What's a Liberal Art and Where Can I Buy One? The Trivum

In a case of potentially confusing terminology, classical education is sometimes called a liberal arts education. This is confusing for a couple of reasons. Reason 1. all classical education is technically a liberal arts education, but not all programs that describe themselves as liberal arts programs are classical. This stems from Reason 2. A lot of people don't actually know what the liberal arts are. There are seven liberal arts, but in this post, I will only go over the basic definition of liberal art as a term, and I'll only go over the first three (the linguistic arts of the Trivium). We'll hit the last four next time.

The Liberal Arts

In one sense the answer to the question 'what is a liberal art?' is a relatively simple one. Liberal stems from a Latin word that means 'Free,' and Art stems from a Latin word that means something closer to the English word for 'skill' or 'skilled work.' So, a liberal art is literally a skill needed by a person to function as a free man in society. Remember from a previous post that formal education used to be reserved for society's elite. So a liberal arts education was one designed for men who were not only not slaves, but who were meant to lead their people. Over time the word 'liberal' began to be interpreted in a less literal sense, and now when people talk about the liberal arts they speak of them as the skills that a human being needs to BE truly free. So, the liberal arts over time have shifted from the skills that it was proper for freemen to learn because they were in the class of freemen, and now they are understood as disciplines that create a spiritual and mental freedom in those who study them.

So, that's what the term liberal art means and how it's generally interpreted. There's a little more to it than that, however. According to a tradition that's been handed down since the Middle Ages there are seven liberal arts divided into two categories. There are the three arts of the Trivium (tri - three, vium - way, path, road) and the four arts of the Quadrivium (quad - four, vium - way, path, road). This is kind of my take on them, but the Trivium and the Quadrivium both represent the two different kinds of language that humans use to understand reality.

The Trivium

The three arts of the Trivium are the skills that have to do with human language and our ability to communicate with one another. These arts are Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. 

Grammar

Grammar is the art of understanding how language works on a basic level. What are the parts of human language? How do we combine words to make sentences? What are the different kinds of sentences? How does word choice affect meaning? Can we put words in any order we want or is there a point where certain combinations of words destroy coherent meaning? Vocabulary. As anyone who has attempted to learn a new language knows, in order to communicate effectively a person not only needs to have a sufficient number of words from the different parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc.), but needs to know how to put those words together in ways that make sense. The sentence "The black dog ate the delicious meal" does not mean the same thing as "The delicious meal ate the black dog." Grammar tells us why. Grammar also tells us why the sentence "Jack gave me a cake." does mean the same thing as "Me Jack a cake gave." Grammar, then, is the ability to understand what language truly is, its ins and outs, the way it works.

Logic

The next art of the Trivium is Logic. Logic takes language and seeks to make it say things that make

sense. Logic is where language tends to look a lot like math. Logic tells us why statements like "A tiger is a cat, but a tiger is not a cat." are nonsense. Grammatically there's nothing wrong with a sentence like that, but it breaks the logical rule of non-contradiction, which says that a statement cannot be true and false at the same time. Logic is a very rigid art. It has a lot of rules and even formulas where variables show the validity and invalidity of certain statements. For example, a classic logical argument is a modus ponens (method of affirming) which says:

p q

p 

 q

 Or in language, If 'P' is true then 'Q' is also true. 'P' is in fact true, therefore 'Q' is also true. P and Q are variables. I told you it was just like math. So, we could substitute actual phrases in for the variables. For example, "If I see a cat then I will eat ice cream. I see a cat! Therefore, I will eat ice cream." Logic is incredibly dry and if it's possible even less interesting to people than grammar is, so it gets skipped a lot. I don't think it should be skipped, but I'll make an apology for logic another time.  For our purposes here, Logic is the art of right thinking, its the art of sense as opposed to nonsense. 

