Download Problems and Possibilities in Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning

Problems and Possibilities in Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning
by John Heaton
In a short speech at Oxford in 1947, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” Dorothy L. Sayers documented the
radical decline of classical education as it had been practiced in the West through the 19th century. She was
under no illusions that a monolithic golden age had ever existed in the Western canon, nor did she set herself
to the easy task of knocking down a straw man. Living as she did, however, on the tectonic plates of cultural
change after World War II, she (with her counterparts among the Inklings at Oxford) anticipated the emergence
of mass culture. She recognized that in one century the West was spending the intellectual capital that had
accumulated in the world’s greatest institutions over the previous twenty. “Is it not the great defect of our
education today 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.”1
She summarily called for a return to education built solidly on the ancient formulation of the Trivium.
“The syllabus was divided into two parts: the Trivium and Quadrivium [and]…the interesting thing for us is
the composition of the Trivium, which preceded the Quadrivium and was the preliminary discipline for it. It
consisted of three parts: grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, in that order.”2
Sayers’ peculiar contribution in her
short remarks was less an exposition of these well-known categories; rather, she linked these categories to the
psychology of the student, which, she said, “in a rough-and-ready fashion, I will call the poll-parrot, the pert,
and the poetic – the latter coinciding, approximately, with the onset of puberty.”3 In other words she indexed
the three components of Trivium to the nature of the learner. In so doing she constructs a mild proposal for the
recovery of the “lost tools of learning.”
Sayers was neither the first word on classical education, nor would she claim to be the last. She would
demure if she were quoted as an authority on education, a pretense she herself flatly repudiated. In less than
twenty pages, however, she made two claims that are worth noting. First, she claimed that the Trivium and the
Quadrivium as the corpus the liberal arts provided the best framework for the education of the pre-university
student. Second, she claimed that the Trivium in particular should not be understood as comprising discreet
subjects but as modes of learning.4 Thus, she explicitly raised the dual challenges of educational content
and pedagogy: the studies that should be undertaken, and the means by which those disciplines should be
approached in the classroom. The Lost Tools of Learning therefore provides a jumping-off point for a reexamination of these two questions. This paper purposes to address the general contours of the first question,
the decline of the liberal arts, and not matters that pertain to pedagogy.
The broadest concern that warrants attention is that of the liberal arts as a core curriculum. It is not
necessary to demonstrate that the liberal arts barely survive in a relative handful of small universities in
America, and that in nearly unrecognizable form. It is not that elements of the liberal arts are completely
absent, but as James Taylor observes, “[W]e see schools that still advertise a liberal arts curriculum with a
reading list from the Harvard Classics or Great Books, but find that these subjects are mostly taught in the mode
of science and practicality where graduates of such schools tend to pursue careers in law, medicine, engineering,
and politics.”5 Moreover, it is equally self-evident that the liberal arts are all but extinguished in primary and
secondary schools, very few of which give the feeblest lip service to them, much less organize the curriculum
around them. The number of students in American high schools taking Latin, for example, has been free falling
for decades. By itself this might be of concern, but it is not a complete index to the problem. Some students
still read Homer, of course, maybe even a little Aristotle or Plato, but fewer still would have the ability to read
them in Greek.
The greater concern, however, is not whether students are taking this or that from an established canon,
but that the liberal arts do not claim the imagination of educators as an organic whole about which a curriculum
can or should be constructed. Nevertheless, drawing upon John Henry Newman and the Catholic tradition,
Sister Miriam Joseph calls for just such an education. In her thinking it [liberal education] is “the highest of
arts in the sense that it imposes forms (ideas and ideals) not on matter…but on mind…In true liberal education,
as Newman explained, the essential activity of the student is to relate the facts learned into a unified, organic
whole, to assimilate them as the body assimilates food.”6
Joseph claims that the purpose of a liberal arts education, it’s telos, is the formation of the student as a
human being. The end of the educational process is not the impartation of a skill that can be quantified in an
annual salary in a technical marketplace. The end of a liberal arts education is “intransitive,” that is, it does
not issue in the re-formation of a thing that has utility. Instead, the liberal arts curriculum is concerned with
the development of the interior of the student, the in-formation of the learner himself.7 The “product” of such
an education, if it can be called that, is a human being who possesses a higher virtue for having submitted to a
wisdom that goes beyond the mere acquisition of skills.
