Classical School – Traditional Curriculum

Classical School — Traditional Curriculum

What do classical and traditional suggest or liberal education?

By Steven Cortright

Preliminaries

The present-day movement toward recovering genuinely human, fundamental education^[1] is—if specially indebted to any single source—thus indebted to Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1947 essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning.”^[2]   Among its many excellences, “The Lost Tools ” reminds its reader that the capacity for self-education is no mere personal ornament, that it belongs to what makes human beings good.  Hence, a third of her essay is (memorably) devoted to Sayers’s acid review of random nonsense coursing through the cultural media of her day, infecting civic discourse, and ascribable to sources who, in light of their educational credentials, ought really to know—and to do—better.^[3]  Her illustrations—alas!—ring neither unfamiliar nor even especially noxious, by comparison to the parallel phenomena of the present.  Patently—now, as then—instruction (not to say, indoctrination) is not lacking to the conventional schools; lacking, rather, is close cultivation of habits apt to quicken the twofold mode of human participation in the truth of things: the twofold capacity for judgment and for calculation, a capacity which is made shareable through speech and measurement.^[4]   Lacking to the schools, that is, is their first business, cultivation of the tools—the faculties—the mind requires for practicing “the art of learning.” These necessaries, Sayers proposes to recover from “the syllabus of the [medieval] Schools,” and in particular through the medievals’ Trivium, or threefold way, of arts for fashioning truth-capable speech. By her account, these arts in turn provided “the preliminary discipline,” needed to address the Quadrivium, the medievals’ fourfold way of approaching the mathematicals [τὰ μαθηματικά]—the term, in Latin as in Greek, for “the subject-matters most readily taught and learned.”^[5]  Following Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon,^[6] Sayers names the threefold arts Grammar (the art regulating correct—in the sense of precise—speech, viz.: speech capable of embodying thought), Dialectic (the art regulating the fashioning of true speech),^[7] and Rhetoric (the art regulating communication—that is, communion in judgment—via speech).

Now, Sayers insists compellingly that the syllabus of the (ancient and medieval) Schools represents nothing failed or superseded.  Rather, it constitutes the latest common and comprehensive view of education’s “true object,” the view current before “education [sc. as a practice or institution entrusted to public guardians, to the teachers] began to lose sight of [it].”^[8]  She proposes, then, that this order of learning is a tradition fallen into desuetude; that its aims and proper means are recoverable from its relics (the more so, since the latter embody, and hence illustrate, the cultivation of permanent, signal human capacities).   We have, then, in the essay a scheme, the form or intelligible framework, for a kind of curriculum

(perhaps better, for a coherent approach to the construction of curricula).   It were well to be reminded here that “curriculum,” literally signifies, in Latin, “a racecourse,” and that, as an educational metaphor, it suggests a detailed itinerary of texts and exercises “run through” by students, and so ordered that the “runners” become something “in the course” of attaining something. At the course’s end, they attain “a palm,” certification (say, a degree); in the course of their “run” they become, they are, formed for responsible judgment.  

The curriculum Sayers places in prospect bears the characters traditional and classical,^[9] as (and, perhaps, because) its early stages thematize, and its later stages will appropriate, the artes liberales, the liberal arts, which the medievals themselves received and appropriated from Latin antiquity as the complementary curricula called the Trivium (the threefold way) and the Quadrivium (the fourfold way).   Moreover, because this scheme is itself an object of learning, it should, on Sayers’s account, yield its sense to the very tools it celebrates: we should expect that there accrue to it a grammar, a dialectic, and a rhetoric.^[10]

Proper usage, questions of diction, fall to Grammar.  Hence,  we will treat the terms classical curriculum and traditional curriculum, and their uses, grammatically, in the main, offering (because grammatical questions point beyond grammar) a gesture or two toward the accompanying dialectic and rhetoric (observing this economy by way of keeping the presentation within announced limits).