Rhetoric

On to the final member of the Trivium, the sexy one - Rhetoric! Rhetoric gets a bad rap. I mean, honestly, all of the Trivium does. grammar and logic are considered boring, and rhetoric is associated with politicians and therefore has come to be associated with lies and emptiness. That's not really what rhetoric is meant to be. rhetoric is the art of persuasion, it is the art of using language to convince

people to do, or say, or believe something. It seems obvious that rhetoric can easily be abused. However, some of the oldest defenders of rhetoric (i.e. Aristotle) made sure to insert the caveat that REAL rhetoric was concerned with persuading people to do something good or to believe something true. 

Rhetoric is often considered a sort of capstone art because it is meant to combine everything one has mastered from the art of grammar and logic and use them toward the end of persuasion. The best rhetoricians are the ones who know what they want to say, who know how to say it, can say it in a way that makes good sense, and finally can say it in a way that's interesting and moving. It's the last part, interesting and moving, that's unique to rhetoric and that gives rhetoric its unique power.

Conclusion

The Trivium, then, are the human arts. They originate in our humanity, they are unique to us, and they belong to us. There is nothing in nature that can replicate these. If you want to take a theological view they stem from our participation in the image of God. God is a God of language. He gave us reason, which is unique in the natural world (reason being here identified with the ability to think about things beyond our immediate physical needs and desires, the ability to dive into the mysteries of our existence and purpose), and He gave us the ability to take what's inside our heads in all of its complexity and to place it into the heads of other people. Human language is incredible and our ability to use it is an incredible power. The story of Babel illustrates this. Human beings, using language, made themselves so powerful that God, for the sake of their salvation so that they would not orchestrate their own destruction through their hubris, had to confuse and break human language. 

God speaks to us using grammar, logic, and rhetoric. By placing the story of human salvation into a human language He made it possible, through translation, for anyone to understand deep spiritual mysteries. He made His mind and heart known to us. Likewise, in His image, we use language to bear ourselves to one another. Men cannot be truly free unless they can escape from their own minds and connect with other members of their race. We do this with language, with the three arts of the Trivium. There's no denying that language as a human power is incredibly dangerous and easy to abuse, but when language is oriented toward truth, beauty, and goodness it truly shows the best of us. 

Find Part Two here

Sources

If you're interested in reading more on the Liberal Arts or on the Trivium specifically I recommend the following sources (most of these can be found for free online): 

• Institutes of Oratory by Quintillian. If you want to know not only what these arts are in a lot more detail, at least how they were traditionally considered, but also how they were taught you must read Qunitillian. Quintillian is still used as a model in Neo-Classical schools.
• The Marriage of Philology and Mercury by Martianus Capella. This is a fun resource because Capella explains what the arts are in an allegory. The character Philology, or the human intellectual life, marries the god Mercury. The seven Liberal Arts visit her on her wedding day to explain their gifts and to offer themselves to her as her handmaidens.
• Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning and On The Soul by Cassiodorus. This one is nice because he provides pretty small descriptions that are easy to understand.
• Etymologies by Isidore of Seville. This one is longer and more complex for those really interested in diving in. 

New Product: Teaching Disputation

I posted a new product! Visit my store I Can Classical at Teachers Pay Teachers. I upload lessons for classical classroom and home educators to use at the middle and high school levels.

This one is on teaching disputation. I use this for middle grades, although if you have high school kids who have only just finished a logic course or who have never had any debate experience this would work for them as well.

Disputation is the medieval art of argumentation or debate. As students finish a course in formal logic it is important to show them what logic is actually for in a practical sense - namely rhetoric. This guide will help students apply logical thinking in a formal and fun way. Students will be introduced to the five-part form of a disputation, will review an example, will read and discuss an example of medieval disputation poetry, and will finally create their own formal written disputation.

This guide contains the following parts:

• A teacher guide that goes over the entirety of the lesson, and contains verbal prompts and sample answers. The teacher guide also includes extension opportunities.
• A student guide that contains the images and readings the students will discuss and contains spaces for students to take notes and write their responses.

This lesson will probably take anywhere from three to five 45-minute class sessions to complete if it is done in its entirety.

