Enchantment, Education and the Trivium

Stratford Caldecott’s latest book Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education (2012, Angelico Press) offers a well-constructed rationale for a return to an authentic understanding of liberal education for the modern age. In brief, Caldecott’s argument is as follows: the return of the classical trivium of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic is an essential condition for education to re-root itself in the search for wisdom. For Caldecott, there is an urgent need to see education as a process of enchantment with beauty:

‘Too often we have not been educating our humanity. We have been educating ourselves for doing rather than being. We live in an excessive activist civilization, in which contemplation and interiority are often despised and suppressed in favor (sic) of mere action and reaction’ (p.11).

Why is this such an important argument? Is this not simply a sepia-tinted vision with little grounding in the reality of schooling today? These are important questions and below is the brief sketch of an answer.

The neglect of the foundational principles set out by Caldecott has allowed education, especially at tertiary level, to become detached from its true home in philosophy and theology and become a branch of the social sciences. Here the focus is slanted heavily towards measurable ‘outcomes’: for many, a ‘good education’ is one which leads to a good job  - understood as one with a high salary and concomitant social status. The notion of learning as a journey to goodness seems to have been left to one side, possibly because there is no shared agreement on what it is to be good and on how goodness can be expressed in public and private life. In other words, a moral relativism has taken a firm, and increasingly intolerant, grip on education.

The rediscovery of the trivium is not to be seen as the ‘painkiller’ which will ease the symptoms of the current ‘educational emergency’. It is part of a long-term approach designed to change the culture of education towards one which values the shared intellectual traditions bequeathed to us and which we should bequeath in turn, suitably enhanced, to those who come after us.

For more on this see (and disseminate) the Beauty in Education blog.

Access Programmes

The recent report on access to Higher Education in the United Kingdom merits careful reading and, more importantly, a considered response. I do not intend to comment on the report as a whole but would like to offer a brief reflection on the principle of university access programmes.

I have had some involvement in access programmes. I am currently my own university’s representative on one modest but successful programme: Access to Primary Education.  What makes it a successful programme is, in my opinion,  the recognition by the pupils on the programme that entry to an ‘ancient’ university is dependent on hard work, dedication and a change in attitudes, principally their own. This programme does not offer a lower tariff for entry but offers extra tuition in English and Maths from post-graduate students. Furthermore, residential weekends designed to raise the aspirations of the participants encourage them to see university as an achievable goal. All of this seems worthwhile to me.

Of course, it is easy to be sceptical and argue that this and similar initiatives favour those who happen to live in the areas covered by the programme. Nonetheless,  I remain convinced that a good access programme can go some way to remedying the less than helpful consequences of so-called progressive education -  but that is another story for another time. Give access programmes your support. 

Silence and Stillness in Education

One of the manifestations of the current ‘educational emergency’ is a lack of opportunities for a genuine appreciation of silence and stillness. This does not refer solely to noise and chatter in the classroom but is something deeper and more urgent. What does this mean and how is it an issue?

The educator should see websites, blogs and social media platforms as rich opportunities to enhance the educational opportunities available. We hold no truck with an unthinking Luddism which holds technological innovation in disdain; neither do we see the new media as revolutionary tools without which we can no longer teach. (A good exercise for student teachers is to plan lessons for a classroom which has no power sockets. They can only use books and some form of board for writing. If you are a teacher educator, try it with your students.)

Social media afford us an opportunity to connect instantly to our ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ across the world. Of course, this can be a wonderful tool to pass on good information about books, websites etc. but has the potential seriously to disturb our ability to concentrate for sustained periods of time. If we study constantly with these media switched on then the temptation to break our patterns of work and study is ever-present.

Without denying the beneficial role that technology can play in education, let us not forget the value of a comfortable chair and the text of a good book or a journal. It does not matter if it is read on an e-reader as long as other functions of the device are turned off. To read deeply in such a setting needs silence and stillness, not just of the body, but of the spirit; from this recreative opportunity the student is free to engage in meaningful dialogue with the text and begin to make sense of it in his or her own mind. This is where learning begins and the students realise that their teachers are not just those who stand before them in class on a daily basis but are, in fact, the great minds of the past upon whose shoulders we all stand. The only way to know what these minds have to say to us today is to spend the necessary time in the sustained, silent reading of the classic texts.