I was delighted and honored to deliver this essay at a recent conference at Regent University. The conference was held by the Honors Program, and I’m very grateful to Dr. Simon Tarr & Dr. Joel Iliff for their invitation and their work on the conference.
Audio Recording:
Introduction
A perennial topic among classical educators is what to make of its ambivalent usefulness. When a school announces that it will introduce Latin to its curriculum, the approving comments from parents and the reassurances of headmasters often converge onto similar themes: “It’s shown that the study of Latin will improve one’s scores on standardized testing.” “They will know what a cognate is, and will understand english more.” “I’ve heard that many accountants and bankers studied Latin, for the mathematical and puzzle-solving skills it develops.” “Learning a language helps develop critical analysis of language itself.” “It will make them smarter.”
Perhaps these remarks rub some teachers the wrong way, having been exposed to the offensively useless category of things studied “for their own sake.” To suggest during a parent-teacher meeting the possibility that Latin is something to learn for its own delight and wonder — to blush at the shocking of myths of Ovid, to be stirred by the glory of Aeneas, to appreciate the periodic coherence of a Ciceronian oration — might strike the alert teacher as potentially incomprehensible, inappropriate, even indecent to a parent’s ear. It seems to offend the parent’s very understandable, even noble, goal of securing for their children a bright future, a good chance of employment, even the outside chance of a comfortable existence. That learning Latin is something one might do for its own sake seems to mock what the parents would do for the sake of their children. How, then, should classical educators reflect on usefulness? How should we prepare our students to go out and live in the world, or challenge the world, perhaps even to change it?
Today I want to explore two theses with you all. The first is that classical education will not prepare students for the real world; the second is that only classical education will prepare students for the Real world. I am fully aware that these two claims stand in blatant contradiction to each other. I do not intend a Chestertonian paradox, nor some exasperating contentment with the irrational. I promise to unravel this. But for the time being, I ask that we sit together in a state of irresolution.
A brief history of the university
To probe deeper into the uneasy relationship between usefulness and classical education, we must turn to the history of the university. I realize that we are not concerned with teaching at the university level. Our interest is broader. We want to understand education oriented toward our children, from their earliest years leading up to their decision to enter into some guild or corporation or factory or office or homestead where they will spend their days earning bread. It is true that education continues well past this period in their lives, but as a field of cultural & political attention, these earlier, and especially the earliest, years are our focus. As a point of definitions, when I say classical education, I mean at least the tradition of education influenced by the medieval university system. I am aware that classical education applies to something larger. But it is also more elusive, for reasons that the following may help somewhat to illuminate.
Once we look into the origins of the university, however, we will quickly realize that the establishment of ivory towers was also to shape our conception of education as such.
The beginnings of the university is a shadowy land, full of more speculations and conjectures. We do not, for instance, know precisely which was the first university to be founded, and what the exact date of its institution was. The University of Bologna claims to have been founded in 1088, yet when scholars have looked through the archives, substantiating evidence is wanting and myths are plentiful. It is true, there were free schools cropping up. Many scholars gathered together to teach on the subjects of law or theology in something like semi-organized book clubs or conferences. Similar accounts overshadow the birth of the University of Paris, the University of Salerno, and Oxford. It is a bone of contention best left undisturbed if you want to keep your friends in high places, but we all know that Oxford is the oldest university, being merely the formally recognized continuation of the work of ancient philosophers who, expanding upon Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account, accompanied their fellow expatriates as they travelled by ship from their homeland, the burning ruins of Ilium, eventually to conquer and settle down in Albion. Oxford was founded by scholars from Troy.
Turning to an especially relevant aspect of the university’s origins involves us stepping into an even thornier debate than the university’s pedigree. It is this question: why should it have occurred to anyone to establish the institution of the university in the first place? Since the efforts of Alcuin in the court of Charlemagne, European civilization was given the equipment and the conviction with which to educate effectively and deeply. (Alcuin also provided the University of Paris with its own founding myth.) Europe in the 12th or 13th century was not a yawning chasm of idiocy, stupidly unable to educate an elite class, incapable of teaching without the official sanction which institutionalization alone can grant. There were guilds, cathedral schools, monastic houses, royal courts, innumerable ad hoc meetings between scholar and pupil. Patronage, room and board, quill and parchment were provided the student and the teacher alike within a largely undocumented association between village parents and motivated teachers. True, it was often local, improvised, unreflectively observing custom, subject to the chance availability of manuscripts, responsive to elastic prices, a history of the famous and the nomadic teacher and to the promising and the lazy novice, and as always, the disgruntled parent. Yet in the main, this compact worked. What would formality, official recognition, or ecclesiastical sanction introduce which was not already understood at the level of convention?
