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.