Diction (Grammar)

All language is inherited: our efforts at shaping expressions apt to make our thought hear-able (no less by us than by others), and so memorable and shareable, is itself shaped according to the preëxisting order of the language into which we are born.  In the exact sense of the Latin verb invenire, we invent our personal speech, inner and outer: we “go into,” we “dis-cover,”^[11] in the language given to and for us, expressions that satisfy (more nearly or remotely) our intention.  Vivaldi—to pose an analogy—elicits from the violin expressions never heard before him, sounds truly original; but, without exception, these proceed according to the strictly pre-determined pattern of tones that can be produced by four human digits disposed over four strings and a certain stretch of fingerboard; and even Vivald’s most arresting compositions share, with forebears, the polyphony of  the minor and major modes.   Invention, that is, plays upon and emerges from constraint, and bows to precedent invention.  Each human thinker-composer-speaker is bound to deal with terms, and with a syntax that regulates those terms’ uses, which are pro-posed [Latin: proponere, given in advance] somewhat as the tonal possibilities given in the structural interplay of violin and human hand, together with the conventions of polyphony, pro-pose the music of Vivaldi.

The foregoing insufficient little disquisition looks to invite assent to a proposition, namely: every natural language is repleat with terms that, because they are already freighted with meaning—because they respond to an origin-story, an etymology, and a history of use—constrain invention, and so pro-pose the meanings present users make with them and make of them. At the same time, the “ranginess” of the uses to which the long line of their prior users have put them modifies [sc. limits and enriches] the terms’ significance—hence, their possibilities—for subsequent users.  Indeed, the very term, “etymology,” suggests (perhaps, one should say, “testifies”), through its two Greek roots—viz., the adjective ἔτυμος, -ον (é tew mos, -on: true, authentic, actual) and the noun λόγος (ló-gos: word, reason, account, proportion, meaning . . .)—that at its origin each such term touches upon and preserves a root meaning which is liable to be modified, and may even be obscured, by on-going human invention.  

In this light, we may begin to suspect that the view which takes “classical curriculum” and “traditional curriculum” for equivalent (or near-equivalent) ways of expressing “rooted” or “time-tested curriculum” and “transmissible” or “receivable curriculum” may miss some dynamic interplay between the root senses of “classical” and “traditional.”^[12]     

First, as to “tradition”: the root Latin verb, tradere is one of a handful that bear dual primary senses: tradere means “to hand down, bequeath, transmit” and—neither secondarily nor additionally, but equally and simultaneously—“to hand or to give over, to surrender, to betray.”  The very term “tradition” then, suggests that no cultural heritance—no doctrine,  text, narrative—is (or can be) transmitted, handed down, unless, by the selfsame act, it be handed over, betrayed into the power of its receivers.^[13]  Hence, to call something “traditional” is, indeed, to imply that it has been handed down, received—that it betokens continuity—but also that it bears the marks (so to speak), for good or ill, of “hands” that have been agents in the event of its arrival to the here and now.

As to “classical,” the Latin classicus, signifies, as an adjective, “pertaining to a part or division,” namely (in its first and technical sense) a division of the fleet, or (in its extended sense) to a marshaling of a part among, or even the whole of, the citizen-body; what is thus set out is a classis, an assembly gathered to execute public business.   Classicus and classis rest on the root verb, calore, “to summon, call out, assemble” (so that, nominatively, classicus can mean “he who summons,” while the cognate neuter noun, classicum, signifies “a battle call on the trumpet”).  Calore and its derivatives also testify to the close relationship between Latin and Greek: the Greek καλέω (kah-lé-oh) is “I call or summon”; thus, in ancient Greek, the compound ἐκκαλέω [ek (preposition, out of, from) + kah-lé-oh) means “I call forth, summon [sc. to an assembly, for a shared purpose]” and ἡ ἐκκλησία (hey ek-kley-sée-ah) signifies the citizen-body—the assembly—those called forth to address public business, while from καλέω derive κληρόω (klay-ráw-oh: I call or appoint, viz., to office), ἡ κλῆσις (hey klêy-sis: a calling, summons), and ὁ κλήτηρ (ho kléy-tayr: one who summons) quite in parallel to the Latin calore, classicus/um, classis.  (A great deal, then, is suggested by the usage ἡ ἐκκλησία to signify the Church, the assembly of those called out of their worldly pursuits to undertake the up-building of the Body of Christ, the Kingdom of God in souls.)   

Now, the sense embedded in classis–classicus/um militates directly against the common-place notion that the “classics” are so called because they are (or were) the practices, texts, or teachings handed down through the “classes”—the divisions—of the schools (medieval or ancient).  This notion, insinuating that the classics, like obsolescent aristocrats, are survivals-by-inertia, further suggests that any claim they make to attention here and now, to our attention, must smack of mere antiquarian nostalgia, or (worse) of some ulterior motive: ideology, political allegiance, religious obscurantism vel alia.  This account evidently betrays the native sense of “classic” by inversion.  For, it is the “call” (classicum) sounded by the “summoner”(classicus) that convenes, as we have seen, the assembly (classis), namely, the form that answering-to-the-call is to take.  Hence, to propose, in effect, “Being the focus of the classis—the class—is what makes the classicum” is to spin material nonsense on all fours with “Happening to stand before the orchestra is what makes the conductor” or “Being found on the field is what makes the player”—although, of course, the conductor must take the podium and the player must take the field.   