I hope that you enjoy introducing the art of clear thinking and rational argumentation to your students and hope that this can serve as the foundation for logical thinking, speaking, and writing in your classrooms!

Back to Basics - Classical Education Isn't Ancient Education. A Hot Take.

Today is the first of the Back to Basics series where I attempt to share the knowledge and insights I've gained from nearly a decade of asking over and over again 'what is classical education actually?' And I've decided to start with A Hot Take. 

One of the very first pithy descriptions I heard about the modern classical education movement was that it was the way everyone was taught until a hundred years ago. This definition has some very clear benefits: It's intriguing, it brings the weight of tradition and historicity to bear on the mind, and best of all, it's short. Another one I heard recently along the same lines was that classical education was not a new trend. Even shorter! Unfortunately, both of these definitions fall short, mostly because they're not super-duper true. They're a little bit true, but the direct ties they claim to have between the ancient past and the present are... overstated. 

I think that this might be one of the more controversial takes I have within the classical community. The idea that classical education is not just participating or continuing an ancient idea of education, but actually is that idea of education reborn is pretty ingrained in some parts of the community (you didn't know that there was a classical community, but boy is there. Remind me to do a series one day on all the different kinds of classical education and how they fight each other.). I don't think, however, that there's really an honest way to truly claim that classical education is anything other than a uniquely modern educational movement that began truly in the 1950s. 

I tried to write up the history of western education and realized that there's no real way to do that in a single blog post. If I'm devoted to one thing it's not getting too long or academical. So, I'm going to cheat a bit. I think that understanding how education and our understanding of education have evolved over the past two millennia has been incredibly helpful for me as a classical educator. It helped me understand what we're doing and why we're doing it. So I think diving into what education was in those eras is really important. However, I think that a summary of the goals of education in those eras will be enough to show for now that classical education is a fundamentally different enterprise than education was in the distant past.  

I think that looking at who education was for in the past is almost enough to support my claim. For example, in the ancient Greek and Roman world education was almost solely the purview of wealthy freemen. In medieval Europe, it was almost solely reserved for the clergy class in the early middle ages, the aristocrats, and the clergy as the centuries rolled on, and finally, by the time you inch toward the Renaissance education has certainly expanded its scope but is still reserved for the clergy, aristocrats, and nuvo riche middle-class professionals. The Enlightenment era stayed pretty much the same, offering education mainly to those who could afford it, however, the increased availability of books allowed many men from lower classes to start sneaking into the educated elite. They had to really want it though. It's not until the late eighteenth century and really the nineteenth century that people felt like the lowest classes should maybe have the opportunity to learn anything in a formal educational setting, and it's not until the twentieth century that some countries, including the United States, made education compulsory for everyone regardless of class. 

History shows us that there was a trend over time toward making educational opportunities increasingly available to all men regardless of class, station, income, etc. However, it's impossible to overstate how radical compulsory education is in the grand scheme of history. This is not the idea that educational opportunities should be available to everyone, which was the historical trend, but that everyone must receive the same basic education without reference to desire or necessity. 

There's a point to all of this, though. Who education is for reveals a lot about what the goal of education is. The ancient world, ancient Greece and Rome, reserved education for the social elite because education was meant to create statesmen. A peasant farmer didn't need to know how to read or write. He didn't need to know any mathematics beyond the basics that are evident to reason and sense. He didn't need to know how to speak well in front of a crowd. He needed to know how to plow, how to sow and reap. (It is true that the Roman Republic prized itself on having a ruling class who were down-to-earth, think of the gentleman farmer Cincinnatus, but it's important to note that Cincinnatus was not a peasant farmer who became a politician, he was a wealthy elite who preferred farming to politicking.) Education to craft the small class of ruling elite does not sound like any educational goal one would hear today, even in a classical school.

