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Socrates’ Argumentation — Method, Madness, or Something Else?

Monday, July 31st, 2017

The common understanding of basic terms and ideas is often amiss. Sometimes that’s innocuous; sometimes it’s not.

Many in the field of classical education tout what they call the Socratic Method, by which they seem to mean a process that draws the student to the correct conclusion by means of a sequence of leading questions. The end is predetermined; for good or ill, the method is primarily a rhetorical strategy to convince students that the answer was their own idea all along, thus achieving “buy-in”, so to speak. As rhetorical strategies go, it’s not really so bad.

Is it also good pedagogical technique? I am less certain. The short-term advantage of persuading a student that something is his or her own idea is materially compromised by the fact that (on these terms, at least) the method is fundamentally disingenuous. If the questioner feigns ignorance, while all the while knowing precisely where these questions must lead, perceptive students, at least, will eventually realize that they are being played. Some may not resent that; others certainly will, and will seek every opportunity to disengage themselves from a process that they rightly consider a pretense.

Whether it’s valid pedagogically or not, however, we mustn’t claim that it’s Socratic. Socrates did indeed proceed by asking questions. He asked them incessantly. He was annoying, in fact — a kind of perpetual three-year-old, asking “why?” after each answer, challenging every supposition, and never satisfied with the status quo or with any piece or accepted wisdom. It can be wearying to respond to this game; harried parents through the years have learned to shut down such interrogation: “Because I said so!” The Athenians shut Socrates’ questioning down with a cup of hemlock.

But the fact is that the annoying three-year-old is probably the most capable learning agent in the history of the world. The unfettered inquiry into why and how — about anything and everything — is the very stuff of learning. It’s why young children learn sophisticated language at such a rate. “Because I said so,” is arguably the correct answer to “Why must I do what you say?” But as an answer to a question about the truth, rather than as the justification of a command, it’s entirely inadequate, and even a three-year-old knows the difference. If we consider it acceptable, we are surrendering our credentials as learners or as teachers.

The difference between the popular notion of this so-called Socratic method and the method Socrates actually follows in the Platonic dialogues is that Socrates apparently had no fixed goal in view. He was always far more concerned to dismantle specious knowledge than to supply a substitute in its place. He was willing to challenge any conclusions, and the endpoint of most of his early dialogues was not a settled agreement, but merely an admission of humility: “Well, golly, Socrates. I’m stuck. I guess I really have no idea what I was talking about.” Socrates thought that this was a pretty good beginning; indeed, he claimed that his one advantage over other presumed experts was that he at least knew that he didn’t know anything, while they, just as ignorant in fact, believed that they knew something.

Taken on this view, the Socratic method is really a fairly poor way of training someone. If you are teaching people to be technicians of some sort or other, you want them to submit to the program and take instruction. It’s arguably not the best tool for practical engineering, medicine, or the law. (There is now a major push in resistance to using any kind of real Socratic method in law school, for example.)

But training is precisely not education. Education is where the true Socratic process comes into its own. It’s about the confrontation of minds, the clarification of definitions, and the discovery and testing of new ideas. It’s a risky way of teaching. It changes the underlying supposition of the enterprise. It can no longer be seen merely as a one-way download of information from master to pupil. In its place it commends to us a common search for the truth. At this point, the teacher is at most the first among equals.

This makes — and will continue to make — a lot of people uncomfortable. It makes many teachers uncomfortable, because in the process they risk losing control — not necessarily behavioral control of a class, but their identity (often carefully groomed and still more zealously protected) as oracles whose word should not be questioned. It opens their narrative and their identity to questioning, and may put them on the defensive.

It makes students uncomfortable too — especially those who are identified as “good” students — the ones who dot every “i” and cross every “t”, and never seem to step out of line or challenge the teacher’s authority. These are the ones likeliest, in a traditional high school, to be valedictorians and materially successful, according to a few recent studies — but not the ones likeliest to make real breakthrough contributions. (The recent book Barking up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker has some interesting things to say about this: one can read a precis of his contentions here. Barker’s work is based at least in part on Karen Arnold’s Lives of Promise, published in 1995, and discussed here.)

In practical terms, education is a mixed bag.

There is a place for training. We need at least some of the “download” kind of instruction. Basic terms need to be learned before they can be manipulated; every discipline has its grammar. I really do know Latin, for example, better than most of my students, and, at least most of the time, what I say is likelier to be correct. But my saying so neither constitutes nor assures correctness, and if a student corrects me, then, assuming he or she is right, it should be my part to accept that correction graciously, not to insist on a falsehood because I can prevail on the basis of my presumed status. If the correction is wrong, the course of charity is also to assume good intention on the student’s part, and clarify the right answer in my turn. Either way, there is no room for “alternative facts”. There is truth, and there is falsehood. The truth is always the truth, irrespective of who articulates it, and it — not I or my student — deserves the primary respect. We must serve the truth, not the other way around.

At some point in their education, though, students should also be invited to get into the ring with each other and with the teacher, to state their cases with conviction, and back them up with reasoned argument and well-documented facts. If they get knocked down, they need to learn to get back up again and keep on engaging in the process. It hurts a lot less if one realizes that it’s not one’s own personal worth that’s at stake: it’s the truth that is slowly coming to light as we go along. That’s the experience — and the thrill of the chase that it actually entails — that constitutes the deeper part of education. That’s what the true Socratic method was — and still should be — about.

Two modes of learning are prevalent today in colleges, especially — the lecture course and the seminar. In the lecture, the students are, for the most part, passive recipients of information. The agent is the lecturer, who delivers course content in a one-way stream. It’s enshrined in hundreds of years of tradition, and it has its place. But a student who never moves beyond that will emerge more or less free of actual education. The seminar, on the other hand, is about the dialectic — the back-and-forth of the process. It requires the student to become, for a time, the teacher, to challenge authority not because it is authority but because truth has the higher claim. Here disagreement is not toxic: it’s the life blood of the process, and it’s lifegiving for the student.

At Scholars Online, we have chiefly chosen to rely on something like the seminar approach for our live chats. We have, we think, very capable teachers, and there are some things that they need to impart to the students. But to large measure, these can be done by web-page “lectures”, which a student can read on his or her own time. The class discussion, however, is reciprocal, and that reciprocity of passionately-held ideas is what fires a true love of learning. It’s about the exchange — the push and pull, honoring the truth first and foremost. It may come at a cost: in Socrates’s case it certainly did. But it’s about awakening the life of the mind, without which there is no education: schooling without real engagement merely produces drones.

Posted in Character formation, Curriculum, Education, SO News | No Comments »

Getting Started Asking the Right Questions

Wednesday, April 13th, 2016

Recently on a homework assignment for my Natural Science course, I asked students to identify which solar system planets it would be possible to explore from Earth-based telescopes, which from space-born but Earth-orbit telescopes (like the Hubble), and which would require space probes sent to the planet. The results were fairly telling about the approaches students take to open-ended questions. Several students left the question blank, because (as they explained in emails and chat), they “couldn’t find the answer” in the assigned reading. Most students explained in very generic terms that while Venus and Mars (closest to Earth) could be viewed from Earth-based or Earth-orbit satellites, more distant objects would require probes. None addressed the question of Earth-based vs. Earth-orbit telescopes implied by listing the two options, and only one considered planetary characteristics other than distance, and identified Venus as a candidate for a probe because its dense atmosphere blocks any attempt to view its surface from Earth-bound telescopes.

Although I had warned the students repeatedly that some of their homework questions would require them to think through the answer and not simply look it up, at least some of my students felt this was unfair: they couldn’t be held responsible for what they couldn’t not look up and quote from the assigned reading. Most of my students were game to tackle the question even without finding the words “we can use telescopes to look at Mars but need probes for Pluto” in their reading, but they still did not study the question carefully enough to realize they needed to think about the advantages and disadvantages of each option, and consider the individual planet itself, as criteria for determining the best method of observation. They immediately seized on finding a single uniform answer, which would let them complete the assignment quickly, without worrying too much about whether the situation was more complicated.

