I have been slack in my duty to complete the various expansions of reasoning off my "list of reasons to homeschool". One of those items was "Why Classical?" I was struggling to put my reasons into words until I read an essay that pretty much summarized what I consider to be the chief deficiency in modern day education. That is it often lacks a solid foundation in logic.

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?

Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side? Or have you ever pondered upon the extremely high incidence of irrelevant matter which crops up at committee meetings, and upon the very great rarity of persons capable of acting as chairmen of committees? And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?

Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or elsewhere and noticed how frequently writers fail to define the terms they use? Or how often, if one man does define his terms, another will assume in his reply that he was using the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in which he has already defined them? Have you ever been faintly troubled by the amount of slipshod syntax going about? And, if so, are you troubled because it is inelegant or because it may lead to dangerous misunderstanding? (source)

The name of the essay is "The Lost Tools of Learning" by Dorothy L. Sayers and it is worth the time to read it. One who has spent any time on this big Internet of ours has seen many examples of bad argumentation. In my public school education much time was spent trying to teach me to be persuasive as if my thoughts and ideas meant something apart from truth. Without a logical foundation to frame my persuasion, I might find myself trying to convince others of my fancy rather than trying to convince them of what is right, good and true. That is where logic comes in. There are fallacies that should be avoided. Much propaganda should be shunned sheerly because it is trying to convince and only convince -- there is no real reason. I was fortunate, in a sense, because I have a degree in a field that requires studying at least the mathematical applications of logic. The basis of everything I do at work rests on it. To that extent I am familiar with the basic concepts and can identify common fallacies even if I am not intimately familiar with their names. I shudder to think of how easily I could be taken in without recourse to what I do know. I do NOT want my children suffering through the same type of education crippled with the same disadvantage.

Watching television, reading the op-ed page in a newspaper or listening for what passes as debate on talk radio is an exercise that strongly condemns the state of education in America. That hasn't changed since the essay was written. Where modern debate excels in words and pithy one-liners it lacks in actual content. I want to raise children capable of sifting through that muck to mine the truth. I want to raise children who know how to learn and that is where I feel a classical education has a strong leg up on the standard method of education offered in classrooms today.


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Another choice quote

Post-classical and mediaeval Latin, which was a living language right down to the end of the Renaissance, is easier and in some ways livelier; a study of it helps to dispel the widespread notion that learning and literature came to a full stop when Christ was born and only woke up again at the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

Yes, learned people from the ever creeping forward Dark Ages were not idiots ...