The ancient Greek and Roman civilizations were periods of rapid cultural growth and advancement. Over two thousand years ago, these cultures developed an education system that persisted until the 20th century. Known as the liberal arts, they were the essential tools a free person (from the Latin liberalis: “worthy of a free person”) must know to become a functioning member of society.
The importance of a liberal arts education was known from before the time of Christ until the turn of the 20th century. While modern democracy is a failed institution, especially in contrast with benevolent monarchy, it is possible that with a well educated populace, democracy could work. The liberal arts represented this basic level of education, and comprised seven different fields, which will be briefly examined here.
The Seven Liberal Arts, Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi (1406-1486)
The liberal arts can be traced to Plato, who thoroughly prescribed them in perhaps his most famous work, The Republic. Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, stated that an educated man should be capable of considering and investigating any idea or concept thoroughly without necessarily embracing or dismissing it. Seneca the Younger, a Roman Stoic philosopher who lived from 4 BC to 65 AD, and advisor to Emperor Nero, was a strong advocate of the liberal arts.
The Stoics, founded in the 3rd century BC in Athens, believed in a rational outlook on life, that harmful emotions stem from errors in judgment and reasoning, and stressed the importance of maintaining a will in accord with nature, and that one’s actions should be judged more importantly than one’s speech. Logic was an important component of a successful man, and “virtue consists in a will that is in agreement with nature.” In the realm of interpersonal relationships, one is stressed to “be free from anger, envy, and jealousy.”
The liberal arts also were emphasized heavily in Hellenistic Greece, described as the “enkuklios paideia” or “education in a circle.” They were divided into four scientific arts—music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, and three humanities—grammar, logic, and rhetoric. These were divided into two main groups: The Trivium, representing the three humanities, was taught first as a framework for observing and understanding what the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell were perceiving.
The Quadrivium was the upper division and included the four scientific arts. Together, the seven liberal arts represent the thinking skills, and served as a basis for the education of all. Those who wished to specialize would first obtain an education in the liberal arts before proceeding to the practical arts (medicine, architecture) or other fields such as philosophy or theology.
The purpose of learning the arts is to train the mind how to think (as opposed to what to think). By combining the seven liberal arts with the five senses, one can distinguish between reality and fiction. This can be visually represented with a Pythagorean triangle.
The Humanities (The Trivium)
The Trivium (literally, the place where three roads meet), known as the elementary three, represent the basic tools needed and was taught before the Quadrivium. The word trivia (tri=3 via=road) comes directly from the trivium. The trivium includes General Grammar, Formal Logic, and Rhetoric. While technically simpler than the more advanced subjects in the Quadrivium, many flaws in logic and reasoning can be traced back to failure to adequately learn the basics found in the Trivium.
Grammar is the systematic method of gathering raw data and ordering the facts of reality into a consistent body of knowledge. Grammar includes the mechanics of language, properly identifying and describing information perceived by the five senses.
Logic or Dialectic is the mechanics of thought and analysis, the process of identifying fallacies or errors in reasoning, and removing contradictions.
Rhetoric or Wisdom is the application of language in order to persuade.
| [1] General Grammar | [2] Formal Logic | [3] Classical Rhetoric |
|---|---|---|
| Answers the question of the Who, What, Where, and the When of a subject. | Answers the Why of a subject. | Provides the How of a subject. |
| Discovering and ordering facts of reality comprises basic, systematic knowledge. | Developing the faculty of reason in establishing valid [i.e., non-contradictory] relationships among facts is systematic understanding. | Applying knowledge and understanding expressively comprises wisdom or, in other words, it is systematically useable knowledge and understanding. |
The Scientific Arts (The Quadrivium)
The scientific arts include music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. After learning the basic skills of the Trivium, which are applicable to all other studies, the scientific arts known as the Quadrivium would be studied. The Quadrivium “place where four roads meet” include arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
Arithmetic is the study of the number, a pure abstraction outside of space and time. It is the study of quantities.
Geometry is a number in space, the study of magnitude at rest.
Music is a number in time; the application of the theory of numbers. It is the study of the relations between quantities.
Astronomy is a number in space and time. It is the study of magnitude inherently moving.
The Seven Combined
Grammar = Knowledge = What?
Logic = Reason = Why?
Rhetoric = Communication = How?
Arithmetic = Formal = Do
Geometry = Visual = See
Music = Artistic = Feel
Astronomy= Exploration = Seek
By developing these basic skills, men would have the basic tools they needed to live a fulfilling and satisfying life, and to explore their emotions, dreams, ambitions, and desires.
Two Thousand Years Of Liberal Arts
In ancient Greece, all free men were expected to obtain a basic liberal arts education. Women received a limited public education which focused on physical fitness, how to sing, dance, and play instruments. These were not seen as “childish endeavors” but indeed a strict and formal education system was established that provided a complementary, but important role in society, a foil to the men who were trained in logic and reason.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the entirety of human knowledge was consolidated into a series of volumes known as the “encyclopedia” which translates as “complete instruction or complete knowledge.” Almost every major culture over the past 2,000 years has adopted the seven liberal arts. The Fellowcraft Degree commands all Freemasons to study them, and indeed much of Freemasonry is based upon principles found in the seven.
