I am a fan boy of D.T. Sheffler.
I am a fan boy for three reasons . . .
First, because he is a fantastic writer.
Second, he is a superb philosopher in medieval, religious, ethical and political competencies.
And, third, he is a former Navy Seal.
The dude is smart, witty . . . and deadly.
I was reminded while reading one of his recent essays that society, to our detriment, has separated our libraries from our laboratories.
My education occurred in the modern STEM group of subjects. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. I appreciate my education, and I am very grateful for it.
However, in the process of homeschooling my children . . .
(The Beautiful One actually did all the schooling, I just watched, listened and cheered her on . . . )
I realized that I missed out greatly on a Classical education.
Classically educated students and educators (the Beautiful One is essential a Classical Educator) tend to be a bookish lot.
They love Cicero and Shakespeare and George MacDonald.
The get all giddy when they see a musty bookstore, gothic arches and castles . . .
And, they love imagining the Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland.
In fact, a few of them have saved it as their desktop background.
They speak in code to one another frequently using metaphors from The Lord of the Rings and Narnia, and they may even use Elven script when writing.
This is very different and antithetical to the creatures like me that emerge from the math and science schools of the modern era.
We love aviation, science museums and biology.
We wear Star Wars and NASA t-shirts, and many of us may be caught wearing white knee-high tube socks with Birkenstocks.
We loved marine biology in the eighth-grade, dissecting frogs in 10th grade and won science fairs and physics contests in high school. I actually built a bridge out of balsa wood that held 1300 lbs., winning a cash prize from a nearby college.
Many of us will have telescopic images of constellations on all four of our computers monitors and get all giddy hearing the sound of the clicking of our Model-M keyboards.
And, yes, my lot actually enjoyed doing their calculus homework.
This dramatic difference between the STEM educated and the Classical educated would look very strange to any pre-modern world scholar.
Before the hyper-specialization of today’s modern research universities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mathematics and poetry, physics and philosophy, were all required together to be an educated person. They came together as a unified package.
A scholarly gentleman often housed his laboratory equipment and his fencing gear in the same room as his library.
In fact, Sheffler states that “Plato inscribed above the entrance to his Academy the words: ‘Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.’ More certainly, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates insists that an extensive education in geometrical reasoning is necessary before a student can embark on the study of philosophy.’”
Aristotle combined his extensive writing and philosophy with works on meteorology, rhetoric and physics. He actually made a number of discoveries in marine biology through dissection and he knew a great deal about astronomy from close observation of the sky.
Most people are aware that Leonardo da Vinci was profoundly competent in multiple fields.
Yet, few know that Isaac Newton, the man who formulated the laws of motion, the theory of universal gravity, and built the first reflecting telescope, spent the last years of his career obsessed with the textual analysis of scripture.
Most are aware that Benjamin Franklin was a very wise statesman and diplomat, but few know his involvement in the discovery of electricity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is known as one of the most influential German writers of all time. Yet, he was also a polymath and had profoundly insightful scientific contributions in botany and color theory.
Education throughout your entire life should consist of the education of a single mind, yours, both knowledgeable and flexible, capable of handling deductive thinking and interpretation of nuance.
I have come to learn that scientific education stocks your mind with facts about the concrete world. It teaches you how to reason carefully about probabilistic causal inferences.
Poetic education teaches the mind to see the analogy between things and create metaphor.
Mathematical education trains the mind to carefully work through a difficult chain of deductive, quantitative reasoning.
Philosophical education incites the mind to ask fundamental questions and then, to reason toward sound answers to those questions.
Literary education civilizes your mind with a very cultivated imagination. It teaches you to make both judgement about and emotional response to what you have imagined.
Educating comprehensively in this way educates the single mind, yours, not a bunch of separate little independent minds.
Extensive scientific knowledge of the physical world with its very complex system of natural causes makes you a better novelist or writer.
The ability to see the analogy within the subtlety of a good joke makes a person a better scientist. (I know a bunch of really boring scientists who have no sense of humor and it affects their research).
A deficiency in one area will lead to incompetence in others, this includes physical exercise and athleticism.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve hear people say, “I’m no good at math.” You’ve likely heard people say, “I’m more of a creative, artsy type,” or they excuse their horrible spelling by saying, “I’m a math and science guy.”
People and students will have different interests that lead to different specializations. That is understandable and expected. However, I’ve seen it in my education and I’ve had multiple professors tell me that a student who is unable to discipline his or her mind to work carefully through a math problem is likely to have difficulty in carefully reading a story.
The student who interprets everything literally and cannot craft a metaphor is also likely to have difficulty with designing an experiment.
The student or professor that is an arm-chair rationalist failing to go out and apply his skill in the real concrete world will never fully comprehend natural phenomena.
Just because you specialized in one area of learning, do not let other areas drop.
This is why I took up sword fighting and fencing at the age of 50 years old.
I now comprehend what it means when one says that “you must be alive to philosophize.”
Without an educational balance in science and humanity, you will never truly understand the need for opposites in the world. You cannot understand life until you experience opposites in all things, happiness and sadness, joy and misery, pleasure and pain, life and death.
This requires strength, courage, mastery and honor as the true virtues of men and women all around the world.
Without a comprehensive education in all areas, the virtues that make civilization possible will disappear.
To Your Health & Longevity,
Adam Nally, DO