From the perspective of classical education, this is backward, because classical education, and in particular Christian classical education, is not fundamentally about finding right answers to practical questions. Its goal is to develop the skills required by a free citizen who would be responsible for discerning God’s will, then making decisions for himself and for the state. It recognizes that there is no set formula for “getting the right answer” to the questions of real life; the most important first step is to make sure we can even formulate or recognize the important questions. Then we can look at how these questions (or ones like them) have been answered before, in literature and in history. Although Greek philosophy in particular developed rigorous methods of rational analysis, classical education still depends on story to convey the complexity of real decisions in real circumstances. Greek drama and history constantly throw out examples where individuals must decide between personal integrity, duty to the gods, and duty to the state. Latin literature is full of examples of individuals who sacrifice themselves to fulfill their civic duty. The Greeks and Romans of the classical period studied their own history, read their own literature, and produced often conflicting philosophical reflections because they realized that determining the right questions to ask was a citizen’s responsibility, and it was no use seeking answers until one had the right questions.

St. Clement of Alexandria, in his Stromata calls rational philosophy God’s divine gift to the Greeks, identifying direct revelation as God’s gift to the Jews. The early Christian Fathers, like Clement, who found inspiration in and supported the study of pagan classical literature recognized the development of reason and logic as an important skill in witnessing to and defending the Christian faith — and for distinguishing important questions that were worth pursuing from questions that were merely divisive and distracting. For nearly twenty centuries, western civilization depended on these stories and philosophies to help students form the values that would let them determine the wisest course in a difficult situation, both for themselves and for those they were expected to govern: personal integrity, loyalty, charity, civic duty, duty to God. The questions it forces us to ask are the most important questions of our lives: who am I? what do I want? what is God calling me to do?

If classical Christian education is about questions, then, how do we get students to learn to formulate or recognize the questions they need to ask? And equally important, how do we get them to develop passion for their studies and the courage to overcome the sense that asking questions is somehow an admission of failure to study correctly?

I believe that we need to make asking questions the most important job a student has to do: not completing the homework, not skimming the reading, but thinking deeply about the ideas they encounter and formulating questions about them. Every student (and teacher) needs to come to class full of questions. We meet in discussion to bring up these questions and to hear each other’s questions. As a teacher, I usually have a stock set of questions for a given chat to get the ball rolling, but these are based on my own experience and my own values and they are essentially “plan B” material for the chat. The most successful discussions occur when the students raise questions about their own understanding, based on their own concerns. When they voice those questions and we explore possible answers, we all find new ways of thinking about the material, and new insight on the questions that pester us.

While ultimately we need to address the important questions of our lives, we have to start somewhere, so here are some of the questions even novice students ought to be asking themselves constantly as they read both factual material and literature. Most important, to put this into practice, students should be writing down notes to bring up in class if they are puzzled or don’t have answers, or want to test their own assumptions:

Do I know what all the words mean? Does a term (even if I know its dictionary definition) seem vague or misapplied to the topic? Do all the parts of this graph or illustration make sense and can I see how they are related?

Can I follow all the steps of an example? Do I know what all the assumptions are, and how they are justified? Can I follow the calculation or reasons given for making a conclusion?

Is the author making an argument for a general conclusion or interpretation? Is the author’s claim valid? Do I understand the evidence used to support it? Does it apply to the cases given? Is it too general? too narrow? Can I think of any contradictory examples?

If several things are described, what characteristics, values, or processes are used to distinguish them? Do I understand how these distinctions are made, and can I use these methods myself to make distinctions among similar things?

If a process is described, can I follow the process? If not, why not — where do I get confused? If I do understand the process, do I accept it as valid, or do I think it skips important steps or considerations?

What does the author think are the most important points to make or take away from his or her presentation? What criteria does he or she use to make this evaluation (and do I agree)? Can I make an outline of the important points and identify the supporting details? Does the author skip points I think are important? Can I figure out why — what values or assumptions am I making differently from those the author is making?

If I am translating a sentence or a paragraph, does my English translation make sense in English? Does it reflect something an intelligent person would say, or is it gibberish? Do I understand what each word means and how it functions in the sentence?

These questions force us to be honest with ourselves in two ways. One is making sure that we actually engage with the materials, not just pass our eyes over the reading, and that we seriously attempt to comprehend the knowledge presented. The second is making sure that we are also applying our own developing system of values to what we are learning, that we are not simply agreeing blindly to what is presented, but trying to develop ways to determine for ourselves what is right, pure, lovely, admirable, and worthy of praise.

Posted in Character formation, Education | No Comments »

Failure as a good thing

Friday, March 11th, 2016

People tout many different goals in the educational enterprise, but not all goals are created equal. They require a good deal of sifting, and some should be discarded. Many of them seem to be either obvious on the one hand or, on the other, completely wrong-headed (to my way of thinking, at least).

One of the most improbable goals one could posit, however, would be failure. Yet failure — not as an end (and hence not a final goal), but as an essential and salutary means to achieving a real education — is the subject of Jessica Lahey’s The Gift of Failure (New York, HarperCollins, 2015). In all fairness, I guess I was predisposed to like what she had to say, since she’s a teacher of both English and Latin, but I genuinely think that it is one of the more trenchant critiques I have read of modern pedagogy and the child-rearing approaches that have helped shape it, sometimes with the complicity of teachers, and sometimes in spite of their best efforts.

Christe first drew my attention to an extract of her book at The Atlantic here. When we conferred after reading it, we discovered that we’d both been sufficiently impressed that we’d each ordered a copy of the book.

Lahey calls into question, first and foremost, the notion that the student (whether younger or older) really needs to feel that he or she is doing well at all stages of the process. Feeling good about your achievement, whether or not it really amounts to anything, is not in fact a particularly useful thing. That seems common-sensical to me, but it has for some time gone against the grain of a good deal of teaching theory. Instead, Lahey argues, failing — and in the process learning to get up again, and throw oneself back into the task at hand — is not only beneficial to a student, but essential to the formation of any kind of adult autonomy. Insofar as education is not merely about achieving a certain number of grades and scores, but about the actual formation of characer, this is (I think) spot-on.

A good deal of her discussion is centered around the sharply diminishing value of any system of extrinsic reward — that is, anything attached secondarily to the process of learning — be it grades on a paper or a report card, a monetary payoff from parents for good grades, or the often illusory goal of getting into a good college. The only real reward for learning something, she insists, is knowing it. She has articulated better than I have a number of things I’ve tried to express before. (On the notion that the reason to learn Latin and Greek was not as a stepping-stone to something else, but really to know Latin and Greek, see here and here. On allowing the student freedom to fail, see here. On grades, see here.) Education should be — and arguably can only be — about learning, not about grades, and about mastery, not about serving time, passing tests so that one can be certified or bumped along to something else. In meticulous detail, Lahey documents the uselessness of extrinsic rewards at almost every level — not merely because they fail to achieve the desired result, but because they drag the student away from engagement in learning, dull the mind and sensitivity, and effectively promote the ongoing infantilization of our adolescents — making sure that they are never directly exposed to the real and natural consequences of either their successes or their failures. Put differently, unless you can fail, you can’t really succeed either.

Rather than merely being content to denounce the inadequacies of modern pedagogy, Ms. Lahey has concrete suggestions for how to turn things around. She honestly reports how she has had to do so herself in her ways of dealing with her own children. The book is graciously honest, and I enthusiastically recommend it to parents and teachers at every level. If I haven’t convinced you this far, though, at least read the excerpt linked above. The kind of learning she’s talking about — engaged learning tied to a real love of learning, coupled with the humility to take the occasional setback not as an invalidation of oneself but as a challenge to grow into something tougher — is precisely what we’re hoping to cultivate at Scholars Online. If that’s what you’re looking for, I hope we can provide it.

Posted in Character formation, Curriculum, Education, Latin | No Comments »

A Fine Thing

Tuesday, February 9th, 2016

Nearly two years ago, disquieting rumors hit my work group: our jobs were moving out of the area, across the country.

