Transcription
Today is August 6, 2024, and this is William Michael, the headmaster of the classical liberal arts academy. Reports from forbes.com say that 90% of students admit to using chat GPT to complete assignments in school. 90% of students who are asked admit to using chat GPT to complete assignments for school. As time goes on in modern society, this crisis is going to become greater and greater. Students are going to study and learn less and less. Schools are going to become more and more useless, and no one’s going to care, because modern schools are really just sources of employment for adults. They’re designed to employ adults.
They’re not effective. They haven’t been effective for a long time. The philosophy on which they’re founded has never been sustainable, and schools are either closing or they’re continuing to be propped up, usually by artificial funding sources, but they’re becoming more and more useless, especially as technology continues to develop information technology, and this leads to a real crisis. In fact, last night, I was sitting in my living room, and I had my tablet, and I like to spend time just sitting and thinking and writing out notes, and I was thinking, what is the real purpose of schooling? What is the real purpose of schooling?
Because I face this question often in my own work, when I’m reviewing student assignments, there will be some questions that I ask, some assignments that I give to students, that I wonder if I’m not creating opportunities for cheating, making cheating possible by simply asking the wrong questions or focusing on the wrong skills. And so I was taking some time last night to ask the question, what is the purpose of schooling? What are we really trying to accomplish in school? We can’t train children for successful future work, because that’s going to require specialization in the market. We can’t teach children all of the information they’re going to need to know. We can’t teach children all of the skills, all of the specific professional skills they’re going to know.
And when schools attempt to do these things, their classes are worthless. I can remember having computer classes in high school back in 1992, and those lessons were just a complete waste of time. Technology is constantly developing, constantly changing, and the only way that anyone is going to have professional skills in modern industries is by being fully engaged in them as a professional, constantly working at professional development, constantly improving skills, constantly working, constantly thinking, and so on. Anyone who doesn’t do that is just going to be out of a job. We can’t provide that kind of training in schools, so it just brings us back to the question, what is the purpose of schooling? What are we really trying to accomplish in schooling?
And it’s not an easy question to answer. Everyone thinks they know the answer, but when you examine your answer, you’ll find that it really doesn’t make much sense, or it’s just not possible, it’s not practicable. So last night, I was thinking through this and thinking through this, and just writing out notes, and I came to a surprising conclusion, which I think is true, and I’d like to share it and ask you to think about this with me.
What I started to realize as I thought through the question, what is the purpose of schooling? What are we really trying to accomplish? What are we responsible for accomplishing? I came up with this: the purpose of schooling. And I’m talking, of course, as a Catholic. The purpose of schooling is to equip students to access authoritative text sources directly. The purpose of schooling is to equip students to access authoritative text sources directly. And that may sound pretty wild, but I’d like to talk through it a little bit.
As I said before, we can’t give the children all of the information that they’ll need, and that’s not the purpose of schooling. If we try to give students information, we’ll often be required to oversimplify subjects. For example, we can give students a history class, but we’re likely going to oversimplify history and really not present a true history. We’re going to present a history that supports our worldview, and it’s going to be largely mythological or mythical, I should say. It’s going to be overly simplified. It’s going to be summarized excessively, and all kinds of details are going to be omitted, which are actually very important.
If we look at our lives as a history study, we can write, let’s say, a five-minute summary of our life, but we all know that that summary does not in any way accurately represent our life. If we were to give a 30-minute summary of our life, it would be a little better, a little more realistic, but we would know that even that doesn’t present a good understanding of our life, because every detail of our lives matters. Every detail is significant. Every conversation, every interaction, every experience. None of them can be taken out of our life story without having a negative effect on that story. And the details of our life stories, all of the details lead to the glory of God. He’s glorified by all the details, the good and the bad, our sins and our successes, our obedience and our failures, all of the details of our lives. Glorify God either actively and positively by us giving glory to God, or when we’re punished and suffer, and the truth is confirmed by our failures, we give glory to God in a negative or indirect way, but every detail is significant.
And so to try to give kids historical information is just going to be overly simplified. That’s not how history works. And in the big scheme of things, history is really not that important unless it comes from authoritative sources. And this is true in most subject areas. In most subject areas, the discussion is filled with unverified, unproven information, unproven assertions, unless we can show that they come from authoritative sources. And the question of authoritative sources is a whole other discussion or debate. What are the authoritative sources? And as we move from one group into another group, from one audience to another audience, the answer to that question changes.
What are the authoritative sources? If I’m speaking with fellow Catholics, the authoritative sources should be the sacred scriptures, the Catechism of the church, the writings of the doctors of the church, maybe papal encyclicals, things like that. We admit them as authoritative sources. And if our opinions, if our assertions, can be shown to be drawn from those sources, they become credible. If I am speaking with a Protestant or group of Protestants, those Catholic sources are no longer accepted or recognized as authoritative, and so I may be restricted to the sacred scriptures, or at least the 66 books that are accepted by Protestants as sacred scripture. I may be restricted to the writings of their own teachers, writing, writers like John Calvin, Martin Luther, and so on.
So the answer to the question, what are the accepted authoritative sources, that answer will change as I communicate with different audiences. If I communicate with non-Christians, the acceptable sources, the authoritative sources, will be reduced even further. I may be required to provide evidence from peer-reviewed journal articles, for example, or established experiments and results of research that’s been conducted. So this question of authoritative sources is always the foundation for discussion, for arguments, for reasoning, persuasion, and so on.
