I’m on board no matter what, but throw in Confucius and Lao/Mo-tse and you have a full house.
The 4+ R’s - Reading (including Religion), wRiting, Rithmatic, and Research.
I’d say most college degree programs these days are a combination of education and training.
After the turmoil of the 1960’s, the powers-that-be determined that educated people are hard to control, and ‘education’ became more trade-school oriented, then later became out-and-out carefully tended nurseries for socialism.
Our American/Western method of education was purposefully supplanted via the Rockefeller $ over a century ago. Evil actors like Thorndike set it on the path to destruction through Rockefeller funded “Teacher’s Colleges”. The process was slow but in recent years the transformation is complete in the Public Schools. The current system is the German system where psychological control is the goal. Well educated people who can think are seen as to the Clintons, Bidens, Obamas and the entire plethora of would be dictators.
Purposeful mis-education makes a population unable to think and process information properly. This is why you see so many mentally incompetent college grads who can’t screw in a light bulb but seem to think that they could centrally control an entire economy or “end racism” through a system of racial preferences.
Ad sapientiam pertinet aeternarum rerum cognitio intellectualis. ( to wisdom belongs the apprehension of eternal things.) - St. Augustine
Today education is to be envied or to be despised. Today’s common man wants his sons and daughter to become part of the the educated woke elite, have the trapping of success, the bobbles and beads that carry weight — like driving a fancy red sports car around Harvard. But if not that and you end up as an educated fool, with useless degrees but working in a comic book shop — then you are despised. The educated fool can also have some degree of arrogance about his education, gets puffed up with pride and that turns people off. The one is admired but brain dead, the other has useless knowledge and is generally despised and humiliated. Further, who wants their son and daughters to end up like tragic Socrates and Jesus who are poor, despised by the governing class and eventually put to death? Does the father want this to befall his children? No. That is not a classical education. What is a classical education?
Classical education is an education in greatness. There is something about the classical corpus that has and shows greatness — what the human can achieve while standing on the shoulders of others.
So then, is any teaching of the basics, without christendom, dung?
The Socratic model does not include forming beliefs on something with no evidence of proof, aka faith. All things are tested for evidence, and if none exists, they are discarded.
Also, the burden of proof is not on the one challenging the evidence, but on the one presenting the thing for examination.
Trivium & Quadrivium.
Thank you for asking.
I remember reading, about thirty five years ago, of an African dictator who insisted his small nation have a “Classical Greek Education”. Can’t remember the nation.
“My spies in academia have kept me abreast of the revolting developments in the decline of the humanities. Albert Jay Nock hit on this idea back in the thirties:
“The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest and fullest continuous record available to us, of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity; every department, I think, except one - music. The record covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years of the human mind’s operation in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, politics, medicine, theology, geography, everything. Hence the mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disiplined mind but an experienced mind; a mind that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage point of an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty experience of the human spirit’s operations. . . . These studies, then, in a word, were regarded as formative because they are maturing, because they powerfully inculcate the views of life and the demands on life that are appropriate to maturity and that are specific marks, the outward and visible signs, of the inward and spiritual grace of maturity. And now we are in a position to observe that the establishment of these views and the direction of these demands is what is traditionally meant, and what we citizens of the republic of letters now mean, by the word education; and the constant aim at inculcation of these views and demands is what we know under the name of the Great Tradition of our republic.”