The list serves in the US are quiet today, as are the people of the nation.
Watching the events, and the coverage of the events, and the treatment of
those impacted at all levels often brings me to outrage. Then I remember
our rush to judgment about Duke, and about so many other areas as we bounce
around often making situations worse. It is also interesting in that the
full range from Omaha school children (N word) to Oprah (Rutgers women BB
team) all highlight the inconsistences of a society that promotes order yet
supports those who promote the ultimate disorders, especially the status
and security of women and children. The lessons are often lost on me as I
bounce around after dealing with patients who face daily outrage, after
dealing with research that does not flatter our nation, after dealing with
advocates who want everything for everyone and are willing to do everything
to get it in health care and other areas, even when I like what they
promote. It is a great challenge not to be paralyzed. It is also a
challenge not to break the bank as we respond to each outrage as if we
could control every situation. How do we respond, work, function, maintain
hope, or overcome the adversities and adversaries?

The following page is worth reading, but the essay by Sayers on the Lost
Tools of Learning is priceless.

Anger in Public Discourse    -  The Rules of Engagement   April 17, 2007
Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark
Earley.

As I mentioned on yesterday's broadcast about Peter Wood's new book, A Bee
in the Mouth, anger has become the new norm for public discourse today.
Just think about any arguments you have had—or heard—lately about the war
in Iraq, global warming, gay "marriage," or abortion. Clearly, our nation
and our culture are polarized. Discussion and debate have been replaced
with yelling and demonizing. We Christians cannot retreat from the public
square. We are called to speak the truth in love. But how do we engage
others in a world where sound bytes compete and angry rhetoric is the order
of the day?

As I have thought about this cultural trend, I have been reminded of a
famous speech by Dorothy Sayers, "The Lost Tools of Learning," presented at
Oxford in 1947. In it, she discusses the three pillars of a classical
education: fact-gathering (or "grammar" as it is referred to), logic, and
rhetoric.
(RCB comment - I cannot strongly recommend enough the reading of this essay
at http://www.classicalhomeschooling.com/html/lost_tools_of_learning.html)

We can apply this classical way of learning to our own discourse: Gather
facts, apply logic, and then use effective principles of communication.
Thankfully, there are a number of Christian classical schools across the
country teaching kids exactly this. But this does not get us quite far
enough in this postmodern world. How do we engage with others who may have
tossed logic to the curb long ago? For starters, we might look to Jesus
Himself as a model. Throughout His ministry, Jesus engages in conversation
by probing people so that they examine themselves. How does He do it? He
asks them questions of His own: Why do you call me good? Whose image and
word are stamped on this coin? Who was the neighbor to this man? Some
eighty-two questions of Jesus are recorded in the book of Matthew alone.

Take a look, for instance, at the story of the woman caught in adultery.
The Pharisees come dragging a woman before Jesus to put Him between the
rock of the Mosaic Law and the hard place of a public bloodbath. Stewing in
their anger against Jesus, the Pharisees asked Him what they should do with
the woman. Jesus could have responded in anger. Instead, He stoops and
scribbles in the sand, creating a silent moment in a volatile situation.
Then, knowing that this teachable moment has more to do with exposing the
Pharisees' hearts than the heart of this already-exposed woman, Jesus says,
"If anyone is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."
It's an implicit question: Who among you is sinless? Jesus was not merely
trying to win an argument, nor was His main goal even diffusing anger. He
was trying to win the hearts and minds of those who might listen.

The Pharisees had come with an agenda, and their anger, like the anger of
so many around us today, was merely a symptom of a deeper problem. Of all
people, Jesus could have shown a judgmental attitude. Unlike us, He is,
after all, a righteous judge. But instead through a humble heart, and an
implicit question, Jesus gently exposes the real issue.