Rousas John Rushdoony, an orthodox Protestant agrees, noting that a liberal education takes as its end
the liberty of the student. A liberal education should make individual men free, and by extension, it should give
rise to freedom in their societies. He recognizes the crisis of the older education, however, when it is confronted
with the charge of irrelevance in the face of the demands of modernity. Thus, quoting Lynn White, Jr. “to this
[a liberal education] has been added, and in many instances substituted, a new value, skill, not a value of ends,
but of means. The change of values has thus led inevitably to a need for a new concept of liberal education.
If skills, scientific and professional, make men free, then skills constitute a liberal education. But if skills are
only a necessary but subordinate part of freedom, then in themselves they cannot constitute a liberal education,
however necessary to it (emphasis his).8
Although Rushdoony’s analysis of liberal education as the gateway of freedom of the individual is a
different question than the concerns Joseph raises, both would agree that personal virtue, individual freedom,
and a democratic society are philosophical and religious questions, which any full consideration of education
theory must include. For the moment, however, we must set aside the question of the religious nature of liberal
education, and limit the discussion to categories that exclude the role of religious dogma.
Catholics and Protestants, who disagree on details, do agree on broad points. The most significant
of these is the transcendent nature of the educational process. The long history of the liberal arts shows that
even the ancients pursued education in religious terms. At the very least, therefore, a curriculum rooted in this
conception of the liberal arts will be value laden, although it may or may not be explicitly Christian. Joseph’s
“Ideas and ideals” point to what David V. Hicks calls “normative education,” and what the Greeks referred
to as the Ideal Type. “The first premise of classical education is that the Ideal Type’s ancient prescriptive
pattern of truth – which served Christian and Jew, Roman and Greek – remains the most durable and the most
comprehensive.”9 The liberal arts coalesced from pagan roots, seminally organized by the Greeks, and later
catalogued by early theologians and philosophers in the Christina Era, notably St. Augustine and Martianus
Capella.10 What is important for this discussion is that both pagan and Christian formulations were committed
to a transcendent ideal. The Greeks valued the concepts of truth, goodness and beauty, to which the Medieval
Church added holiness.11 The Greeks ultimately located their ideal in man himself, the Christians in the
incarnate Christ. While the two positions are fundamentally in conflict, they both share a commitment to
education oriented toward a higher order. In either case the liberal arts developed in a context of transcendence,
and are characterized by integrated knowledge and right living. This conviction provides the steel girding of
ethical philosophy provided by Aristotle himself:
Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in
the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since
he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not
knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character;
the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion
directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire
and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit
(emphasis added).12
It is on this point that liberal education discovers its cultural dilemma. It is faced on the one hand with
a deeply rooted concern for virtue, and on the other with reflection upon the deepest questions of life. The
sharpest contrast between ancient and modern education, then, is the tendency of the ancients to link religious
and moral knowledge with action, over against the modern tendency of merely acquiring knowledge of external
nature, completely free of moral animation. As Hicks points out, for example, in reference to the sweeping
changes in education during England’s Industrial Revolution, “the school itself came to resemble the factory,
losing its idiosyncratic, intimate, and moral character.”13
It is overly simplistic to assume that a liberal education is concerned with theoretical issues to the
exclusion of the material world, or that the ancients were unified in their opinions on the purposes of education,
theories of knowledge, and the moral education of the young. It is equally unfair to suggest that all modern
education has been severed from any moral context. I am arguing neither. Peter Chojnowski summarizes it
this way: “The intent of the liberal arts, with a literary and a mathematical, “scientific” component, was to
lead the young mind to higher and higher levels of abstraction and universality, until finally, there would be the
attainment of a wisdom that would understand, with increasing degrees of certainty, the connections that existed
between all things and their first and most universal causes” (emphasis his).14
With such lofty aims it would have been hard to predict that liberal education would find itself
struggling to command the imagination of educators, and it remains for us to inquire as to where exactly it ran
off the tracks. Moreover, if liberal education is in fact a superior pathway, we can reasonably ask why has it
been abandoned? Or, perhaps more to point, why has it been transmogrified into a departmental way station
rather than the dominant modality in the secondary and post-secondary environment? The anwer is partially
found in the challenges of modernity that have all but supplanted the liberal arts with a utilitarianism that
reduces all education to vocational or technical training to the exclusion the whole man.
