Thoughts Without A Thinker
Cognitive decline in the era of brilliance.
Lost among the treasures of the past is an educational system that lies dormant in a world that is crying out for change.
In the Middle Ages, education was based on the Trivium, a syllabus consisting of three parts: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. The Trivium was a preliminary discipline that served as the foundation for the Quadrivium, which consisted of “subjects,” that built upon the initial, three-pronged syllabus.
Each of the three part play an important role in a student’s educational foundation. Grammar helped students to understand the structure of language and how it worked. Dialectic helped them to ask questions and probe beneath the surface of things. And Rhetoric helped them to express their understanding in a clear and persuasive way. In a very basic way, the Trivium taught students how assimilate and process information — in other words, how to think!
But education has changed. The fundamentals of thinking, in many instances, have been replaced with the immediacy of telling — the expectoration of facts with little or no support of basic knowledge. The result is the barking idiot, spewing empty rhetoric that, on first blush, may be factually correct, but is built on nothing more than a superficially acquired handful of facts.
