I think the general suggestions for changes to upper education would be beneficial. However, I disagree with the characterization of Medieval education as a “Dark Age.”
The education wasn’t limited to the trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, it was expanded to that. Our concept of a university grows directly from the Church-founded institutions of the middle ages. Rather than limiting knowledge, the Trivium provides a solid core for the growth of a critically-thinking mind.
The medievals were dramatically more inventive than say the Romans for example, who piggybacked off the Greeks and hardly invented anything for 500 years of empire. By the late Middle Ages, large sections of Europe had the highest standard of living in the World and had a far more dense population than those same regions under Roman rule, largely due to major technological innovation.
What the medievals lacked was the manpower, urbanization, and large scale organization that the Romans possessed, which allowed them to, through sheer force of numbers (mostly slaves) level entire mountains.
Gothic architecture exemplifies what the medievals did better than the Romans. The Romans might spend 10 years with 10s of thousands of slaves working to build a massive public work using concrete and a Greek cargo cult aesthetic. In comparison, the medievals would build a far more complex and innovative building using entirely volunteer labor, but which took centuries to build because of their limited wealth and labor pool. Lincoln Cathedral and Trajan’s forum/marketplace are two works which exemplify this difference.
Compared to what goes on now a strict curriculum based on the trivium and quadrivium would indeed be a substantial improvement, as a foundation of intellectual discipline and rigor is surely better than one of blind obedience to an unthinking regime.
But that doesn't mean that the trivium and quadrivium weren't used to set limits on what could or could not be known. They were, up until the point where the seven arts all lead to philosophical and scientific dead ends.
And the purpose of the seven arts purpose was to regiment the elite in order to orient their world view along Christo-Platonic lines, the coherence of which entirely depended on attaining verifiably certain knowledge.
Grammar and logic were domains of the knowledge best suited toward that end, and indeed together composing a majority of what was known and thought about, while rhetoric was included but largely out of need in dealing with the public.
Later, in the 13th century, the quadrivium was only added to university curricula because of the rediscovery of once missing Aristotlian texts. It most certainly was not included out of a deep seated desire to expand the boundaries of human knowledge.
Now perhaps, here, I am missing the crux of your argument --and perhaps my initial argument was unclear too.
So let me try to reformulate what I think is my point.
At one point access to knowledge was restricted to a few key domains.
At the same time in those days the university served as a true hub of knowledge and perhaps some slow going cultural advancement, because again the access to and the different domains of knowledge was limited.
Today the opposite is true -- thus there is no need for the university to serve as a cultural institution. It's outdated and worse than irrelevant -- it's proactively taking us back to a comparatively darker time where inquiry is limited to whatever metaphysical and epistemological fashion the elites want to impose on us.
And the only sensible way to deal with this ongoing battle between the historical forces of old world Europe and modern America is to reformulate the idea behind such institutions to meet modern needs.
Which it's clear the university can not indeed do.
I think the general suggestions for changes to upper education would be beneficial. However, I disagree with the characterization of Medieval education as a “Dark Age.”
The education wasn’t limited to the trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, it was expanded to that. Our concept of a university grows directly from the Church-founded institutions of the middle ages. Rather than limiting knowledge, the Trivium provides a solid core for the growth of a critically-thinking mind.
The medievals were dramatically more inventive than say the Romans for example, who piggybacked off the Greeks and hardly invented anything for 500 years of empire. By the late Middle Ages, large sections of Europe had the highest standard of living in the World and had a far more dense population than those same regions under Roman rule, largely due to major technological innovation.
What the medievals lacked was the manpower, urbanization, and large scale organization that the Romans possessed, which allowed them to, through sheer force of numbers (mostly slaves) level entire mountains.
Gothic architecture exemplifies what the medievals did better than the Romans. The Romans might spend 10 years with 10s of thousands of slaves working to build a massive public work using concrete and a Greek cargo cult aesthetic. In comparison, the medievals would build a far more complex and innovative building using entirely volunteer labor, but which took centuries to build because of their limited wealth and labor pool. Lincoln Cathedral and Trajan’s forum/marketplace are two works which exemplify this difference.
Compared to what goes on now a strict curriculum based on the trivium and quadrivium would indeed be a substantial improvement, as a foundation of intellectual discipline and rigor is surely better than one of blind obedience to an unthinking regime.
But that doesn't mean that the trivium and quadrivium weren't used to set limits on what could or could not be known. They were, up until the point where the seven arts all lead to philosophical and scientific dead ends.
And the purpose of the seven arts purpose was to regiment the elite in order to orient their world view along Christo-Platonic lines, the coherence of which entirely depended on attaining verifiably certain knowledge.
Grammar and logic were domains of the knowledge best suited toward that end, and indeed together composing a majority of what was known and thought about, while rhetoric was included but largely out of need in dealing with the public.
Later, in the 13th century, the quadrivium was only added to university curricula because of the rediscovery of once missing Aristotlian texts. It most certainly was not included out of a deep seated desire to expand the boundaries of human knowledge.
Now perhaps, here, I am missing the crux of your argument --and perhaps my initial argument was unclear too.
So let me try to reformulate what I think is my point.
At one point access to knowledge was restricted to a few key domains.
At the same time in those days the university served as a true hub of knowledge and perhaps some slow going cultural advancement, because again the access to and the different domains of knowledge was limited.
Today the opposite is true -- thus there is no need for the university to serve as a cultural institution. It's outdated and worse than irrelevant -- it's proactively taking us back to a comparatively darker time where inquiry is limited to whatever metaphysical and epistemological fashion the elites want to impose on us.
And the only sensible way to deal with this ongoing battle between the historical forces of old world Europe and modern America is to reformulate the idea behind such institutions to meet modern needs.
Which it's clear the university can not indeed do.
Universities are outdated, yes. Agreed. Makes a lot more sense now.