You know, if our priority is winning over our opponents, instead of merely
beating them in an argument, God can give us grace to do the same as Jesus
did.
www.breakpoint.org

Beginning and Ending from the 1947 Sayers  essay at
http://www.classicalhomeschooling.com/html/lost_tools_of_learning.html
1947 but sounds like today and extremely relevant for family medicine today

The Lost Tools of Learning, Dorothy Sayers

That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, should presume
to discuss education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology. It is
a kind of behavior to which the present climate of opinion is wholly
favorable. Bishops air their opinions about economics; biologists, about
metaphysics; inorganic chemists, about theology; the most irrelevant people
are appointed to highly technical ministries; and plain, blunt men write to
the papers to say that Epstein and Picasso do not know how to draw.  Up to
a certain point, and provided that the criticisms are made with a
reasonable modesty, theses activities are commendable. Too much
specialization is not a good thing. There is also one excellent reason why
the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education.
For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or
another, been taught. Even if we learnt nothing perhaps in particular if we
learnt nothing our contribution to the discussion may have potential value.

However, it is in the highest degree improbable that the reforms I propose
will ever be carried into effect.  Neither the parents, nor the training
colleges, nor the examination boards, nor the board of governors, nor the
ministries of education would countenance them for a moment.  For they
amount to this: that if we are to produce a society of educated people,
fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of
our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or
five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of
its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.

Before you dismiss me with the appropriate phrase reactionary, romantic,
mediaevalist, laudator temporis acti, or whatever tag comes first to hand,
I will ask you to consider one or two miscellaneous questions that hang
about at the back, perhaps, of all our minds, and occasionally pop out to
worry us.

When we think about the remarkably early age at which the young men went up
to the university in, let us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were held fit
to assume responsibility for the conduct of their own affairs, are we
altogether comfortable about that artificial prolongation of intellectual
childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so
marked in our own day?  To postpone the acceptance of responsibility to a
late date brings with it a number of psychological complications which,
while they may interest the psychiatrist, are scarcely beneficial either to
the individual or to society.  The stock argument in favor of postponing
the school-leaving age and prolonging the period of education generally is
that there is now so much more to learn than there was in the Middle Ages.
This is partially true, but not wholly. The modern boy and girl are
certainly taught more subjects but does that always mean that they actually
know more?

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the
proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher that it has ever
been, people should have become susceptable to the influence of
advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and
unimagined?  Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the
press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to
distribute over a wide area?  Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion
that the product might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven
from the plausible?

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 speak to the question, or to meet and refute the
arguments of speakers on the other side?  Or have you ever pondered upon
the extremely high incidence of irrelevant matter which crops up at
committee meetings, and upon the very great rarity of persons capable of
acting as chairmen of committees?  And when you think of this, and think
that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have
you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?

Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or elsewhere and
noticed how frequently writers fail to define the terms they use? Or how
often, if one man does define his terms, another will assume in his reply
that he was using the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in
which he has already defined them?  Have you ever been faintly troubled by
the amount of slipshod syntax going about? And if so, are you troubled
because it is inelegant or because it may lead to dangerous
misunderstanding?

Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only
forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected) but
forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a
new subject for themselves? Are you often bothered by coming across
grown-up men and women who seem unable to distinguish between a book that
is sound, scholarly, and properly documented, and one that is, to any
trained eye, very conspicuously none of these things?  Or who cannot handle
a library catalogue? Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a
curious inability to extract from it the passages relevant to the
particular question which interests them?

Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a subject
remains a subject, divided by watertight bulkheads from all other subjects,
so that they experience very great difficulty in making an immediate mental
connection between, let us say, algebra and detective fiction, sewage
disposal and the piece of salmonor, more generally, between such spheres of
knowledge as philosophy and economic, or chemistry and art?

Are you occasionally perturbed by the things written by adult men and women
for adult men and women to read? We find a well-known biologist writing in
a weekly paper to the effect that: It is an argument against the existence
of a Creator (I think he put it more strongly; but since I have, most
unfortunately, mislaid the reference, I will put his claim at its lowest)
'an argument against the existence of a Creator that the same kind of
variations which are produced by natural selection can be produced at will
by stock-breeders. One might feel tempted to say that it is rather an
argument for the existence of a Creator. Actually, of course, it is
neither:  all it proves is that the same material causes (recombination of
the chromosomes by cross-breeding and so Fourth) are sufficient to account
for all observed variation just as the various combinations of the same
dozen tones are materially sufficient to account for Beethoven's Moonlight
Sonata and the noise the cat makes by walking on the keys.  But the cat's
performance neither proves nor disproves the existence of Beethoven: and
all that is proved by the biologist's argument is that he was unable to
distinguish between a material and a final cause.