Today
Yale University, R.I.P. 1701-2016
Today, a liberal arts education is no longer even available at so-called “liberal arts” schools. The wisdom found in the seven basic liberal arts is the basis of every major civilization and advancement since before Christ. Only in the last few decades has this system been decimated.
In the image from Yale above, we can clearly see failures of the very first lesson of grammar. Without understanding grammar, no further education can be learned. The internet offers a vast array of knowledge to almost every person alive today. While our institutions may have failed us, a neomasculine man must develop his mind, as well as his body, and I encourage all to study the liberal arts.
Perhaps we will examine these subjects in further detail in future articles.
Read More: My Education Was a Complete Waste of Time
50 – 60 years ago, Liberal Arts majors from top schools were highly recruited by big companies looking for management trainees. Their demonstrated ability to read and communicate, use reason, logic and math, do research and analysis… Made them highly sought after.
That’s all gone. STEM and business majors are all we even consider now.
I was about to make a similar comment. Any more info? I’m curious — liberal arts used to be a path to long-term success in business world, but apparently no longer.
I believe it still can be and I’ve seen some exceptional leadership from such rare beings of the 21st century work world…a lot depends on your body of work over time, how you display the content of your character, and of course the depth of your skill set. That ability to grasp complexity (and being able to achieve useful reductionist actions from within complexity, the kind that squelch complication) requires well-roundedness and that’s a scarce commodity these days (hence, it’s in demand). You often find that most of these guys did fine in school, but were really natural autodidacts and self-starters who found a unique formula for success. People *do* get noticed and hired this way.
Well done and very nice and clear explaination of trivium and quadrivum. This was enjoyable. Also, for the people out there who know “liberal arts” only in its modern form, I think it will be enlightening to know that the liberal arts education is, in fact, the most important education for a human being to be just that, a human being. It’s perversion into what it is now, this, ugh, just distended anus of academia, is truly shameful. The start of the problem is when people started mistaking avocation for vocation and making careers out of it….not some, not the best, not a couple just so the knowledge can be passed, but first an entire generation of fucking pansies and then, since they realized they were running an academic Ponzi scheme and needed more dipshits to buy in, an entire generation.
It would be great if every engineer and doctor had a liberal arts education and liberal arts education stopped being the default vocation of everyone who get get a federal loan for college (i.e., everyone)
As an aside, that “disteded anus of academia” generally earns 6 figure incomes to “teach” how great socialism and other destroyers of western culture are. All while convincing idiot students that 6 figure debt for a degree in transformative underwater basket weaving and wymyn’s studies was a fantastic idea.
A small percentage of them are making 6 figures while adjuncts who basically work for slave wages are doing the bulk of the work and waiting for them to die so more tenure track positions eventually open up.
The idea of a tenured professor teaching a subversive subject is good in principle but, of course, degenerates into exactly what they are saying. To paraphrase Brad Neely, I was once just like them….but then I grew a brain, a dick and a heart.
I think we basically agree. Same coin, both sides.
Education today is basically phony baloney liberal crap.
The problems in education today, and there are many, are very easily solvable.
After 8th grade people are sent either to a trade school or to a highschool similar to German gymnasiums. We need to reduce the number of students and number of teachers by roughly 90% and make spots for both students and teachers insanely competitive. That small percentage of people who wind up not going to a trade school will go to a palace of a university, will not pay a dime for it and should they succeed to get through it’s rigorous programs will then be passed on to career specific graduate schools.
There are simply far too many people getting an “Education”
A college diploma now is slightly less valuable than used toilet paper….
Politics, from left or right, have absolutely no place in the classroom.
The whole world has up and gone full faggot and it all stems from a single source…the destruction of education and economy and morals and art and a myriad of other things all comes from the absolute worst that the world has to offer…the American middle class.
Funny enough, that was the old standard.
yes and it worked. It is why being a college graduate was something to be proud of.
There is an article I read about a girl who is suing her lawschool. She graduated and passed the bar and after some time still hadn’t got a job. She accused them of inflating their job data stats. This was a law school which has been in business, and it is a business, for about 10 years.
It is a law degree mill and the people out there who hire lawyers know it.
And that is law school. It is universal with undergraduate universities.
Despite making schools and universities successful being so easy and having the effect of, in a single generation, pretty much reversing the vast bulk of our economic and social problems we will never be able to do it because every fucking moron wants their kids to go to colleges they can’t afford so they can throw them graduation parties they can’t afford so everyone can just stay in debt forever.
People blame the banks but fuck that, banks are supposed to be greedy. That’s why those fucks got into banking. Blaming banking folk for being greedy is like blaming chefs for being fat.
The real problem is the average Mr. and Mrs. Smith from all over the country who are trying to live above their station rather than trying to see their children live above their station and their grand children live above that station.
