Quiddity

on integration: Be careful to distinguish it from overlapping. Overlapping is what happens when you take the content of one subject and place it on top of the content of another subject. This causes the subjects to either be swallowed up in a third and hopefully higher subject, one of the subjects to disappear in the other subject, or both of the subjects to disappear in a question mark. Integrating is when the subject is taught as itself and then, having been learned, the ideas of that subject are bound together with corresponding ideas from other subjects.

The history of math is not math, it is history, just like the history of politics or warfare is history. In math you study math. If events from its history help you understand it, then by all means use them. Even so, if you are studying civics (which I fear if it is studied to early) and you find that events from history help you better understood THE IDEAS of civics, by all means use them. (In the case of civics you’d probably have to since it is a moral science, which means it has to do with human behavior all of which takes place in history. But math qua math doesn’t happen in or depend on history.). I would urge you to be careful to distinguish history from math and civics.

Another important distinction should be made between arts and “subjects” (what used to be called “sciences” before the natural philosophers of the 17th and 18th century arrogated the term science to their own inquiries). An art is a mode of operation or of producing something that serves something higher than itself. You don’t learn the seven liberal arts so you can know the seven liberal arts. You learn them so you can “do” natural, moral, and metaphysical sciences (what we call subjects).

A few applications:
 You can’t do the natural sciences beyond your mastery of the seven liberal arts. To attempt to have a great science program without the Quadrivium is like trying to have a great swimming team without swimming laps only more so.
 Classical schools that have resisted the sophistic stream have traditionally focused on the seven liberal arts as a foundation for all that follows in the subjects.
 What you mean by the term subject and what domain of inquiry you label a subject are decisive. The Enlightenment framework of the modern school breaks out every conceivable specialty as its own subject. The classical world breaks subjects out according to the mode by which they are known. Thus, for example, the natural sciences are one set of subjects, known with a degree of precision you would never ask of the moral sciences. We can send a rocket to Jupiter and know exactly the moment it will pass by 11 years from now. You can’t do that with an economy.
 By teaching the seven liberal arts in their entirety and as closely as possible to the mode of the ancients and medievalists, you bring the mind of the student to life, find an already integrated curriculum (bound together by the questions asked and ideas contemplated), and prepare the student for the full mastery of the natural and moral sciences later, when he is capable of interacting with them safely. You also set in the curriculum the order of reason, nature, and the cosmos that God put us in the world to know. To use a different pattern is to risk implementing habits of thought that don’t formally correspond to reality and thus necessarily create confusion and very possibly obstacles to truth later in life.
 The more you try to push “subjects” down and replace the liberal arts with them, the more the student’s mind is disordered by your instruction and the less able he is to master the “subjects.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 at 9:58 am and is filed under Philosophy/metaphysics, pedagogy, Trivium, Quadrivium, Curriculum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.