STEM
- Grammar. This is the study of words, and especially:
- how definitions work, so that we can "come to terms" with one another; and
- how words are assembled into meaningful sentences or propositions.
- Logic. This is the study of the structure of arguments:
- how to assemble propositions into arguments; and
- how to draw proper conclusions from those propositions without error.
- Rhetoric. This is the study of the proper use of arguments:
- how to use arguments to persuade others; and
- how and when to persuade without misleading people.
- Arithmetic. This is the study of number.
- Geometry. This is the study of number in space.
- Music. This is the study of number in time.
- Astronomy. This is the study of number in space and time.
∞
Good Education Should Lead To Good Questions
"If we treat the contemplation of the best life as a luxury we cannot
afford, seemingly urgent matters will crowd out the truly important
ones."
[....]
"If the aim of education is to gain money and power, where can we turn for help in knowing what to do with that money and power? Only a disordered mind thinks that these are ends in themselves. Socrates offers us the cautionary tale of the athlete-physician Herodicus, who wins fame and money through his athletic prowess and medicine, then proceeds to spend all his wealth trying to preserve his youth. This is what we mean by a disordered mind. He has been trained in the STEM fields of his time, and his training gains him great wealth, but it leaves him foolish enough to spend it all on something he can never buy."
[....]
"If the aim of education is to gain money and power, where can we turn for help in knowing what to do with that money and power? Only a disordered mind thinks that these are ends in themselves. Socrates offers us the cautionary tale of the athlete-physician Herodicus, who wins fame and money through his athletic prowess and medicine, then proceeds to spend all his wealth trying to preserve his youth. This is what we mean by a disordered mind. He has been trained in the STEM fields of his time, and his training gains him great wealth, but it leaves him foolish enough to spend it all on something he can never buy."
From my latest article, co-authored with John Kaag, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Read it all here.
∞
Thoreau on Liberal Education, Wealth, and Freedom
“We seem to have forgotten that the expression "a liberal education" originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further and say, that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man.”
-- Henry David Thoreau, "The Last Days of John Brown"
∞
The Trivium And The Quadrivium
The Seven Liberal Arts (and their aims)
At some point in the Middle Ages, through a slow process of growth and refinement, educators came to identify seven arts that were considered liberal. The seven liberal arts were the arts practiced by people who were, or who would be, free. (The Latin word liber can mean "a free man.")
The liberal arts were divided into two groups: the trivium and the quadrivium. As the names suggest, the trivium included three arts, and the quadrivium included four.
The trivial arts sought to teach eloquentia, or eloquence, the proper use of words. The quadrivial arts aimed at sapientia, or sapience, the proper use of numbers.
In each case there is a natural progression, beginning with the rudiments and building on those foundations to help the student master eloquence and sapience.
The Trivium and the Quadrivium (and how they are built)
The trivium proceeds like this:
The quadrivium proceeds like this:
But Is Any Of This Relevant?
It's not hard to see that a lot of this is outdated, especially in the quadrivium, which was like the STEM of the Middle Ages, focusing on mathematics, engineering, and natural sciences. We no longer believe in the "music of the spheres" or that the motion of astronomical bodies is governed by harmony akin to music. And our sciences and humanities have grown to include many other disciplines that (at least at first) don't seem to be included here.
It's also not hard to see that some of the way we educate today still has echoes of this structure. For instance, until recently, we called children's schools "grammar schools," and this is why.We still consider it important to begin important enterprises with teaching the relevant vocabulary, grammar and logic: we often begin classes by introducing new vocabulary, and we begin contracts by defining terms.
And while we don't think of outer space as being a set of nested, harmonious spheres governed by intelligences who receive their direction from the Empyrean, we do think number is extremely important as a tool for discovering how nature works. This may seem like the most obvious of points, but that is because the idea has pervaded our thinking. It's a good idea, and it stuck. Similarly, we have the hunch that inquiry into the nature of things will in fact be met with answers. Again, this seems obvious, but not every culture has thought so. The idea has stuck, and it has paid off.
Yes, But Only If You Care About Science And Freedom.
In my view, the trivial arts and their organization remain as relevant as they once were, for three reasons.