The idea of multigenerational success has gone the way of the dodo and people are blaming shadow government, bankers, jews, illuminati, democrats, republicans…it is all bullshit….want to blame someone….blame middle class American teachers and secretaries and police officers and window washers. These hard working salt of the earth retards have bought hook line and sinker into the ideology of now now now now and have destroyed the world….starting with academia and branching out.
To quote Daffy Duck when bugs bunny told him not to take the treasure out of the cave because the genie had warned there would be consequences: Consequences Schmonsequences, so long as I’m rich.
I was one who fell for the whole “You need a degree in order to succeed” spill. There’s a joke that I heard in college that I now realize wasn’t really so much a joke in the conventional sense:
B.S. = Bullshit
M.B.A. = More Bullshiting Applied
P.H.D. = Piled Higher & Deeper
I think the only way to get a decent education at this point is to go to one of the elite universities and somehow avoid the massive pitfall of being a total faggot.
Stick to the locker room and the library. Work your ass off. Pick your professors with care and wisdom. Avoid sticking your dick in shit or, at least, avoid trying to impress things you want to put your dick in.
Spend 4 years without accruing a dime of debt, getting in good shape physically and mentally and then graduate while following a plan from orientation day one until commencement which gets you to the exact graduate program you need for your pre determined career.
You see what is necessary here? Half a million dollars cash and the ability to let someone else make decisions for you because your cum filled 18 year old brain sure as fuck isn’t going to make the right ones…..this is known as every fucking Chinese kid at an ivy league school whose parents have been saving nickels from selling pork fried rice to make sure their kids do the right thing.
Or just go to a trade school, although one might have to watch out for shady institutions.
Agreed. I saw the forest for the trees as a teenager when the teachers at my high school were pushing that shit left and right. Virtually all of my fellow students then were so gung-ho about going to college when I asked them what they wanted to do, none of them had any answer which I found telling. Hell, even members of my own family still buy that college education bullshit and I’ve called them out on it that unless they have an idea of what they’re going for is something that A. They will love B. Will help them pay off their loans within a decade it’s not worth earning C. Question the kind of bullshit the school counselor is pushing, because if anything, he’s being a salesman for that school.
Additionally, I think people have been living beyond their means for quite some time. I used to get pissed at people who complained about their lack of funds, now I just laugh at them. They dug that hole of debt, now lay in it.
As a lawyer, I’m familiar with that dipshit chick you mention. Talk about the failure of liberal arts education. Where does a school having high job placement rates guarantee any specific individual a job? Logic 101 fail. Moreover, this retard highlights an entirely different problem – complete lack of ambition. If you passed the bar, you are a licensed attorney. Start your own firm and hustle up some clients. I don’t have much pity or patience for someone who expects things to be handed to them just because they checked some boxes. I doubt many judges do either, though with some of the retarded rulings I see, I sometimes wonder.
Going to a trade school early is an excellent idea for people inclined to do so. There are people who are truly meant to be in a university and people more suited to trades. The people more suited to trades will enjoy their time in the trade school, will do well and when they leave will find work that they are good at and well compensated for which will allow them to make money without unnecessary debt. That same person sitting in a class learning about David Hume might feel totally bored, annoyed or even angry….will wind up doing poorly if not from aptitude then from attitude and will wind up in that trade school anyway only he will be carrying the debt from the university, be 4 years behind people who got there first and wind up being miserable.
Another totally valid choice is military service (though with the articles here yesterday that is feeling dubious).
The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of different types of people and a lot of different ways of life. The idea that all of them need to funnel into a 4 year liberal arts college because that is what you are supposed to do is batshit crazy, the idea that they will carry a half million dollars in debt for it is even batshittier crazy and the idea that the institutions would turn themselves into day care for young adults and then pat themselves on the back for it is just plain plaid shirt, big head, drooling retarded.
Really bat shit crazy right? I would love to find out she was offered a job at a firm but turned it down or quit after realizing that fresh out of law school the hours are basically slavery. I wish, I hope, hell I will pray that some reporter finds out that a large firm offered her a job or that she left a job. It would be amazing.
You mentioned Jew blaming. What I’m aware of is Jews started dealing with money because Christians weren’t allowed to loan money with interest and because Jews weren’t allowed to do anything else. If that’s true, then Jews got so good at it by pure necessity. So every time someone blames Jews, they should be reminded it was their ancestors that empowered Jews in the first place. Same with guns. You can’t blame gun manufacturers that one dipshit killed another dipshit because of, say, a woman. Although I can argue that in all fairness, deep in, gun lobbyists wouldn’t mind seeing people kill each other a bit more. You know, business.
This has a good bit of truth to it, but I don’t think it is the whole story. I think there is a lot about being a people who spent a lot of time trying to make it in other people’s homelands and a few other cultural things as well.
Blaming people, groups, religions, the darks, faggots, whatever…blaming people for shit is basically what you do when you reach down to grab your dick and man up and realize you have no dick so instead you turn into a crying little bitch pointing fingers.
There is a lot of truth in the sterotypes…the hebes with money and entertainment as you pointed out is just one of them. Many of them, if not most of them, have a basis in truth somewhere, but are all explainable if you look close and rarely, if ever, are secretly twirling their mustaches and plotting world dominance. That’s just a bunch of hooey from impotent twats.
