeschoolers I meet who thinks I should fit into one of the neat boxes you read about in the homeschool how-to books. 😁🤣😂
What I find extraordinary about classical education is how much mythology is used to prop it up, but also how much of that mythology seems to be deliberately hidden or occluded by its proponents. Classical educators in America, whether they want to be or not, are actually appealing to a form of classical education that was revived or retrieved by western imperialists in the late Middle Ages and early Modern Era. The idea that classically-trained students should learn Latin for Latin's sake and read Virgil and Homer because they're part of the "classical tradition" is a modern notion, not a classical one, and it owes its existence to the Eurocentric and imperialist worldview that created it. When ever I have met parents of a classically-educated student and I ask questions like "Why Latin in particular?" or "What's the connection between a 21st-century American and a 6th-century BC Greek?" they usually do some sort of rhetorical gymnastics to avoid saying what they're usually really thinking ("Because they're the best").
Christopher, how well am I restating you if I’m getting that originally, classical education had pragmatic goals — but when it was revived, its goals became quasi-mystical?
Classical education is ostensibly retrieving a pragmatic method from the ancient world but is actually constructing a new paradigm that has very little to do with what it refers to and has much more to do with upholding the sensibilities of a subset of the culture that values a romanticized view of Western civilization. Short summary: classical education is a dog whistle for Eurocentric, rad-trad, conventional education.
I'm very grateful for your viewpoint, Christopher. The other day, I asked Brandon whether I should have my son (from China) and my future son (from Taiwan) focus on Mandarin or Latin in their elementary years. I mentioned to him that I am currently reading Brent Pinkall's Redeeming the Six Arts: A Christian Approach to Chinese Classical Education, and Pinkall has given me hope that at least for non Western countries, classical education does not have to be Eurocentric. His focus is on a Christ centered education and learning from the sages of our own culture who point to truth. Since our own homeschool is Christ centered, our challenge is how to incorporate both Western and Eastern classics in the elementary stage since we live in the US but have ancestral ties to China. Also, your response reminds me of a podcast I listened to where a Mexican American guest mentioned she received a classical education in Texas as a child. During a field trip, several of her classmates were mocking the Mexican laborers they saw and expressing relief that they were not Mexican. I was appalled and wondered what in the world they were learning in their classical school.
Or what they were NOT learning. Some of the dark aspects of humanity are deep, and it's not enough for an education to merely avoid strengthening them — it needs to actively eradicate them. My hunch would be that this is one.
Could your 27th pattern, spiral history, be a start? Phillip Campbell, a Catholic history teacher, wrote a book on how to teach history at different ages, and that book convinced me to use Pandia Press that starts with the paleolithic times. There is no mention of Greece until the 14th unit. It allows my son to see humanity through a lens of what we have in common rather than our differences.
My sister lived in Beijing for thirteen years and raised her third culture children there. She wondered the same thing: should I teach my children Latin or Mandarin? In the end she taught them neither and they know bits of each.
I remember visiting, with my wife, one of her cousins and their family many years ago. And their kids were in a classical Christian educational setting. And the mom of the family trotted out the oldest two and they were made to recite the paragraphs-long poems that they had learned to remember the facts of American history. This is what they understood to be the "grammar" portion of the trivium. I was quietly appalled. The mom said to me something to the effect that she was pleased that she had found education that was "for us." And then I was even more appalled, because I understood her to mean that a natural throughline could be drawn from the Aegean and Italian cultures three millenia ago to the upper-middle-class northern European white American culture she inhabited. And if that "classical" culture was the "best," then it stood to reason that her culture was the best. And there really is just a short hop to be made from those suppositions to unfavorable comparisons about other cultures and other races, and, as I would extend something that Brandon has said below, then the education has not merely avoided strengthening the "dark aspects of humanity" but has actually supported them. It's not simply important that a classical education drop the idea that Greeks and Romans were the best. It must drop the idea that any one culture, including one's own, is the best.
>> “classical education… must drop the idea that any one culture, including one's own, is the best.”
Thanks for communicating so vividly how gross cultural supremacy can be. Ironically, if I have any resistance to what you’re saying, it’s that I experience it as an uncompromising cultural value — that’s to say, as the thing it’s trying to do away with! As an aspiring cultural pluralist, I think I have an acceptance of most culture’s pretensions to being the GOAT. Anyhow, we’re probably steering into dangerous waters for what an online comments section is able to contain.
