Let’s find the ancient tools.

[W]e let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of “subjects”; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education–lip- service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.
                                                                      Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning”

There’s still time!

Each of the classes will begin the last full week in September, so you can still join us.

Why integrate knowledge?

Throughout our schooling, we must gather this Everest-sized pile of knowledge that somehow must fit into our tiny heads.  So we organize.  Addition, subtraction, the Pythagorean theorem, graphs of equations all go in the math folder.  Dates, famous real people (famous pretend people are filed elsewhere), war statistics, and geography all go in the history folder.  Baby step by baby step through our thirteen plus years of schooling, we climb the mountain of knowledge via the path of organization.  And somewhere along the way, becoming taxonomers of information, we lose sight of the reality that all this accrued knowledge comes from one huge, majestic mountain.

Not only is it all part of the same mountain, but the pieces all fit together.  It’s imperative that we recognize that the pebbles of history we’ve memorized along our trek lay at the shore and basin of–not floating atop–the streams of science.  Each individual subject or piece of the mountain, while intriguing by itself, finds greater purpose and grandeur as part of the whole. 

Integration of knowledge and the ability to locate this factoid’s place and purpose in the mountain of learning stretches our minds beyond mere knowledge and pushes us toward wisdom. 

In pursuit of wisdom, I invite you to trek this mountain of knowledge with me.  I offer classes that integrate the history, literature, and philosophy of a certain time period while honing a specific writing skill each semester.