There’s always work in porn….just saying. Ask Duke law school porn chick.
I wish that when I was a kid my family asked me how I wanted to live instead of what I want to do. If I had the question of finding a realistic lifestyle for my adult life in my mind from when I was a child I would have made a lot of decision better than I had.
I am not complaining, I’ve done alright….but I would have done better and it would have been easier if I had some different thoughts in my head.
everybody keeps saying “go to trade school, go to trade school..” but blue collar jobbers need the white collar job sector to be prosperous in order for them to be- who do the plumbers, electricians, etc service after all?
The yuppie sector is shrinking.
Service other blue collar workers. How do you think people make it in third world societies? It’s basic interdependence among members of a society. And electrician might not make bank off of hipsters, but he us still needed, and he will need the fellow with carpentry skills.
This will just lead to a glut of tradesmen.
I know blue collar guys here in NYC, they are furloughed a lot more than you’d think
You do have a good point, but that’s because that’s NYC we are talking about. Of course, when (not if) society collapses, mark my words, there will be more than enough work for these guys, or at least the ones that survive, and hipsters and other useless libs are wiped off the face of this earth. The other choice is immigration to another land, but seeing that nationalism is on the rise, we may not get the chance. And seeing how ROK has embraced nationalism over globalization, that might bite us in the ass.
BC jobs in NYC are a strange breed. Different than rest of the country for a lot of reasons. The idea of learning a trade as an adult because it will be prosperous is just about as smart as going to culinary school in your 40’s — aka…fucking retarded.
But if you have a job with a trade and you have a son and he shows an aptitude to that trade and you are teaching him young and, especially, if you can help him into a local then that kid will prosper in ways he couldn’t imagine if you said “I’ve been here with local 3 sparkies running wire every day and I want better for my son, I am going to send him to CUNY and watch as he becomes a great psychiatrist”
Im not saying its a bad idea, Im just saying you need white collars jobs to support this job sector…supply and dee-mand
You don’t need culinary school. Just ask the old Mexican ladies that sell me tamales on a daily basis. That’s a skill that gets perfected through generations of good cooks and cooking with love.
Of course. It works both ways. I manage construction projects. Which means I need all sorts of tradesmen not to mention lawyers, architects, expeditors, waste disposal people — and they need me too….they couldn’t do their job if I didn’t coordinate and I couldn’t do my job if they didn’t do theirs….we all need the rich jews who are spending 500m to build this fucking thing as well as all the young lawyers and accountants and finance people who will live there making it a reasonable investment.
correctamundo.
Anthony Bourdain in one of his books (I think the first, Kitchen Confidential) said straight up that the last person he would ever fucking hire in a kitchen is a white guy who went to culinary school. Who needs that fucking headache. They have ideas and shit they learned in a school which have nothing to do with reality.
Who does he want? Some equadorian that you can show exactly how to do something and without question, without a sick day, without even thinking he will do it over and over again exactly the way you showed him with zero fucking deviation and never get tired or bored.
btw nice hives.
Kinda sad one of the best rick band of the past 15 years is from Sweden. Also check out Volbeat
Actually I reached this conclusion by watching Hell’s Kitchen on a regular basis. And it’s not just getting a kick of watching Gordon Ramsay being a perpetually pissed off harpy. The types of cooks competing there are but a microcosm of what’s wrong with American schools in general. And even assuming (perhaps correctly)that the show is somewhat scripted, it does show that dirty truth. That graduates can’t handle real life grind. And that modern women are whiny, egocentric, aggressive bitches.
As we used to say in USAF aircraft maintenance:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/b2/4a/37/b24a378e6ea3c9f49c195e31cb0d1664.jpg
You said Hell’s Kitchen and I instantly thought Daredevil…
That’s good that you have at least realized what’s going on. Growing up, I was fortunate enough to have a father who taught from an early age to question authority when necessary. Additionally, I attended two different types of schooling in Alaska and Texas (side benefit of having a career military guy for a father). The differences in schooling were night and day in comparison. While Alaskan teachers would purposely make mistakes to ensure you were paying attention, Texas teachers were always right, period.
Lolknee, its was its Kitchen Confidential where he said the last person a chef will hire is an grad from culinary school. As Bourdain said, the head chef wants his food to be made exactly the same every single time and its cheaper to hire a third world immigrant to do the work. I worked in small restaurant for good ten years of my life, I saw it in person what Boudian talk about in Kitchen Confidential. In Medium Raw, Bourdain flat out say never go to culinary school if I recall correctly. Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw are good books to give to someone thinking of going to culinary school, along with the slap on the back of the head.
You need to learn only the basic 7 liberal arts above. No more. Perhaps 15% of the populace could continue further studies into medicine, law, etc. but the basic liberal arts education does not take 12 years to learn, if property taught.
I question that. When the yale students in the photo above are failing at the FIRST lesson of grammar, I must conclude logically, that that institution is unable to effectively impart knowledge to me. Sure, it is one of the top schools, and there are undoubtedly some smart professors there, but those fundamental failures are too much for me.