By contrast, according to the sense carried by these descriptors, an undertaking at once classical and traditional will suggest something naggingly paradoxical on its face, namely, a summons to participation in conservative innovation or (obversely) in overflowing recurrence.^[14]  When, moreover, the undertaking in view is education, and the classicumsummons to a curriculum grounded (at least) in the liberal arts, we may anticipate that the conditions for that play upon constraint which subserves invention are also in immediate prospect.  For the liberal, “freeing” arts are called “arts”—according to some the medievals regarded already as classical authorities—because artant arte, “they bind strictly.” ^[15]

But with these reflections, we are passing already into Dialectic.

Select Sketches of a Dialectic

A first sketch: the elemental case of transmission, of traditio—namely, one person (“teacher”) handing on to another (“student”)—is inseparable from the notion of education, but were the traditio involved in acts of education to entail no more than the handing down of programmatic affirmations or denials from “teacher” to “student,” success must entail that the (now educated) “student” will have come to affirm or deny just as the “teacher” affirms or denies.  In person, the “teacher” would be (within a certain nexus of expectation; call it “classroom ritual”) the source of the “student’s” speech, which must depend on the “teacher’s” speech, as effect upon cause.  In fine (on this supposition), then, “education” must consist essentially in the reproduction of opinions, and to be educated must be to be stored with new or firmer or more coherent—or just approved—opinions (a view by no means uncommon).  By contrast, if and only if the student’s response could be said to depend on the matters addressed in the teacher’s speech—a dependence that cannot but entail a self-perceived change of the student’s mind, a reflection—only then, could the exchange qualify as education in the root sense: educare, “to lead up or out.”  To be handed on (as learning, as education), then, speech must be handed over, eo ipso, surrendered to the use (the application to judgment) of the student-receiver,^[16] who thus comes to be something of an authority, a minor authority, in (as we say) “the tradition of ___.”  It follows that there is no mere transmission of learning; put another way: disciplinary doctrine which is merely transmitted in speech amounts not to learning, but to lore, that is, to guidance for performance.^[17]

A second, related sketch: the notion of handing on/over is inseparable also from a certain notion of source: traditio supposes an auctor, that is, an author-authority,^[18] who stands as a telling—a first or a proximate or a decisive— “hand” in the act of handing on/over.   In case the tradendum is prescriptive, in case it formulates what is true-to-art or true-to-method, “true” shades into “correct,” and the auctoritas of the teaching to be handed on becomes the authority of a standard and paradigm, which actually goes over only to the receiver who masters it.  But again, the receiver who masters such teaching does not merely reinstantiate it, but (as we say) reinvents it.  The “summons,” then, that comes down through traditional classics comes down as the chorus sung by a family of re-inventors; the classicum (to vary the metaphor) is a clarion call not to imitate exemplars, but to sort out, as the condition of one’s own invention (one’s own approach to artistry, or transition from apprentice to journeyman), when faithful and conserving innovations prevail, and when, contarily, the appearance of recurrence covers the breaking, as opposed to the enlarging, of bounds. 

and (as a Nod to Rhetoric) a Brief Peroration

In “The Lost Tools of Learning,” Dorothy Sayers luminously proposes paths to recovery of the public and adequate means of inquiry.  These, the liberal arts, are instrumental goods, tools for inventive thinkers or (to adopt Fr. Robert Sokolowski’s mot juste) for agents of truth.^[19]  Of the two, the second, “tools for agents of truth,” is the more just or proportionate description, because it refers liberal art and liberal artist to their end.  It reminds that the classicum—the summons to tradition, that is, to conserving innovation—echoes, in the keys both of reason and of revelation, John 8 xxxi– xxxii: Truth alone makes free.^[20]

^[1] “Genuinely human, fundamental education” is, of course, a near-empty place-holder for the congeries of descriptors—classical, traditional, liberal—this essay is obliged to clarify.  A personal note: my wife, Belinda (primarily), and I (ancillarily) homeschooled (in whole or part) our seven children, through the eighties and nineties, largely guided by Sayers’s essay, to which we were introduced by true homeschooling pioneers, Dr. Frank and Charlotte Ellis, who homeschooled their seven children from the mid-sixties in (even then) ultra-“progressive” Oakland, California, and in the face of a hostile bureaucracy.

