Back to School with Metalogicon
It's time even more American parents stop drinking the Kool-Aid.
It’s back-to-school time and the news is out! Enrollment in public schools is down by two million students. In this, I rejoice!
Americans are waking up to the fact that the education system they are most familiar with—a system that employs compulsory, age-graded, full-time instruction in a government institution—is nothing if it’s not an efficient means of social conditioning for the modern industrialized (now technologicalized) State.
Remember Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe who boldly proclaimed, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach”?
Parents shocked by such statements plus the events surrounding the American public education system over the past couple of years (i.e., introduction of CRT, COVID closures, co-ed bathrooms, etc) may be even more surprised to discover that this kind of social conditioning has been the goal all along.
Last year we made this animated short film, “We’ve Been Schooled!” that explains it all in eleven minutes.
Consider how those educated in the modern public school system tend to possess a utilitarian worldview, materialistic values, and a strong dependency on formal institutions. From the very beginning, this was the outcome those who employed the modern system hoped to achieve: docile citizens who function as cogs and consumers in an industrialized state.
Prior to introducing the militarized Prussian model to the American education system, free men and women—like the American founders—received a liberal arts education, an education that cultivates the life of the mind, fosters virtue and wisdom, and has for its aim the pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty.
Remember “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”? These words were not just the flippant, flowery rhetoric of a colonial politician. They are thoughtfully crafted words rich with historical meaning carefully picked out of the garden of Western, liberal, political thought.1
It is unfortunate that such an important aspect of human cultivation has been allowed to be so awfully miscarried in the modern world. But as Bob Pepperman Taylor, dean and professor of political science at the University of Vermont, explains in the video, it hasn’t exactly been miscarried by accident. Different goals require different methods for educating students.
He says,
For the civic educator, the goal is to produce a particular kind of citizen; for the educator released from political goals, the goal of education is less to shape students than to develop their reason and knowledge so they are able to take personal responsibility for shaping themselves as free and independent individuals—thinking through their own views, cultivating their own tastes, developing their own life plans, and becoming unique people.
Taylor further reminds us that the open-endedness of a liberal arts education is worrisome from the political perspective, so the temptation is toward an education with a known and satisfactory outcome because free men and women are often a bit too unpredictable for the civic educator's taste.
And just to drive the final nail into the coffin of the good will of the modern public education system that some parents may be still clutching to optimistically because their kids go to a small school in the country where their teachers are good Christians, let us not forget such agendas begin much higher up the food chain.
For example, one of the chief culprits of dehumanization in the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler, notably focused on crafting Germany’s public education system in his attempt to create the Aryan man to populate and propagate his 1000-year Reich.
In Mein Kampf he wrote,
By educating the young generation along the right lines, the People's State will have to see to it that a generation of mankind is formed which will be adequate to this supreme combat that will decide the destinies of the world.
In sum, no education is free from the influence of a worldview. As a matter of fact, education is literally the transmission of worldview in the widest scope possible. And except in the cases where education is purposefully leveraged as a means to a nationalized (or global) ideology, any secular attempt to educate—that is, the futile attempt to avoid worldview—is reduced to the utilitarian and slavish goal of job training. That is why I continue to beat the drum of a Christian humanist approach to education—a liberal arts education.
Metalogicon and a Liberal Arts Education
Having tackled this thing from the negative, allow me to finish by way of the positive and recommend John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon.
Metalogicon is helpful because John suggests education is more that job training or nationalistic propaganda; it is logic in the broadest sense of the word. By logic in the broadest sense, it is understood to incorporate that which is predicated of logic, grammar, and that which follows logic, rhetoric—in a word, the Trivium, and following this, the Quadrivium.
Together, the Trivium and the Quadrivium constitute the liberal arts, proper.
Further, the fact that John wrote the Metalogicon in the twelfth century “to defend logic,” offers evidence that there is in nearly every generation those who would oppose the teaching of the liberal arts, or at least components of it, as irrelevant and vain. John defends and advocates the liberal arts as essential to a free society, because without it, human civilization becomes enslaved to vice.
Daniel McGarry, who translated and wrote the Introduction to Metalogicon explains just how important education is to the proper cultivation of a civilization. He writes,
In the historical development of human culture, one of the most essential and determining factors has ever been education. Paradoxically, education is both a product and producer of civilization.
Consider this brief review of this important work.
Book I
In the first place, John lays the foundation of what a proper education must be like by writing, “The creative Trinity, the one true God, has so arranged the part of the universe that each requires the help of the others, and they mutually compensate for their respective deficiencies, all things being, so to speak, “members one of another.”
He advocates for a harmonized education on the grounds that the universe is intelligently created and ordered by a Triune God. The universe God created is one that has various working parts each with its own purpose and function, so arranged to be mutually dependent on the help of the other parts where it is deficient, and offering its strengths in the areas where it is more competent in function.
