As we go into this historical review, we will keep in mind that much of what our educational renewal movement has been about stands against the erosion of values that came with industrialized education. I think there are great opportunities once this history is understood to guide students to colleges and universities that will be excellent destinations for students to build on their educational foundation at our schools and homeschools.

Universities Prior to Industrialization

Let us begin by considering how higher education became what it is today. We can go all the way back to the medieval universities. With the founding of the University of Bologna in 1088, numerous intellectual centers were established throughout Europe including Paris (1150), Oxford (1167), Cambridge (1209) and St Andrews (1413), among many others. These universities were representative of the Aristotelian scholasticism of high middle ages. Our understanding of the trivium and quadrivium within the modern classical education movement is significantly shaped by the medieval universities. Renaissance humanism, far from being a break from the universities, was an outgrowth of these universities which became centers of scientific and humanistic thought.

The word “university” is a composite of “unity” and “diversity.” The goal of the liberal arts curriculum was to find unifying principles across the diverse arts and sciences learned at these institutions. This unity of diversity was also seen at places like Oxford where multiple colleges were federated as a university, something that modeled the federation of states, such as the United States. Taking Oxford as an example, the career of a student began with oral examinations. All students entering Oxford were required to know both ancient Greek and Latin (this was true even into the early 1900s). The first year ended with an examination on the classics. Most students then went on to study degrees that would place them in law, politics or the church. In essence, they received the education of a gentleman as they were the sons of gentlemen who were to be placed in the positions of civil leadership.

The university model struggled to keep up with changing times, as advances in technology and medicine occurred largely outside these centers of learning. Thus Spencer Walpole took a dire view of the education on offer at Oxford, writing:

“‘The education imparted at Oxford,’ wrote the Oxford University Commissioners in 1852, was ‘not such as to conduce to the advancement in life of many persons except those intended for the ministry of the Established Church.’ Few medical men, few solicitors, few persons intended for commerce or trade, ever dreamed of passing through a university career.”

Spencer Walpole, History of Twenty-Five Years, Vol. 4: 1870-1875 (Longmans 1903), 136-137.

From Walpole’s perspective, the old medieval model was not suitable to meet the demands of a more technical age. In many ways he was correct that advances in scientific research were neglected in favor of the liberal arts, which had eroded into a status-confirming exercise for the aristocracy. Walpole was expressing the prevailing opinion in British society as educational reforms substantially overhauled the system from the 1870s to the 1940s.

As an aside, the widespread educational reforms in Britain set the backdrop for authors such as Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton and others who lamented the loss of the liberal arts. Chesterton, for instance, lamented how modern reforms gutted education of any philosophical insight when he wrote, “But there is something to be said for teaching everything to somebody, as compared with the modern notion of teaching nothing, and the same sort of nothing, to everybody” (Chesterton, All I Survey, 50).

The same story as laid out here for the British educational system can be repeated as it regards American education. Harvard, Princeton, Yale and any number of schools underwent similar kinds of reforms, leading colleges to shift their emphasis from liberal arts education to technical job training and scientific research. To be fair, there is certainly a place for science and job training. However, as Chesterton astutely recognizes, the loss of the liberal arts was not simply about a change in the curriculum, but about sweeping social changes that emphasized secular atheism, gutting education of its life-giving ideas that empowered learners to consider what it means to live with meaning and purpose.

The Emergence of the Educational-industrial Complex

Already in the mid-1800s higher education saw significant reforms shifting colleges and universities towards research in medicine and technology. As mentioned above, this came at the expense of the liberal arts. Then in the first half of the 20^th century, higher education exploded. According the census data, the number of college degrees awarded in 1950 (432,000) were over ten times the number in 1910 (37,200). There were several factors leading to this massive expansion.

During the great depression, colleges and universities struggled with finances as did the rest of the economy. Roosevelt ignored the pleas of leaders in higher education to offer federal aid to colleges and universities, but he did create a New Deal program offering federal word-study grants to students. This opened the door for a new segment of society to enter higher education, bring greater economic diversity into American schools.

After World War 2, the G.I. Bill enabled millions of returning veterans to gain access to higher education. Just this influx of new students alone accounts for the massive expansion of colleges and universities in the mid-1900s. In addition, college campuses began to expand from small institutions to massive campuses with some state universities hosting tens of thousands of undergraduates.

