The brilliant Dorothy L. Sayers answers a question I had always carried around - namely, "why did they do that?":
"Scorn in plenty has been poured out upon the mediaeval passion for hair-splitting [re: how many angels could dance on the head of a pin]: but when we look at the shame-less abuse made, in print and on the platform, of controversial expressions with shifting and ambiguous connotations, we may feel it in our hearts to wish that every reader and hearer had been so defensively armored by his education as to be able to cry: Distinguo.
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary."
Her proposed remedy and structure for childhood education seems really, really strong to me, brilliant and integrated with itself and with the children themselves. In fact, her work currently finds itself at the center of a branch of the home schooling movement that takes a classical education seriously. A pity Ms. Sayers never lived to see it.
As for those angels and pins, there was a method to the madness after all:
"A glib speaker in the Brains Trust once entertained his audience (and reduced the late Charles Williams to helpless rage) by asserting that in the Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to know how many archangels could dance on the point of a needle. I need not say, I hope, that it never was a matter of faith; it was simply a debating exercise, whose set subject was the nature of angelic substance: were angels material, and if so, did they occupy space? The answer usually adjudged correct is, I believe, that angels are pure intelligences; not material, but limited, so that they may have location in space but not extension. An analogy might be drawn from human thought, which is similarly non-material and similarly limited. Thus, if your thought is concentrated upon one thing say, the point of a needle it is located there in there in the sense that it is not elsewhere; but although it is there, it occupies no space there, and there is nothing to prevent an infinite number of different people's thoughts being concentrated upon the same needle-point at the same time. The proper subject of the argument is thus seen to be the distinction between location and tension in space; the matter on which the argument is exercised happens to be the nature of angels (although, as we have seen, it might equally well have been something else); the practical lesson to be drawn from the argument is not to use words like there in a loose and unscientific way, without specifying whether you mean located there or occupying space there."
And now you know the rest of the story....
As one whose undergrad education was based on the trivium and quadrivium - + laboratory and theoretical science - I've got to say that Sayers was absolutely right.
Hasn't kept me from adding other degrees, was a first rate place to begin an education.
Oops, damn, this was slated for auto-publication on Monday. Back into Limbo it goes... and comments capability will return when it does.
Which will be - after about 3 days. I bet Ms. Sayers would find that very funny.
Most people associate Dorothy Sayers with the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery stories which are, of course, wonderful.
But her Divina Commedia translation is fabulous. Makes a great interlinear with the Italian if you're inclined that way.
I'm not crazy. I thought I read this article here the other day. But, when I came back to follow the link it was gone.
Thanks for the post. I'm printing out copies for my Discrete Math class tomorrow. Discrete Math always starts out with logic and its connections to proper reasoning. And Sayers really covers the reason "Why?" very will within the essay.
Many universities have students start with composition, speech, and a basic math class (usually algebra or calculus). Reading this maybe we should drop the 'technical' math class and replace it with a logic (Dialectic) course that would tie together the composition and speech through argumentative reasoning.
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For an arch essay complaining of the modern deficits of education & the neglect of the right & proper instruction in the liberal arts, that article is certainly full of poor transcription & worse grammar. I would prefer to think that these faults were introduced in transcription by a slack editor or worsened by a mischievious proofreader, if only to spare the reputation of Sayers, but that would mean that the operators & maintainers of a home-schooling website are so careless as to mangle a document they would put at the core of their doctrine. This does not speak well of the enterprise.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by modern. Personally, I read it as a very well-written essay with a message that makes a lot of sense. Robin's point from personal experience re: this curriculum was also telling.
But then, I went to public school.
#5: Would you care to provide an example?
My impression is that, while that most demanding of editors - Edgar Allen Poe - might deplore some of her punctation choices, there are in fact no serious problems of grammar in her essay. As a somewhat less knowledgable editor than the esteemed Mr. Poe, I read over it the first time without stumbling in outrage over an unnecessary comma, or a comma when a semicolon in fact was required. I'm sure there are some errows; few people could right as densely as that without producing some sort of error, but unless I got out the Strunk and White and deliberately trying to pick some nits they'd probably pass beneath my notice. Perhaps your sensibilities are more highly refined than mine. But since you fail to give an example, my guess is that what you see as a poor use of grammar is in fact an ornate use of grammar with which you are simply not acustomed, as it belongs to an earlier and more linguisticly rigorous age from before Hemmingway dubiously conquered the literary world with his pithy and elegant prose.