I did not want to move out of my home, away from my friends and family, or face restarting our home business in another state, especially since I would just be trading one earthquake zone for another one, but one with worse winters, more flooding, and tornadoes. So I let my bosses know that I wouldn’t be following my work assignment backwards along the Oregon Trail, and starting thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

As usually when requiring clarity of thought, I turned to Dorothy Sayers, who recounts in one of her addresses how she came to learn Latin:

“I was rising seven when [my father] appeared one morning in the nursery, holding in his hand a shabby black book, which had already seen some service, and addressed to me the following memorable words: “I think, my dear, that you are now old enough to begin to learn Latin.” … I was by no means unwilling, because it seemed to me that it would be a very fine thing to learn Latin, and would place me in a position of superiority to my mother, my aunt, and my nurse-though not to my paternal grandmother, who was an old lady of parts, and had at least a nodding acquaintance with the language.”

I already know a little Latin, but I do not know classical Greek. My husband does, and my children do, so far from being in a position of superiority to my own children, I am somewhat at a disadvantage when they talk about finer points of Homer’s style, or the interpretation of a passage from Luke. It seemed to me that it would be a very fine thing to learn Greek, and would place me on something of a more level position with my husband and my children, at least, so far as classical languages are concerned.

Besides, there are some Byzantine commentaries by John Philoponus and John of Damascus on Aristotle’s de Caelo that I ran across when researching my dissertation on medieval astronomy forty years ago, and I have never been able to read them, since the only available printed editions are in Greek and 19th century philosophical German. Of the two, Greek seemed easier to master.

I happened to mention my sort of vague yearning to start classical Greek to a few friends and some family members. This may have been a mistake, but it’s too late now. Scholars Online posted its Greek I course for 2016-2017, and I enrolled, thus putting an end to well-meant but incessant encouragement that I actually indulge myself in the joys of ancient Greek. Mr. Dean kindly agreed to accept me into his course.

It’s been interesting, to say the least.

Latin has seven noun cases, forms of nouns that indicate how they will be used in a sentence as subject, direct object, indirect object, and so on (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative, and vocative). Greek has five, lacking the ablative and locative, whose functions still exist but are rolled into one or another of the other cases. Plowing through the explanations in Unit I, I thought, this I can do: Greek is simpler is simpler than Latin!

So for the first unit, I put my time into learning paradigms for three nouns: a first declension feminine: ἡ ἀρχή: beginning, from which we get the English words “archaic” and “archeology”; the second declension masculine ὁ λόγος, word, from which we get “logic” and “theology”; and a mixed bag word which could be either masculine or feminine — you have to pay attention to the attached article: ὁ θεός, ἡ θεός, god or goddess.

I’m sure those of you reading this who know some Greek are mentally nudging one another with barely-disguised glee, the kind novelists invoke with the well-worn phrase “little did she know….” Yes, the plot twist is coming.

With the next unit, we hit the verbs. Greek has all the Latin tenses, plus one more. It has all the Latin verb moods, plus one more. It has an extra voice. It even has an extra number, distinguishing between singular, plural, and dual (just two). That’s a lot of verb forms to learn.

Let me spare you the details, but for the first time since I was in high school, there are 3×5 cards in stacks all over the house, wherever I happened to leave a set the last time I found a few minutes to study, minutes that usually add up to at least an hour every day. The ones with green edges have the principal parts of verbs, the ones with yellow edges give the cases for nouns and adjectives, the multicolored ones hold details on prepositions and which cases they take and how the meaning changes with the case. The blue-edged ones have grammar rules for conditional phrases with wonderful names like “future more vivid”, clauses of purpose with different levels of purposefulness, summaries of all possible endings, and rules for accents that give new meaning to the concept of mathematical chaos. I’m sure there’s a connection, since my teachers insist there’s a pattern even if I can’t find it. The blue-edged cards are the most bent and draggled of the bunch, because for some reason, I can’t keep straight whether the future passive indicative uses the un-augmented aorist stem or the augmented perfect stem with an extra syllable thrown in so you don’t confuse it with the perfect passive, and I have to look up which verb stem is used when, even if I remember the six stems and the proper endings for the tense and mood and voice in question.

There was a time when I thought sequence of moods meant something like the sequence of emotional states on getting a new software program that doesn’t quite do everything you hoped — anticipation, joy, frustration, resignation. Now I realize the “sequence of moods” depends on the verb tense used in the independent clause to govern the tense in the subordinate clause. There is probably some philosophical observation to be made there, but at the moment, I’m just trying to keep my tenses straight. I sometimes feel that if I manage to get the pluperfect endings lodged firmly in my head, the aorist ones will fall out the other side.

But there is more to learning a language than memorizing forms or appreciating its contributions to one’s own native vocabulary. The next step is translation, and while forms may be approached with rigorous method (even if there are lots of niggling details), translating is rarely straightforward.

That’s because words don’t just have meaning in some one-to-one correspondence between languages, any more than chartreuse, lime, Kelly, or Lincoln all mean the same green, even though they all mean “green” at some level.

After centuries of use in philosophical, scientific, and theological works, ἀρχή and λόγος have become loaded terms in Greek, words that absolutely defy a one-word decoding translation.

ἀρχή can mean beginning, or the first principles or elements on which all else is built, or the source of power, and by extension an empire, realm, authority, or even command.
λόγος can mean the story one tells in words, a speech one makes — that is, the spoken-out-loud-word that stirs others to action (one of Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion), or the reason why one does something, or the root or basis behind an action.
θεός is more direct: it unambiguously means a god, a deity; it cannot be used for something merely divine or spiritually-inclined.

We did a lot of sentences with the vocabulary words in different situations, partly to learn the different forms, but also to gain by experience appreciation for the nuances of meaning.

Homer taught the men with words (using speech).
The poets teach well by means of stories (skillful use of rhetoric).
The young men learned skills with words (learned to reason clearly or speak clearly).
The messengers from the enemy destroyed the peace with words (of persuasion).

On December 24, I could sit down and work out out the Gospel for the first Eucharist of Christmas in Greek: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεός ἦν ὁ λόγος.

I know the English translation, “in the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”, but the Greek means more than that, so the author of John meant more than the plain English. In a word-for-word translation, the text arrives in English naked, stripped of all the nuances the author surely reasoned out when he chose those words to begin his story and lay out the foundations of his faith so long ago.

And that’s the reason for learning Greek: to read and recognize what Homer and Aristotle, Herodotus and Sophocles, Plato and the authors of the New Testament really said, and to get closer to what they still have to say to us today, in all its complexity.

Learning Greek is hard work, and that’s okay. Learning anything, and learning it well is hard work. It takes time and effort and repetition and review and thought and puzzlement and clarification.

I make lots of mistakes, and that’s okay, too. My mistakes in class provide harmless amusement to my teacher and classmates and they don’t hurt me. In fact, I usually remember the points I’ve flubbed better over the long run than the ones I somehow, and often accidentally, got right the first time.

But the very best part of my own personal Greek journey is something I haven’t mentioned yet: my teacher was once one of our own students.

And for a teacher, it doesn’t get much better than this: to sit at the feet of your own student, and learn something new.

It turns out that taking Greek really is a very fine thing.

Posted in Education, Greek | No Comments »

STEMs and Roots

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2016

Everywhere we see extravagant public handwringing about education. Something is not working. The economy seems to be the symptom that garners the most attention, and there are people across the political spectrum who want to fix it directly; but most seem to agree that education is at least an important piece of the solution. We must produce competitive workers for the twenty-first century, proclaim the banners and headlines; if we do not, the United States will become a third-world nation. We need to get education on the fast track — education that is edgy, aggressive, and technologically savvy. Whatever else it is, it must be up to date, it must be fast, and it must be modern. It must not be what we have been doing.

I’m a Latin teacher. If I were a standup comedian, that would be considered a punch line. In addition to Latin, I teach literature — much of it hundreds of years old. I ask students, improbably, to see it for what it itself is, not just for what they can use it for themselves. What’s the point of that? one might ask. Things need to be made relevant to them, not the other way around, don’t they?

Being a Latin teacher, however (among other things), I have gone for a number of years now to the Summer Institute of the American Classical League, made up largely of Latin teachers across the country. One might expect them to be stubbornly resistant to these concerns — or perhaps blandly oblivious. That’s far from the case. Every year, in between the discussions of Latin and Greek literature and history, there are far more devoted to pedagogy: how to make Latin relevant to the needs of the twenty-first century, how to advance the goals of STEM education using classical languages, and how to utilize the available technology in the latest and greatest ways. What that technology does or does not do is of some interest, but the most important thing for many there is that it be new and catchy and up to date. Only that way can we hope to engage our ever-so-modern students.

