Thanks to Tim at Random Observations for alerting me to this interesting commentary on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The book and the movie derived from it have formed our national image of the Depression and the Dust Bowl. The trouble is, that's a false impression. Like Amadeus and Braveheart, The Grapes of Wrath tells a good story based on historical events, but without letting the truth get in the way of the narrative.
Someone with a solid knowledge of the historical situation might be able to imbibe the story without harm, but the rest of us, unfortunately the majority, are learning history through these media, and learning it wrong. We're left with a mish-mash of fact and fiction we may never sort out, and upon which we will unconsiously base our philosophical, political, social, and moral decisions.
Whoever said (I've seen various attributions), "Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws," might just as well have been speaking about its popular books, television shows, and movies. The only antidote besides a healthy (uncynical) skepticism is a solid grounding in history, preferably from several viewpoints. Mea culpa; my own knowledge of history is abysmal, and I did not do much to help our children achieve more. But if I were designing a home eduation program now, the tripod on which I would rest the entire academic program, beginning from the earliest stages, would be: language, mathematics/logic, and history. Those who are strong in these three areas will not easily be duped.For me it would be grammar, logic, and rhetoric
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.
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.
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.
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 . . .
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.
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.