Look then at the Middle Ages. Which class was the most educated? The clergy class. In the early Middle Ages, it would not have been at all unusual to find members of the nobility who were illiterate.  As time went on, the noble classes would begin to educate their children, but if one looks at the conversations surrounding the purpose of education in the Middle Ages they have a decidedly religious flavor. Theology became the queen of all academic disciplines, all other areas of learning were her handmaidens. The purpose of education then? To better contemplate God and to better understand the Christian religion. This will probably strike a chord with those who work at Christian classical schools, but again it's important to remember that this view of education still very much existed within a class system. It was not for everyone, especially as the clergy became inundated with the second and third sons of noble families in an effort avoid inheritance issues. 

The later Middle Ages and the Renaissance took a bit more of a utilitarian approach. Machiavelli might be the best person to look at here. The clergy were educated, the nobles were educated, but an increasing number of former peasants (really skilled artisans and merchants) were becoming incredibly wealthy. This new 'middle class' latched onto education, forming the majority of lawyers and doctors. What was education for now? Power. Education served to divide those with means from those without. This is admitedly a necessary oversimplification of a complicated era, but the general point still holds - who education is for on a practical level tells us a lot about what many people thought it was for. Again, I don't think many classical educators would agree with the principle that the point of education is to maintain or gain social and political clout. Even if we look at the humanist movement, which would have claimed that education served to unlock human potential, it is important to remember that human potential is reserved for those who have the monetary means to attain it. There was not a lot of educational philanthropy going on before the 19th century.

As we move into the Enlightenment, education was meant to produce a gentleman. Class divides were just beginning to erode. A gentleman in this era could be self-made, and you have men like Jefferson writing about schools that would be populated by those with the most merit, regardless of class. These schools are still not for everyone. The idea of class based on historical title or wealth was becoming unpopular, but men like Jefferson weren't advocating for the abolition of class or even radical equality. They were pushing for a class-based society based on merit. A meritocracy. This is closer to what classical schools do, but it's still not really what the goal of most classical schools is. Most classical educators would push back at the idea that the best education should be reserved for the best. 

That brings us almost to where we are now. More democratic minds prevailed. Education has become compulsory from ages five to sixteen. Why? What are we attempting to do? We're not attempting to craft a ruling class. Compulsory education makes that impossible. Ruling classes are small, and even in a country where even the children of former slaves can now and do sit in the highest courts of power, an educational system that serves all men cannot focus on creating political leaders. In the same vein, a public education system in a pluralistic society cannot focus on creating Christian clergy. Even if all students were practitioners of Christianity, education specifically designed to create a priest class would serve only the needs of the few for whom that is a calling. 

In our society, you do see thinkers who view the educational system as a tool to wield power - political and social power. The proper educational training allows one to join an inner circle of our intellectual and political betters. Education itself is a tool to be wielded in the pursuit of this power. You see this in the progressive movement in the nineteenth century, with the communist takeover of the teacher schools in the 1960s, and in the leftist movements of the present day. Classical education usually unequivocably sets itself against this view of education.

So, where does this leave us? What is classical education? It's not the way everyone was taught until a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago everyone was not taught. It is new. It has to be. Classical education is not a useful enterprise in the way people typically mean useful. It certainly can and does provide an excellent education for those who will rule us, both politically and religiously, but the production of ruling classes is not its goal. It is a powerful education because it is centered on the pursuit of truth, but the seeking of power for its own sake is not its goal. Classical education is not old, but it is traditional. Because classical education exists in a world where education is compulsory its goal must be universal. At bottom, I think, if you speak to most classical educators and most people who think about what classical education is for, it comes to this: Classical education seeks to create rational and moral persons. Almost every person has the capacity to be rational to one degree or another. Almost every person has the capacity to be moral to one degree or another. A universal education's goal must be universal.

In some ways, modern classical education is superior to the historical kinds of education from which it stems. The idea that all persons are worthy of the opportunity of developing all aspects of their humanity is an excellent one. The recognition of the fact that all students are not just minds but also souls is not one that is unique to classical education, but classical education's synthesis of modern democratic notions with traditional morality is laudable. It's a kind of education created in a modern world to be used in modern schools which are fundamentally different from their ancient counterparts. Its form and its goals are modern (and we must be careful not to automatically equate modern with bad in a sort of reverse chronological snobbery), but it does retain a connection to the past through its understanding of what a good man is. 