A few answers dominate the scholarship on this topic. One camp has argued that the university was responding to a felt need among the elite. As one scholar puts it,
The thesis, so often and so variously reiterated by bourgeois and imperialistic historiography, that there is a pure idea of learning and of universities which has no relationship to classes and to class struggle … has been shown by history to be an error and a falsification … Schools and higher educational institutions are founded in order to train the persons who are needed to maintain the ruling class domination.1
Universities, on this view, were and are still fundamentally the effect of utilitarian political pressures to maintain strata and power, a demand for functionaries and apparatchiks, bureaucrats and managers. This view is largely dismissed by scholars of the medieval period. For one thing, at a very practical level, the university was not well-designed to filling the halls of the court, since graduation from a university granted to the graduate the sole privilege of teaching within the university itself, a licentia docendi. Yet the marxist historians cannot be rejected without concession.
To cut a complicated story short, the clear and earnest desire expressed by many scholars leading up to the 12th century and well into the early centuries of the university’s existence was concentrated into the idea of amor sciendi, a love of knowing. Knowing something was its own goal, and though its needs were earthly — leisure time and ample money, book and quill — its orientation was heavenly.
This orientation, however, did not preclude what we might call secondary effects. We might see these effects in better relief if we pause to consider the curriculum of early universities. After a short period of flux, the curriculum of study settled into what would recognize as the well-known and ill-understood trivium — grammar, rhetoric, and logic — and quadrivium — music, arithmetic, geometry, and astrology. These have their own history, itself nothing straightforward, and I will pass it over for now. These became the foundational training for university students, a common elementa, the essentials of a studium generale, something analogous to today’s common core. In addition to these courses, the university, from very early on, possessed what would recognize today as different faculties or departments. These were the artes, the predecessor to our humanities departments, medicine, law, and theology.
The inclusion of law and theology, and especially medicine, should raise some questions. Intuitive as their inclusion might be to us, we might ask what, for instance, medicine is doing in a university, if the university’s goal is heaven oriented and not practically driven? The theologian and the humanities professor might spend his time endlessly thinking about things, offering little in the way of practical usefulness to curia and crown. With a bit of luck, the lawyer might even spend his time in a state of sedentary and benevolent insignificance in the affairs of the world. But what is the point of medicine, if it is not practically to heal the body, to be preeminently useful in our lives? The physician may spend a great deal of time reading and writing, contemplating the heavenly home of the soul and enjoying and loving his knowledge of the physical — but the knowledge of the body has never been for the mere sake of that knowledge. Medicine must hold its subject matter in contempt or else be irreducibly useful in the world. And if it is useful, how does its presence in the catalogue of faculties square with the idea of love of knowledge for its own sake?
Noting all this, we are led to a wider question: how is it that medicine was welcomed in and not any number of other fields of study whose love of its own sort of knowledge implies obvious social benefit? Why was architecture not a faculty? What about agriculture? Why not ship building? Or textiles?
To answer that such faculties were widely understood to be artes mechanicae or artes serviles or artes lucrativae will not serve. These and the artes liberales were not always seen, as they sometimes are today, as exclusionary. According to some theologians and philosophers before and at the period, medicine is considered a non-liberal art. Yet when Thomas Aquinas argued that medicine, like the other servile arts, belonged to activities of the unfree man, he was not expressing a settled view, but proposing his own to contend with others. To wit, according to Varro’s arrangement, medicine is considered a liberal art, but so is architecture. For another view, we find in Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalion, a list of artes mechanicae, including medicine, that served the body, alongside the cultivation of soil, hunting & cooking, and the theatrical arts. Further, he and Kilwarby considered the artes mechanicae as constitutive elements of philosophy, for they represent human action and must therefore be studied in order to understand human nature. St. Bonaventure paints a similar picture in his Reduction of the Arts to Theology, where the mechanical arts are reflections of their superior source, theology. Yet another philosopher, Dominicus Gundissalinus, argued in the 12th century that all the artes could be divided into their theoretical and their practical expressions.
Even if medicine might be permitted as a faculty, this does not resolve the riddle that only medicine was included, and not others. As Walter Rüegg observes, “On the basis of this way of looking at the various kinds of knowledge, the university could have incorporated into itself from the very beginning not only the technological sciences but also the economic and empirical sciences as well as other practical specialities such as are not unusual in contemporary universities. As it turned out, only one ars mechanica, namely medicine, became a university subject.”2
There is no neat solution on offer. One has either to reject medicine as a liberal art, and puzzle over its addition — one has also to ponder why, at least, architecture is not included — or one must admit that medicine is a servile art, and wrestle with the significance of a servile art set alongside the other, contemplative faculties of the university.
