Journal 4 - 2/25/2024
Having just completed my discussion assignment, I see the masses, having just completed a module on misinformation and its proliferation, calling out for censorship. Not in so many words, but it is what they call for nonetheless. One fellow student said, “Free speech is certainly a right, but…” And here erodes our free speech. Then I considered how every student followed the same path that I did through the module, but none of the others seemed to critically evaluate exactly what would happen if their solutions were implemented. This, along with some of these college students' poor grammar and demonstrated lack of grasping the concepts, led me to a conclusion: Americans have become both ignorant and, in many cases, stupid. But why? I believe it is a departure from classical education.
From the 15th to the 17th centuries, there was a radical shift in European thinking, overthrowing the classical approach in favor of something less effective but yielding short-term gains. The key changes include a transition from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy, replacing virtue with method in education, shifting from harmony to mechanics in understanding truth, moving from apprenticeship to industrial models in education, and reducing liberal arts like astronomy, music, geometry, arithmetic, grammar, logic, and rhetoric to less meaningful forms. This shift led to the abandonment of the cultivation of virtue in classical education, replaced by a dominant reliance on method, resulting in an overall inadequacy in achieving their intended purposes.
In essence, this departure from a holistic approach to learning, which emphasized critical thinking and a deep understanding of the world, to the industrialized method of education has left a crucial void in our educational system. Regrettably, we have failed to instill in our children the art of genuine comprehension and thoughtful analysis. Instead, they have become adept at absorbing and regurgitating information, devoid of the essential ability to truly process and understand the knowledge they acquire.
References:
Kern, A. (2022, November 28). What happened to classical education, part 3. CiRCE Institute. https://circeinstitute.org/blog/what-happened-classical-education-part-3/