Classical education is, in a sense, the product of evolution. It is not ancient education but it is descended from historical impulses that have been working themselves out for over two thousand years. It retains vestiges from the older models that preceded it, but it has adapted itself for the world in which it finds itself. 

So, what is classical education? It is the product of two thousand years of educational practice working itself out in the minds of educators long dead and in the policies of societies that have come and gone. It is an animal whose ancestors we can trace back in the fossil record, related to the dead, but better for living.

Fight Me: A Consulting Course

I would like to invite all of my loyal followers to come and fight me July 25, 2022 and July 26th, 2022. 

Not really. Well, I mean, kind of. 

I'm teaching two classes on the art of disputation, aka medieval debate. The class on the 25th is for middle school teachers and home educators and the one on the 26th is for high school teachers and home educators. 

If anyone is interested they can follow this link to register.

Christian Teacher, Secular School

Disclaimer: I'm a Protestant Christian, so I'll be addressing the topics in this post from that lens.

Something that classical educators talk a lot about are the three transcendentals - Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. One day I'll do a whole series about them, but they raise some interesting dilemmas outside of their definitions. If, as many classical educators claim, the goal of education is to guide students to know truth, to do good, and to love beauty, then shouldn't it be the goal of an educator to lead children toward Christ, toward the Truth of God as seen in his Word? As a Christian, is it possible to really educate students without being able to talk about Christianity? Basically, is it possible to actually teach in a way that's consistent with Christian beliefs in a public school? 

This has always been a bit of a struggle for me personally. I teach at a classical school, yes, but it's a charter school. For those not familiar with charter schools, they're essentially public schools - they're tuition-free, they receive federal and state funding, and they have to subscribe to all the rules and regulations of normal public schools - the upside of a charter school is that it has a bit more freedom than local ISD schools to choose its curriculum and its teaching methods. Still, charter schools are legally required to be secular institutions. Because I teach in a charter school I can teach how I want (classically), but I can't teach what I want (to be fair, there is no school where you can teach whatever you want).

So, if one of my main goals as a teacher is to lead students to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and if as a Christian I believe that God is the ultimate embodiment of those three things, how can I successfully teach my students and guide them toward truth, beauty, and goodness if I'm not allowed to teach Christianity explicitly?

Well, the conclusion that I've come to over the years is that it's not really possible to be a successful Christian educator in a secular school if we define success in education as instructing students in Christian values and in Christian theology. And maybe, if we assume that Christianity is actually true, a truly successful education is one that produces young men and women who can think well, speak well, love others well, and love God above all. I think, however, there's space for an excellent education to be had outside of an explicitly Chritstian context.

Christian thinkers, almost from the outset of the faith, have struggled with the question of whether it was even possible for anyone to know anything outside of the light of the Christian faith. The general answer to that question has been that there are two main categories of knowledge. There is the category of general revelation, and this includes most things that can be known - science, mathematics, history, language. This is essentilly the entire foundation of an education. The idea behing general revelation is that men are created in the image of a good God. They were created to fill the earth and subdue it. In order to fulfill this mandate men need minds that are capable of understanding and interacting with the woeld that God created. Christians and non-Christians alike, then, using the reason and sensory capacities that they have are capable of gaining real knowledge about the world we live in.

There's more to general revelation, however, than just the observations of the natural world that are the foundation of science, or the relationships between numbers that make up mathematics, or the mere facts and sequences of events of history, or the rules and intracacies of language. Even the most skeptical Christians will grant that a specialized knowledge of God is not necessary the excell in these subjects. General revelation, however, extends even to truths as important as the appreciation of beautiful things, human ethics, the existence and basic nature of a god. Don't take my word for it. Christ himself says in the Sermon on the Mount, "For he [God] makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect," (Matthew 5:45-8). The implication of these verses is there even people who do not love and honor the Judeo-Christian God are given the grace to know what good and evil are, and are given the grace to choose to do good things in, quite frankly, a broad range on contexts. General revelation shows us the difference between truth and lies, good and evil, beauty and ugliness and our natural capacity for reason can help us seek and pursue those things. 