First, every free person needs to know how words are used. If you don't learn to use them, and then practice with them, you will be easily misled. If you don't study persuasion, you are far less likely to know that you are being persuaded.
Second, and related to the first point, the sciences depend upon the trivial arts. Students who cannot read and write cannot learn effectively.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, long study in the humanities leads one to consider both the way words are used for persuasion and the ethics of persuasion. People who are trained in the conclusions of the sciences are not scientists, they are databanks. People who are trained in some of the methods of the sciences are technicians. Databanks and technicians are useful to other people. But what we need are people trained in the scientific method, which, by the way, is not something we get from the sciences. It is tested and approved by the sciences, but the natural sciences do not give it to us. Which of the natural sciences could discover a scientific method, after all? Scientific method is about the proper handling of data, the examination of claims and propositions, and the distribution of relevant conclusions. Look back at the description of the trivium and the quadrivium and you'll see that this is the work of the former, not of the latter.
The Real Crisis In The Humanities
There is a lot of talk these days about the crisis in the humanities. The money is all in the sciences, and smart students should go there to study, we are told. College administrations look to humanities departments as service departments to bolster the offerings of the science departments, who do the real work of the university.
I actually don't dispute this view, even though I'm in the humanities. It's quite obvious that much of the money is in the sciences, and I think that smart students should study the sciences. That's because I think every student should study the sciences.
But I also think that smart students should engage in long study of the humanities. The sciences depend upon the humanities, just as the quadrivium was legless without the trivium. More importantly, people who want to be free -- that is, people who do not wish to be persuaded without their consent, people who wish to think for themselves, people who wish to wield tools and not just to be the tools of others -- these people need to study the humanities.
The crisis in the humanities is that even in the humanities we've allowed ourselves to forget how interrelated all the disciplines are. It's time to brush up our eloquence, for the sake of our students, and take this message to our schools.
*****
Addendum: A friend wrote to me and pointed out that I called the second part of the Trivium "logic" when I should have named it "dialectic," which includes both logic and disputation. I don't dispute his correction.
I've also since discovered Dorothy Sayers' "The Lost Tools of Learning," an illuminating essay on the medieval liberal arts. I wrote this post hastily, after a meeting at my college where the question of what an education ought to do was under consideration. I wanted to make a thumbnail sketch of the Trivium and Quadrivium for my colleagues, and this was the result of some quick typing in the last few minutes of the workday. A fuller picture would have included C.S. Lewis' essay "Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages," and at least some mention of Martianus Capella. Maybe another time I'll return to this topic and write that fuller essay. For now, these references will have to suffice.
At some point in the Middle Ages, through a slow process of growth and refinement, educators came to identify seven arts that were considered liberal. The seven liberal arts were the arts practiced by people who were, or who would be, free. (The Latin word liber can mean "a free man.")
The liberal arts were divided into two groups: the trivium and the quadrivium. As the names suggest, the trivium included three arts, and the quadrivium included four.
The trivial arts sought to teach eloquentia, or eloquence, the proper use of words. The quadrivial arts aimed at sapientia, or sapience, the proper use of numbers.
In each case there is a natural progression, beginning with the rudiments and building on those foundations to help the student master eloquence and sapience.
The Trivium and the Quadrivium (and how they are built)
The trivium proceeds like this:
The quadrivium proceeds like this:
But Is Any Of This Relevant?
It's not hard to see that a lot of this is outdated, especially in the quadrivium, which was like the STEM of the Middle Ages, focusing on mathematics, engineering, and natural sciences. We no longer believe in the "music of the spheres" or that the motion of astronomical bodies is governed by harmony akin to music. And our sciences and humanities have grown to include many other disciplines that (at least at first) don't seem to be included here.
It's also not hard to see that some of the way we educate today still has echoes of this structure. For instance, until recently, we called children's schools "grammar schools," and this is why.We still consider it important to begin important enterprises with teaching the relevant vocabulary, grammar and logic: we often begin classes by introducing new vocabulary, and we begin contracts by defining terms.
And while we don't think of outer space as being a set of nested, harmonious spheres governed by intelligences who receive their direction from the Empyrean, we do think number is extremely important as a tool for discovering how nature works. This may seem like the most obvious of points, but that is because the idea has pervaded our thinking. It's a good idea, and it stuck. Similarly, we have the hunch that inquiry into the nature of things will in fact be met with answers. Again, this seems obvious, but not every culture has thought so. The idea has stuck, and it has paid off.