The accrediting body that reviewed our curricular offerings at Scholars Online supplies a torrent of exortation about preparing our students for twenty-first century jobs by providing them with the latest skills. It’s obvious enough that the ones they have now aren’t doing the trick, since so many people are out of work, and so many of those who are employed seem to be in dead-end positions. The way out of our social and cultural morass lies, we are told, in a focus on the STEM subjects: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Providing students with job skills is the main business of education. They need to be made employable. They need to be able to become wealthy, because that’s how our society understands, recognizes, and rewards worth. We pay lip service, but little else, to other standards of value.

The Sarah D. Barder Fellowship organization to which I also belong is a branch of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth. It’s devoted to gifted and highly gifted education. At their annual conference they continue to push for skills, chiefly in the scientific and technical areas, to make our students competitive in the emergent job market. The highly gifted ought to be highly employable and hence earn high incomes. That’s what it means, isn’t it?

The politicians of both parties have contrived to disagree about almost everything, but they seem to agree about this. In January of 2014, President Barack Obama commented, “…I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree. Now, nothing wrong with an art history degree — I love art history. So I don’t want to get a bunch of emails from everybody. I’m just saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training that you need.”

From the other side of the aisle, Florida Governor Rick Scott said, “If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I’m going to take that money to create jobs. So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state. Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.”

They’re both, of course, right. The problem isn’t that they have come up with the wrong answer. It isn’t even that they’re asking the wrong question. It’s that they’re asking only one of several relevant questions. They have drawn entirely correct conclusions from their premises. A well-trained plumber with a twelfth-grade education (or less) can make more money than I ever will as a Ph.D. That has been obvious for some time now. If I needed any reminding, the last time we required a plumber’s service, the point was amply reinforced: the two of them walked away in a day with about what I make in a month. It’s true, too, that a supply of anthropologists is not, on the face of things, serving the “compelling interests” of the state of Florida (or any other state, probably). In all fairness, President Obama said that he wasn’t talking about the value of art history as such, but merely its value in the job market. All the same, that he was dealing with the job market as the chief index of an education’s value is symptomatic of our culture’s expectations about education and its understanding of what it’s for.

The politicians haven’t created the problem; but they have bought, and are now helping to articulate further, the prevalent assessment of what ends are worth pursuing, and, by sheer repetition and emphasis, crowding the others out. I’m not at all against STEM subjects, nor am I against technologically competent workers. I use and enjoy technology. I am not intimidated by it. I teach online. I’ve been using the Internet for twenty-odd years. I buy a fantastic range of products online. I programmed the chat software I use to teach Latin and Greek, using PHP, JavaScript, and mySQL. I’m a registered Apple Developer. I think every literate person should know not only some Latin and Greek, but also some algebra and geometry. I even think, when going through Thucydides’ description of how the Plataeans determined the height of the wall the Thebans had built around their city, “This would be so much easier if they just applied a little trigonometry.” Everyone should know how to program a computer. Those are all good things, and help us understand the world we’re living in, whether we use them for work or not.

But they are not all that we need to know. So before you quietly determine that what I’m offering is just irrelevant, allow me to bring some news from the past. If that sounds contradictory, bear in mind that it’s really the only kind of news there is. All we know about anything at all, we know from the past, whether recent or distant. Everything in the paper or on the radio news is already in the past. Every idea we have has been formulated based on already-accumulated evidence and already-completed ratiocination. We may think we are looking at the future, but we aren’t: we’re at most observing the trends of the recent past and hypothesizing about what the future will be like. What I have to say is news, not because it’s about late-breaking happenings, but because it seems not to be widely known. The unsettling truth is that if we understood the past better and more deeply, we might be less sanguine about trusting the apparent trends of a year or even a decade as predictors of the future. They do not define our course into the infinite future, or even necessarily the short term — be they about job creation, technical developments, or weather patterns. We are no more able to envision the global culture and economy of 2050 than the independent bookseller in 1980 could have predicted that a company named Amazon would put him out of business by 2015.

So here’s my news: if the United States becomes a third-world nation (a distinct possibility), it will not be because of a failure in our technology, or even in our technological education. It will be because, in our headlong pursuit of what glitters, we have forgotten how to differentiate value from price: we have forgotten how to be a free people. Citizenship — not merely in terms of law and government, but the whole spectrum of activities involved in evaluating and making decisions about what kind of people to be, collectively and individually — is not a STEM subject. Our ability to articulate and grasp values, and to make reasoned and well-informed decisions at the polls, in the workplace, and in our families, cannot be transmitted by a simple, repeatable process. Nor can achievement in citizenship be assessed simply, or, in the short term, accurately at all. The successes and failures of the polity as a whole, and of the citizens individually, will remain for the next generation to identify and evaluate — if we have left them tools equal to the task. Our human achievement cannot be measured by lines of code, by units of product off the assembly line, or by GNP. Our competence in the business of being human cannot be certified like competence in Java or Oracle (or, for that matter, plumbing). Even a success does not necessarily hold out much prospect of employment or material advantage, because that was never what it was about in the first place. It offers only the elusive hope that we will have spent our stock of days with meaning — measured not by our net worth when we die, but by what we have contributed when we’re alive. The questions we encounter in this arena are not new ones, but rather old ones. If we lose sight of them, however, we will have left every child behind, for technocracy can offer nothing to redirect our attention to what matters.

Is learning this material of compelling interest to the state? That depends on what you think the state is. The state as a bureaucratic organism is capable of getting along just fine with drones that don’t ask any inconvenient questions. We’re already well on the way to achieving that kind of state. Noam Chomsky, ever a firebrand and not a man with whom I invariably agree, trenchantly pointed out, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” He’s right. If we are to become unfree people, it will be because we gave our freedom away in exchange for material security or some other ephemeral reward — an illusion of safety and welfare, and those same jobs that President Obama and Governor Scott have tacitly accepted as the chief — or perhaps the only — real objects of our educational system. Whatever lies outside that narrow band of approved material is an object of ridicule.

If the state is the people who make it up, the question is subtly but massively different. Real education may not be in the compelling interest of the state qua state, but it is in the compelling interest of the people. It’s the unique and unfathomably complex amalgam that each person forges out of personal reflection, of coming to understand one’s place in the family, in the nation, and in the world. It is not primarily practical, and we should eschew it altogether, if our highest goal were merely to get along materially. The only reason to value it is the belief that there is some meaning to life beyond one’s bank balance and material comfort. I cannot prove that there is, and the vocabulary of the market has done its best to be rid of the idea. But I will cling to it while I live, because I think it’s what makes that life worthwhile.

Technical skills — job skills of any sort — are means, among others, to the well-lived life. They are even useful means in their place, and everyone should become as competent as possible. But as they are means, they are definitionally not ends in themselves. They can be mistakenly viewed as ends in themselves, and sold to the credulous as such, but the traffic is fraudulent, and it corrupts the good that is being conveyed. Wherever that sale is going on, it’s because the real ends are being quietly bought up by those with the power to keep them out of our view in their own interest.

Approximately 1900 years ago, Tacitus wrote of a sea change in another civilization that had happened not by cataclysm but through inattention to what really mattered. Describing the state of Rome at the end of the reign of Augustus, he wrote: “At home all was calm. The officials carried the old names; the younger men had been born after the victory of Actium; most even of the elder generation, during the civil wars; few indeed were left who had seen the Republic. It was thus an altered world, and of the old, unspoilt Roman character not a trace lingered.” It takes but a single generation to forget the work of ages.

But perhaps that’s an old story, and terribly out of date. I teach Latin, Greek, literature, and history, after all.

Posted in Character formation, Curriculum, Education, Government, Greek, History, Latin, Literature, Mathematics, Programming, Science, Technology, World History | No Comments »

There are no short cuts. Really.