Finally, the Great Society under Lyndon B. Johnson set the expectation that a college education was part of the American dream. Federal grants and loans subsidized this expectation in the Higher Education Act of 1965. From this point forward, higher education saw in influx of hundreds of thousands of new enrollment each decade.

The sheer size of higher education meant that it represented a significant sector of the economy with a huge federal budget allocated to support it. Combined with the reforms of the late 1800s, higher education was no longer about the lengthy process of forming students for leadership positions in society in the liberal arts tradition, but was now centered on technical job training. The industrial economy needed workers. It also needed consumers. Thus, going to college became a hallmark of American life where teenagers would expect to live in dorms, eat cafeteria food and tick the boxes of graduation credits. The combination of technical training and consumerist mentality. In his manifesto to change our conception of education, Seth Godin critiques what higher education had become by the latter part of the 1900s, “The mission used to be to create homogenized, obedient, satisfied workers and pliant, eager consumers” (Godin Stop Stealing Dreams).

It was Dwight D. Eisenhower who warned Americans of the “military-industrial complex” in his 1961 farewell address.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell address” (January 17, 1961).

The threat of an education-industrial complex mirrors Eisenhower’s warning. True, it doesn’t wield the same kind of destructive power, but an educational-industrial complex places its citizenry under the “unwarranted influence” of “misplaced power.” It raises the question as to whether it is worth placing our children in the institutions of higher education. What is the value of a college education? Have the rising costs of undergraduate education matched our perception of its value?

A New Post-industrial Economy

I have probably painted higher education in a rather poor light thus far. It is true that I have benefitted from my college education and regularly guide our high school graduates in the college selection process. I do not want to leave you without hope in what is becoming a rather bleak landscape when it comes to higher education broadly. There are two reasons that I am hopeful as it regards higher education for our students.

One, there remain numerous colleges and universities that offer excellent liberal arts programs. Students graduating from high school are not without great options whether they want to pursue specialized degrees or desire certain kinds of campus environments. It is actually an exciting time to be searching for colleges as classical school kids and their homeschooled compatriots are highly attractive to these colleges and universities. They know that generally speaking these are students who write well, think deeply and care about their learning.

Two, the demographic cliff colleges and universities are facing means that there is a simultaneous winnowing of small colleges and improvement of quite a number of collegiate programs. The recession in the early 2000s has meant that there are fewer students graduating in the 2020s. With lower enrollment, many colleges are needing to tighten their belts and make themselves more attractive to the smaller pool of applicants. While this might not mean savings for families paying for college, it can mean that tuition dollars are being invested in programs offering better value.

Conclusion

Having looked at the history of universities and capturing a sense of the current state of affairs, we are now better positioned to understand many of the mechanisms that exist in higher education today. In the next article we will delve into the way the game has been played for the past eighty years or so. Ultimately, we will promote a program of guidance that plays a different kind of game. Yet, understanding these rules will enable us as guides to understand the processes and procedures of higher education as it currently stands. We cannot go into college guidance naïve to the inner workings of topics such as federal funding, standardized tests and grade point averages.

For now, hopefully I have left you with a strong sense of how important the liberal arts tradition has been within the history of higher education since the middle ages. Figures at the start of the 20^th century cried out against the erosion of the liberal arts, figures such as Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis. Yet, situating the liberal arts within the broader framework of scientific research and technical training remains a significant question today. For instance, the debates between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois addressed this very question. While this question may remain prominent in our minds today, new questions are emerging with the rising costs of a college education. Is it worth spending so much in tuition only to have significant loan debt for decades afterward? Is the value of a college education worth the cost? I think these are actually significant questions parents and students today are asking when they begin asking for college guidance. Hopefully with the perspectives gained in this historical overview, some answers have emerged that address all of these questions.

The post The State of Affairs: Higher Education as an Educational-industrial Complex appeared first on .

Previous article in the series, Human Development:

Part 1: What Do You Have in Mind?

Dorothy Sayers and the Lost Classical Tradition

Although not properly a member of the Inklings – the informal literary society gathered around Tolkien and Lewis – Dorothy Sayers was an esteemed member of the British literati in her day and frequently shared her works with Lewis and Tolkien. Best known for her detective novels, Sayers was likewise a first-rate essayist, critic and scholar. She was among the group of women upon whom degrees were first granted at Oxford in 1920. Her writings rarely directly address education, although learned figures like Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane opine from time to time on the subject. It was in 1947 that Sayers addressed an audience in Oxford on the subject of education, a presentation later published under the title “The Lost Tools of Learning.” It wasn’t until the 1990s that her educational vision took hold, and then not in her native England, but in America of all places.