For my part, Rüegg’s assessment points us the right direction. He writes,
The persistence of the patterns of four faculties of the medieval university into the nineteenth century cannot be explained by the scholastic classification of types of knowledge or by the distinction between ‘free’ and ‘mechanical’ sciences or between ‘speculative’ and ‘mechanical’ philosophy. Rather, the adherence to the scheme of the four faculties is a result of the fundamental significance of the amor sciendi.3
Rüegg’s point is instructive for how we understand the end of education. An object of one’s love may be bounded, but the effluent, superabundant nature of that love is not. A love of knowledge, of whatever object, even divine, superlunary things, brings about inevitable effects within the sublunary world below. Love of knowledge for its own sake is not the same as love of knowledge out of spite for other things. The contemplative life is not that of the ascetic or the hermetic. In a sense, it should not surprise us that love of knowledge should turn out to be a powerful force to shape the world. Thus, the worldly usefulness of university education, in the medieval period, was seen as a beneficent declension of attention paid to higher things, something like the opposite of what the economist calls an externality. Odd as it is to say: giving one’s attention beyond the world cannot help but in-form the world.
Encouraging as this account may be, the history of the university does not comfort us for long. It does not take a great deal of time for the secondary utility of amor sciendi to become its own goal and the love of knowledge to transform from a generous catalyst into an onerous accident. Apart from my primary motivation for offering this brief history — that the love of knowledge and usefulness admit of a proper mutual relationship — we should also observe that the question of usefulness for the world is the opposite of a new problem for education in the west. If we take the university system as the dominate model influencing education at every level in western schools, we should find, if not comfort at least wisdom, in the knowledge that the usefulness of education is worse than perennial. It is constitutive.
The World on Offer & the Contradiction of Usefulness
The above history was perhaps encouraging to us, and may have even suggested ways by which to solve the riddle of our two, seemingly contradictory theses. What we turn to next may not have the same effect, I’m afraid.
Recall the approving parent praising the study of Latin for its usefulness in terms of college applications and career opportunities. Drawing on the history of the medieval university, one might be inclined to explain to the parent that, yes, the study of Latin is useful in a sense. However, this would be a lie, and for reasons entirely unrelated to our previous tour of the middle ages.
There is a strong case to be made that the study of Latin, in any sense of usefulness, is an utterly useless exercise. The same applies to the whole of the quadrivium, and to the trivium. But we ought not stop with the subject near and dear to us. We must broaden our horizons if we to appreciate the point I now wish to make.
Imagine three hypothetical programs of education, proposed by three very different characters. It does not matter if they are proposing for a k-12 school or a university program. These characters are headmaster or what have you; money is no object; the administration is completely and enthusiastically behind their every decision. The parents and let’s say prospective students are gathered together to hear their educational vision (read=how they plan to spend their money).
Proposal Iº: The students will begin by learning memory techniques on the models described by Hugh of St. Victor, with no bias against those of Bradwardine and John of Garland. If they wish, they may choose to adopt the model outlined by Albert the Great, whose herrenian techniques are indebted to Aristotle. Having equipped themselves with these skills, they dedicate themselves to memorizing the psalter, in addition to a series of florilegia and commentaries, and to incorporating into their memories the summa of Thomas Aquinas; for music, they will study Boethius’ De Musica; for astrology, I confess I have a liking to Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera. For arithmetic will proceed through the riddles of Alcuin. For geometry, Euclid’s Elements. I have surrendered to previous requests, and all texts will be studied in translation. Conferring of degree will consist in oral exams wherein the instructors will ask the student to supply definitions, solve questions, complete quotations, and compose their own florilegium upon any of the well-known loci communes — all from memory, without notes. By the end of the study, students will have in their memorial possession all the standard texts of the trivium, the quadrivium, among other additional studies, everything known at a minimum ad rem and all of scripture verbaliter. (end of Proposal Iº)
Aftermath: The headmaster later reports to a baffled school board and absolutely flummoxed donor base that, not only did no one raise a protesting hand in preference for Ptolemy’s Almagest, but not a single parent committed their promising child’s future to the his tutelage. He leaves dumbfounded, but not disheartened. He is confident of a better reception when he makes the same pitch later that month in Austin, TX.
Proposal IIº: Students will read from only the finest scholars, from Ierne Plunket to W. H. D. Rouse. Teachers are all trained in one of Charlotte Mason’s schools for teachers. Subjects will include grammar, logic, Latin & Greek, history, and maths. A great deal of rote memorization of Dryden’s Aeneid and Samuel Butler’s Odyssey. Evolution will be considered and dismissed with prejudice. Students are asked to bring with them their own, mechanical typewriter. The school will provide ink ribbons. Students must also equip themselves with their own fountain pens and pencils. The school will not provide spare nibs, and asks that all ink used by students for writing be of the black or blue variety and pH neutral. Students must also bring their own circular slide rule calculator for maths class. An abacus is encouraged for advanced courses.
Aftermath: More or less the same as what the first proposal received. One parent is overheard as they leave explaining to their child what they think a circular slide calculator is. Better prospects undoubtedly lie in St. Lawrence, NY.
