Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Education

Back to Basics

by Clay Staggs

The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece earlier this week that caught my attention. It was an argument for the restoration of a standard liberal education curriculum in the nation’s universities. The writer, Peter Berkowitz, who taught at Harvard, witnessed there the ill effects of the failure to teach the works that form the core of a liberal arts eduction. Bear with me; I’m going to reproduce a couple of paragraphs in their entirety:

About the problem:

Indeed, many professors in the humanities and social sciences proudly promulgate doctrines that mock the very idea of a standard or measure defining an educated person, and so legitimate the compassless curriculum over which they preside… . Many American colleges do adopt general distribution requirements. Usually this means that students must take a course or two of their choosing in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, decorated perhaps with a dollop of fine arts, rudimentary foreign-language exposure, and the acquisition of basic writing and quantitative skills. And all students must choose a major. But this veneer of structure provides students only superficial guidance. Or, rather, it reinforces the lesson that our universities have little of substance to say about the essential knowledge possessed by an educated person.

After analyzing Harvard’s recent efforts to reform its core liberal arts curriculum and finding it to be wanting, Berkowitz proposes his own:

Crafting a core consistent with the imperatives of a liberal education will involve both a substantial break with today’s university curriculum and a long overdue alignment of higher education with common sense. Such a core would, for example, require all students to take semester courses surveying Greek and Roman history, European history, and American history. It would require all students to take a semester course in classic works of European literature, and one in classic works of American literature. It would require all students to take a semester course in biology and one in physics. It would require all students to take a semester course in the principles of American government; one in economics; and one in the history of political philosophy. It would require all students to take a semester course comparing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It would require all students to take a semester course of their choice in the history, literature or religion of a non-Western civilization. And it would require all students to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language of their choice by carrying on a casual conversation and accurately reading a newspaper in the language, a level of proficiency usually obtainable after two years of college study, or four semester courses.

I commend the entire article to everyone. It’s a fascinating read. Find it here.

Now, I’d like to offer two comments about this. First, I heartily support what Professor Berkowitz suggests. I agree with his assessment that modern university education tends to convey the notion that “there is nothing in particular that an educated person need know.” I can support this with my own experience. I graduated with a liberal arts degree (majoring in English) without ever being required to take a course in European history or Western Civ (nor had I been required to do so in high school). The implicit message there is that there’s really nothing particularly important about the history of the West that I needed to know. Today, I find that utterly appalling. How can one possibly hope to understand literature without the background of the history in which the works are written?

The simple fact, reviled by relativists (and, I think, many liberal arts professors), is that “knowledge is cumulative and that some books and ideas are more essential than others,” to use Prof. Berkowitz’s formulation. As Christians, we should understand and support this concept most of all because we know that there is objective truth, and we know the source.

My second reaction to the article is to take it a step further: why wait until university to teach these fundamentals? Two hundred years ago, the idea of waiting until university to expose the learner to the fundamentals of history, literature, religion, etc., would have been thought foolishness. Because, at that time, under the classical education structure, by the time the student made it to the university, those fundamentals has LONG been mastered. The classical structure taught the basic facts of history, religion, art, language, and mathematics by what we know as the 6th grade. This was known as the “grammar” phase. From there, the student was then taught the rules of logic during the next few years. Then, during what we call high school but they called the “rhetoric” phase, the student was taught to take the basic facts he or she had learned already, apply logic to them, and to express their critiques of ideas and arguments in writing and oral speech. This three phase sequence was referred to as the trivium, and it’s the very pattern we follow today at Riverwood Classical School.

Classically, because the student had already been taught in grade school what Prof. Berkowitz advocates for college freshmen and sophomores, the university was reserved for four areas that required scientific and relational reasoning to evaluate: higher arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Only after these subjects were mastered, did the student proceed to study what were considered the ultimate intellectual inquiries in graduate school: philosophy and theology.

Compared to what classical education accomplished, Prof. Berkowitz’s suggestion seems timid at best. I’d like to think that Riverwood has started making small steps to restoring what western educators seem to have willingly lost.