Tuesday, January 26th, 2016

Several years ago, while hunting for something to add to Dr. Bruce’s extensive Shakespeare media collection, we ran across a short documentary called “The Hobart Shakespeareans”. It’s a profile of teacher Rafe Esquith of the Los Angeles school district, and his dedication to his fifth-grade students. Besides the normal coursework required by the state for the grade level, Mr. Esquith encouraged his students, many of them from a disadvantaged area, to put in extra hours to create an end-of-term production of a Shakespeare play (in the documentary, it’s Hamlet). The success of the documentary led Esquith to write about his experiences in “There Are No Shortcuts”.

In the half-dozen years or so since I read Esquith’s book, I’ve found myself using that phrase a lot. Managers seem to think there should be a single, simple process that can solve all of their problems, but there is no short cut to good design: you have to analyze the situation and balance security, hardware, and software requirements. Students seem to think a week’s extension to study for an exam will fix a year’s worth of neglecting homework and failing quizzes or skipping classes, but there is no short cut to knowledge. You need disciplined study and review habits.

Some of this, I think, is the result of living in the instant-feedback, information-based age that that Internet has created for us. It’s easy to run a search engine and get some data to answer a question. Most of my students can google a website faster than I can, and then use the control-F find command to locate a term, and cut-and-past a response into our online discussions. They are experts at rapid retrieval.

The problem is that in their haste (if they bother to actually read it all), they haven’t noticed that the string they’ve chosen doesn’t actually define the term we’re discussing, doesn’t explain how it relates to other ideas, and doesn’t show them how to apply it. They have some data, but no context for it, and no way to determine whether it is accurate, or the prejudiced opinion of an agenda-driven author. What they have is not really knowledge, and certainly not wisdom. Yet we are often content merely to commend their ability follow a process that allows them to look something up quickly, as though this were the end, and not simply the means. We fail to push them to acquire and apply critical thinking skills to what they have found, so that they can truly evaluate its importance and implications.

Too often, students who are asked to write an essay expressing their own ideas and to justify their position with their own reasons find it much easier to look up the idea online and present the arguments as their own work. When a math or physics problem proves challenging, instead of working the solution out themselves and risking getting it wrong, they hunt for the worked-out example at some “resource” site, and copy whatever approach is presented. We used to identify blatantly copying someone else’s work — however easily available — as plagiarism, and suspend students for cheating this way, but faced with competition for college admission and lucrative jobs, students (and even their parents and their teachers) will justify these methods as “just shortcuts”, so the students can have time to do all the other things we expect them to accomplish. [At Scholars Onlilne, we still consider presenting someone else’s work as one’s own a form of plagiarism, and our polcies on cheating spell out the consequences.]

We have traded the goal of depth of knowledge and real mastery of a subject for a breadth of information so expansive that it can be nothing other than superficial — it’s hardly knowledge and it certainly isn’t wisdom. Instead of struggling with ideas until we truly make them our own, we fracture our time into pieces to cover dozens of topics, many of which will be revised or disappear before our students can actually use them. In order to meet all of the perceived educational requirements, our students must split their attention and wind up constantly multitasking, often to the point where they miss the key idea of a discussion entirely, misinterpret their assignments, and answer the wrong questions altogether.

Any athlete, any performance artist, and any farmer can tell you that when you are trying to develop real skills or produce an edible real crop, there are no shortcuts.

There are no shortcuts that can eliminate the hours of focused training required to build muscle tone and cardiovascular endurance if you want to run a marathon, and there is no substitute for working with and accepting critical evaluation from a coach who can help you identify the behavior that slows you down. There are no shortcuts that will let you avoid hours of concentrated practice if you want to play a piano concerto perfectly and with passion, and you will still need a teacher who will help you realize and release your love for the piece. There no shortcuts that can eliminate the labor of planting, weeding, watering, and harvesting if you want to eat your carrot crop — and you will need the experience of others who have successfully raised carrots in the same valley if you are going to realize a good harvest. Even then, you will have to wait while nature does its own work with sun and rain and soil and teaches you patience.

What we often forget is that practice and coaching are also necessary if we want to grow in knowledge and wisdom. There are no shortcuts that will let you skip the disciplined study and reflective thought required to achieve mastery of a subject, much as we would like to think there are. It takes us time to review details and develop the memory skills needed to master a new concept. We need guidance to learn how to read complex material closely and critically, and criticism to hone that preception when we stray or become distracted. We need to take enough time to follow an argument, examine its premises, research the facts it cites, and determine for ourselves whether or not the conclusion is justified.

We need teacher and peer interaction to recognize that we have not expressed ourselves clearly and we need to restate or rewrite or redraw our ideas before we can really share them. We need the support of our learning community to encourage us when we fail at all of these things from time to time. We even need to practice our ability recognize our failures and to develop the discipline to try again, so that we can emulate the athlete who doesn’t give up after losing her first race, the pianist who doesn’t stop practicing with the first flubbed trill, and the farmer who weeds and waters and bides his time until the harvest is ready.

With our educational system’s emphasis on preparing for the technical skills needed in the twenty-first century, we have forgotten that classical liberal arts education in critical thinking is the foundation on which we build build those skills, but also the foundation on which we build our system of values. The average worker in the 21st century will hold a dozen jobs, not just one, and the skills and technical expertise for each job will require retraining. We need to emphasize not only the skills that will make retraining easier — critical thinking and self-evaluation — but also the character traits of honesty, integrity, charity, and patience that will make our children valuable citizens of their communities as well as employable members of the work force.

Posted in Character formation, Education | No Comments »

Reminder: PSAT/NMSQT and Classics Exams Online Deadlines

Sunday, September 28th, 2014

2014 PSAT/NMSQT 15 October and 18 October

Register now: The 2014 PSAT/NMSQT, otherwise known as the National Merit Test, will be offered Wednesday October 15 or Saturday, October 18, depending on the test site. When taken in your junior year, your score on this $14 standardized test (plus any small additional fee a school may charge for administrative costs) is used by many companies, non-profit organizations, colleges, and universities to identify students qualified to receive merit scholarship awards, and by many students to prepare for the SAT examinations in their senior year. The examination is only offered at high schools, so you must contact a local school to register, pay the fees, and make arrangements to take the test. Check the College Board site for schools near you offering the test, and further information about the program.

For more information bout the PSAT/NMSQT: check the College Board general information page on the National Merit exam.

Homeschoolers planning to take the National Merit exam should check these special instructions.

2014 National JCL On-line Exams

The National Junior Classical League offers online examinations to students, with medals awarded for gold, silver, and bronze achievement levels.

Registration for the National Classical Etymology Exam (NCEE) opened September 1. Regular registration at $4.00 per student closes October 17, and late registration at $8.00 per student closes October 27. Payment must be mailed by November 3, 2014 so that proctors can receive instructions and examination copies. The exam is administered between November 3 and December 5, 2014.

The NCEE tests a student’s ability to handle Latin and Greek derivatives and their usage in the English language. For an overview of the exam contents, and to practice with the 2013 exam, visit the NCEE Overview page.

Registration for the National Roman Civilization Exam (NRCE) opens November 3, 2014. Regular registration at $4.00 per student closes January 30, 2015, and late registration at $8.00 closes February 5, 2015. The examination is administered between February 11 and March 20, 2015.

The NRCE tests a student’s knowledge of Roman society. For an overview of the exam contents, and to practice with the 2013 examination, visit the NRCE overview page.

New this year is the National Latin Vocabulary Exam. Registration for this exam (NLVE) opens November 3, 2014. Regular registration at $4.00 per student closes January 30, 2015, and late registration at $8.00 closes February 5, 2015. The examination is administered between February 11 and March 20, 2015.

The NLVE tests a student’s command of Latin vocabulary, and consists of 70 multiple choice questions which must be answered in 45 minutes. Vocabulary lists are tested at six levels: ½ and 1 (first and second year Latin), 2 (preparation fo Caesar), 3, 4, and 5+ (Latin vocabulary for Caesar, Vergil, and Cicero). The wordlists are available by free download for study.

Homeschoolers should use their last name and “Homeschool” as the name of their school, and arrange for someone who is not the parent teaching the student to proctor the test. If you have further questions, contact onlinetests@njcl.org.

Posted in Education | No Comments »

Scholars Online Curriculum and the AP Program

Saturday, July 12th, 2014

We’ve had a number of inquiries about our AP programs at Scholars Online.