If antiquity teaches us to “know thyself,” modernity has taught us that the highest goal of education
is the fulfillment of the individual, and that education is the union card that that guarantees the privileges
of possessions. For more than a century individualism and progress have dominated academia. This is
documented thoroughly by Frank Pierrepont Graves, who, in his expansive two-volume History of Education
makes the point abundantly clear. Written as a textbook for students, the work’s value is found in his
comprehensive treatment of every major (and nearly all minor) movements in education in the Western
tradition. A professor of Greek, he clearly possesses an appreciation for the accomplishments of antiquity;
however, he judges nearly every educational development in history by the gold standard of the empowerment
of the individual and societal progress.15 Nowhere does he adequately define these terms as being good, but no
doubt his audience understood and likely agreed that the desirability of these criteria was self-evident.
He points out the roots of the modern challenge to liberal education are at least four centuries deep.
Graves uses the term educational “realism” to note the primary challenger to the older education (not be
confused with philosophical realism). By this he refers to the emergence of scientific development in the latter
part of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries. He points out in dramatic understatement
that “this scientific progress was accompanied on the philosophic side by the rationalism of Descartes and
the empiricism of Locke. The educational theorists, as a result, began to introduce science and a knowledge
of real things into the curriculum.”16 It is important to note that education for more than 15 centuries prior to
Descartes, Locke, Bacon and others, did not exclude the investigation of the natural world. It would be more
accurate to acknowledge that the purposes and methods for this investigation had very different ends. The
ancients looked to the natural order for instruction on ordering their lives, rightly intuiting that the cosmos,
natural and supernatural, were a coherent whole. Modernity has largely denied this formulation of the order
of things, and has reduced the natural world to a vast collection to be conquered, mastered, or otherwise
manipulated, without reference to its connection to man’s moral or religious sensibilities. As G raves notes,
“the movement included an attempt at a formulation of scientific principles in education and an adaptation
of education to the nature of the child.”17 This revolution in philosophy had profound, albeit unintended
consequences in education, a result its chief architects did not intend.
A full treatment of Descartes is beyond the scope of this paper, but the Cartesian impact on education
has been brilliantly detailed by James S. Taylor.18 The point warrants attention because Descartes is not
typically associated with educational theory. Nevertheless, his ideas have had a profound effect upon
modern educational theory and practice, “since modern education is dominated, in one way or another by its
influence.”19 Descartes chipped away at notions of the transcendent, and has provided more than sufficient fuel
for an education that is reduced in all areas to scientific analysis at the expense of the student who would be
great-souled.
Descartes reacted not only to medieval scholasticism, but also to skepticism. His intense desire for
mathematical precision, and his quest to construct an entire theory of knowledge purely through reason, was
an attempt – perhaps an unconscious one – to protect against the imprecision of what Aquinas called poetica
scientia. This was the older idea that some things, particularly the divine, might be known truly through an
intuitive consciousness. Such knowledge admittedly lacked the clarity of detail through a rigorous rational or
empirical examination, but in Aquinas’ thinking, were known more truly or fully. There are some things that
simply cannot be reduced to metaphysics.
Descartes method, however, completely severed knowledge from the senses. His first premise was
a kind of dissociation of the external order from the process of knowing, by applying a rigorous test of prior
certitude to anything that was to be subjected to deductive reasoning. Ultimately this process locates knowledge
in a disembodied mind, such that the knower himself tests the very existence of the external world, ruling them
out as adequate starting epistemic starting point. Thus, Descartes begins with the presupposition of doubt
– doubt that is extended to his own existence.
Descartes was ultimately satisfied with proving his own existence by his own thought processes,
summed up in “Cogito, ergo sum.” The circular nature of this supposition, of course, has been widely reviewed
and critiqued, and need not be repeated here. We may suffice to agree with Daniel J. Sullivan who points out
that “Descartes, in an effort to make proof doubly sure, demanded that we prove the existence of things outside
the mind…when he demanded proof for the existence of the outside world, [he] started a false problem.”20 To
ask for proof of the existence of something, including one’s own existence is first to grant that such things are
present. The ontological problem is not easily escaped by simply converting it to an epistemological problem,
even for the sake of argument or for a method that would ultimately yield the desired result. In other words,
before one can rightly conclude, “therefore, I am,” one must at some level grant the “I” as the actor of the verb
“think.”
Whatever philosophical and logical problems there may be in Cartesian thought, the most important
for our purposes is the matter of doubt. Taylor shows that before Descartes, all philosophers from Aristotle to
Aquinas assumed the reality of the external world, not as something to be proven, but as something that worked
in harmony with man’s own reason, and from which man was able to move in contemplation of higher orders.
By extracting the external world from the reasoning process and locating it purely in the mind, Descartes
overturned the tables entirely. He can rightly be called the first “modern” man because he thought like one.
