Comments for sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/post/the-importance-of-learning-history

Comment #1742

2008-05-01T14:08:04Z

Certainly. Hence the importance of learning history from many sources, so as to be aware, at least, of different biases.

History is not foundational in the sense of teaching the thinking process, but ignorance of history makes one susceptible to being manipulated by those biases, just as ignorance of mathematics makes one vulnerable to any fool with a statistic.

Comment #1741

2008-05-01T03:03:35Z

I was only partially aware of all that. It just seems logical to me. I don't have classical teaching methods memorized or anything. But basically, you need to be able to understand how sentences are formed, understand what they imply a priori, and understand what they don't imply a priori but might seem to.

Make sense?

History would totally not be anything close to foundational IMO. Heck, in order to *really* "know" anything you have to examine the source files / documents / etc or else you have to trust someone else to have done so and know their biases. Particularly for anything controversial.

Comment #1740

2008-04-29T21:02:05Z

That's in line with what I learned in my medieval classes. There's a muse for each in the Trivium and in the Quadrivium (of which music is one). They reside in spheres radiating out from the earth. I don't think the supporters today keep that part of the belief . . .

Comment #1739

2008-04-29T18:07:16Z

As I recall, those are the three stages of the Trivium, the Medieval approach to education. The essay that awakened many in today's world to this idea was Dorothy Sayers' The Lost Tools of Learning.

Comment #1738

2008-04-29T17:05:09Z

That grammar, logic, and rhetoric are stages is also what I recall from Tanya's explanation (not that you'd know Tanya). What I don't remember is where the three stages come from: if there was concrete research behind it or if it was just a combination of gut feeling and definitive proclamation.

Comment #1737

2008-04-29T10:05:41Z

Ah, you are a Classicist, I see. Not a bad idea, though I quarrel with the implementation sometimes.

Aren't those stages, though, rather than subjects? I mean, within them one still covers the subjects, just in a different way, e.g. at the grammar stage, history is more focused on the framework of people,places, and dates, then gets more complex in the later stages.

Comment #1736

2008-04-29T01:44:55Z

For me it would be grammar, logic, and rhetoric