Proposal IIIº: Studies will focus on Science, Engineering, Technology, and Mathematics. Some attention will be given to the softer sciences — anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Individual courses in theology available in conversation with a professor at no more than two credit’s worth. Students may bring their own computers, of the following vintage: iMac (ca. 1997), Dell PC (ca. 2000), or any running Windows ‘98. Classes in assembly and compiling languages are required for all students wishing to study engineering and technology. Interpretative languages (mostly C++) are optional. The students will have access to the web 1.0, i.e., static, text-based webpages with minimal .png and zero .mp4 content, available through our library desktops via dial-up at a maximum speed of 56 Kbps.
Aftermath: Mostly the same reaction as in the first two proposals. A few parents actually do sign up their children. These parents all work (remotely) for silicon valley technology companies, and whispering grimly about specialization and a retrograde skill advantage.
To focus on one common element of the proposals — and there many things going on — one reason why parents all but universally rejected those proposals is that they offer nothing by way of usefulness, employability, or career readiness whatsoever. One might make a quibbling defense for one or another detail. But overall they are decidedly, comically impractical.4
It might strike us as nothing surprising that a curriculum from the 13th century is more relic than realistic. It is perhaps only a little less surprising to us that a curriculum ca. 1940 is outdated, nearly a century out from our time. Proposal IIIº, however, represents education only a few decades in the past.
Today, the question on the mind of many educators might be put this way: will the curriculum of courses and skills and opportunities on offer this very semester be relevant to our world by the time the fall semester begins? Will technological progress in areas of information-processing, token-generation, probabilistic algorithms, virtual reality, and, God save us, robotics effectively compromise every domain of human labor (not to mention human art and leisurely pursuits)?
As pressing as this dilemma is to us right now, the principle beneath the progress is centuries old. We live in a time of technological revolution, the principle of which is that advancement must be granted a sacred privilege: that of being the metric of success. To move on is to live. To upend is the end. To replace is the point.
However things turn out in the years to come, this much will be true: a world of revolution is antithetical to education; classical education cannot prepare students for this sort of world because nothing worthy of the name education can. It is impossible for a world of revolution to teach others even towards itself. Teach students to use the tools, navigate the systems, and manipulate the levers of today, and tomorrow they will, they must, change. They all are meant to be replaced. The bandwidth of relevance shortens to quarters of the business cycle. The computing demands require a new laptop every few years. The trends of scholarship might change while one’s article is under review. The textbook you assign in one year will celebrate its 22nd edition in the year to come. Any curriculum of exquisite, eminent usefulness is always already soon to be out of date. Methods and tools and vocations are adopted and disposed of according to the lucrative and enervating will of planned obsolescence. This is what a 20th century philosopher meant when he wrote, “the machine has no tradition.” There is no conservation, merely perdurance.
Conclusion
I promised I would acquit the two theses of the charge of contradiction. In closing, I will attempt to do so. I remind us that both theses refer to something called “the real world.” Whenever something is qualified with being “real,” I at least grow deeply suspicious. I might be relieved if someone says, not to worry, this is real food. But in the back of my head, something panics and shouts, compared to what?
There are at least two senses to the word ‘real,’ distinguished in modern French by the two terms, réel and actuel. Réel means the true thing, la vraie chose in French. The thing as opposed to its counterfeit. Actuel on the other hand, denotes our present moment, our contemporary condition. Now as opposed to then. Were I to clarify the English terms with their French counterparts, our theses would run thus: classical education will not prepare students for the real world, le monde actuel; the second is that only classical education will prepare students for the Real world, le monde réel.
The cheeky wordplay might annoy us, if this solution does not annoy us even more forcefully. Is this a roundabout way of emphasizing the essential uselessness and irrelevance of classical education? Cold comfort that it leads our students to a Real world if we must remind parents that, in terms of the world we live in now, there is no usefulness worth paying for.
I would, however, caution us from surrendering too much to the real-as-in-current world. It was built by hands, and it is more feeble than most want to admit. Recalling the medieval conception of amor sciendi I would suggest that, if anything, classical education should remember the ways in which the program of the medieval university built the world as it lived within it and contemplated beyond it. Our students must be builders. The geometry of the modern world will strike them as all wrong, and as their love of what they come to understand matures, the earthly effects of that love must be encouraged. They must become builders on earth, with their hearts in heaven.
Footnotes
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Steiger. pg. 12 cited by W. Rüegg pg. 10 ↩
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A History of the University in Europe vol. I. pg 27 ↩
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A History etc. pg. 29 ↩
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Each is a rough sketch of what kind of pedagogy we might encounter across history: Proposal Iº comes to us from 13th century Europe; Proposal IIº represents England in the 1940s; Proposal IIIº hails from the first decade of the twenty-first century. ↩