[forty-two]

Going back to the article posted in the OP. The author specifies that she's not talking about "an education based on classic, language-rich books that hold up high virtues", as that's a "classical" thing that is also a CM thing. Rather, she specifies that by classical she means "the classical approach that is based on the trivium (the three stages of learners) and that emphasizes memorizing and outlining facts."

While that sort of classical ed definitely *can* be practiced in the "carefully curated and organized fact-food" way, I don't think it's inherent to the method . I mean, "The Well-Trained Mind" definitely hits all three of those points - trivium-as-stages, memorization, and outlining - yet it's not nearly as fact-food-focused as people often assume. For all that Susan Wise Bauer has the deserved rep as a very parts-to-whole kind of teacher, she still teaches those parts in context. It rather surprised me, honestly, just how story-focused she is in the grammar stage. Plenty of memorization, yes, but almost always in context. I use SWB's grammar-stage writing curricula (Writing With Ease), and it is *very* story-centric - she's definitely keeping the facts embedded in their animating ideas. And she definitely focuses on outlining in the logic stage, but not in a "separating facts from ideas" way .

Now, SWB's approach to narration is different from CM's: SWB focuses on summarizing, and my understand of CM narration is that it's more retelling, or in any case isn't focused on summarizing the main ideas. Outlining in WTM is an extension of the summarizing that was learned in the grammar stage - it's summarizing each of the various idea-chunks of a larger passage, and using the outline form to show how the ideas and facts relate to each other. But it's still wrestling with *ideas*, and the facts that illustrate and embody them.

I do think there are important differences between WTM-style classical and CM, but I think that WTM, at least, isn't nearly as fact-food-centric as people assume. (Although even people who follow WTM sometimes miss it, so I get how it got its rep.)


Also, wrt differences, I have the impression that classical in general places the role of teacher higher than CM - that students better understand a text when a good teacher explains how it fits into the tradition, which my understanding of CM is that it's more in favor of not getting between the student and the book - that students make better, more lasting connections when they come up with them themselves. Classical values the teacher's role in helping show how the important points of the book connect to what the students already know and love. I have the impression that *particular* connections matter more to classical than CM - that CM isn't too fussed about *which* ideas students connect with from the generous feast placed before them, while classical ed wants to connect students with the ongoing Great Conversation, with "the best that's been thought and said", and some ideas matter more than others in doing that. I think that classical ed might value *specific* facts and *specific* ideas more than CM does .

~*~

WRT wisdom-and-virtue classical (which relates to the article's "an education based on classic, language-rich books that hold up high virtues" that shares an affinity with CM), a good book in that vein is "Norms and Nobility, by David Hicks, Here's an article he wrote recently, "Is Classical Education Still Possible?" that gives a decent picture of what goes into classical ed as he pictures it. It's a very life-forming, paideia sort of education.

His article is pessimistic in part because so many people seek out some kind of traditional classical ed in an effort to recover the culture that went with it. They don't know what the that culture is like, though they desperately want to, and since education is formative, they latch onto traditional classical ed as a means of forming both themselves and their kids in that alien-to-them culture. (A few years ago, I was right there with them - figuring out what to do when everything you know is wrong - wanting to do something different than what you know, because all you know is wrong - that's hard and frustrating. It's easy to idealize what you aspire to as a magic bullet.)

Anyway, Hicks' point is that the classical teacher must *already* be formed by the classical tradition before they can pass it on to their students. You can't just rotely follow-without-understanding a classical curriculum and expect it to magically have imparted the culture that formed it to you. You have to have recovered the tradition yourself before you can impart it to others. And it's very hard to recover a tradition without seeing it lived out - it's very hard to recover a tradition without being part of a community that is living it out. And HIcks argues that there are very few communities in the West that are living it out. There are significant differences between modern Western culture and premodern classical Christian culture, and too much contemporary traditional classical ed ends up just applying modern Western assumptions to classical education, which mostly just forms students in modern Western culture and largely fails to do much to form students in the premodern classical Christian culture they were aiming for. And people don't realize it, because they don't know what they don't know.

Hicks is very pessimistic about people's attempts to recover the culture *through* classical education - his main point is that the culture has to be in place *before* kids can be successfully educated in it. But that culture is largely lost in this time and place, and so you are in a catch-22: you have to already have what you are trying to recover in order to successfully recover it in the first place . If you don't understand the ideas and assumptions that animate a given curricula or approach, then no matter how perfectly it embodies them, you can still screw it up by importing your own foreign ones .

I've been working for nearly four years now on trying to recover a premodern sacramental Christian worldview and culture. (I was doing so because I believed it was a more Biblical way to understand the world than the modern assumptions I had - it had nothing to do with classical ed (it actually supplanted my previous interest in traditional classical ed); but as it turns out, it was very similar to the worldview and culture of premodern classical Christian education.) It took me about two years before I really had any real understanding of what I was seeking. But now I think I have enough of a fledgling understanding to at least start to have a sense of what I don't know, and enough that I can learn more as I go - there's enough of a foundation for that. So I'm somewhat less pessimistic than Hicks - yeah, you can't rely on classical education to itself form you in the foreign culture and worldview that it embodies. But you *can* learn it elsewhere - it's just hard and time-consuming. I'm not sure it's possible outside of Christian communities that still retain some connection to the living tradition of the past - you need some kind of starting point, and some kind of living example. I did it mostly through books and the internet, but I was reading both recent authors who are wrestling with similar issues in similar communities as me, and the older authors who offered alternative views. And I was part of a living church body that was at least trying to stay connected to the Western Christian tradition.

On the WTM forums, people often pair "Norms and Nobility" with "The Abolition of Man", by C.S. Lewis (which diagnoses the problem), and "Leisure as the Basis of Culture", by Josef Pieper (which provides a philosophical answer), with N&N providing the "what does it mean to educate like this" answer.