Keep in mind, nowhere in ancient Greek or Roman society would you see students at an advanced level publicly displaying their failure of mastery of the first lesson of grammar. It is disgraceful and a clear sign of our culture’s inferiority to past civilization, despite our possessions of air travel and electronic gadgets.
Exactly. People are so helpless today, they don’t know how to fix common problems like unclogging a sink, repairing a refrigerator, etc. It’s usually very basic stuff, I went on youtube and figured out how to repair a fridge while waiting for 2 dumbass repairmen to call me back. Point being there is a huge market of helpless people that will need to call you if something breaks.
Being a great lawyer has little to do with book smarts–I’ve been watching the new FX series on The People vs OJ Simpson, and they point out that the dream team was a bunch of slightly above average attorneys who had unlimited resources and a lenient judge which allowed them to challenge and manipulate everything.
I think more important than anything is they thought the way a non-lawyer would. “If the glove doesn’t fit you must acquit” is something a musician or rapper could come up with better than a lawyer. They stressed ideas like exploiting every tiny mistake that the police made, most of which didn’t have an effect on the suspect’s guilt, but showed that the police were error-prone, and many times, showed they lied. Then all they had to do was imply that if they made little mistakes and little white lies, perhaps they also made big mistakes and big lies.
Plus the jury was pissed at the prosecutors for keeping them boarded up for months, the defense kept things short and sweet and *entertaining* because jurors are humans and just wanted something interesting to do until the time they got to go back to the hotel to eat. Point being, very little of the victory was legal skill or anything they learned in law school, but just basic manipulating emotions and masterful manipulating and exaggerating language like F Lee Bailey did with Mark Fuhrman.
In my state, the richest lawyer is a guy who went to the local unacreddited school instead of a university. He is the most successful lawyer, not to mention never carrying debt from a big uni.
Pretty sure she was undergrad, only like 19 .. Belle Knox? She was a hottie. Messed up in the head though.
An education is what you make of it. Plenty of morons at Yale and loads of shit wine in France. However, if you want to get an excellent education it is there if you can avoid the faggotry
All this is true, but also more to lawyering than trial law. Book smarts plays a huge part of the work that research lawyers do, loads of other lawyers too not to mention judges especially Supreme Court
We are the heritage of the Greco-Roman philosophy. And just like them, we have barbarians both inside and outside our civilization. We are walking the exact same path of the Roman Empire and we all know how it ended up.
We have to treat those barbarians inside our countries (mainly university parasites and politicians with 0 logic and reason, and infinite greed) as they are, useless lazy-ass dumb parasites, and rise again critical thinking, reason, merit, dedication, effort and logic.
Great article. ROK has improved a lot.
I would add that while Romand and Greeks are the base of Western Culture, we shouldn’t dismiss the “barbarians” outside the boundaries and think they were some kind of african low-IQ savage tribes.
As an example: we can think of vikings as some kind of violent primitive tribe. However, not many people know that drakkars were (are) a masterpiece of engineering, and quite possibly the best ship design at that time in the world. Not bad for a primitive tribe.
I believe Ghengis Khan was actually quite intelligent, if I remember correctly. Most would place him square in the dumb barbarian category.
So was General Tso — but he was chicken.
Heh, happy Friday.
barbarian originally just mean “not roman or greek.” the romans would have considered persians barbarians, for example, even though they were highly civilized.
So was Colonel Sanders.
Well done
Barbarian is actually a very cool word. It didn’t just mean not Greek but the Greek word barbaros was literally the opposite of the word for citizen. Also, onomatopoeticly barbo was nonsense language like blahblahblah is for us. The fact that they spoke like animals (not with Greek) meant they were subhuman and incapable of participating in the polis. Gotta love them Greeks.
First rule of conflict: paint your picture as subhuman and inferior. It is then very easy to justify doing horrible things to them.
Maybe we should start calling ourselves barbarians…
Not me: I can read Classical Greek
Similarly, the Slavic word for German comes from the word for “mute” for much the same reason (Germans being the other significant ethnicity in contact with Slavs, the label stuck to them, perhaps in a similar way as ‘Barbary’ stuck to North Africa.)
As in Russian ‘Немецкий – Nemetskiy’, Polish ‘Niemiecki’, etc.
I don’t know about you but in my country we speak ‘Queen’s English’, so we’re certainly not the ones “barbar-ing” as though we can’t speak an intelligible language.
Thanks for that. Very interesting
Good on you. I’ve started learning it, so can read a little, but only at a very basic level like “Dikaiopolis goes to the fields.” My accent though is pretty good – despite being a dead language, I try not to read it like one and get pedantic with pronouncing it well.
I thinks it’s fantastic to learn classical languages, and though I’d like to continue Greek, I’d also like to learn some Norse, Old English and Old Irish for something closer to my own ancestry.
..Starting with the Germanic tongues. As much as I’d like to learn Celtic one’s, it’s quite alien to me, whereas I already speak English (of course) and German.
Greek I was surprisingly well prepared for by knowing German.
German does help with the Greek. Hegel said that philosophy can only be done in greek or german.