More than once the reader is reminded of the value of an intensive study of
at least one subject, so as to learn the meaning of knowledge and what
precision and persistence is needed to attain it.  Yet there is elsewhere
full recognition of the distressing fact that a man may be master in one
field and show no better judgement than his neighbor anywhere else: he
remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he learned it.

I would draw your attention particularly to that last sentence, which
offers an explanation of what the writer rightly calls the distressing fact
that the intellectual skills bestowed upon us by our education are not
readily transferable to subjects other than those in which we acquired
then: he remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he
learned it.

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.  It is as though we had taught a child, mechanically and by
rule of thumb, to play the Harmonious Blacksmith upon the piano, but had
never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorized
the Harmonious Blacksmith, he still had not the faintest notion how to
proceed from that to tackle the Last Rose of Summer:. Why do I say, as
though? In certain of the arts and crafts we sometimes do precisely this
requiring a child to express himself in paint before we teach him how to
handle the colors and the brush. There is a school of thought which
believes this to be the right way to set about the job.  But observe: it is
not the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a
new medium. He, having learned by experience the best way to economize
labor and take the thing by the right end, will start off by doodling about
on an old piece of material, in order to give himself the feel of the tool.

Let us now look at the mediaeval scheme of education the syllabus of the
Schools.  It does not matter, for the moment, whether it was devised for
small children or for older students, or how long people were supposed to
take over it.  What matters if the light it throws upon what the men of the
Middle Ages supposed to be the object and the right order of the educative
process.

The syllabus was divided into two parts: the Trivium and Quadrivium.  The
second part the Quadrivium consisted of subjects and need not for the
moment concern us.  The interesting thing for us is the composition of the
Trivium, which preceeded the Quadrivium was the preliminary discipline for
it. It consisted of three parts: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, in that
order.

Now the first thing that we notice is that two at any rate of these
subjects are not what we should call subjects at all they are only methods
of dealing with subjects. Grammar, indeed, is a subject in the sense that
it does mean definitely learning a language at that period it meant
learning Latin.  But language itself is simply the medium in which thought
is expressed.    The whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach
the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning, before he began to apply
them to subjects at all. First, he learned a language; not just how to
order a meal in a foreign language, but the structure of a language, and
hence of language itself what it was, how it was put together, and how it
worked. Secondly, he learned how to use language: how to define his terms
and make accurate statements: how to construct an argument and how to
detect fallacies in argument.  Dialectic, that is to say, embraced Logic
and Disputation.  Thirdly, he learned to express himself in language how to
say what he had to say elegantly and persuasively.

At the end of his course, he was required to compose a thesis upon some
theme set by his masters or chosen by himself, and afterwards, to defend
his thesis against the criticism of the faculty.  By this time he would
have learned or woe betide him not merely to write an essay on paper, but
to speak audibly and intelligibly from a platform, and to use his wits
quickly when heckled.  There would also be questions, cogent and shrewd,
from those who had already run the gauntlet of debate.

Scorn in plenty has been poured out upon the mediaeval passion for
hair-splitting: 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. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the
mercy of the printed word.  By the invention of the film and the radio, we
have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the
incessant battery of words, words, words.  They do not know what the words
mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling
them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the
masters of them in their intellects.  We who were scandalized in 1940 when
men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when
young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with
a smattering of "subjects"; and when whole classes and whole nations become
hypnotized by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be
astonished.  We dole out lip-service to the importance of education lip
service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the
school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the
teachers slave concientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I
believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have
lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched
and piecemeal job of it.

What, then, are we to do?  We cannot go back to the Middle Ages. That is a
cry which we have become accustomed. We cannot go back or can we?
Distinguo. I should like every term in that proposition defined. Does "go
back" mean a retrogression in time, or the revision of an error?  The first
is clearly impossible per se; the second is a thing which wise men do every
day. "Cannot" does this mean that our behavior is determined irreversibly,
or merely that such an action would be very difficult in view of the
opposition it would provoke? Obviously the twentieth century is not and
cannot be the fourteenth; but if the Middle Ages is, in this context,
simply a picturesque phrase denoting a particular educational theory, there
seems to be no a priori reason why we should not "go back" to it with
modifications as we have already "gone back", with modifications, to, let
us say, the idea of playing Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them, and not
in the "modernized" versions of Cibber and Garrick, which once seemed to be
the latest thing in theatrical progress.