While we endeavor to help our students gain recognition for their work through the AP program where appropriate, we have focussed on creating a curriculum that meets our primary mission: to provide a rigorous classical Christian education for our students. There are cases where our mission and the AP program are at odds.

To use the term “AP Course” and offer AP credit requires approval of the course syllabus by the College Board review team. In some cases, Scholars Online teachers have elected to create and submit a course syllabus for review (a lengthy process, for which the teacher does not receive remuneration, and one which has to be repeated every 2-3 years at the whim of the College Board). Three of our science courses have received official approval in the past to grant AP credit on school transcripts, providing students complete all required lab work. Students must still take the AP exam for exam credit; some elect to do so and others do not.

For some of our other courses, the teachers have determined that the College Board requirements for the delivery of material are in fact not in the best interests of students following a classical Christian education curriculum with its emphasis on close analysis and critical thinking. While these courses meet and exceed requirements to cover specific material and topics in preparation for the AP and SAT subject exams (and our students do very well on these exams), we cannot grant official AP credit for these courses. Again, students must take the AP exam for exam credit.

Even when students have AP courses on their transcript, or score well on the AP exams, individual colleges and universities differ widely in how they use AP credit and AP exam results for admission or course credit, and that there is a growing controversy over the usefulness of the College Board testing program. If you are a parent of students who will not be attending college for several years yet, you should be aware that the entire AP/SAT/CLEP/ACT exam system is changing, and this may affect your choice of courses and how you validate your students’ work.

In the list below, links to the entire SO sequence are given, so that you may see how each individual course fits into the overall Scholars Online curriculum.

Official AP courses at Scholars Online [Scholars Online Science Sequence]

AP Biology (current AP syllabus approved 2013)
AP Chemistry (past AP syllabus approved 2009; new syllabus under review for 2014-2015 academic year)
AP Physics (past AP syllabus approved 2010; new syllabus under review for 2014-2015 academic year)

Courses at Scholars Online meeting or exceeding preparation requirements for subject AP Exam

World History (two year program should prepare student for the AP exam) [Scholars Online History Sequence]
Latin IV (Caesar and Vergil AP curriculum as specified) [Scholars Online Latin Sequence]
Senior English (exceeds AP curriculum reading and writing programs) [Scholars Online Literature Sequence]
Calculus (exceeds AP curriculum in presenting both materials and methodologies) [Scholars Online Mathematics Sequence]

As always, parents should consult with our independent curriculum advisor, Mrs. LaJuana Decker, with any questions on whether our courses are appropriate for their students. She may be reached at acadsupport@scholarsonine.org.

Tags: classical education, standardized tests
Posted in Curriculum, Education | No Comments »

Why Study Greek?

Thursday, September 13th, 2012

I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.
— Winston Churchill (somewhat out of context).

A few years ago I wrote an entry on this blog entitled “Why Study Latin?” It was a distillation of my own thoughts about the actual benefits of learning Latin — and the benefits one ought legitimately to expect from doing so. I tried to distinguish the real benefits from other phantom benefits that might not be, in and of themselves, fully valid reasons for undertaking the study. Not everyone agreed, but in general I stand by what I said there. From my point of view, the chief reason to learn Latin is to be able to read Latin; a significant second is to gain that unique way of looking at the world that attends that ability. One has access to a number of great works of Latin literature in their original forms, therefore, and one has also an enhanced ability to think in Latinate terms.

Of course other collateral benefits might reasonably accrue, but they are neither absolutely guaranteed to the student of Latin, nor are they benefits that attend Latin study exclusively. Dr. Karl Maurer of the University of Dallas suggested that I didn’t sufficiently credit the advantages a trained Latinist would have in reading older English — and he’s definitely right that this kind of textural depth of English poetry and prose will probably elude anyone who isn’t familiar with Latin, and the way Latin education was a cornerstone of English education from about 1500 to at least 1900. I certainly don’t disagree with his claims there; I don’t think they rank as matters of linguistics as much as matters of literary development and style. They’re still not trivial, however.

Be that as it may, for a variety of reasons, some of them right and some of them wrong, learning Latin has its champions, and I hope it gains a lot more. While I don’t agree with all the reasons one might advance for Latin study, I will enthusiastically concur that it’s a terrific thing to learn and to know.

Far fewer, however, champion learning Greek so loudly. For a variety of reasons, Greek is seen as far less significant. Some of those reasons are sound: Greek does not directly stand behind a broad range of modern Western European languages the way Latin does. Many of our ideas of statecraft and polity come from Greece, but most of them came through Latin in the process. Other reasons people shy away from Greek are fairly trivial. It has an odd-looking alphabet. Its literature seems to depend on a lot of odder assumptions. Realistic, though rather defeatist, is the fact that, in general, Greek is just considered tougher to learn. Many mainstream churches no longer even require their clergy to be able to read Greek (which seems preposterous to me, but that’s another matter).

For whatever reasons, Greek is certainly studied far less at the high school level than it once was. I read a statistic a few years ago suggesting that maybe a thousand students were actually studying ancient Greek in modern American high schools at any one time. The numbers may be as high as two thousand, but surely no higher than that. I don’t know whether those numbers have risen or fallen since I read it, but I certainly see no evidence that they have skyrocketed. I do occasionally run into a Latin teacher at the American Classical League Summer Institutes who teaches some Greek, but it’s most often a sideline, and often a completely optional “extra” for before or after school. Most of those students are being exposed to the Greek alphabet and some vocabulary, but fairly few of them are receiving a rigorous exposure to the grammar of Greek as a whole. If one narrows that to those who have studied real Classical Greek, as opposed to New Testament Greek, the numbers are probably smaller still.

For me most of the reasons for learning to read Greek are similar to those for reading Latin. The chief benefit, I would still insist, is to be able to read Greek literature in its original terms. Lucie Buisson wrote an eloquent defense of Homer in Greek not long ago in this blog. You cannot acquire a perspective on the Homeric poems like Lucie’s without reading them in Greek. It’s a huge deal: something snaps into view in a way that just cannot be explained to someone who hasn’t experienced it. No translation, no matter how good, can capture it for you. Though Keats memorably thanked Chapman for something like this eye-opening experience, the fact remains that Keats didn’t have the real thing as a comparandum. Chapman’s Homer is terrific — but Homer’s Homer is better.

Beyond the immediate experience of the literary objects themselves there is the fact that Greek provides its students with what I can only (metaphorically) call another set of eyes — that is, a different way of seeing the world, with different categories of thought that run deeper than mere changes in vocabulary. Virtually any new language one learns will provide that kind of new perspective: French, Spanish, or German will do so; Latin certainly does. I would suggest that Greek provides a uniquely valuable set precisely because it is further removed from English in its basic terms.

A reasonable command of multiple languages gives us what might be likened to stereoscopic vision. One eye, or one point of view, may be able to see a great deal — but it’s still limited because it’s looking from one position. A second eye, set some distance from the first, may allow us to see a somewhat enlarged field of view, but its real benefit is that it allows us, by the uncannily accurate trigonometric processor resident in our brains, to apprehend things in three dimensions. Images that are flat to one eye achieve depth with two, and we perceive their solidity as we never could do otherwise. Something similar goes on with an array of telescope dishes spread out over a distance on the earth — they allow, by exploiting even relatively slight amount of parallax in cosmic terms, an enhanced apprehension of depth in space. (Yes, there are also some other advantages having to do with resolution — all analogies have their limits.)

I would argue that every new language one learns will thus provide another point of view, enhancing and enriching, by a kind of analogical stereoscopy, a deeper and more penetrating view of the world. And like the more widely spaced eyes, or the telescopes strung out in a very large array, the further apart they are, the more powerfully their “parallax” (to speak purely analogically) will work upon us. This, I would argue, is one of the chief reasons for learning Greek. In some of its most fundamental assumptions, Greek is more sharply distinct from English than is Latin. A few examples will have to suffice.