If you look at the roman empire, when it fell the lives of the country bumpkin didn’t change too much (I hope the same holds true for us).
Plus these “barbarians” were hoping to benefit from the roman culture, but couldn’t due to their cultural differences.
We won’t notice it in our daily lives at all. I am not concerned about my personal life, but the (lack) direction of my country and my culture, and eventual cultural and material misery of my descendants.
I’m in the same boat as you. I personally am not that afraid of surviving if I live to see the death of Western Civilization. I’m sure i’d be able to get by; just like most people did during the Great Depression. However, I’m a very nationalistic man who loves my country to death. My biggest fear would be witnessing the death of my nation and its culture. As well as the death of Western Civilization as a whole, and how much suffering the future citizens will have to endure.
I live in America and already mentally consider my nation and its culture dead. Fully. Although I suppose the idea of the entire death of Western Civilization troubles me somewhat more than merely my country, I too see this as inevitable. It has been on top for a long time, and had a nice run, but it’s on the way out. Historians have been noting this for decades.
I try to detach myself from loving nations or labels or cultures and instead love the ideas behind them. So instead of loving Murica or Great Britain, I love ideas like free association, free speech, a safe and peaceful country, a well education populace, strong morality, and patriarchy (many of which these countries possessed in the past). Then, in any new culture, I can judge it based on the presence or absence of these factors. I find this a much better lens from which to view the world.
It is true.
It is similar, I take it, to what my grandfather told me about life during the great depression.
He was a farm boy. He lived on a farm. They always had chickens and vegetables. Everyone for 200 miles was pretty much in the same financial situation. They didn’t have much, but never went wanting.
If people were tossing themselves out of windows because the economy was crashing it wasn’t something he would have ever noticed. He just got home from school, did his chores and homework and played baseball with local kids.
I am getting a salary of 6900 dollars each week. Over a year ago I was in a horrible condition ,,odf jobless and no bank credit . Thanks to one of my friends who showed me a way where I was able to gather myself and making average of 58 d/h. So it can change your life as it has changed mine. Why not try this.
Look here for details
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Memoria Press is a GREAT source of information on the Trivium. In addition to being suppliers for classical home schoolers, they have articles that go in depth about the teaching Latin (grammar), logic, and rhetoric. I’ve used one of their recommended Latin textbooks and it did wonders for my literacy skills.
http://www.memoriapress.com/
“We are loved”?? Who the fuck loves you !
Look at the guy in the background on the right. He’s looking straight at the camera with such a shit-eating grin. What’s he up to?
He’s the Devil.
Satan does “evil” to test a person’s faith in god.
Don’t insult poor Satan like that.
Reminds me of a joke I heard in church years ago.
A man was challenged with saying something nice about everyone who was brought up. It started off pretty benign; “What about Sally? John? Phillip?” As it progressed, it became increasingly tougher. “What about Hitler and Stalin?” Finally, someone who thought they were clever brought out the trump card: “What about Satan? Say something nice about him.” The man smiled and simply replied, “He’s a hard worker.”
I’m sorry but his eyes seem to stare right into my soul.
I’m sorry for bringing this curse on you. If only I hadn’t mentioned it, he wouldn’t be haunting you so. Forgive me.
Do you think I need to offer him my cat in sacrifice for him to leave me in peace ?
Even if not, I’d get rid of the cat anyways…little furry bastards.
That would make my dog sad and the mice creeping in my home like illegal migrants happy.
I was gonna say, offer a virgin woman, but you might have to import one from overseas, and I’m no expert on Customs law, but I think that’s illegal.
eating shit.
Shit eating I guess
I think in the cunt to English dictionary love is rape and rape is any societal interaction which isn’t praise so, as these pigs might say, ipso fatso
Well done article. For all the Trillions dumped into education, our students are falling behind and are poorly educated in the classical sense (perhaps miseducated is a better term?).
All. Very. Deliberately. Done.
You cannot crush the culture of a smart, aware people. So the ‘liberals’ conspired to make the people dumb.
It all began with Progressive theorists developing what I think were well intended ideas on education. At some point someone realized that education on the K-12 level could also be used to indoctrinate society. The ideological descendants of the people fight fiercely to maintain the public school monopoly.
Public school was an indoctrination project from the start. It started out well, with a strong emphasis on American and Christian values, but it went off the rails in the early 20th century.
“Public school was an indoctrination project from the start. It started out well, with a strong emphasis on American and Christian values, but it went off the rails in the early 20th century.”
Government funded schooling was always a trap. Shape the minds of children for 12+ years, lure all those bored wives into the workplace, capture all that previously un-taxed labor by half the population.
This is an excellent article. I would further say that the rise of so-called “experts” across the entire spectrum of the liberal arts and sciences has undoubtedly diminished the general standards and knowledge across these fields.
Apart from Medicine and Engineering, I find it laughable when you come across a Professor and expert in “The study of Human Group Telemetry during the Great Depression” whom subsequently knows zero about any other topic across the entire field of the Arts and Sciences.