At the heart of her address is a maneuver to map the medieval trivium upon three stages of development. The trivium denotes three of the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic and rhetoric), or what we might call the language arts. Our educational renewal movement has devoted much attention to figuring out what these three arts are and how to teach them effectively. Sayers refers to three stages of development, designating them as the Poll-parrot stage (the youngest learners), the Pert stage (middle grades), and the Poetic stage (after puberty sets in). This designation directly led to classical schools adopting titles such as Grammar school (usually Kindergarten through grade five or six), Logic school (grades five or six through eight) and Rhetoric school (high school), for better or worse. This pairing of the liberal arts trivium and stages of development became so powerful within the classical education movement that it is common to find school websites that describe the trivium as the learning stages of children.

A Critique of Sayers’ Stages

In his 2019 article “Dorothy Sayers Was Wrong: The Trivium and Child Development” on the Circe Institute blog, Shawn Barnett challenges Sayers’ correlation of the trivium and stages of child development. He rightly identifies how Sayers was responding to the state of educational reform that overly focused on teaching facts in more specialized subject areas. Elsewhere I have referred to and critiqued the factory model of education (particularly as developed in Seth Godin’s book Linchpin), and inasmuch as this was what Sayers was responding to, we have found her to be helpful in our day to formulate a renewal of education along classical lines. I share Barnett’s concern that we not be so overly reactionary to the state of conventional education that we warp our understanding of what classical education is.

Despite Sayers’ clarion call to rediscover the lost tools of learning – that is the classical liberal arts – Barnett takes to task her developmental stages understanding of the trivium as anachronistic. Barnett writes, “medieval educational theorists never conceived of the trivium in terms of developmental stages that roughly correspond to a student’s age.” He correctly assesses the ahistorical nature of her essay in that childhood stages of development were never in view during the Middle Ages. He further rightly points out that most of the trivium was taught to university students, not to children. I leave aside Barnett’s discussion of Medieval curriculum as I am certain he is correct that we must take special care to select the best texts for our curricular content. I don’t know that Sayers would disagree with this point. My sense is that Sayers was less interested in spelling out specifically what children should read at what age, but instead giving general guidance that the liberal arts trivium is the answer to the problem of an overly specialized model of education that emerged after WWII with undue focus on technicism and scientism. Medieval education never thought of education in developmental terms, and Barnett demonstrates that Sayers’ is completely anachronistic on this point.

Yet where I think Barnett’s critique misses the mark is that the punchline of Sayers’ joke is exactly that it is anachronistic. We can hear even in her naming of the stages of childhood (Poll-parot, Pert, Poet) an element of humor or levity. Her appeal to the old guard Oxonians in her audience is that the antiquated trivium can be dusted off to meet the needs of modern education. She is not calling us to return to the Middle Ages. When we truly understand the Western cultural heritage as something like open source software, there are ways we can update something like the trivium today. Keep in mind that the Medieval version of the trivium as it existed in the universities was an updated version harking back to the classical era. In fact when we attempt to identify exactly what we are talking about when we look for a classical analogue, we are really looking at a centuries old tradition that grew, developed and changed in a dynamic relationship with the prevailing culture of the eras in which it existed.

What Sayers provides through her anachronistic paring of the trivium and child development theory is an attempt to link the deep magic of the classical liberal arts tradition with the cutting edge of modern research. One can clearly see the influence of Piaget in Sayer’s thinking. Piaget’s breakthrough work on child cognitive development was first published in French in 1936 and then translated into English in 1952. Because his work corresponded roughly to Rousseau’s four stages of child development in Emile (1762), Piaget’s ideas spread fairly rapidly. Yet Sayers never refers to Piaget, nor Rousseau for that matter. Her three-part schema seems not to be based on Piaget’s four-part schema, but this may be more down to her desire to fit the schema to the trivium than a lack of awareness of the Rousseau/Piaget four-part schema.

Piaget’s work on childhood cognitive development was the cutting edge science of Sayers’ day. So one major take away from her essay has to do with the nature of her argument. For the classical liberal arts to inform and influence education today, it must be conversant with modern research. In hindsight, we can see how there is a tension between the classical tradition and advances in research. Yet, that tension enables us to explore the ways we can gain insights into the craft of teaching. To that end, let’s examine further Piaget’s theory of childhood cognitive development and the ways it influences neurobiology and cognitive science today.