Yes, But Only If You Care About Science And Freedom.
In my view, the trivial arts and their organization remain as relevant as they once were, for three reasons.
First, every free person needs to know how words are used. If you don't learn to use them, and then practice with them, you will be easily misled. If you don't study persuasion, you are far less likely to know that you are being persuaded.
Second, and related to the first point, the sciences depend upon the trivial arts. Students who cannot read and write cannot learn effectively.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, long study in the humanities leads one to consider both the way words are used for persuasion and the ethics of persuasion. People who are trained in the conclusions of the sciences are not scientists, they are databanks. People who are trained in some of the methods of the sciences are technicians. Databanks and technicians are useful to other people. But what we need are people trained in the scientific method, which, by the way, is not something we get from the sciences. It is tested and approved by the sciences, but the natural sciences do not give it to us. Which of the natural sciences could discover a scientific method, after all? Scientific method is about the proper handling of data, the examination of claims and propositions, and the distribution of relevant conclusions. Look back at the description of the trivium and the quadrivium and you'll see that this is the work of the former, not of the latter.
The Real Crisis In The Humanities
There is a lot of talk these days about the crisis in the humanities. The money is all in the sciences, and smart students should go there to study, we are told. College administrations look to humanities departments as service departments to bolster the offerings of the science departments, who do the real work of the university.
I actually don't dispute this view, even though I'm in the humanities. It's quite obvious that much of the money is in the sciences, and I think that smart students should study the sciences. That's because I think every student should study the sciences.
But I also think that smart students should engage in long study of the humanities. The sciences depend upon the humanities, just as the quadrivium was legless without the trivium. More importantly, people who want to be free -- that is, people who do not wish to be persuaded without their consent, people who wish to think for themselves, people who wish to wield tools and not just to be the tools of others -- these people need to study the humanities.
The crisis in the humanities is that even in the humanities we've allowed ourselves to forget how interrelated all the disciplines are. It's time to brush up our eloquence, for the sake of our students, and take this message to our schools.
*****
Addendum: A friend wrote to me and pointed out that I called the second part of the Trivium "logic" when I should have named it "dialectic," which includes both logic and disputation. I don't dispute his correction.
I've also since discovered Dorothy Sayers' "The Lost Tools of Learning," an illuminating essay on the medieval liberal arts. I wrote this post hastily, after a meeting at my college where the question of what an education ought to do was under consideration. I wanted to make a thumbnail sketch of the Trivium and Quadrivium for my colleagues, and this was the result of some quick typing in the last few minutes of the workday. A fuller picture would have included C.S. Lewis' essay "Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages," and at least some mention of Martianus Capella. Maybe another time I'll return to this topic and write that fuller essay. For now, these references will have to suffice.
∞
The Other Drones Problem: The Tragedy of the Unexplored Commons
John Brennan's nomination hearings brought about a slew of articles about drone warfare. On the one side, people like William Saletan in Slate argue that drones (or UAVs) minimize civilian casualties while safeguarding American soldiers. Others, like John Kaag and Sarah Kreps in the New York Times remind us that the technological advances come with moral hazards we might not have anticipated.
But there is another ethical issue related to UAVs that doesn't have to do with war. Or, if it does, it has to do with a "war against crude nature."
The technologies we invent in wartime don't go away when the conflicts end. Already, UAVs are being deployed for a number of other uses, and we can expect their uses to increase. I'm no flag-waving Luddite here. The things we invent can be put to diverse uses, some helpful and some harmful. But if we care about promoting the helpful uses, we'll need to be intentional about that.
UAVs are a brilliant platform for remote-sensing technologies. They can cover a lot of ground and stay aloft for a long time. Drone aircraft are adding to our ability to conquer unknown spaces. If you've used Google Maps to explore places you've never been before, you know what an aesthetic boost and letdown this can be: it's a boost to see what you've never seen, and at the same time, we find ourselves sharing Aldo Leopold's lament in "The River of the Mother of God": the unknown places are being replaced by maps, and our deep genetic need to explore runs up against the feeling that everything has already been seen. When I lived in Madrid, I tried to make places like the Retiro park my places of natural exploration and solitude, but I couldn't escape the feeling that I was treading where millions of others had already trod.
