Scholarly education?

[Renarax]

Hello
Sorry I didn’t know where to put this but I’ve been wondering. Back during the renaissance Up to the Victorian age, what did a royal person, or noble, or a religious scholar have to study (apart from Latin) to be “learned”

I think the 20th century focused a lot about education to get jobs and that is good . . . In a way, but I feel the 500 year period before it was much more culturally rich (back when most higher education institutions were Christian in Europe)

 

[on_the_hill]

Hello
Sorry I didn’t know where to put this but I’ve been wondering. Back during the renaissance Up to the Victorian age, what did a royal person, or noble, or a religious scholar have to study (apart from Latin) to be “learned”

I think the 20th century focused a lot about education to get jobs and that is good . . . In a way, but I feel the 500 year period before it was much more culturally rich (back when most higher education institutions were Christian in Europe)

Probably a version of what we call a Classical Education: Latin, Greek, History, Law, Grammar, Science, Math, the subjects that have capital letters, in a way that integrates them into a progression of rote, questioning, analyzing, logic, debating.

How do I know this? Because only this morning a colleague and I were discussing the Classical education program in which she has enrolled her children.

 

[PaulfromIowa]

Classical Education included the seven liberal arts; comprised of the Trivium, grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the Quadrivium, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

 

[1ke]

Two books I recommend for you are Those Terrible Middle Ages and Women in the Days of the Cathedrals, both by Regine Pernoud.

 

[EasterJoy]

Well, not quite.

Let us say you are studying in 1500. You can’t study Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is still writing it. You can’t study anything about cultures in the New World or Indonesia, because no one knows anything about it yet. You can’t know anything about the structure of the atom, because that won’t really be understood until the 20th century, and the same goes for the real meat of astronomy as it is known now. The Dead Sea Scrolls? What are the Dead Sea Scrolls? Those weren’t discovered until after 1945. What would Dr William Harvey and Gilbert North have given, if they had the information about Stonehenge that was just published in just the last few years!

The scholars of even a 100 years ago would have thought they had died and gone to Heaven, if they had been able to know the things that anyone with an internet connection can learn now without ever buying a book.

There has never been a better time to be a scholar than right now. The Catholic Church gave us universities, and that gift to humanity is bearing fruit right now as never before. You just have to go out and gather it in. The only question is where to start, because no one can ever think they’ll come close to knowing the first fraction of all of it, not ever again.

 

[Contra_Mundum_1]

The kind of education you are talking about you will not get at schools. These days ‘education’ mostly means some kind of vocational training the purpose of which is to get a job. Universities are the same. Sure, some people study literature and the classics, etc. but most of the time people get degrees that are about getting a job.

I am considering all possible ways to incorporate aspects of a classical education with the limited material my children will be taught at school. I have no courage to home-school, but if I did, I would do a classical curriculum all the way.

 

[EasterJoy]

The kind of education you are talking about you will not get at schools. These days ‘education’ mostly means some kind of vocational training the purpose of which is to get a job. Universities are the same. Sure, some people study literature and the classics, etc. but most of the time people get degrees that are about getting a job.

I am considering all possible ways to incorporate aspects of a classical education with the limited material my children will be taught at school. I have no courage to home-school, but if I did, I would do a classical curriculum all the way.

Even so, a classical education is more easily obtained now than ever before. I know a middle-school aged student who learned Latin online, even though neither of her parents knew Latin. Who could afford a private Latin tutor?

 

[Contra_Mundum_1]

Even so, a classical education is more easily obtained now than ever before. I know a middle-school aged student who learned Latin online, even though neither of her parents knew Latin. Who could afford a private Latin tutor?

In some respects you are right: material is available in ways that were not in the past, and that is great. But the general state of education, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries and those that follow their example is beyond dire. Everything caters to the lowest point denominator.
It is a few individuals who have such interests that can pursue them on their own initiative - like the kid from the above example, or kids whose parents desire a different approach to education that end up being exposed to the classical way. So once again, education is something for the elite, for a select few, while the masses are stuck with something mediocre at best. Kids get the basics that is followed by a vocational training (what most people do in college) and then a job.

