After a long and glorious history, classical education was discarded wholesale by the educational “philosophers” of the late 19th century? Why?
Four errors come to mind:
- Education in the Liberal Arts became a vacuous “general education” when the liberal arts lost their identity as the seven.
- The natural sciences were unmoored from the liberal arts that prepared students to master them and from their place under the humane and philosophical sciences.
- Dewey and various “philosophers” of this and that Utilitarian or Pragmatic school of thought established a reductionist naturalism as the only acceptable theory for education.
- Specialization.
- The take over of education by the state.
All of these can be traced back to the disordering excesses of the Enlightenment and the compulsion of some of the natural scientists to make their domain ultimate.