Piaget and His Stages of Development

The basic theory of cognitive development moves through four stages. The first stage is the sensorimotor stage from birth to two. The infant uses basic reflexes to interact with the world, establishing sets of habits in reaction to various stimuli or bodily functions. Some of the cognitive traits initiated in the first stage are understanding object permanence and gaining a sense of curiosity surrounding novelties. The second stage is called the preoperational stage, beginning when the child learns basic speech patterns. Children begin to play and pretend during this stage. They also ask lots of questions, sponging up knowledge through those close to them. The third stage begins around the age of seven. The concrete operational stage finds children developing the skill of logic, particularly inductive reasoning. The fourth stage, called the formal operational stage, begins around the age of eleven. Children in this stage are able to think abstractly, solving multifactorial problems and monitor their own learning.

So far we can see how Piaget’s four-stage theory corresponds somewhat to the kind of schema Sayers proposed as the trivium stages. However, we can add a few layers of complexity to what Piaget understood about these stages. To begin with, children progress through these stages at different rates. It is not as though every child upon turning seven automatically enters the concrete operational stage. What Piaget was really after in his research was not entirely about the four stages, but the mechanisms that enabled a child to develop cognitively. He saw that a child responded to new challenges by updating old schemas to assimilate new knowledge. However, there comes a point where a child makes a shift to respond to complexities of newly assimilated knowledge and updates her entire schema. For instance, an infant is able to assimilate a massive amount of information just through physically manipulating objects. But there comes a point when the child alters her schema because physical manipulation is insufficient to assimilate certain kinds of new knowledge. Language is required because of the insufficiency of motor operation, and the child updates her schema, moving into the preoperational stage. This does not mean that the sensorimotor method of learning goes away. Instead, the newly accommodated way of learning expands the aperture of knowledge receptors.

It should also be pointed out that abstract thought is not absent in children before turning seven. It is not uncommon for Piaget’s stages to be described as a concrete stage followed by an abstract stage. In Piaget’s use of the word “operate” or “operational” he is conveying that a child is capable of systematizing thought in the best mode possible for that stage. So the infant is systematizing thought about the physical world by putting objects in her mouth and banging them on the tile floor. When we think about the realm of the abstract, it is clear that children are able to have abstract thoughts, it is just that the ability to systematize abstract concepts has not yet become the dominant schema for their thinking.

There are some key concepts Piaget developed as hallmarks of cognitive development. We begin with decentering. A child is decentering when she is able to pay attention to multiple attributes of the same object. Children younger than three or four can become fixated on only one attribute of an object. Once children are able to decenter, they can hold in their mind multiple aspects of something. This cognitive skill is essential to reading. When we read, we see the letter symbols grouped together. By decentering we can simultaneously see that these symbols form words and phrases that carry meaning. Next is conservation. The concept of conservation involves the ability to recognize a quantity remains the same even when transformed in different situations. For instance, the amount of orange juice remains the same when poured from a tall, skinny glass into a short, wide glass. Children gain the ability of conservation usually by age seven. Finally, reversibility is the concept that an object can be restored to its original condition after being transformed. For instance, if you take a cookie out of the cookie jar (subtraction), you can restore the original state by returning a cookie to the cookie jar.  A child that has the ability of reversibility can understand series of events and how to move forward or backward through that series. Like conservation, this ability emerges around the age of seven.

Gleaning from Piaget’s work, we can draw a few postulates about child cognitive development. First, Piaget provides a way for us to think about the mind of the child from the perspective of the child, meaning we are not evaluating a child’s cognitive abilities as lesser or slower than adult cognitive ability. In fact, there are cognitive process that are rather faster and more adept than adult cognitive ability. Take language as a case in point. Children acquire their native language more rapidly and with greater fluency than most adults acquire a second language. So, the cognitive ability of the child is not a diminution of grown-up cognitive ability, it is actually a cognitive ability unto itself.

Second, Piaget gives us certain hallmarks that are present at different stages. We can observe a toddler banging pots together with an understanding that the child is actually thinking at a deep level about his little universe. Students in, say, Middle School are not only learning about different subjects, they are also gaining mastery of executive function. Can they follow sets of instructions to solve equations, write a paper, and turn in work on time fully completed?

Third, Piaget’s layout of the developmental stages shows educators that learning is dependent on and constrained by developmental processes. At a certain level, this is intuitive. John Milton Gregory in his Seven Laws of Teaching establishes the principle that the unknown should be built upon the known. This idea is consistent with the notion that new learning should be built upon the structures of the child’s operational abilities.

