The Modern Trivium: A Guide to Self- Education

Thanks so much for what you do. You take complex ideas and make them so comprehensible, listening to your lectures always inspires me to want to learn more!

Your beginning line is so iconiccc. Gooood eveningggg lady and gentlemen!

Enjoyed the video. I’m in the Navy and I’ve always thought the way the Navy did things made sense, namely, trained you and taught you a specific skill in exchange for “x” number of years of service (in reference to the comment on apprenticeships and the employer taking on the risk). We literally have kids right out of high school running and maintaining nuclear reactors after about two years of training. No college degree. My brother did four years of college for a job doing pay-roll…

THANK YOU WES CECIL!!! Have been Loving your lectures for many years now 🙏 Port Townsend 💜

I hated school. I fucking hated it. I hated it so much. Except for reading and writing, basic math skills, and English (I'm German) and whatever Latin I haven't forgotten, I never learned anything interesting in school. Now I'm a computer programmer, a musician, and a philosopher. I understand advanced concepts in all these disciplines. Every other year I program an embedded domain specific language for logic programming in another programming language as an exercise. I can explain the ins and outs of Schopenhauer's philosophy. I can explain Wittgenstein's private language argument. I can explain most of the Dao De Jing. I can play the electric bass, both fretted and fretless, and the double bass. I have some understanding of macro economics and politics. I learned all that from reading books, practicing a lot, and becoming friends with academics. I do understand that I was privileged in that I didn't come from a poor family. Not a very rich one, but wealthy enough so that I had some time on my hand in my teens and early twenties without having to scramble for money.

Great stuff, as always. I don't think I've ever heard anyone else talk about education and make this amount of sense consistently. Personally, I had a lot of pretty good schooling by modern standards, but it was all basically pointless and useless by the ancient metrics. They even failed to teach me English, computer games did that. Fortunately, as a talented student, I was always left alone to do my own stuff, which is how I learned everything that both feels fulfilling to me now and allows me to make money. It worked out for me this way, but it would sure be nice if literally any part of it was also happening at school - in my case, the actually helpful things were debating competitions, poetry and theater, computer games, and, believe it or not, astrology. I guess my education was in many ways literally ancient and classical, plus computers. Then again, they had Antikythera mechanism back then, so maybe computers wouldn't be a very surprising educational addition to them.

We love you, Dr. Cecil. Your amazing consilience and insights are such delightful companions for those of us who aspire a Renaissance man education. I agree with Socrates, " The good lies in wisdom." I might only suggest that one could find onself second by stidying the world first. This has been my road. Gracias, maestro! You are light.

Yay! I love you Wes! 😻🌺😘

Thank you very much for doing this.

Barthes thought every class should be taught like a literature class. His denotative, connotative and symbolic are in the ballpark.

I agree with your arguments and I'm looking forward to your next videos on this. It's only 2 years after finishing my bachelor's degree that I realized there were many topics I wanted to learn about, like philosophy, and that getting a stable income from a job was not getting me any happier or less confused about life.

I very much like your channel and feels it performs a much needed role on the YT in terms of cultural literacy and related matters. I had overwhelmingly positive experiences with school because I went to both an arts high school and then onto music and liberal arts studies for college. From what people tell me there is a world of difference, you could say different galaxies, between the particular schooling I experienced and the generic mass kind - yet all are in the (same) educational system. There are trends over the past thirty years, possibly forty, that seem to be negative in the way that you diagnose in this episode. But I was long out of school before these took hold.

Liking and commenting for algorithmic purposes

I really appreciate the notion of being fluent and perfect, but it is a illusion We are one, and to know thy self is to clearly know the other. There are millions of different experiences some more valuable than others, have some prudence choose wisely and judge the tree by the fruit. Just found your channel love it;

Thank you so much.

thanks for providing some needed insight

First! Listening on my lunch break right now

It’s interesting that you alluded to a “progress” that had occurred by the Renaissance, but it seems to me that this sense of “progress” is what justified abandoning the liberal arts as the basis for education. In my mind, the whole point of the liberal arts is that they are timeless. No adaptation should be necessary, and once you’ve conceded that it needs to be adapted it’s only a few more logical steps to abandoning it entirely. I also find it interesting that, at least in my experience, the sons and daughters of the upper class often pursue our closest approximations to classical education. They go to liberal arts colleges and study philosophy, mathematics, English, etc. and if they enter professions, they enter professions like law and journalism. The strictly technical education is given to the masses of middle and working class people for the most part, whereas before they typically received no education at all. Neither the children of English aristocracy nor the children of Kennedys and Rockefellers tend to study engineering.

Question for you Wes, when you say people conflate money with power and that it is a false connection. What about power with money, or in the case of the CasP people, capital is a way to quantify one's power? I know that you added the Capital as Power book in the library app you are a part of, I would be interested in your thoughts of the book. Thanks again for the lectures!

Can you write about suicidal thoughts please