In any event, attacking the punctuation of an author rather than the ideas that the develop is considered to be a low blow on the internet, befitting of only a troll. Your own post does not seem to me to stand up any better than that which you criticize.
As far as the things which offend my sensibilities, I deplore the practice of self and attempted public deception involved preferencing claims with qualifiers like "I would prefer to think..." If you would prefer to think it, then by all means do so. If you wouldn't prefer to think it, then do not be dissembling and claim that you would.
That essay is, in fact, the basis of the classical homeschooling movement. Read Climbing Parnassus or The Well-Trained Mind for a more modern and complete take. Of course, people who want the appearance of rigor and solid educational foundations, but who deplore the actual need for themselves (as teachers) to be disciplined and self-educating, have of late been tending to devalue the term by calling all kinds of educational choices "classical education", even though they are not related in any way to the principles of education that the term originally denoted.
I think that there are three kinds of education we can get in our lives (as distinct from schooling): general education, trade education and leadership education. General education includes basic facts and skills that allow us to exist in our world and culture (like color names, counting, basic numeracy, basic literacy, the ability to work to arbitrary deadlines, the ability to perform meaningless tasks for the approval of a superior, and so on). Trade education includes skills necessary to perform a particular trade, like journalism or plumbing or IT consulting (like how to write in a given style, which types of pipe work together and which don't, or how to administer a UNIX system). Leadership education includes the skills needed to undertake a profession like law, politics or medicine (like decision making, critical thinking, evaluation of competing narratives).
Our public and most private schools do an excellent and thorough job of general education. Trade education is generally obtained in college or on the job, or in some cases at specialized trade schools. A few trade skills are taught, in a limited way, in elective classes in some public schools. Leadership education is taught at only a very few private schools and colleges, as well as professional programs like law school or medical school. Public schools tend to claim they are giving a leadership education, but do not actually do so in any noticeable degree. Classical homeschooling is an attempt to provide a leadership education, and even unschooling (basically letting the child learn what they want when they want with the parent just answering questions) provides a general education (though not, in the case of unschooling, as well as public schools, since that kind of freedom tends to be nonexistent in adult life except for the quite wealthy).
Now, to be fair to the public schools, it's probably not true that we need, or even want, as a culture or nation to have the majority of our people educated as leaders. It's hardly even a given that most people are both capable of being trained that way and interested in that kind of training. It's overkill for most people.
Except for one thing: we expect people to vote on a wide range of issues that are outside of the skill base of any non-expert, and thus to evaluate complex issues based on partial or even non-existent information presented primarily by advocates for a particular outcome (yes, this includes many MSM outlets). As such, we have created an electoral system that includes more people than can vote responsibly in such a way as to preserve long-term national interests, and we have compounded this by expanding the government's reach into areas that only experts can truly understand.
The result is the governing system we have now, including the substitution of hyperpartisan ranting for informed debate, the appeal to base emotions and selfish interests (as opposed to rational self-interest) at the expense of the nation's long-term health, and the focus on buying votes by group pandering rather than creating long-term policies and institutions to guide the nation's progress. We've done it to ourselves, and deserve the government we've got.
#7: On behalf of #5, here are two examples:
Paragraph 1:
“Even if we learnt nothing perhaps in particular if we learnt nothing our contribution to the discussion may have potential value.”
The CH transcribers left out a pair of em dashes. It should be:
“Even if we learnt nothing – perhaps in particular if we learnt nothing – our contribution to the discussion may have potential value.”
Paragraph 9:
“... piece of salmonor ...”
There are multiple typos just in that phrase – it should be “... price of salmon, or ...”. (I found a better transcript only after digging out the OED and discovering they hadn’t heard of salmonor either.) (I regret to say the immediate mental connection to sewage disposal still eluded me.)