But that is a small worry compared to the bigger issue of the world's oceans and natural resources. For the whole history of our species we have been able to act as though the world contained unlimited resources. Our species is an explorer species. We have "restless genes," as a recent National Geographic article put it.
Gone is the age of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. We no longer take to the seas in small craft and fish commercially with handlines. The last century has pushed fishing fleets thousands of miles from the places where they will ultimately bring their catch to market. We can no longer treat the oceans as limitless resources; we are fishing them out, and some species may collapse under the pressure and never come back.
In the race to find the last remaining schools of fish, we are beginning to use UAVs to scour the seas. Where fishermen once looked for birds circling schools of sardines, robot airplanes now skim the waves and do the searching for us.
Ethicists and game theorists refer to this as the "tragedy of the commons": if we each only take resources in proportion to what we can use, the resources can be shared indefinitely. But if some of us take more than our share of the "commons" or the resources, they will have a short-term gain at the expense of the long-term gain of everyone.
The STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) are brilliant, and wonderful. New technologies give us new access to the world, and they can save and improve lives. But they lack the ability to regulate themselves, which is why as the STEM fields grow, we need the humanities (and their critiques of technology) to grow with them. If we are not careful, new technologies can also permit us to do great harm to our common world - and to ourselves. If fish seems cheap and plentiful, stop to ask where it came from, and whether that source is sustainable. If it's not, vote with your dollars and eat something else.
But there is another ethical issue related to UAVs that doesn't have to do with war. Or, if it does, it has to do with a "war against crude nature."
The technologies we invent in wartime don't go away when the conflicts end. Already, UAVs are being deployed for a number of other uses, and we can expect their uses to increase. I'm no flag-waving Luddite here. The things we invent can be put to diverse uses, some helpful and some harmful. But if we care about promoting the helpful uses, we'll need to be intentional about that.
UAVs are a brilliant platform for remote-sensing technologies. They can cover a lot of ground and stay aloft for a long time. Drone aircraft are adding to our ability to conquer unknown spaces. If you've used Google Maps to explore places you've never been before, you know what an aesthetic boost and letdown this can be: it's a boost to see what you've never seen, and at the same time, we find ourselves sharing Aldo Leopold's lament in "The River of the Mother of God": the unknown places are being replaced by maps, and our deep genetic need to explore runs up against the feeling that everything has already been seen. When I lived in Madrid, I tried to make places like the Retiro park my places of natural exploration and solitude, but I couldn't escape the feeling that I was treading where millions of others had already trod.
 |
| We have a deep need for exploration, and so we need places that feel unexplored. |
But that is a small worry compared to the bigger issue of the world's oceans and natural resources. For the whole history of our species we have been able to act as though the world contained unlimited resources. Our species is an explorer species. We have "restless genes," as a recent National Geographic article put it.
Gone is the age of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. We no longer take to the seas in small craft and fish commercially with handlines. The last century has pushed fishing fleets thousands of miles from the places where they will ultimately bring their catch to market. We can no longer treat the oceans as limitless resources; we are fishing them out, and some species may collapse under the pressure and never come back.
In the race to find the last remaining schools of fish, we are beginning to use UAVs to scour the seas. Where fishermen once looked for birds circling schools of sardines, robot airplanes now skim the waves and do the searching for us.
 |
| At the crossroads |
Ethicists and game theorists refer to this as the "tragedy of the commons": if we each only take resources in proportion to what we can use, the resources can be shared indefinitely. But if some of us take more than our share of the "commons" or the resources, they will have a short-term gain at the expense of the long-term gain of everyone.
The STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) are brilliant, and wonderful. New technologies give us new access to the world, and they can save and improve lives. But they lack the ability to regulate themselves, which is why as the STEM fields grow, we need the humanities (and their critiques of technology) to grow with them. If we are not careful, new technologies can also permit us to do great harm to our common world - and to ourselves. If fish seems cheap and plentiful, stop to ask where it came from, and whether that source is sustainable. If it's not, vote with your dollars and eat something else.
*****
Here is one of my favorite sources of fish news.