The whole expert mentality has led to a sharp decline in the development of that well rounded general intelligence that allow a man’s mind to eloquently debate and discuss an array of different subjects, then go out and change the brake pads on his car after which he prepares the pheasant for dinner that he shot that morning. No, we just don’t make them like this anymore, instead we’ve produced a generation of “experts” who are even more ignorant than those most remote primitives they praise so liberally from their cushioned and safe ivory towers in the land of academia.
Nothing wrong with having a scholar on an arcane subject, but the problem is that everyone wants to be an expert on an extremely narrow subject nowadays.
I recall watching Borat and getting a kick out of that “humor” coach. Who knew that existed. Of course some of you will say it has nothing to do with liberal arts. I bet that’s where the fellow learned his “trade”, from a liberal arts school.
that was hilarious. Aaaaand now I will be thinking of borat all freaking day.
It’s not just that Sasha Baron Cohen is hysterical, but as an outsider to American culture, he’s more able to satirize it than others.
“We support your war of terror”. Without getting into a “war on terror is good or bad” debate, that line was hilarious.
FUCK YOU UZBEKISTAN!
I will confess that I got lost in part on the Trivium triangle.
How do the “non est/est” lines work?
Is there no truth to be found between Grammar and Rhetoric, etc?
non est= is not
est = is
They are not the same thing, but they are equally valid paths to find truth.
Im having a flashback to my HS latin class
I am hoping it is a good flashback.
I am from a completely different field, but I’ve always envied those who had the luck of making philosophy, history and languages their day jobs.
Philosophy was my day job for years. I jumped ship. It looks good on paper, but it is really terrible. Over the years I have come to realize what they will never teach you in school, at university, graduate or wherever….philosophy, history and languages are not a career, they are a passion.
They can be pursued (even more easily than ever thanks to the internet) in ones free time if they truly enjoy it and people can get good or even great at it. It was never meant to be a job and in becoming a job is has collapsed inward on itself and become nothing but an oozing herpes sore on the lip of a fat vadge
The only thing I remember from my HS Latin class is the number “6”. If you know it in Latin, you know why.
Ha! the only latin I remember is in swedish “VeniVidiVicious” (see below if you dont get what Im referring to).
Yes, that is how I see things and why I managed to keep them my lovers and not my “wives”…
Actually, what, in our present day academic world, has not become banal and sordid?
But how wonderful it could have been if I had ever had the chance of visiting the Lyceum and exchange ideas with men like Sócrates, Plato, Zeno or Epicurus?
Every time I got lucky I altered that to “vidi, vici, Veni”…I saw, I conquered, I came.
Well played.
Man, you need to read Catullus’ or Ovid’s works…
You’ll have the time of your life… if you don’t count those times you conquered and came lol
Sextus?
http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/294/965/830.jpg
Modern version
So pissed that anyone under age 20 is literally unable to see any humor in this scene any longer…
Nope just “sex”.
VI?
i tried to find that funny, but all i could think about were psycho SJWs.
That part I understood, and thank you.
What confused me was that the lines would seem to indicate that they are NOT equally valid paths.
“Non” means NOT, which leads one to believe that it is NOT a valid path, especially on a path to LOGIC!
Is there a Cliff’s Notes link to the Trivium? I’ve never read about this and I’m genuinely interested.
[email protected]
I rejoice in watching the Return of Philiosophers, sorry Kings 😀
Especially this one:
Reminds me of this
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/d4/b1/b9/d4b1b958feedb1eae0322f856ba34fcb.jpg
There is a concept called cognitive dissonance that I find interesting. It’s uncomfortable to consider two contradictory thoughts. I think similarly it is uncomfortable to behave in contradiction to your thoughts. So, habits form because if you continue behaving one way, to avoid the discomfort, your thoughts conform to the behaviours. You break and give up sort of thing then you have formed a habit. So I agree with the two pics above!
I also have an extension of this. Maybe people differ in their mental strength and volition so someone may be able to sustain dissonance for longer than others, without succumbing to the discomfort. So when forced to act a certain way they can do so without breaking. They can be dissonant. They are less likely to fall into addictions and they can dream of a better job and one day get it, they can lead others etc.
A lot of that cognitive dissonance arises from confirmation bias and the inability to examine the self in an objective, panoramic way. The human race would be better off if most people could realize that Humans have the special capacity to step back and survey themselves, and the lives to which they are committed. Without developing the illusion that they are able to escape from their highly specific and idiosyncratic position, a “truth” in the abstract view can develop, one that is at once sobering and sometimes comical.
From this perspective the ill aspects of cognitive dissonance can melt toward certainty as the stronger pull of reason and logic (grammar, etc) takes hold and flourishes.
I like this confirmation bias. I had to look it up but I immediately recognised the phenomenon when I read the wiki description. I would describe the concept as follows…
If you look hard enough for something, you will eventually find it. But you will never notice anything else!
I’m not sure which is the more fundamental mechanism, “confirmation bias” or “cognitive dissonance”. I believe that both are caused by the same human trait. An aversion to maintaining multiple contradictory thoughts.