Nothing is true unless it is first proven beyond doubt. This insistence may be appropriate for mathematics and
experimental sciences, but Descartes advocated that his method be applied to all sciences and human knowledge
itself.
In fairness, Descartes was not seeking to disprove the existence of the Creator or even himself for that
matter. He desired to be a good Catholic, and held his Jesuit instructors with the greatest respect. Ideas,
however, have consequences, and once sown, Cartesian philosophy bore more skepticism than it ever
eradicated. This is what Taylor cites as “one of those grand ironies in the history of philosophy that…a
man of faith wished to correct a trend of skepticism in current philosophy, only to give the Western world a
system whose starting point is to produce a method of inquiry based on doubt; in fact a whole new category of
epistemology based on uncertainty.”21
Ancient and medieval education was oriented toward the Ideal Type or an incarnate transcendent in
the Christ. One of its first principles articulated by Aristotle and echoed by Aquinas was that wonder is the
doorway to learning. The imagination, what Taylor calls “poetic knowledge,” is the unique ability of man that
assists him in understanding and grasping reality as a whole. After Descartes, however, philosophy and science
follow a trajectory that empowers man to be the master of his nature – and all of nature – a scientific quest delinked from any sense of the ideal. Education in this mode quickly fragments the disciplines from their higher
purposes and is submerged beneath a fractured collection of brute facts, which, if mastered to the level of a
politically generated test, become the benchmark of education for today’s man.
Finally, it should be pointed out that the pedagogical effects of an analytic and scientific approach to
academic disciplines permits the educator to stand aloof from the moral burden of inquiry. What passes in
today’s schools as “critical thinking” is typically nothing more than the process of placing oneself in a position
of disengagement in a kind of pretended neutrality. The student may be led to make choices and judgments that
have no more goodness or badness, rightness or wrongness, than any other option on the table. The student
is not – and cannot be – addressed from the standpoint of the conscience, particularly as it may be informed
by religion. The relationship of church and state do not enter this question. That is a political matter that
obfuscates the more fundamental issue that cuts to the vitality of a truly liberal education.
It is precisely this reality which permits a technological society to scramble stem cells, to pursue genetic
cloning and a myriad other potential horrors, without clear direction on how to answer the nagging questions of
“should” and “ought.” As Hicks says, “Whereas the modern technocrat sees knowledge as a source of power
giving him a manipulative edge over nature and over others, the ancients treated knowledge as a source of virtue
challenging the individual to improve himself and to look beyond the appearances [in nature] for truth.”22
In calling for a return to the liberal arts curriculum, we are not merely advocating that more students
study Latin, read Homer, and learn the principles of the dialectic and rhetorical arts. Nor are we suggesting
that students should not study technology and other utilitarian disciplines. All of these may be valuable. What
Sayers understood was that students who are cut off from the great conversation, and who are unable to think
and integrate knowledge with wisdom and virtue would in one generation be completely captured by the
manipulative power of mass media and popular culture which was only emerging in her lifetime. To the extent
that a truly liberal education fortifies the student against it, we become its defender and advocate.
Ultimately, the promise of a liberal education is what it has always been: a life that is informed by the
good, the true, the beautiful, and yes, the holy. It also holds forth the best soil from which free men and free
societies come, and is therefore of enormous relevance in today’s world. Its chief obstacle, therefore, would
appear to be the culture itself. A classical, liberal institution will have to find ways to adapt – not accommodate
– but adapt to the deeply embedded mindset of education as the key to possessions, manipulation of nature for
selfish ends, and challenges of a society addicted to human exploits made possible by the technical elite.
Annotated Bibliography
Aristotle. On Rhetoric. Translated by George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford University Press,
1991. The Rhetoric is the foundational treatise from antiquity that attempts to “map” human
speech. Aristotle’s achievement is astonishing in its completeness appearing as it does
“wholly formed.” Modified through the centuries, Aristotle’s Rhetoric nevertheless remains
as the seminal work that established the categories of human speech viewed from multiple
perspectives. These categories largely remain in place. It is clearly relevant to this research
as rhetoric, rightly understood, is the telos of a classical curriculum.
_____. Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, translated by W.D. Ross (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1908) available on-line at http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/nicomachaen.html
Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. by, Victor Watts.
Penguin Books, 1969. I obtained this book, having always wanted to read it. It was on my
“secondary” list, but I have benefited from the reading I’ve been able to accomplish (about
half).