Details of the author's construct are omitted here for sake of space.

It is difficult to say at what age precisely, we should pass from the first
to the second part of the Trivium. Generally speaking, the answer is, so
soon as the pupil shows himself disposed to pertness and interminable
argument. For as, in the first part, the master-faculties are Observation
and Memory, so, in the second, the master-faculty is the Discursive Reason.
In the first, the exercise to which the rest of the material was, as it
were, keyed, was the Latin grammar; in the second, the key-exercise will be
Formal Logic. It is here that our curriculum shows its first sharp
divergence from modern standards. The disrepute into which Formal Logic has
fallen is entirely unjustified; and its neglect is the root cause of nearly
all those disquieting symptoms which we have noted in the modern
intellectual constitution. Logic has been discredited, partly because we
have come to suppose that we are conditioned almost entirely by the
intuitive and the unconscious. There is no time to argue whether this is
true; I will simply observe that to neglect the proper training of the
reason is the best possible way to make it true. Another cause for the
disfavor into which Logic has fallen is the belief that it is entirely
based upon universal assumptions that are either unprovable or
tautological. This is not true. Not all universal propositions are of this
kind. But even if they were, it would make no difference, since every
syllogism whose major premise is in the form "All A is B" can be recast in
hypothetical form. Logic is the art of arguing correctly; "If A, then B";
the method is not invalidated by the hypothetical mature of A. Indeed, the
practical utility of Formal Logic today lies not so much in the
establishment of positive conclusions as in the prompt detection and
exposure of invalid inference.

Let us now quickly review our material and see how it is to be related to
Dialectic. On the Language side, we shall now have our vocabulary and
morphology at our fingertips; henceforward we can concentrate on syntax and
analysis (i.e., the logical construction of speech) and the history of
language (i.e., how we came to arrange our speech as we do in order to
convey our thoughts).

Our Reading will proceed from narrative and lyric to essays, arguments, and
criticism, and the pupil will learn to try his hand at writing this kind of
thing. Many lessons - on whatever subject - will take the form of debates;
and the place of individual or choral recitation will be taken by dramatic
performances, with special attention to plays in which an argument is
stated in dramatic form.

Mathematics - algebra, geometry, and the more advanced kinds of arithmetic
- will now enter into the syllabus and take its place as what it really is;
not a separate "subject", but a sub-department of Logic. It is neither more
or less than the rule of the syllogism in its particular application to
number and measurement, and should be taught as such, instead of being, for
some, a dark mystery, and, for others, a special revelation, neither
illuminating nor illuminated by any other part of knowledge.

History, aided by a simple system of ethics derived from the grammar of
theology, will provide much suitable material for discussion. Was the
behavior of this statesman justified? What was the effect of such an
enactment? What are the arguments for and against this or that form of
government? We shall thus get an introduction to constitutional history - a
subject meaningless to the young child, but of absorbing interest to those
who are prepared to argue and debate. Theology itself will furnish material
for argument about conduct and morals; and should have its scope extended
by a simplified course of dogmatic theology (i.e., the rational structure
of Christian thought), clarifying the relations between the dogma and the
ethics, and lending itself to that application of ethical principles in
particular instances which is properly called casuitry. Geography and the
Sciences will likewise provide material for Dialectic.

But, above all, we must not neglect the material which is so abundant in
the pupils' own daily life.

There is a delightful passage in Leslie Paul's The Living Hedge which tells
how a number of small boys enjoyed themselves for days arguing about an
extraordinary shower of rain which had fallen in their town - a shower so
localized that it left one half of the main street wet and the other dry.
Could one, they argued, properly say that it had rained that day on or over
the town or only in the town? How many drops of water were required to
constitute rain - and so on. Argument about this led on to a host of
similar problems about rest and motion, sleep and waking, est and non est,
and the infinitestimal division of time. The whole passage is an admirable
example of the spontaneous development of the ratioinactive faculty and the
natural and proper thirst of the awakening reason for definition or terms
and exactness of statement. All events are food for such an appetite.