Greek, for example, invites us to think about time differently. Greek verb tenses are not as much about absolute time as English verb tenses are; they are more about what linguists call aspect (or aspect of action in older writings). That is, they have more to do with the shape of an action — not its intrinsic shape, but how we’re talking about it — than merely locating it in the past, present, or future. Greek has a tense — the aorist — that English and Latin are missing. The aorist is used in the indicative mood to denote simple action in the past, but in other moods to express other encapsulation of simple verb action. Greek aorist verbs in the indicative will certainly locate events in the temporal continuum, and certainly English also has ways to express aspect — things such as the progressive or emphatic verb forms: e.g., “I run” vs. “I am running” or “I do run”. But whereas the English verb is chiefly centered in the idea of when something happened or is happening or will happen, with aspect being somewhat secondary, in Greek it’s the other way around. What exactly that does to the way Greek speakers and thinkers see the world is probably impossible to nail down exactly — but it’s not trivial.

Attic and earlier Greek has a whole mood of the verb that isn’t present in English or Latin — the optative. Students of New Testament Greek won’t see this on its own as a rule. There are a few examples such as Paul’s repeated μὴ γένοιτο in Romans (sometimes translated as “by no means”, but intrinsically meaning something more like “may it not come about”). But Attic and older dialects (like Homeric Greek) are loaded with it. It’s not just an arbitrary extension of a subjunctive idea: it runs alongside the subjunctive and plays parallel games with it in ways that defy simple classification.

Greek has a voice that neither English nor Latin knows, properly speaking — what is called the middle voice. It is neither active nor passive; but tends to refer to things acting on or on behalf of themselves, either reflexively or in a more convoluted way that defies any kind of classification in English language categories.

The Greek conditional sentence has a range of subtlety and nuance that dwarfs almost anything we have in English. Expressing a condition in Greek, or translating a condition from Greek, requires a very particular degree of attention to how the condition is doing what it is doing. In the present and the past, one may have either contrary to fact conditions (“If I were a rich man, I would have more staircases,” or “If I had brought an umbrella I would not have become so wet,”) general conditions (“If you push that button, a light goes on,”), and particular conditions (“If you have the older edition of the book, this paragraph is different”); in the future there are three other kinds of conditions, one of them nearly (but not quite) contrary to fact (“If you were to steal my diamonds, I’d be sad,”) called the future less vivid, and then a future more vivid and a future most vivid, representing increasing degrees of urgency in the future. All of these can be tweaked and modified and, in some rather athletic situations, mixed. If you study Greek, you will never think about conditions in quite the same way again.

Greek has what are called conditional temporal clauses that model themselves on conditions in terms of their verb usage, though they don’t actually take the form of a condition. There is something like this in English, but because we don’t use such a precise and distinct range of verbs for these clauses, they don’t show their similarities nearly as well.

The Greek participle is a powerhouse unlike any in any other Western language. Whole clauses and ideas for which we would require entire sentences can be packaged up with nuance and dexterity in participles and participial phrases. Because Greek participles have vastly more forms than English (which has only a perfect passive and a present active — “broken” and “breaking”) or than Latin (which has a perfect passive and a present active, and future active and passive forms), it can do vastly more. Greek participles have a variety of tenses, they can appear in active, middle, and passive voices, and they are inflected for all cases, numbers, and genders. All of these will affect the way one apprehends these nuggets of meaning in the language.

Those are only some examples of how a Greek sentence enforces a subtly different pattern of thought upon people who are dealing with it. As I said, however, for me the real treasure is in seeing these things in action, and seeing the ideas that arise through and in these expressions. So what’s so special as to require to be read in Greek?

Lucie already has written thoroughly enough about the joys of Homer; much the same could be said of almost any of the other classical authors. Plato’s dialogues come alive with a witty, edgy repartee that mostly gets flattened in translation. The dazzling wordplay and terrifying rhythms of Euripidean choruses cannot be emulated in meaningful English. Herodotus’s meandering storytelling in his slightly twisted Ionic dialect is a piece of wayfaring all on its own. The list goes on.

For a Christian, of course, being able to read the New Testament in its original form is a very significant advantage. Those who have spent any time investigating what we do at Scholars Online will realize that this is perhaps an odd thing to bring up, since we don’t teach New Testament Greek as such. My rationale there is really quite simple: the marginal cost of learning classical Attic Greek is small enough, compared with its advantages, that there seems no point in learning merely the New Testament (koine) version of the language. Anyone who can read Attic Greek can handle the New Testament with virtually no trouble. Yes, there are a few different forms: some internal consonants are lost, so that γίγνομαι (gignomai) becomes γίνομαι (ginomai), and the like. Yes, some of the more elaborate constructions go away, and one has to get used to a range of conditions (for example) that is significantly diminished from the Attic models I talked about above. But none of this will really throw a student of Attic into a tailspin; the converse is not true. Someone trained in New Testament Greek can read only New Testament Greek. Homer, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides — all the treasures of the classical Greek tradition remain inaccessible. But the important contents of the New Testament and the early Greek church fathers is open even with this restricted subset of Greek — and they are very well worth reading.

Greek is not, as mentioned earlier, a very popular subject to take at the high school level, and it’s obvious that it’s one of those things that requires a real investment of time and effort. Nevertheless, it is one of the most rewarding things one can study, both for the intrinsic delights of reading Greek texts and for some of the new categories of thought it will open up. For the truly exceptional student it can go alongside Latin to create a much richer apprehension of the way language and literary art can work, and to provide a set of age-old eyes with which to look all that more precisely at the modern world.

Posted in Character formation, Education, Greek, Language, Literature, Western Literature to Dante | 1 Comment »

Computer Programming as a Liberal Art

Monday, September 3rd, 2012

One of the college majors most widely pursued these days is computer science. This is largely because it’s generally seen as a ticket into a difficult and parsimonious job market. Specific computer skills are demonstrably marketable: one need merely review the help wanted section of almost any newspaper to see just how particular those demands are.

As a field of study, in other words, its value is generally seen entirely in terms of employability. It’s about training, rather than about education. Just to be clear: by “education”, I mean something that has to do with forming a person as a whole, rather just preparing him or her for a given job, which I generally refer to as “training”. If one wants to become somewhat Aristotelian and Dantean, it’s at least partly a distinction between essence and function. (That these two are inter-related is relevant, I think, to what follows.) One sign of the distinction, however, is that if things evolve sufficiently, one’s former training may become irrelevant, and one may need to be retrained for some other task or set of tasks. Education, on the other hand, is cumulative. Nothing is ever entirely lost or wasted; each thing we learn provides us with a new set of eyes, so to speak, with which to view the next thing. In a broad and somewhat simplistic reduction, training teaches you how to do, while education teaches you how to think.

One of the implications of that, I suppose, is that the distinction between education and training has largely to do with how one approaches it. What is training for one person may well be education for another. In fact, in the real world, probably these two things don’t actually appear unmixed. Life being what it is, and given that God has a sense of humor, what was training at one time may, on reflection, turn into something more like education. That’s all fine. Neither education nor training is a bad thing, and one needs both in the course of a well-balanced life. And though keeping the two distinct may be of considerable practical value, we must also acknowledge that the line is blurry. Whatever one takes in an educational mode will probably produce an educational effect, even if it’s something normally considered to be training. If this distinction seems a bit like C. S. Lewis’s distinction between “using” and “receiving”, articulated in his An Experiment in Criticism, that’s probably not accidental. Lewis’s argument there has gone a long way toward forming how I look at such things.

Having laid that groundwork, therefore, I’d like to talk a bit about computer programming as a liberal art. Anyone who knows me or knows much about me knows that I’m not really a programmer by profession, and that the mathematical studies were not my strong suit in high school or college (though I’ve since come to make peace with them).

Programming is obviously not one of the original liberal arts. Then again, neither are most of the things we study under today’s “liberal arts” heading. The original liberal arts included seven: grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric — all of which were about cultivating precise expression (and which were effectively a kind of training for ancient legal processes), and arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Those last four were all mathematical disciplines: both music and astronomy bore virtually no relation to what is taught today under those rubrics. Music was not about pavanes or symphonies or improvisational jazz: it was about divisions of vibrating strings into equal sections, and the harmonies thereby generated. Astronomy was similarly not about celestial atmospheres or planetary gravitation, but about proportions and periodicity in the heavens, and the placement of planets on epicycles. Kepler managed to dispense with epicycles, which are now of chiefly historical interest.