Bunting, III, Josiah. An Education For Our Time. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1998.
Bunting wrote the introduction to Cardinal Newman’s republished The Idea of a University.
A Rhodes Scholar, university president and former soldier, Bunting is uniquely qualified to
address education in the modern context.
Chojnowski, Peter, The Liberal Arts: Part I Forgotten Pathways to Wisdom (available online from
http://www.edocere.org/articles/liberal_arts_I.htm)
Graves, Frank Peirrepont. A History of Education Before the Middle Ages (Vol. 1); A History of
Education During the Middle Ages and the Transition to Modern Times (Vol. 2). Honolulu:
University Press of the Pacific, 2004.
Originally published in 1925 this two volume
series is nevertheless a 19th century examination of education from earliest documented
times to the present. In places Graves gives exceptional clarity to the development of
education as, for example, his treatment of Jesuit education. The book, however, is tedious
to read, monotonous in style, and largely suffers from a documentary style that informs,
but does not captivate. In addition Graves suffers acutely from what C.S. Lewis called
“chronological snobbery” – the modern tendency to assume that the present era represents
a more advanced human experience than all that has gone before. Graves’ philosophical
commitments are clear, though poorly presented. He regularly critiques an educational
endeavor by the touchstones of “individualism and progress,” (read Dewey) twin ultimates
which he seems to assume are shared by the reader. Thus, the work, while expansive and
helpful in shaping broad contours, is maddeningly provincial. Graves did not live long enough
to see where “individualism and progress” took 20th century man.
Hicks, David V. Norms and Nobility, A Treatise on Education. Lanham: University Press of
America, 1984. This book did not enjoy wide distribution and I happened upon it quite
accidentally – and happily so. In the style of Mortimer Adler’s Paideia Proposal, Hicks divides
his book into two parts: theory and a practical proposal. The book is notable for its concise
defense of classical education, and perhaps contains the most succinct but cogent summary
of the Ideal Type of the educational pursuits of antiquity. More than a defense of the liberal
arts, Hicks explores the tension between mythos and logos, two ancient alternative methods
for explaining the Ideal. While noting the sharp differences in these two approaches, he shows
that the ancients were nonetheless unified in their commitment to the transcendent. He notes
convincingly that modern education is committed to discreet analysis, descended as it is from
“logos” thinking, but, unlike its intellectual predecessors, it is cut off from any pursuit of the
Ideal. Thus, modern education is adrift to collect ‘gobbets of knowledge’ while prohibiting the
true end of education that he defines as acting in accordance with what we know. In other
words education is linked directly to action, not mere information.
Joseph, Miriam. The Trivium, The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric. Philadelphia:
Paul Dry Books, 2002. Intended as a textbook, Sister Miriam Joseph provides a stepby-step introduction to the way language works in context of the Trivium. As the sub-title
suggests logic takes a preeminent place in the discussion, superceding the normative order
of grammar, dialectic (logic) and rhetoric. The first three chapters of the book provide an able
and practical polemic for the liberal arts, while the tone of the latter chapters is much more
didactic, complete with examples in typical textbook fashion.
Littlejohn, Robert & Charles T. Evans. Wisdom & Eloquence. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2006.
Writing to the narrow audience of classical, Christian educators of which they are a part,
Littlejohn and Evans provide an interaction with Dorothy L. Sayers 1947 essay, “The Lost
Tools of Learning.” Sensing that many of their readers have misread Sayers – or that Sayers
herself is in error – the authors seek to correct tendencies they observe in the fledgling
movement seeking the revival of classical education. The co-authorship is clumsy in places
as the ‘voice’ changes, and the writing styles are noticeably different. Yet the book largely
accomplishes within its narrow objectives what it sets out to do. Much of the book is a
rambling narrative of suggestions on modifying the classical, Christian syllabus, but lacks the
intellectual punch.
Newman, John Henry Cardinal. The Idea of a University. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999. This
is a standard 19th century work delivered as a series of five lectures by Cardinal Newman
in the winter of 1852 as he prepared to assume duties of rector of the then-new Catholic
University in Dublin, urged upon him by the Bishop of Armagh. The prose of the text is
brilliant – typical of the time, elevated in style, requiring a slow-read. It’s well worth the
journey. (Of all the books in this bibliography, this is the one that I’m continuing to read). Not
only does Cardinal Newman defend Catholic university education, but he admirably defends
the liberal arts as the organizing feature of education. This work represents an much more
valuable historical resource (as opposed to Graves, in spite of its historical sweep) to my
research in the history and development of liberal education.
