Rethinking the Foundations of Education: Stratford Caldecott
by Andrew Seeley
Stratford Caldecott’s Beauty in the Word is like no book in the genre of classical education that I have read to date. It is personal, reflective, profound, spiritual, psychological, learned, practical. I have hopes that it will fill a great need in my work with Catholic schools seeking to recover and develop our lost traditions, but it might be too rich and varied for most educators. Still, I recommend it to anyone who is serious about Christian education at any level and has time to think with a man of great heart who has read widely and reflected deeply.
Mr. Caldecott faces the problem that all contemporary treatments of the Trivium must address—the Trivium cannot be for us what it was in classical times, when mastering the language and literature of ancient Greece and Rome was the whole of pre-collegiate education. “The lessons drilled on in the morning were regularly recited in the afternoon, and all the work of the week was reviewed in recitation on Fridays and Saturdays. A 16th century schoolmaster estimated that one hour of instruction would require at least six hours of exercise to apply the principles to writing and speaking.“ Our segregated curriculum in which the traditionally advanced subjects of mathematics and science claim a large portion of school time does not allow for the focus of yesteryear. And, as Christopher Dawson has pointed out, educators in a democratic age can never leave aside the concern for vocational training.
In this context, Mr. Caldecott’s reflections can serve Christian educators well.
But what kind of education would enable a child to progress in the rational understanding of the world without losing his poetic and artistic appreciation of it? This is what I am searching for in the present book.
Mr. Caldecott gives us glimpses at how to achieve this goal, while helping us to enlarge our own hearts and imaginations. He precedes his treatment of the Trivium with a chapter on the relationship between teacher and student, which he considers to be the heart of the school. He generally, though not uncritically, approves of the Romantic conviction that the natural impulses of the child towards learning need to be the beginning of education and that the best teachers pay great attention to them. The teacher develops the child as a person by fostering his powers of attention, empathy and imagination as he initiates him into a larger cultural tradition, “…to grow as a person we must learn self-transcendence.”
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