well educated mind

(I moved this part of the post because I decided it deserved its own header)

I started reading a book that had been on my shelf for a while. It's called "The Well-Educated Mind" (Susan Wise Bauer) and is focused on the idea that anyone (within reason*) can undertake sort of a personal classical education (There are reading lists and everything, which I will probably mostly ignore, just as I will ignore the advice to "only read on one topic at a time lest your brain get confused")

(*There's a little reading test in there to see if you need remediation. No, really. You read a short passage and see (a) how long it took you, (b) how many words in it were unfamiliar, and (c) could you get the main point of the passage. I read it in half the time an "educated" reader could possibly take, none of the words were totally unfamiliar ("barque" - a type of small boat - well, it's something I can't exactly picture what it looks like but I know what it is), and I got the gist of the passage. Which is kind of a relief because some days I feel like I read too slowly - although then again, the author points out that speed-reading is an innovation of the 20th/21st century, and really, reading fast is not a virtue when you're reading to absorb the full meaning of a text)

One thing she talks about is the Classical "Trivium" - grammar, logic, and rhetoric. I admit with some embarrassment that I never had them explained to me the way she explains them, and they make a lot more sense now. And now it's clear how they're applicable to pretty much anything you learn. "Grammar" is the basic facts of a subject - and is what you must master first. So, for example, in Principles I, I'm teaching the "grammar" of biology - both the literal terminology and how things work, for example, how DNA replicates itself. The next step is "Logic," which is evaluating ideas. While I do still teach some "Grammar" level stuff in ecology, I also try to include "Logic" - does this study answer the question it claims to? Is this a good experimental method? Is the sample size reasonable? The final and most complex step is "Rhetoric," which is arguing your own understanding and thoughts as they apply to what you already have learned.

And the author points something out that I think is true, and if her arguments for classical education are correct, is a shame: all too often students are thrown into rhetoric-stage work without having adequately completed the grammar-stage and the logic-stage. (Or, to use an extreme example: asking a group of schoolgirls to write about how they "feel about the number 3". ) And I do think Rhetoric, in the sense of knowing how to structure an argument and avoiding the various logical fallacy pitfalls, is something that really isn't taught any more. Pretty much all I know about structuring arguments well was learned sort of as a sidelight to doing other things...like writing essays in English or being seminar-leader in grad school classes. (And frankly, that's a scary way - at least as being a seminar leader - to learn about structuring an argument).

She also includes a quotation from, I want to say Dorothy L. Sayers (? I don't have my copy of the book with me) where Sayers remarked that it should seem strange to all of us that while we (speaking of her own era of course, but still applicable today) are arguably the best-educated generation, how many people "fall for" propaganda and advertising. (And it's true.) I suppose the argument could be made that a lot of us (and I include myself in this, at least some times) have allowed our minds to get lazy. I KNOW I don't structure arguments as well as I could, and often think that maybe I should read some books on rhetoric to sharpen my writing abilities.

Then again, reading her descriptions of what each stage of the Trivium is supposed to do....I have to say that I perhaps got a more-classical education than some of my generational cohort did, and that certainly my grad-school training has got me using Logic and Rhetoric (especially evaluating journal articles) on a more regular basis than some.

Part of the reason I'm reading this is that I'm interested in different modes of education. I know right now there's a big push to go hyper-technological, with tablet computers and interactive websites and online education and all of that....and I kind of pull back because I think of the uncritical acceptance of PowerPoint ten or twelve years ago* and how some educators now treat it as anathema. And a lot of the "ONLINE IS THE FUTURE!!" pushes, coupled with the apparent salivating (in some quarters) about how we could make 95% of the professoriate redundant (meaning we'd have to find new careers) by making giant online sections like that guy who left Stanford did...well, I pull back, and go, "That can't be all there is."

(*And OK, I use PowerPoint in my classes. But I've gradually been scaling back, removing information from slides and using them more and more for images and graphs and charts and keywords. However...one thing I've learned from discussions on ITFF, is that it's hard to go too much against the "institutional culture" and if the students expect PowerPoint and they expect the PowerPoints to be posted on BlackBoard for them...well, you're probably better off going along but gradually scaling back, rather than going, "These things make you intellectually lazy so I will not use them." And at any rate...cold turkey is probably hard for people who are not used to, for example, taking copious notes in class.)

And while I doubt the Trivium would ever come back as the main mode of education (though perhaps there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my current philosophy), it does seem like a solid idea - and the idea of evaluating whether you're teaching at the grammar level, the logic level, the rhetoric level, or all three, makes more sense to me than those six (? I can't remember exactly) "levels of learning" that educational specialists say you need to have questions representing on exams. ("Synthesis" is the topmost level, but I forget the others).

(Bloom's Taxonomy. That's it. I should remember that but I can never remember all the levels, no matter how much I was browbeat with them in TA training....)

So, I don't know. Hopefully I can incorporate some of what I'm reading here into how I teach (that is how one becomes a better teacher...by thinking about different ways of doing things and using them if they work and seem to help the students). But also I think about learning this kind of stuff against some kind of awful future day when higher education IS mostly online, and most of us profs are unemployed (as some of the political-commentator's fantasies seem to go)...I could maybe hire myself out to homeschoolers, or let it quietly be known, "Will teach the Trivium for food" or whatever. (And who knows...maybe sometime in the future a bunch of those anti-online-education rebels will band together and form a sort of group, a sort of school, with different departments, where students can go and learn subjects they want to learn....what a new innovation that would be!)

I also want to get back to reading Shakespeare again.