Jump Right In
The case for postponing the survey
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Before sitting down to start this little essay, I fixed a broken dishwasher, trouble-shot a wi-fi connection, and prompted Chat GPT to help me find a copyright-free, high-resolution, not-too-busy, painting of the Seven Liberal Arts.
I enjoyed full success with the first two tasks. My silicon amanuensis, alas, dug a dozen dry wells. I therefore resorted to the website of the Art Renewal Center, where searches of the serendipitous sort turned up a picture that, at least to my pre-Raphaelite eyes, suggested the notion of ‘sequence’.
This trio of pre-dawn achievements could not hold a birthday-cake candle to the oft-quoted catalog that sits atop this page.1 Nonetheless, it leads me to ponder one of the foundational assumptions of formal schooling, the notion that a student should acquire a general understanding of a subject before immersing himself in specific studies.
This presumption accords with the classic curriculum of our civilization. According to that scheme, the aforementioned Seven Liberal Arts, students immersed themselves in disciplines of widespread applicability – the Trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric – before moving on to a set of narrower fields – the Quadrivium of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music.
In a world in which most learned treatises had been written (or, at the very least, translated into) Latin, this arrangement made a great deal of sense. Indeed, the dominance of that language placed such powerful limits on second-hand learning that I find it hard to imagine what a workable alternative might have looked like. That said, we of the here and now swim in a very different sea.