An umpire's decision; the degree to which one may transgress the spirit of
a regulation without being trapped by the letter; on such questions as
these, children are born casuists, and their natural propensity only needs
to be developed and trained - and, especially, brought into an intelligible
relationship with events in the grown-up world. The newspapers are full of
good material for such exercises; legal decisions, on the one hand, in
cases where the cause at issue is not to abstruse, on the other, fallacious
reasoning and muddleheaded arguments, with which the correspondence columns
of certain papers one could name are abundantly stocked.

Wherever the matter for Dialectic is found, it is, of course, highly
important that attention should be focused upon the beauty and economy of a
fine demonstration or a well-tuned argument, lest veneration should wholly
die. Criticism must not be merely destructive; though at the same time both
teacher and pupils must be ready to detect fallacy, slipshod reasoning,
ambiguity, irrelevance, and redundancy, and to pounce upon them like rats.
This is the moment when précis-writing may be usefully undertaken; together
with such exercises as the writing of an essay, and the reduction of it,
when written, by 25 or 50 percent.

It will, doubtless, be objected that to encourage young persons at the Pert
age to browbeat, correct, and argue with their elders will render them
perfectly intolerable. My answer is that children of that age are
intolerable anyhow; and that their natural argumentativeness may just as
well be canalized to good purpose as allowed to run away into the sands. It
may, indeed, be rather less obtrusive at home if it is disciplined in
school; and, anyhow, elders who have abandoned the wholesome principle that
children should be seen and not heard have no one to blame but themselves.

Once again: the contents of the syllabus at this stage may be anything you
like. The "subjectas" supply material; but they are all to be regarded as
mere grist for the mental mill to work upon. The pupils should be
encouraged to go and forage for their own information, and so guided
towards the proper use of libraries and books of reference, and shown how
to tell which sources are authoritative and which are not.

Towards the close of this stage, the pupils will probably be beginning to
discover for themselves that their knowledge and experience are
insufficient, and that their trained intelligences need a great deal more
material to chew upon. The imagination - usually dormant during the Pert
age - will reawaken, and prompt them to suspect the limitations of logic
and reason. This means that they are passing into the Poetic age and are
ready to embark on the study of Rhetoric. The doors of the storehouse of
knowledge should now be thrown open for them to browse about as they will.
The things once learned by rote will be seen in new contexts; the things
once coldly analyzed can now be brought together to form a new synthesis;
here and there a sudden insight will bring about that most exciting of all
discoveries; the realization that a truism is true.

It is difficult to map out any general syllabus for the study Rhetoric; a
certain freedom is demanded. In literature, appreciation should be again
allowed to take the lead over destructive criticism; and self-expression in
writing can go forward, with its tools now sharpened to cut clean and
observe proportion. Any child who already shows a disposition to specialize
should be given his head; for, when the use of tools has been well and
truly learned, it is available for study whatever. It would be well, I
think, that each pupil should learn to do one, or two, subjects really
well, while taking a few classes in subsidiary subjects so as to keep his
mind open to the inter-relations of all knowledge. Indeed, at this stage,
our difficulty will be to keep "subjects" apart; for as Dialectic will have
shown all branches of learning to be inter-related, so Rhetoric will tend
to show that all knowledge is one. To show this, show why it is so, is
pre-eminently the task of the mistress-science. But whether theology is
studied or not, we should at least insist that children who seem inclined
to specialize on the mathematical and scientific side should be obliged to
attend some lessons in the humanities and vice versa. At this stage also,
the Latin grammar, having done its work, may be dropped for those who
prefer to carry on their language studies on the modern side; while those
who are likely never to have any great use or aptitude for mathematics
might also be allowed to rest, more or less, upon their oars. Generally
speaking: whatsoever is mere apparatus may now be allowed to fall into the
background, while the trained mind is gradually prepared for specialization
in the "subjects" which, when the Trivium is completed, it should be
perfectly well equipped to tackle on its own. The final synthesis of the
Trivium - the presentation and public defense of the thesis - should be
restored in some form; perhaps as a kind of "leaving examination" during
the last term at school.

