We continue our conversation on Trivium Method of learning:
Grammar - who, what, when, where
Logic - why
Rhetoric - how
Today we break the surface on a dive into the history of education in the United States.
My goal is to communicate the necessity of orderly thought so that we can avoid getting snagged up on any one of innumerable lies out in the world, and as a blessed secondary result, also learn how to have more effective conversations about the truth. What I am not trying to do is idealize some "good old days" way of teaching (a logical fallacy called "appeal to history") or disparage public school as a whole (another logical fallacy called a "sweeping generalization") or shame those who attend or teach within that system. This is not a duel: “public school vs. some more enlightened method"; we’re exploring what has been removed from all of us - via noble intentions or otherwise - and what we can do individually to supplement.
I could use the analogy of a healthy gut flora. We have natural immune and digestive systems, but when our diet turned to processed foods and factory farming - even though the intent may have been “noble” (feed more people more efficiently and at a lower cost), we exchanged vital nutrients with additives, chemicals and fillers, and many of us now need to take vitamins and digestive enzymes to supplement.
That being said, I’m going Meta here, to exercise the Trivium within a series of posts on the Trivium. Thus, here we go with a bit of Grammar.
PRO DEO: A PROTESTANT UTOPIA
In our previous post, we touched briefly on the history of the Trivium, and really, the origins of Western education/systematized thinking itself, in the early Anno Domini centuries of Europe. I’m skipping a lot of history for now: let’s leap to the 1600’s, when groups of Protestant Europeans were leaving their countries for North America in search of religious freedom.
To recap, when Rome fell, the Trivium/Quadrivium-based Greco-Roman Paideia educational model was preserved in monasteries, and what rose from the ashes of a crumbled civilization was an educational system with Christian morals and theology as part of the curriculum. Notably, part of the great church Reformation was also educational reform (more on that later...). When religious persecution became unbearable in Europe, it was a sect of Reformers - aka Puritans - who came to North America seeking refuge and a new life built upon the principles in which they believed.
As settlements and an economy grew in New England, other Europeans came for opportunity. However, this new wave of immigrants was not necessarily Puritan, which didn’t just mean they did not have (“the proper”) Christian values, but also that most of them were lower class servants and apprentices who had little to no formal education at all.
A concern grew that these folk would not make very capable citizens. To help raise the civil standard for all colonists, in 1642 a law was passed in Massachusetts stating that the head of the household was required to provide instruction in reading, religion, and civil law to anyone under their charge: children as well as hired hands.
This proved to be burdensome to many working households, so in 1647, it was mandated that every community with at least 50 households hire a teacher for reading and writing, and that if your community had over 150 households, arithmetic was added. Note that most schoolmasters at that time were usually Protestant ministers, so religion was naturally instilled into the education.
Higher educational institutions such as secondary schools were established, and in 1636 Harvard College opened to train Puritan leaders for church and state offices. These schools trained students in the following:
Greek and Latin classics
Western History and Literature
Advanced arithmetic
Specialized occupational training
Finishing schools for young ladies opened, teaching:
Handwriting
French
Music
Dance
Needlework
Over the next century, classical education was flourishing in the colonies with the additional colleges, which added the following to curriculum:
Theology
Astronomy
Physics
Ancient world history
Modern history
Politics
I point out the subjects taught so you can see the shift that occurs next...
PRO PATRIA: THE NOBLE CITIZEN
It is now the mid-1800’s, and the immigrant population has increased to 2.5 million. Education reformers arose due to what they perceived as class differences growing in the United States. These reformers advocated tuition-free “common schools.” The schools would be compulsory, as they believed that this type of equality was essential for educating citizens in a democracy.
With the focus on equality and citizenship, schools shifted away from religious teachings to civic obligations. There was a resistance movement in Massachusetts by an estimated 80% of the population. The last outpost in Cape Cod finally succumbed in 1880 under militia force. With the governmental success of every state finally ratifying compulsory common schools, other problems arose: with so many public schools, qualified teachers did not meet the demand. There was also a massive debate over whether secondary schools should be focused on higher education (college prep) or vocation.
In 1918, the US Department of Education released a bulletin called “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education,” in which the shift was clearly away from Trivium-based classical learning (considered college prep) to the following:
Health
Command of fundamental processes
Worthy home membership
Vocation
Civic Education
Worth use of leisure
Ethical character
See the difference in curriculum? Here’s a telling quote from the bulletin:
“Education in the United States should be guided by a clear conception of democracy. The purpose of democracy is to so organize society so that each member may develop his personality primarily though activities designed for well-being of his fellow members and of society as a whole...education in a democracy, within and without the school, should develop in each individual the knowledge, interests, ideals, habits, and power whereby he will find his place and use that place to shape both himself and society toward even nobler ends.”
There is a noble tone to the paragraph above, and fundamentally, the subject matters laid out in the DoE’s bulletin seem reasonable, as it is valuable to learn how to function in society. But as the history of education in the US marches forward, it becomes clear that training a child toward “nobler ends” depends on what the government decides is noble, as opposed to the individual, or - as I’m sure all families have learned through experience - the parents.
A CHRISTIAN QUASI-LIBERTARIAN CONFESSION
Full disclosure: during this wave of research, I started with a book about the Trivium and the history of modern education from a Christian homeschooling perspective. The author naturally argued for the importance of taking back the power of our children’s education, basing it on our familial and religious worldview which, as we see above, has become secondary at best to a sociopolitical one. As a Christian and quasi-libertarian (for lack of better label) myself, I floated down the river of her narrative with ease.
However, I ran into some, as we canoeists say, “sweepers and strainers” downstream, when I read non-religious sources, and found that some of this woman’s data, while still being factual, was being spun as positive to support her thesis, while these other authors were using that same data to prove the downside of religious-based education in the US (and I admit, some of what I read disturbed me). I needed to be unbiased to really think clearly here and get to the heart of the matter of my thesis: how and why we’ve lost the basic training in critical thinking, and what to do about it now.
Basically this dilemma forced me to go further back in time and it gets more interesting deeper down the dive indeed! I will share more of the story as I piece it together...but in the meantime, let me just say this:
My point is not that we are lost because we don’t know something like Latin anymore...although many of our English words and meanings come from Latin and etymology is very useful for grasping the true definition of a word.
My point is not that we are lost because we don’t all attend a Christian school...although when schooling was at home or under the tutelage of a pastor, Bible study was naturally part of the curriculum that blended seamlessly with the rest of education, as opposed to something that was compartmentalized and reduced to only an hour on Sunday.
Part of my point IS that elite schools DO still teach a Trivium-based education, which promotes critical thinking as individualism, while the public schools have shifted to the “Cardinal Principles”, which promotes civil obedience as subordination, and there certainly is a disparity there. If you wonder why lawyers, politicians, and powerful talking heads who graduated from these top schools can run rhetorical circles around you, it’s not because they are fundamentally smarter.
The good news is that, especially these days with so much information available, we can teach ourselves nearly anything we want. THIS is why the Trivium is so important: because learning can be convoluted if you don’t have a clear system of processing it and the ability to research critically. Harkening back to our food analogy, let’s drink our Trivium kombucha - build that good bacteria to keep us immune from the fake sound bites of heavily processed media.
More to come...
Here’s some teaser topics I want to explore: anyone interested?
Martin Luther as a founder of modern education!? (Did he help or hinder?)
Plato reveals the secret to the downfall of civilization to his pupils (and they implement it!)
Total Quality Management and Outcome Based Education (Gee, sound fun kids!?)
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