Although it is naturally difficult for us as men to maintain multiple contradictory thoughts, the fact that something is uncomfortable has never been the factor that has stopped men throughout history achieving a goal. Discomfort does not stop a man. In fact it is those men who overcome adversity who build our civilisation.
This article about classical academic training is just great. I agree that, for our present discussion, it is LOGIC and perhaps GRAMMAR that is of greatest need. With a cold, trained, and disciplined approach to the practice of logical thought, one can have this perspective that you mentioned. Through training, one can follow mulitiple contradictory thoughts in the same way that a trained juggler can juggle a bowling pin, a water melon and a chain saw. We can achieve abstraction.
A great modern introduction to the Trivium is a book aptly called “The Trivium” by Sr. Miriam Joseph
Grammar has been a particularly lost art of late. I just finished making suggestions to someone for corrections on a web page because there were glaring grammatical errors. If proof-reading paid good, I’d make that my main job.
And if you said it paid well, you might actually get hired. 🙂
haha
Unless the employer was illogical.
“Without understanding grammar, no further education can be learned.”
Couldn’t be more true.
IMHO, a person’s understanding of grammar (or lack thereof) perfectly mirrors their ability to think. After all, thoughts are words. Thoughts pre-dating one’s grammatical education are merely thoughts of a child; feelings.
“IMHO, a person’s understanding of grammar (or lack thereof) perfectly mirrors their ability to think. Thoughts pre-dating one’s grammatical education are merely thoughts of a child; feelings.”
That underestimates the intelligence of young children and various animal species.
And rightfully so.
What about logic. There are some obious contradictions in a lot of modern thinking. Maybe teaching logic to children would make them “dangerous” dissenters. I didn’t come across logic until university level mathematics. So the vast majority of people would never see it.
Almost know one I know has the skill mentioned in the article of “considering an idea without embracing or dismissing it”
Thought experiments!
There is also the consideration that our establishment dictates that the education of children cannot be done in a way that disadvantages girls. Who knows what kind of education system we could have in the west if this was not a consideration. Technical academic training could begin in early childhood with logic and other hard disciplines taught at an early age.
Thanks Max.
What still flabbergastes me is that we don’t even teach rhetoric in Law schools. The very profession based predominantly on the persuading of another, dosen’t place rhetoric as a core part of its curriculum. Crazy!
I honestly feel that if I were put in charge of a law school, hospital, etc. I could come up with a far superior way of doing things. And I know little about medicine or law. I feel like some of what is done is just so unintuitive and dumb. For example: I’d make doctors work regular 8 hour shifts on 3 rotations instead of those crazy long week on-week off 12 hour a day routines that leave them tired and make them demand more money. I’d get rid of the politically correct stuff and privacy laws and sign medical malpractice waivers just saying hey, we are treating you the best we know how; it may be different than what another doctor will do, but we’re trying hard, just take it or leave it. And I’d empower doctors to do what they went to school for in the first place–make people well, not treat symptoms and fill out insurance paperwork. I’m convinced one could still make an enormous profit selling aspirin for $5 a pill instead of $80.
As for law school, I’d have a few courses on the framework of law but the majority of the classes would be on persuasion, jury selection, rhetoric, logic, debate, body language, emotional intelligence, ie the stuff that makes you a great lawyer in the real world but you are never taught unless you seek out that knowledge yourself.
I am pretty good at test taking, especially the logic of finding the correct answer on multiple choice tests. I have always been curious to see if I could pass a law or medical license test, merely by using process of elimination and narrowing down to 2 best choices and sometimes guessing. It’s relatively easy to qualify to be a dr or lawyer. It’s much more difficult to be a good one.
To date this article…
Abraham Lincoln was a self-taught lawyer. The disaster we call a modern education is a recent phenomenon. We have effectively stopped thinking and started whining.
Please do follow up on this article with detailed teachings on each liberal art. I strongly feel that there is a critical need for such lectures on ROK.
As engaging and informative as this article was, there is a deeper subtext that needs to be addressed. Self cultivation should be the goal of any thinking human being but it has been successfully undermined by nihilistic reductionism. Indeed it has been so successful that it has produced such complete caricatures of human beings as SJWs who gleefully, psychologically suicide bomb the very pillars of their own civilization. However, the pendulum of history is always swinging and I wonder how long it will be before a cannibalistic atavism, unrestrained by the seven liberal arts, releases the primal man into the modern world. On the one hand, I will be sorry for the world that is lost but , on the other hand , I will have a once in a lifetime chance to behold the punchline to the greatest joke in the past two thousand years. Civilizational collapse or cosmic hilarity, it is all a matter of perspective.
Knowledge leads to understanding, understanding leads to wisdom, which is putting into action that ability to clearly define right and wrong. Once a mind is fed the appropriate amount of information it will eventually figure it all out for itself, you will get the “Eureka!” moment once you make a new connection. It’s no surprise then that a society teaching it’s children to simply parrot useless facts has accepted such falsehoods as feminism and gay marriage.
I often see people walking around with a confused look of their face, like they know something is wrong but can’t quite figure it out, this is a mind not recieving the right kind or amount of information neccessary to make connections. Turn off the TV and start reading, then you will become truly enlightened.