Piaget’s theories have undergone transformations since he first proposed his stages. Among the greatest criticisms of his theory is that the basic theory is at best a heuristic guide to general development, but when applied as a structural whole, it misses the nuances of development. Today developmental theory views cognitive development as a modular system, with different parts of the mind operate independently. So an advance in reading skill based on cognitive development does not mean that the same child will experience an equivalent advance in number sense. However, in general terms, there are elements of neuroscience that bear out the basic heuristic of his theory. For instance, our understanding of how the brain develops during the first year of life shows how at a neurological level there are parts of the brain that get connected together, substantially leading to new cognitive capabilities. In infants, the number and quality of neurons linking the prefrontal cortex is limited so that those early years are marked by unhindered curiosity and exploration. When the neurological links are strengthened through the process of myelination, the prefrontal cortex can take on a stronger role in formal thinking which has the effect of inhibiting or restraining curiosity and exploration. Biological factors such as this go some way toward explaining some of the passage through Piaget’s stages.

The dictum that “neurons that fire together wire together” provide insight into cognitive development and also indicate potential pedagogical strategies. What we’ve learned through neuroscience is that the brain grows new neurons, prunes old neurons and myelinates neurons that are repeatedly used. Myelination is the process of wrapping neurons in a fatty substance that helps it fire faster due to increased conductivity. This is the basic theory of neuroplasticity. The brain you have now is not the brain you had yesterday, nor the brain you will have tomorrow. That is IF you develop new habits or make changes in your behaviors. Essentially, your brain wants to conserve effort and will prune neurons it no longer needs and protect the ones it consistently uses. Yet, the environment bombards the brain with new information that forces the brain to constantly evaluate what needs to be kept, discarded and protected. This goes some way towards explaining the physical processes behind cognitive growth even into adulthood.

Reappropriating Dorothy Sayers

Having taken a bit of a deep dive into Piaget, it is worth returning to the basic contours of her essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” If we take the thrust of her argument seriously then we must heed the call to recover that which was lost and use it effectively today. She uses the analogy of “tools” to describe the liberal arts. Our educational renewal movement has done a decent job dusting off the old books and implementing them so that students are once again reading the great books, learning the Western cultural heritage, translating Latin and Greek, examining logic and gaining rhetorical skill. Genuine practice of the liberal arts is raising up a generation of students truly empowered to lead our churches and societies. For this I am grateful to Dorothy Sayers for planting the seed in her essay that would blossom into classical Christian education today.

As I have wrestled with her essay over the years I have seen the inadequacy of the three-stage developmental schema she mapped out for the trivium. For one, the trivium really should not be thought of as stages of development. It was a few years ago now that Jason Barney proposed a twofold understanding of the liberal arts. He wrote:

“This leads me to propose a twofold understanding of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. Each is both an art and a science, both a complex skill of communication and a traditional body of knowledge about that area.”

The liberal arts are neither developmental stages nor are they mere subjects. The reduction of the liberal arts to subjects is likewise problematic.

“If you look at many of our textbooks in grammar, logic or rhetoric, you have to admit that the method of the textbook seems to assume that the goal is primarily to teach our students knowledge about these ‘subjects,’ as if that were enough.”

The danger of this approach is that students acquire the “right” answers as they gain mastery of the subject materials, but have they become well practiced in the art of grammar, logic and rhetoric? This is the genius of Jason’s proposal, that the subject matter informs masterful practice of the art and masterful practice more deeply ingrains the subject matter. The liberal arts conceived of by Sayers as tools means we must have a good knowledge of what the tools of learning are, but we must also be able to use the tools of learning effectively.

This is where my reflection on childhood cognitive development comes into play. As we teachers reflect on the craft of teaching, it is essential to understand the science of how the minds of children are developing. Sayers in a rudimentary way points the way forward for how we can implement the liberal arts for today. It is not that the liberal arts get locked into particular stages of development. Instead, we must gain a sensitivity to how the learning and practicing of the liberal arts matches the emerging cognitive abilities of the children in our classrooms.

Here in the second part of this series we have covered a lot of theoretical ground. So in the last part of this series the goal is to give due consideration to implementation. There are ways in which we can use the science of today to inform best practices as we recover the lost tools of learning.

Previous article in the series, Human Development:

Part 1: What Do You Have in Mind?

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