This is not a relativistic, secular idea. St Thomas Aquinas explains this in the opening of the Summa, that it’s necessary to communicate with different groups of people with different sources based on their convictions, because we’re trying to lead them from things that are known to things that are unknown. We do that by that process. We move from what we know to what we don’t know. That’s really how reasoning works. We start in a logical syllogism, for example, we start with two premises that are accepted and known, and we show that they lead necessarily to a third statement, which is the conclusion. That’s how reasoning works. So we begin with what is known, and then we lead to some new conclusion which was previously unknown. That’s what we do in reasoning.
But we can only begin with accepted premises. The premises must be granted, and it’s a logical fallacy to make an argument beginning with a premise that’s not granted. So to be reasonable, we have to make use of approved authoritative sources. That’s the foundation of credibility, which is the foundation of persuasion. So that ability, that ability to access authoritative sources directly, is really the foundation of the education of a rational creature, because that’s how reasoning works. We’ve got to be able to identify authoritative sources, and we’ve got to be able to access them. We’ve got to be able to read them, study them, and understand them directly. That means for ourselves, in order to be able to reason with others, to participate in any discussion whatever.
And so this, I would argue, is really the purpose of schooling. True schooling, I would say it’s to introduce students to authoritative sources and to equip them with whatever knowledge and skills they need to be able to access directly authoritative sources. But to do so, as I mentioned earlier, as text sources, and as I was, as I was thinking through this question about what is the purpose of schooling, I began to realize more and more that this is ultimately about text sources. Text sources are really essential to learning.
You know, it’s common today, because we have all of these resources and we’ve got tax-funded schooling, it’s common to present all of these different options for learning. We say, Oh, you can travel and you can watch videos. You can listen to audio. You can have live teaching. You can attend live classes. We have all of these ideas about learning styles, learning methods, teaching methods, teaching styles, all of this stuff, but really, none of it is sustainable.
Now if we only needed to learn three subjects, if we only needed to learn what’s required for
an occupation, if that occupation could be simple enough, maybe we could just sit in an apprentice shop, sit in a shop, learn how to be a blacksmith, learn how to be a carpenter, just follow the master around, work as an apprentice, and so on. But the Christian life, the Catholic life, the life of a rational human being requires so much more than that, and what we need to be able to do is to access directly authoritative text sources.
To do that, we need to learn the languages in which those text sources are written. For us as Christians, the sacred scriptures and all of the authoritative sources of the church are written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. We need to be able to read, understand, translate, interpret, and discuss those text sources, and that’s what an education is for. And as I said, this was a surprising conclusion for me, but the more I thought through it, the more I realized that this is true. If we can do this, if we can identify authoritative text sources, and if we can access them, understand them, communicate them, then we can be considered educated. If we cannot do that, we’re not really educated, because if we cannot identify authoritative text sources, we have no way of discerning truth from falsehood.
If we cannot identify authoritative text sources, we have no way of discerning truth from falsehood, and if we cannot access them ourselves, we can’t test anything. We’re going to end up simply repeating what other people tell us. We’re going to just be repeaters of what’s handed to us by other people. And those people may be right, but they may also be wrong. We won’t know, because we don’t have any access to the authoritative sources ourselves, and this is the condition that we find so many people in today. People just listen to media sources, and the problem is they don’t know what the authoritative sources are. Even if they’re given them, they can’t read them. If they read them, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t understand the language. They don’t understand the terms, and they end up just becoming followers of different media figures. They listen to one talking head after another, and they just go from opinion to opinion, and this is really the condition that we’re in. There’s no objective authority that guides the opinions that we have.
And what we need to do is we need to be able to go back to authoritative text sources and have a stable foundation on which we can then build, using reason to move forward in any argument. So as a classical teacher, I would argue that the true purpose of education, the true purpose of schooling, is to equip students to access authoritative text sources directly.
And as you can see, that’s an enormous work. That’s a big challenge, because first of all, we have to agree on what the authoritative text sources are. And the kids are going to go through a long process of argument and persuasion with their teachers and with other students, and they’re going to test their beliefs. They’re going to study with one group, and they’re going to argue with another group, and there’s going to be this process of testing and examining and checking, and they’re going to come to some set of authoritative text sources that are generally accepted by their society, or at least the group that they belong to. And then they have to learn how to access those authoritative text sources directly, which means they’ve got to be able to read. They’ve got to be able to translate. They’ve got to be able to understand the context in which these texts are written. They’ve got to understand the vocabulary that’s used. They have to understand what the authors intend to say.
They have to read slowly and patiently, understand all of the passages, understand the intent, understand the content. This takes time. This takes practice. This takes skill. This takes effort, and this is what an education is really all about. It’s about developing that ability, and as you can see, this is a work that can’t be done by looking things up on Google. This is not going to be a quick reference work. This is not going to be a simple summary of information. This is going to be a careful study of authoritative text sources, and I would argue that that’s what the purpose of schooling really is. So in the classical liberal arts academy, we’re committed to helping students to do that.
First of all, we study the liberal arts, which are the arts of reasoning and communication, and through the study of the liberal arts, students learn the tools of reasoning and communication. The tools of grammar, logic, and rhetoric are used to help students to access authoritative text sources and understand them. The students are studying grammar. They’re studying logic. They’re studying rhetoric. They’re learning the rules of argumentation, and then they move on to the study of the humanities. They study literature. They study history. They study philosophy. They study theology, and they start to see how these tools are used in action. They study the great books. They study the authoritative text sources, and they learn to understand them.
And then they’re able to move forward and to engage with other people, to engage with other ideas, to engage in discussions and debates, to engage in the great conversations, and to be able to make sense of things. They have a stable foundation. They have a firm foundation on which they can build. They know what the authoritative text sources are. They can access them. They can read them. They can understand them, and they can communicate them to others, and that’s what an education is for. So I hope this has been helpful. I hope this gives you something to think about.
Transcribed by Otter.ai; edited by ChatGPT. To help with editing, contact us.
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
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