The scope of Rhetoric depends also on whether the pupil is to be turned out
into the world at the age of 16 or whether he is to proceed to the
university. Since, really, Rhetoric should be taken at about 14, the first
category of pupil should study Grammar from about 9 to 11, and Dialectic
from 12 to 14, his last two school years would then be devoted to Rhetoric,
which, in his case, would be of a fairly specialized and vocational kind,
suiting him to enter immediately upon some practical career. A pupil of the
second category would finish his Dialectical course in his preparatory
school, and take Rhetoric during his first two years at his public school.
At 16, he would be ready to start upon those "subjects" which are proposed
for his later study at the university: and this part of his education will
correspond to the mediaeval Quadrivium. What this amounts to is that the
ordinary pupil, whose formal education ends at 16, will take the Trivium
only; whereas scholars will take both the Trivium and the Quadrivium.

Is the Trivium, then, a sufficient education for life" Properly taught, I
believe that it should be. At the end of the Dialectic, the children will
probably seem to be far behind their coevals brought up on old-fashioned
"modern" methods, so far as detailed knowledge of specific subjects is
concerned. But after the age of 14 they should be able to overhaul the
others hand over fist. Indeed, I am not at all sure that a pupil thoroughly
proficient in the Trivium would not be fit to proceed immediately to the
university at the age of 16, thus proving himself the equal of his
mediaeval counterpart, whose precocity astonished us at the beginning of
this discussion. This, to be sure, would make hay of the English
public-school system, and disconcert the universities very much. It would,
for example, make quite a different thing of the Oxford and Cambridge
boatrace.

But I am not here to consider the feelings of academic bodies; I am
concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal
with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the
modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every
subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the
mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort
expended by the person who has not the tools at his command. To learn six
subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the
approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning
makes the approach to every subject an open door.

Before concluding these necessarily very sketchy suggestions, I ought to
say why I think it necessary, in these days, to go back to a discipline
which we had discarded. The truth is that for the last three hundred yearsor so we have been living upon our educational capital. The
post-Renais-sance world, bewildered and excited by the profusion of new
"subjects" offered to it, broke away from the old discipline (which had,
in-deed, become sad-ly dull and stereotyped in its practical application)
and imagined that henceforward it could, as it were, disport itself happily
in its new and extended Quadrivium without passing through the Trivium. But
the Scholastic tradition, though broken and maimed, still lingered in the
public schools and universities; Milton, however much he protested against
it, was formed by it - the debate of the Fallen Angels and the disputation
of Abdiel with Satan have the tool-marks of the Schools upon them, and
might, incidentally, profitably figure as set passages for our Dialectical
studies. Right down to the nineteenth century, our public affairs were
mostly managed, and our books and journals were for the most part written,
by people brought up in homes, and trained in places, where that tradition
was still alive in the memory and almost in the blood. Just so, many people
today who are atheist or agnostic in religion, are governed in their
conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted in their
unconscious assumptions that it never occurs to them to question it.

But one cannot live on capital forever. However firmly a tradition is
rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it
dies. And today a great number - perhaps the majority - of the men and
women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out
our research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and
pulpits - yes, and who educate our young people - have never, even in a
lingering traditional memory, undergone the Scholastic discipline. Less and
less do the children who come to be educated bring any of that tradition
with them. We have lost the tools of learning - the axe and the wedge, the
hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane - that were so adaptable to
all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each
of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand
receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or "looks
to the end of the work."

What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, is at
the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the
teachers - they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a
civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up
the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand.
They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought
to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this; to teach men how
to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is
effort spent in vain.

Robert C. Bowman, M.D.
[log in to unmask]

Fact gathering, logic, rhetoric, approaching others with love, and teaching
others how to learn for themselves about sums it up.

It is interesting that books and other time absorbing endeavors remain the
only areas that seems to address these subjects, and the public media have
too much to present and too little time. In the mass media the public gets
exposures through movies - A few connected to Robin Williams come to mind
bringing people back to life and learning - Dead Poets Society (waking up
learning), Patch Adams (waking up doctoring), Good Will Hunting (waking up
a wasted life), Awakenings (waking up those dead to life and dead to caring
for patients), Hook (waking up fathers and waking up those who are too
adult)

Rhetoric is indeed possible, and even more than possible with electronic
means, but it seems that we fail to grasp this potential too, but we may be
learning.

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