I was lucky enough that in my home country classical education principles are still followed in primary and secondary education.It is now when I see how things are elsewhere that I truly appreciate what I got, and am determined to give my children the best that I can.

 

[without]

There are a lot of great books programs out there. The University of Chicago created a program that is the model for most of them. St John’s College sjc.edu/ is perhaps the best example.

I attend the Santa Fe campus - you start reading from the ancients, learn a little Athenian Greek and all of your conversations in class are limited to the books and ideas that have been covered to that point.

Euclid - Ptolemy - Copernicus - Newton for example gets you to Calculus.

 

[EasterJoy]

In some respects you are right: material is available in ways that were not in the past, and that is great. But the general state of education, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries and those that follow their example is beyond dire. Everything caters to the lowest point denominator.
It is a few individuals who have such interests that can pursue them on their own initiative - like the kid from the above example, or kids whose parents desire a different approach to education that end up being exposed to the classical way. So once again, education is something for the elite, for a select few, while the masses are stuck with something mediocre at best. Kids get the basics that is followed by a vocational training (what most people do in college) and then a job.

I was lucky enough that in my home country classical education principles are still followed in primary and secondary education.It is now when I see how things are elsewhere that I truly appreciate what I got, and am determined to give my children the best that I can.

You are right: Parents cannot go on auto-pilot, send their children to public schools, and expect a superior result. Some will get it by doing that, but that is not the way to bet.

With regards to becoming adept at using technology and learning to adopt new technologies as they come up, this is a set of skills not in the classical education that absolutely have to be mastered. A person who does not learn to do this is going to be at a great disadvantage when trying to avail themselves of the materials and methods available for lifelong scholarship. An educated person of 1900 could learn how to research the literature once, and they were set for life. An educated person of 2000 and later will have to accept learning and relearning research technologies continually over his or her lifetime as part of what is expected in a fully educated person. (There is no way, for instance, that anyone ought to get beyond 6th grade without having been taught keyboarding.)

 

[Contra_Mundum_1]

With regards to becoming adept at using technology and learning to adopt new technologies as they come up, this is a set of skills not in the classical education that absolutely have to be mastered.

Please don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against technology and what it allows us to have.

I am very much against current ideologies of education that are popular in the west.

It is these ideologies that have shaped the school systems. The foundation is all wrong.
The result are people who have learned history in little bits and pieces, not understanding the bigger picture and how it all fits together. Little exposure to literature outside of their language zone. No understanding how science, arts and literature of certain periods were connected, and how they influenced our current culture. And so on.

The classical education has different principles and different methods of teaching/learning. Technology is not an issue here. (Except that these days learning is increasingly visual based, rather than language based - as it is in the classical approach. I think this is the only aspect of technology being an obstacle to learning.)

 

[EasterJoy]

Please don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against technology and what it allows us to have.

I am very much against current ideologies of education that are popular in the west.

It is these ideologies that have shaped the school systems. The foundation is all wrong.
The result are people who have learned history in little bits and pieces, not understanding the bigger picture and how it all fits together. Little exposure to literature outside of their language zone. No understanding how science, arts and literature of certain periods were connected, and how they influenced our current culture. And so on.

The classical education has different principles and different methods of teaching/learning. Technology is not an issue here. (Except that these days learning is increasingly visual based, rather than language based - as it is in the classical approach. I think this is the only aspect of technology being an obstacle to learning.)

The good thing is that the pendulum is swinging a little from the utter low point of latter part of the last century, at least it is in our local schools. There is some memorization and fact retrieval required of young scholars again, which had all but disappeared for awhile.

As far as being visual-based vs language-based, those categories are too broad. As an example: Professional academics have come to realize that straight lectures are a very poor use of classroom time in a world in which all the students have the textbook. Straight lectures are a holdover from a time so “classical” that the teacher was the only one who had the book. It does make sense, too, to change teaching styles as the neurobiology of learning comes to be better-understood and the technological options available to teachers become more varied.