This perspective also echoes of Plato’s vision of the human soul, that it is virtuous when the noetic, spirited, and appetitive natures are all working together in harmony according to their respective strengths. A harmonized education, then, is an education that cultivates the soul according to the created order where each of the parts are members one of another functioning in a complementary role.
For example, when defending the necessity of cultivating eloquence in those with natural proclivity for speaking, he asserts, “just as natural ability easily deteriorates when neglected, so it is strengthened by cultivation and care.”
Cultivation and care reflect on husbandry where germination of plant life is natural, but with help, such yields a more bountiful crop. So it is when sound instruction and the practice of an art is so ordered that it works in harmony with the natural inclinations and proclivities, it yields more abundance of virtue and wisdom.
John explains it this way: “Natural ability is an immanent power infused into one’s soul by nature…although it proceeds from nature, [it] is fostered by study and exercise...study enhances its effectiveness.” The importance of education that cultivates the soul in harmony with the created order is so fundamental to John’s understanding that he writes, “Whoever tries to ‘thrust asunder what God has joined together’ for the common good, should rightly be adjudged a public enemy.”
Whoever tries to thrust asunder what God has joined together for the common good, should rightly be adjudged a public enemy.
In the next place, he asserts that the kind of education that harmoniously reflects the created order and has as its object “to effect man’s liberation, so that, freed from cares, he may devote himself to wisdom” is called the liberal arts. On this point he writes,
The liberal arts are said to have become so efficacious among our ancestors, who studied them diligently, that they enabled them to comprehend everything they read, elevated their understanding to all things, and empowered them to cut through the knots of all problems possible of solution. Those to whom the system of the Trivium has disclosed the significance of all words, or the rules of the Quadrivium have unveiled the secrets of all nature, do not need the help of a teacher in order to understand the meaning of books and to find the solutions of questions.
As previously mentioned, the first branch of the liberal arts is called the Trivium. John calls this logic, but explaining that “the word logic has a broad meaning, and is not restricted exclusively to the science of argumentative reasoning. It includes grammar which is the ‘science of speaking and writing correctly—the starting point of all liberal studies.” For the remainder of Book I, John expounds the various elements of language and their proper usage.
Book II
In Book II, he considers “the power of logic” proper, the science of argumentation. Logic, the science of argumentation, follows grammar, the science of speaking and writing correctly, and has truth as its object. John writes,
Truth is the subject matter of prudence, as well as the fountain-head of all virtues. One who comprehends truth is wise, one who loves it good, ‘one who orders his life in accordance with it happy.’
Logic naturally follows grammar, and successfully accomplished liberates one from enslaving thoughts. Again, John writes,
The more intimately what is transitory and momentary comes to be known, the cheaper that which is thus doomed to perish becomes in the estimation of a sensible mind...the truth will set us free, and will lead us from slavery to liberty, relieving us from the oppressive yoke of vice.
The remainder of Book II, John considers the various aspects and applications of logic.
Books III & IV
In Book III, he considers Aristotle’s works, known as the “Peripatetic discipline, which is concerned with investigating the truth.” And, in Book IV, he continues his consideration of Aristotle’s works, among other considerations, such as reason, the soul, imagination, faith, sophistry, and indirectly, Rhetoric. John concludes his work affirming the wisdom of a liberal arts education, if the telos of the education is correct. He writes,
If the purpose of the Peripatetics (Aristotelian philosophy) is to reject all empty illusions, determine objective reality, and seek after, venerate, and live according to the truth of God in every respect, they do not labor in vain. But if such is not their aim, then their efforts and pains are wasted.
The Metalogicon properly means “about logic.” In this magnificent work, John of Salisbury thoroughly treats this subject of the liberal arts, particularly the Trivium, showing how it mirrors the created order in all its parts, working harmoniously together to cultivate wisdom in civilization, by cultivating it in the individual who desires truth and wisdom.
In his conclusion, John reminds the reader that “knowledge flows ultimately from our senses, which are frequently misled, and that faltering human infirmity is at a loss to know what is expedient.”
He explains that while the liberal arts cultivate the soul, nothing does this perfectly, and “God in His mercy, has given us a law, to make evident what is useful, to disclose how much we make known about Him, and to indicate how far we may go in our inquiries concerning Him. This law displays the divine power in the creation, the divine wisdom in the orderly plan, and the divine goodness in the conservation of the world...Those who trust in the Lord shall understand the truth, and those who persevere faithfully in love shall rest tranquil in Him.”
Bibliography
John, and Daniel D. McGarry. The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2009.
Liberal has traditionally meant one who had a freeman’s education; one who was educated liberally; from Latin Libere; it doesn’t mean the same thing in modern parlance where it is often conflated with leftist political ideology or more particularly, the American Democratic Party.