I find this sort of thing a rather glaringly obvious interruption in my reading. I can see why you wouldn’t (“punctation, knowledgable, errows, right (for write), trying (for tried), acustomed, linguisticly, Hemmingway”, etc.), but it does bother me.
On the other hand, I’m with you on the grammar. If he couldn’t tell from the writing, the information is right there in the bio beside it - English, born 1893. The essay was presented at Oxford in 1947. Of course it’s in a slightly archaic British style. How the heck did he manage to not figure that out? Mis-education, mayhap?
Next, I quote your comment:
“In any event, attacking the punctuation of an author rather than the ideas that the [sic] develop is considered to be a low blow on the internet [cap. sic], befitting of [sic] only a troll. Your own post does not seem to me to stand up any better than that which you criticize.”
Firstly, I found it amusing to apply the first sentence to your second.
Secondly, Sayers’ punctuation and grammar are beside his point*. As I read him, at least, he was criticizing the editing. Here is the website of a magazine elaborating at length on the benefits of home schooling, and they weren't able to get some simple editing right on a primary document?
*Also amusing, given the context. Sayers: “Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater ... to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side?”
Off-topic PS: I just read your Singularity comment that Joe copied to the front page. I didn’t read the others; I’ve been all Singularitied out for years now, but that seems like my objection to super-intelligences, too: We don’t know if we can get there from here because we don’t know what most of the mathematical problems and physical limitations we’d have to solve are, never mind whether they’ll be too hard, and we aren’t entirely sure where “here” is, never mind “there”. I’m guessing it’ll be a century or three before we find a better way to get brains than just breeding for them. (I count selecting for “smart” genes in sperm and eggs (in 20-50 years?) as breeding. I exclude good government and education as affecting only effective and not potential intelligence. (Though that’s where the action ought to be now, because having more and better scientists is our best way to improve long-run science.)) All opinion; somebody please prove me wrong.
As long as I'm being picky about spelling, would somebody at WoC please touch up a link? The one under Crew: Posting Affiliates says: Dave Schuler: The Gilttering Eye. As in "all that gilt(ters) is not glod".
(The one under Blogkids is fine: The Glittering Eye: Dave Schuler.)
Two links, he must be good, or two links, one of them has to be right?
...in the Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to know how many archangels could dance on the point of a needle ...were angels material, and if so, did they occupy space?
The discussion only covers Classical archangel theory. Quantum archangel theory introduces the archangel exclusion principle, which holds that you cannot simultaneously know the position and momentum of an archangel.
Thus, you can still fit an infinite number on the head of a pin, but you cannot then know that any of them are dancing.
My point was, as Larry Knerr notes, a beef with the editing and/or transcription of the document. Specifically, now that I go back & check for the material which drove me the battiest, the irritating habit of the transcriber/editor/proofreader to fail to reproduce necessary punctuation in the proper place:
To start with, this sentence begins as a question, albeit a rhetorical one. This is the sort of thing most likely to be the fault of the original writer, although it is possible that someone was trying to "correct" some imagined fault of style & thus managed to mangle where they intended to mend. Leaving that aside, the fragment "our education today a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned that" is gibberish without what must have been a set of commas or dashes originally located between "today" & "a" and "mentioned" & "that". Probably dashes, given the usage elsewhere in the sentence of commas, but that's just a guess.
So, the original sentence, properly reconstructed, would have been:
Is not the great defect of our education today - a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned - that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils subjects, we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning?
Not really ideal - I'd probably throw in a sprinkling of "it", "then" & a "that" at appropriate intervals, and probably swap out except for "but" & strip although of its "al" - but at least intelligible as a coherent whole. The sentence as published is rubbish.
As for my experience with complex or recondite prose - good God man, I cut my eyeteeth on Gibbon! I am in no fashion hostile to the occasional empurpled latinate construction. If my literary soul harbors any grammatical sin, it is the inclination to use three adjectives where none would do, often employed in a chain of dependant clauses so dense as to leave the original sense & point of the argument begun lost in clouds of this and that and therefore thereof therein.