So what, then? Can our reason tell us everything that's worth knowing on its own? Is the Bible, are Christian teaching and doctrine, just fun little add-ons to the great amount of knowledge we can amass on our own? The traditional Christian response to that would be no. The human mind, the human senses, and human reason are great gifts, but in an ultimate cosmic sense they're meaningless. The great human problem is not physical death or human suffering (and I do not say this to mitigate those problems). The great human problem is the sin we carry as individuals and as a species that consigns us to eternal separation from God. Our minds, however great they are, cannot solve this spiritual problem. In comes special revelation. Special revelation is knowledge that our reason could never give us, it is the knowledge that God Himself gives us to solve our cosmic problem. It's the most important knowledge we can ever get, by far. 

So, where does that leave the Christian teacher who can't teach the faith? God has given human beings an enormous capacity to know in the arena of general revelation. The Christian teacher can teach the core subjects with just as much effectiveness as anyone else. But it's important to remember that classical education in particular is interested in training students to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful - to train their affections if I may insert a bit of jargon. There is so much space within general revelation to do this as well. Pagans as well as Christians have created great works of art, have crafted glorious songs, graceful dances, and works of literature. In short all men have the capacity to love and see beauty. Pagans as well as Christians have thought great thoughts, have had bursts of insight and flashes of genius. All men have the capacity to seek and understand truth. Pagans as well as Christians love their familes and their friends, have consciences, know to strive to do virtue and avoid vice. All men know and try to be good. All with varying rates of success. 

Is it worth it to teach in a secular enviornment? Yes, but only if we really belive it when we say that we think that God is real, that God is good. We can teach students the subjects we've been given because that is a great and noble task. We can teach students to be virtuous, both in their minds and in their souls. We can teach them to believe in beauty and to long for it. And most of all we can teach them to be truth seekers. Because if God True, if he is Good, if he is Beautiful, if God IS, then those who seek after those things should find them in him.  

Back to Basics - What is Classical Education?

 I recently attended a professional development conference for educators who have experience teaching at classical schools. Despite the collective experience in the room, the first two sessions, totaling over three hours, were devoted to an attempt to define classical education. I won't dwell on the eye-rolls and mild agitation of the more seasoned classical teachers, but will instead offer an explanation as to why basically everywhere people go in the classical education world people feel the need over and over to try to explain what classical education is. The answer is very simple - no one, including the people giving their definitions, knows. 

Thank you for your time, you've been a wonderful audience. 

Ok, in all seriousness though, in all my time as a classical educator I have never heard two people give the same explanation or definition of classical education. I've heard it described as, "the way everyone was educated until one hundred years ago," "a distinctive education based on the Greek and Roman tradition," "An education that produces good men who speak well," "an education that shapes the thoughts and pleasures of its students toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful,"  "An education that produces joy and wonder and creates students who are a light to those around them," or "an education that leads students toward Truth, Goodness, and Beauty and seeks to pass on the soul of a society from one generation to the next." I actually heard all of those different definitions last week. There were twice as many as which were floated, but honestly, I got bored and stopped writing them down. You feel like you know what it is yet? I know my struggle has always been that these so-called definitions that people frequently float have no shortage of jargon but are somewhat lacking in actual substance. 

So, how, then, are schools able to describe themselves as classical, to claim that they're providing a classical education if there's not a clear sense of what a classical education actually is? I've sort of discovered that when most people talk about classical education, they're not really talking about a real pedagogical thing. They're more talking about a sort of pedagogical zeitgeist, a feeling, a movement.