Yes, I suppose that statement is susceptible as any pluralist statement if it is taken to mean that valuing many or all cultures is better than valuing one over another, but I do think one could take it to mean simply that any one particular culture, perhaps especially one's own, ought not to enter into a value comparison of other cultures with any arbitrary or self-evident positive biases. In other words, valuing all cultures equally doesn't necessarily follow from the premise that one culture is better than all the others. But I agree, perhaps this forum can't sustain the digression.
So you casually mentioned that there is a beta-testing of your HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM!! Can we be a part of this journey and how?! We already Science is weird with our 7.5 YO, but love the thought of more!!
Glad someone noticed the casual reference, just thrown in there! ;) I'm spending this week working on launching a Kickstarter to join the journey — look for that soon!
Super!
How can the last one be a mistery if you spoiled it in the image right before it, my man?
I… I don’t think I did! [grinning broadly, if a little nervously] Could you shoot me an email and be explicit as to what you’re talking about? (I don’t want to accidentally spoil anything here.)
The image just before "In place of this, classical ed just has the Trivium." has the final one of the five boxes filled in.
Ha! Fixed.
> I’m not alone — historically, classical schools are famous for graduating people who say they found schooling horribly dull. (This was the grounds for Progressive reformers to create the “practical” curriculum that de-emphasized academic content.)
However, those graduates did in fact turn out well educated, certainly much better than what we have now.
I had three reactions to this, and the order that I had them in probably tells you something important about me. First, I thought: yes, absolutely, because classical education is more restrained in its goals. (Classical goals like “learn good handwriting” and “be familiar with the ancient Greeks” are easier than “help kids find their passion”.) Then, I thought: I’d love to see good data on this… because my bias is definitely toward classical ed. And then, I thought, hey wait, what definition of “well educated” are we using?
That last one is the most Egan of those reactions. He’d point out that part of the difficulty of arguing education is that progressivism and traditionalism have different goals. A progressivist might look at graduates of a classical education and say, wow, no, they’re uneducated in everything that matters: they’ve been so busy studying the ancient world that they don’t understand anything about their local context, they’ve been so busy aping the “proper” way to do handwriting that their own desire to create has been squashed, etc. (This is what Montaigne was pointing at when he spoke of “asses loaded with books”.)
Of course, we could hypothesize that when you compare graduates from both traditionalist and progressivist education, the traditionalists are STILL more creative, more interested in their local environments, and so forth.
And my suspicion is that that’s true. But actually determining it would require a bunch of difficult studies. (How DOES one properly measure “creativity”? There are many who try, but should we have faith that their numbers mean much? Egan thought not.) Then, we’d need to suss out how much of the outcome came from the schooling versus from genes and parenting.
It was for reasons like this that Egan was so closed to ed psychology. This was a mistake (probably his greatest), but it’s important, at least, to recognize that he was right to be suspicious of simple statements about which kinds of education are better.
(That this was my third reaction tells you that I’ve yet to fully internalize this message.)
Hi there. I don’t often get a chance to comment but I really appreciate this post, and your whole blog. I was semi-classically homeschooled myself and have studied classical ed a little bit in my academic research as well. (I have a PhD in philosophy of education.) I’ve landed on something of a “two cheers for classical ed” position, for some of the same reasons and some different ones.
I wish I could comment/contribute more often. This project is very exciting to me, especially as I start to think about my own son’s education. (At eleven months, he’s a major reason I can’t engage more here!) I’ll be on the lookout for the Kickstarter, at least! Onwards!
Having not read Egan beyond your writings and appearances, my interior map of the Triuvium / Wings split was "verified/validated by words in a particular form."
And the degenerate habits of industrial schooling come from compressing to narrower and narrower channels for that v/v process to accommodate scale?
My apologies for being thick: what do you mean by the “Trivium / Wings split”?
You have a Euler diagram called the Trivium in section four, representing the Grammar/Logic/Rhetoric pillars of classical education pillars.
Then later in section 5, you have another chart of 5 rectangles (I assume representing some of Egan's categorizations) showing the Mythic/Romantic/Philosophic center colored in.
Your line under that, "In place of this, classical ed just has the Trivium." I read as a comparison between the thought patterns and habits expressed in the Trivium with the M/R/P. I was referring to the two blank rectangles in that chart as the "Wings."
Later in the article, you fill out the "left wing" of the rectangle document with Somatic. I read this as an implication that these Egan categories are not adequetly represented within the core conception of Classic Education. I assume there is also another component that completes the other "wing" of that chart, and provides another set of learning habits that are somehow skew/orthogonal from the Trivium.
I may be misinterpreting the content here, and appreciate the corrections.