Pieper, Josef. Leisure, The Basis of Culture. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press. 1998. I first
came across Pieper when a friend of mine (former editor at Regnery Books) gave me a
copy. I shelved it at the time for other things, but have found this book quoted in much of the
material presented above.
Rushdoony, Rousas John. The Messianic Character of American Education. Nutley: The Craig
Press, 1963. For Protestant Christians Rushdoony was a seminal thinker in the revival of the
non-Catholic Christian school. In this work Rushdoony argues that state education is selfconsciously religious, as is Progressivist educational thought. Once in the hands of the state,
Rushdoony argues that the state is strengthened in a “messianic” commitment to a kind of
secular salvation.
St. Augustine. De Doctrina Christiana. Translated by D.W. Robertson, Jr. Indianapolis: BobbMerrill Educational Publishing, 1958. St. Augustine sets out to accomplish two things in this
treatise – 1) to determine how we are to understand the sacred text of Scripture; and 2) how
we are to teach or impart its teachings. Divided into four books, the first three are largely
devoted to hermeneutics, and the defense of what many would regard as the allegorical
method. The value of this book for purposes of my research is found in Book IV, in which
Augustine deliberates at a length upon the rhetorical commitments of the teacher of sacred
literature. In the process, his most memorable passages includes discourses on charity.
Stahl, William Harris, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1971).
Taylor, James. Poetic Knowledge, The Recovery of Education. Albany: State University of New
York, 1998. In the spirit of Norms & Nobility by David V. Hicks, Taylor sets out to explore
poetic knowledge. He maintains that the topic becomes relevant after the 17th century
because it was an epistemological given until the Cartesian revolution. The ancients wrote
about it, Aquinas developed it, and it was not challenged until much later. In brief, poetic
knowledge describes a way of knowing that is fundamental and reflexive in human beings. It
is not merely discursive; rather, it is a mode of knowing a thing by subjectively experiencing
the thing. Pure empirical analysis of an object through its parts may yield an accurate
description of those parts, but may completely obscure the nature of the thing itself. Poetic
knowledge occurs prior to the deliberative will and bypasses rational testing into the existence
of the object. In discussing levels of knowledge articulated by Aristotle and by Aquinas, Taylor
includes a most helpful diagram showing the hierarchy of knowledge through the senses,
emotions, volition and intellect. This very theoretical book provides holds the possibility for
extremely practical curricular suggestions for those seeking to capture the spirit of wonder and
imagination that Taylor celebrates as fundamental to human learning.
(Footnotes)
1
Dorothy L. Sayers. The Lost Tools of Learning (New York: National Review; available from online books at http://
www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html), 1947.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
5
James S. Taylor, Poetic Knowledge The Recovery of Education (New York: The State University of New York Press, 1998),
p. 101.
6
Sister Miriam Joseph, The Trivium, the Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books,
2002), p. 7.
7
Ibid., pp. 4-6
8
Lynn White, Jr., Educating Our Daughters, A Challenge to the Colleges (New York: Harper, 1950), p. 9 cited in R. J.
Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education (Nutley: The Craig Press, 1963), p. 2.
9
David V. Hicks, Norms and Nobility, A Treatise on Education (Lanham: University Press of America, 1999), p. 7-8.
10
William Harris Stahl, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971).
11
Ibid, Rushdoony, p. 2.
12
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, translated by W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908; accessed 12 September 2006)
available on-line at http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/nicomachaen.html
13
Ibid., Hicks, p. 23.
14
Peter Chojnowski, The Liberal Arts: Part I Forgotten Pathways to Wisdom (available online from http://www.edocere.org/
articles/liberal_arts_I.htm; accessed October, 2004).
15
Frank Pierrepont Graves, A History of Education During the Middle Ages and the Transition to Modern Times (Honolulu:
University Press of the Pacific, reprinted from the 1910 edition, 2002). Graves’ posture appears to be a mild historical polemic for the
ideas of John Dewey, which were and continue to be popular not only in academia and teachers’ colleges, but also among the rank and
file in the nation’s classrooms.
16
Ibid., p. 262
17
Ibid, p. 263
18
Ibid, Taylor, p. 87-120.
19
Ibid, p. 105.
20
Daniel J. Sullivan, Introduction to Philosophy (Rockford, Ill.: Tan, 1992), p. 79 cited in Taylor, p. 92.
21
Ibid, Taylor, p. 96.
22
Ibid, Hicks, p. 58.