^[2] Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” Paper read at a Vacation Course in Education, Oxford, 1947 (London: Methuen and Company, 1948).

^[3] Cf., ibid., 1–6. 

^[4] That is to say, by articulate measures and measured articulations.

^[5] “The Lost Tools”, 6–7; the “mathematicals,” arguably, the schools’ second business, are (notoriously) botched by the conventional schools: the subject-matters most readily taught and learned are least cultivated, worst cultivated, and, by most students, assiduously shunned.

^[6] The “Teacher’s Manual” or, perhaps (translating with some license), “Instruction for the Instructor,” c. AD 1115 –1120.

^[7] In the later middle age—e.g., in St. Thomas—logic, the art directing the three acts of the intellect—apprehension, judgment, inference—in the intellect’s approach to/attainment of truth; for Sayers (and Hugh), dialectic comprehends formal logic and modes of (material) disputation.

^[8] Sayers, “The Lost Tools . . .,” 4.

^[9] “Classical” in, perhaps, two initial senses: as employing classics or classical works among its proper means, and as a conception retrieved by the mediaevals from classical antiquity.   

^[10] Sayers supposes (rightly) that the relation between trivial and quadrivial studies is by no means “serio-mechanical”; that is, the mind does not “graduate” from the arts of speech (trivial) to the arts of measurement/calculation (quadrivial) as if passing from one class of subjects to another, superordinate class; rather, the order induced by trivial studies in the acting mind informs and fructifies the knower’s approaches to the all the subjects of quadrivial concern (and, indeed, to all subject-matters): thus, there is a grammar of arithmetic (natural, counting-number and the arithmetic functions), a logic (the modes of equality), and even a rhetoric (algebraic elegances), as there are also of the remaining quadrivials, geometry, music and astronomy, while (moreover) there is, e.g.,  a grammar of history (chronological order, the notion of a people . . .), a logic of the novel (cf., e.g., novelist-philosopher Iris Murdoch, in conversation with interviewer, Bryan Magee,  “Literature and Philosophy, a segment of the video series, Manufacturing Intellect [1977] @ <<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBG10XnxQaI>>), and so on (cf. , “The Lost Tools,” 14–17).

^[11] Noun-form: inventio, “invention”; the ancient, lingering sense of inventio jumps out of the quintessentially modern work, Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica: literally translated, Newton titles the application of his Laws in the analysis of linear and curvilinear movement, “the invention of motion.”

^[12] “Tradition”: Latin verb, tradere; noun, traditio; “classical”: Latin adjective, classicus –a –um; cf. “The Lost Tools,” 6-7.

^[13] The Greek translation of traditio, ἡ παράδοσις, with its root verb, παραδίδωμι, does not follow the Latin in making the senses “to hand down” and “to hand over” coprincipals: the first sense in the Greek is “to hand down”;  “to hand over” is secondary. 

^[14] Arguably, a respectable explication of “educational curriculum”; cf. n. 9, above.

^[15] The formula is owing to Cassiodorus, Institutes of the Divine and Worldly Arts, the younger (c. AD 485 – c. 585) contemporary of another classic authority for the mediaevals, Boethius (c. AD 480 – 524).

^[16] “For use” (namely, for the receiver’s use) means, inescapably, “for modification,” since (to affirm the medieval dictum) reception is according to the mode of the receiver.

^[17] “Performance,” namely, of the sort that engrosses the prisoners in the cave of Plato’s Republic 514 A–517 B; cf. Jacob Klein,  A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965; reprinted University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 103–107.

^[18] Or attestor, producer, witness, original . . . to translate some of the senses borne by this heavily loaded Latin root.

^[19] Cf. Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1.

^[20]John 8: xxxi–xxxii: ’Εὰν ὑμεῖς μείνητε ἐν τῷ λόγῳ τῷ ἐμῷ, ἀληθῶς μαθηταί μού ἐστε, καὶ γνώσεσθε τὴν ἀλήθειαν, καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια ἐλευθερώσει ὑμᾶς [Should you remain (stand firm) in my logos^{, you shall truly be my disciples}, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free].