Philosophy
Lovers!
Click Here
The Theory of New Education in Brief
According to a famous U of T Professor of English at Victoria College (Northrop Frye), ‘The native language takes precedence over every other subject of study. Nothing else can compare with it in usefulness.’ I don’t think that assertion is open to doubt, but for the moment let’s assume we can take it as self-evident.
Everyone learns their native language by being bombarded with words and sentences from the day they were born. Given sufficient exposure, there’s no need for formal instruction. Left to itself the brain will do the work. It’s only when the child goes to school that it learns the grammar of the language which it already speaks fluently. For purposes of ordinary self-expression and functional communication, this level of fluency is sufficient.
The case is very different when it comes to that higher level of fluency which is fluency in the language of ideas. Both the vocabulary and grammar of this language consist of ideas where ideas are strings of words that connect abstract concepts. Words for concepts like “justice” or “truth” are in everybody’s vocabulary, but the idea “justice is truth in action” is not, because in ordinary speech we seldom hear such sentences. If we heard them often enough, we would acquire them as effortlessly as we acquire idiomatic expressions such as, “to bark up the wrong tree” or “to scrape the bottom of the barrel” or “to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
To take it a step further, suppose I were to say, apropos of nothing, “economics. . .” “politics. . . ,” you’d probably think to yourself “OK. . . what about them?” By themselves they’re just concepts. But if I were to say, “Economics is really politics in disguise,” that would be an idea that you could agree with or disagree with, and that we could discuss. In this theory all such strings of words are called “aphorisms,” where an aphorism is not limited to the dictionary definition: ‘a pithy observation that contains a general truth,’ but stands for any compressed unit of thought. Despite being self-evident, I think it’s worth remarking that the set of all aphorisms is just a subset of everything that can be expressed in the native language.
OK, so what’s the purpose of all this theory? Here are two outrageous claims about which anyone is more than justified in feeling skeptical. First claim: fluency in the language of ideas is achieved in exactly the same way as the child acquires fluency in its mother tongue; namely, by hearing or speaking strings of words frequently enough and letting the brain work its magic. As with learning the native language, no memorization or cramming is necessary to acquire the language of ideas; which is good because memorization is tedious and cramming is disagreeable and ultimately demoralizing. The second claim is that next to becoming fluent in the native language, nothing is as useful in life as becoming fluent in the language of ideas. To illustrate this point let me give two example sets of aphorisms that I think are well-worth acquiring (click below):
Click HERE to reach
the associated webpage.
For more theory click HERE.