What is missing in education today

An excellent thread from Jeremy Wayne Tate on classical education.  I was just having a conversation this weekend with an age contemporary and talking about how fortunate we were to get our formal educations when we did, the late seventies and the early eighties.  

The old traditions still prevailed but were brushing up against the strains of authoritarianism, provincial ignorance, and the precursors of the now omni-present Woke which were discussed in Allan Bloom's 1987 best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind.  

People of our era take for granted a portfolio of knowledge but also a humility about knowing and epistemology in general.  Both of which are less in evidence today.  And of course today's students have no way of seeing that which they are missing.  

From JWT's thread.

I use the term “classical education” a great deal without defining it so I thought it may be helpful to provide 5 very basic differentiators to help you compare and contrast modern education with classical education.

(1) The goal of classical education is cultivating wonder and virtue in students (think of the 4 cardinal virtues and the 3 theological virtues). The goal of modern education is “College and Career Readiness”.

(2) Classical education aims to pass down wisdom and build upon the contributions of previous generations. Modern education exhibits “chronological snobbery” towards previous generations.

(3) Integration - Classical education is integrated education. There is a “whole truth” connecting every academic discipline. In modern education “subjects” are taught in isolation from each other.

(4) Classical education has an overarching structure known as the Trivium (Grammar, knowledge, and rhetoric) that pair with the developmental stages of the child. Modern education is focused on developing vaguely defined “skills” (“critical thinking”, “higher order thinking”)

(5) Classical education is in continuity with how people in the western world were educated for more than 2000 years. Modern education is a unique product/experiment of the 20th century.