In keeping with the spirit, if not the letter, of that original categorization, we’ve come to apply the term “liberal arts” today to almost any discipline that is pursued for its own sake — or at least not for the sake of any immediate material or financial advantage. Art, literature, drama, and music (of the pavane-symphony-jazz sort) are all considered liberal arts largely because they have no immediate practical application to the job of surviving in the world. That’s okay, as long as we know what we’re doing, and realize that it’s not quite the same thing.

While today’s economic life in the “information age” is largely driven by computers, and there are job openings for those with the right set of skills and certifications, I would suggest that computer programming does have a place in the education of a free and adaptable person in the modern world, irrespective of whether it has any direct or immediate job applicability.

I first encountered computer programming (in a practical sense) when I was in graduate school in classics. At the time (when we got our first computer, an Osborne I with 64K of memory and two drives with 92K capacity each), there was virtually nothing to do with classics that was going to be aided a great deal by computers or programming, other than using the very basic word processor to produce papers. That was indeed useful — but had nothing to do with programming from my own perspective. Still, I found Miscrosoft Basic and some of the other tools inviting and intriguing — eventually moving on to Forth, Pascal, C, and even some 8080 Assembler — because they allowed one to envision new things to do, and project ways of doing them.

Programming — originally recreational as it might have been — taught me a number of things that I have come to use at various levels in my own personal and professional life. Even more importantly, though, it has taught me things that are fundamental about the nature of thought and the way I can go about doing anything at all.

Douglas Adams, the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, probably caught its most essential truth in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency:

”…if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve learned something about it yourself.”

I might add that not only have you yourself learned something about it, but you have, in the process learned something about yourself.

Adams also wrote, “I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.” This is, of course, one of the drolleries about programming. The hidden benefit is that, once perfected, that tool, whatever it was, allows one to save ten seconds every time it is run. If one judges things and their needs rightly, one might be able to save ten seconds a few hundred thousand or even a few million times. At that point, the time spent on programming the tool will not merely save time, but may make possible things that simply could never have been done otherwise.

One occasionally hears it said that a good programmer is a lazy programmer. That’s not strictly true — but the fact is that a really effective programmer is one who would rather do something once, and then have it take over the job of repeating things. A good programmer will use one set of tools to create other tools — and those will increase his or her effective range not two or three times, but often a thousandfold or more. Related to this is the curious phenomenon that a really good programmer is probably worth a few hundred merely adequate ones, in terms of productivity. The market realities haven’t yet caught up with this fact — and it may be that they never will — but it’s an interesting phenomenon.

Not only does programming require one to break things down into very tiny granular steps, but it also encourages one to come up with the simplest way of expressing those things. Economy of expression comes close to the liberal arts of rhetoric and dialectic, in its own way. Something expressed elegantly has a certain intrinsic beauty, even. Non-programmers are often nonplussed when they hear programmers talking about another programmer’s style or the beauty of his or her code — but the phenomenon is as real as the elegance of a Ciceronian period.

Pursuit of elegance and economy in programming also invites us to try looking at things from the other side of the process. When programming an early version of the game of Life for the Osborne, I discovered that by simply inverting a certain algorithm (having each live cell increment the neighbor count of all its adjacent spaces, rather than having each space count its live neighbors) achieved an eight-to-tenfold improvement in performance. Once one has done this kind of thing a few times, one starts to look for such opportunities. They are not all in a programming context.

There are general truths that one can learn from engaging in a larger programming project, too. I’ve come reluctantly to realize over the years that the problem in coming up with a really good computer program is seldom an inability to execute what one envisions: it’s much more likely to be a problem of executing what one hasn’t adequately envisioned in the first place. Not knowing what winning looks like, in other words, makes the game much harder to play. Forming a really clear plan first is going to pay dividends all the way down the line. One can find a few thousand applications for that principle every day, both in the computing world and everywhere else. Rushing into the production of something is almost always a recipe for disaster, a fact explored by Frederick P. Brooks in his brilliantly insightful (and still relevant) 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month, which documents his own blunders as the head of the IBM System 360 project, and the costly lessons he learned from the process.

One of the virtues of programming as a way of training the mind is that it provides an objective “hard” target. One cannot make merely suggestive remarks to a computer and expect them to be understood. A computer is, in some ways, an objective engine of pure logic, and it is relentless and completely unsympathetic. It will do precisely what it’s told to do — no more and no less. Barring actual mechanical failure, it will do it over and over again exactly the same way. One cannot browbeat or cajole a computer into changing its approach. There’s a practical lesson and probably a moral lesson too there. People can be persuaded; reality just doesn’t work that way — which is probably just as well.

I am certainly not the first to have noted that computer programming can have this kind of function in educational terms. Brian Kernighan — someone known well to the community of Unix and C programmers over the years (he was a major part of the team that invented C and Unix) has argued that it’s precisely that in a New York Times article linked here. Donald Knuth, one of the magisterial figures of the first generation of programming, holds forth on its place as an art, too, here. In 2008, members of the faculties of Williams College and Pomona College (my own alma mater) collaborated on a similar statement available here. Another reflection on computer science and math in a pedagogical context is here. And of course Douglas Hofstadter in 1979 adumbrated some of the more important issues in his delightful and bizarre book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

Is this all theory and general knowledge? Of course not. What one learns along the line here can be completely practical, too, even in a narrower sense. For me it paid off in ways I could never have envisioned when I was starting out.

When I was finishing my dissertation — an edition of the ninth-century Latin commentary of Claudius, Bishop of Turin, on the Gospel of Matthew — I realized that there was no practical way to produce a page format that would echo what normal classical and mediaeval text editions typically show on a page. Microsoft Word (which was what I was using at the time) supported footnotes — but typically these texts don’t use footnotes. Instead, the variations in manuscript readings are keyed not to footnote marks, but to the line numbers of the original text, and kept in a repository of textual variants at the bottom of the page (what is called in the trade an apparatus criticus). In addition, I wanted to have two further sets of notes at the bottom of the page, one giving the sources of the earlier church fathers that Claudius was quoting, and another giving specifically scriptural citations. I also wanted to mark in the margins where the foliation of the original manuscripts changed. Unsurprisingly, there’s really not a way to get Microsoft Word to do all that for you automatically. But with a bit of Pascal, I was able to write a page formatter that would take a compressed set of notes indicating all these things, and parcel them out to the right parts of the page, in a way that would be consistent with RTF and University Microfilms standards.

When, some years ago, we were setting Scholars Online up as an independent operation, I was able, using Javascript, PHP, and MySQL, to write a chat program that would serve our needs. It’s done pretty well since. It’s robust enough that it hasn’t seriously failed; we now have thousands of chats recorded, supporting various languages, pictures, audio and video files, and so on. I didn’t set out to learn programming to accomplish something like this. It was just what needed to be done.

Recently I had to recast my Latin IV class to correspond to the new AP curriculum definition from the College Board. (While it is not, for several reasons, a certified AP course, I’m using the course definition, on the assumption that a majority of the students will want to take the AP exam.) Among the things I wanted to do was to provide a set of vocabulary quizzes to keep the students ahead of the curve, and reduce the amount of dictionary-thumping they’d have to do en route. Using Lee Butterman’s useful and elegant NoDictionaries site, I was able to get a complete list of the words required for the passages in question from Caesar and Vergil; using a spreadsheet, I was able to sort and re-order these lists so as to catch each word the first time it appeared, and eliminate the repetitions; using regular expressions with a “grep” utility in my programming editor (BBEdit for the Macintosh) I was able to take those lists and format them into GIFT format files for importation into the Moodle, where they will be, I trust, reasonably useful for my students. That took me less than a day for several thousand words — something I probably could not have done otherwise in anything approaching a reasonable amount of time. For none of those tasks did I have any training as such. But the ways of thinking I had learned by doing other programming tasks enabled me to do these here.

Perhaps the real lesson here is that there is probably nothing — however mechanical it may seem to be — that cannot be in some senses used as a basis of education, and no education that cannot yield some practical fruit down the road a ways. That all seems consistent (to me) with the larger divine economy of things.

Posted in Character formation, Education, Mathematics, Programming, Technology | No Comments »