 

Over the next few weeks, I'd like to explore some of the ideas, methods, and courses that tend to be shared by schools that call themselves classical. It should be noted, however, that because there's not an actual clear-cut definition of classical education, there's not an actual set of rules or pedagogical prescriptives that can be produced and pointed to, that the list I'll be exploring is built on generalizations and tendencies within the so-called classical community. Not every school or co-op will do everything listed, and that's ok. 

So, what makes a school 'classical?'

According to my observations, a classical school tends to, in broad strokes: 

• Connect itself to a perception of a more moral and more academically rigorous past
• Describe itself as a liberal arts institution
• Require its students to learn Latin
• Use older books and use primary texts as its main teaching tools
• Focus on producing students who can use language well

Over the next five weeks, we'll look at each one of these:

1.  Is classical education really the way everyone was educated until a hundred years ago? Here
2. What is a liberal art, and where can I buy one? Part One, Part Two
3. What is the point of learning a dead language (no, really, what is the point)? 
4. Should we only read things by dead people?  
5. And finally, Who is the 'good man speaking well?'

I Can Classical... And You Can Too

I’m a classical educator, I guess. I never set out to be one. I was originally going to study and teach philosophy at the university level. Or if that didn't work out, I was going to get married and volunteer at a zoo. However, my senior year of undergrad I realized that the plan I had crafted for my future had become intolerable to me. I was a philosophy major, and while philosophy texts were fun to read when you could understand them, philosophers were no fun to talk to (you all know what I mean). I could no longer imagine spending the rest of my life trapped in conversations about the place that quantum mechanics held in the debate about the B theory of time. Also, it turned out that zoos wouldn't let you volunteer to just hang out with the animals without some kind of useful degree in biology or exotic veterinary science So, what was I to do?

A friend conveniently mentioned to me that fateful December that it was possible to teach in a classical charter school without an educational degree. I figured that could do that for a year while I reevaluated. And here I am, seven years later, still reevaluating. I fell into the world of classical education, despite never having received one myself. I’ve even been ‘converted’ to its methods and ideologies so far as I or anyone really understands them. I like teaching, and if test scores mean anything (which is debatable), I’m pretty good at it. I still feel a lot of times, however, that I’m just kind of floating aimlessly down a path I sort of fell into.

I know that classical ed. has no shortage of defenders, most of whom are far more eloquent than I am, and honestly, I’m not really interested in defending the style. For one thing, it’s hard to defend something that barely has a definition. For another thing, classical education has become something of a fad in recent years. The amount of metaphorical ink that has been spilled describing, and defining, and defending the style is literally astronomical.

So I’m left with a problem: I’m a child of the internet age and I fit the type well. I have no real skills or interesting hobbies – I’ve finished one cross-stitch project, I’ve knitted half of a scarf, and I draw badly, so I can’t really call myself a crafter. I say that my hobby is reading when asked, but by that I mean that I liked to read when I was younger and now I binge-watch Netflix, listen to podcasts while I drive, and listen to one audiobook a month on audible. I’m overeducated and have a masters in classical education, so I guess that in the world of credentialism, I’m qualified to talk about something. I don’t have Facebook, Instagram, or even TikTok - I got rid of all my social media accounts - and I’ve never been very good or consistent about journaling. So, now I’m stuck with the only philosophical question that really matters – if I don’t post my thoughts on the internet for strangers to read, does my life have any real meaning or value at all?

This post was meant to act as a sort of ethos for myself, as well as to provide a sort of vision or mission for this blog. So far I hope that I have shown that I am not really the most qualified person in the world to talk about anything with any sort of authority. I fell into this life by accident. I’ve been trying to figure out what everything is as I go, and I’d like to invite you on this journey with me as I attempt to discover answers to the perennial questions surrounding classical education.

What is a liberal art? Where can you find a quadrivium? Did Dorothy Sayers ever find her tools of learning?  Does anyone actually know what classical education is anyways? I’ve been a classical educator for a laughable seven years, but if these past years of exercising copious amounts of unearned confidence have taught me one thing, it’s that with a little bit of humility and a lot a bit of patience (and some research) I can classical… and you can too.