I’ve seen your other video about classical education, and I now have this dream of seeing you on The Commonplace podcast with Autumn Kern. WHAT a conversation that would be.

Green-eyed Neptune, Written in stone, Where then shall we mourn? The coast is clear, Not quite yet, but Littered with debris. Alas, the carrier died For lack of mail (sigh), You can say that again.

Are you Muslim? I feel like you’d be fan of Hamza Yusuf either way

Your presentation here seemed like a non-stop barrage. Because of that, it felt not easily ingested. It was too quick of a relentless monologuing. The video shows many edits too for probably different purposes. In reviewing what you you had recorded, you might have asked yourself about all that you said, the tempo, and the fact that there are no contemplative pauses or time offered for hypothetical discussion with the listener/audience. Frustrating listening experience here: quantity, not quality.

Would recommend the history of western philosophy by Bertrand Russell, it's a really good book, well written and includes all those classical works and authors intertwined. Love that book by Livingstone.

What I love most about this video is how your interpretation of the poem differs to my own. As someone bought up in the Western, liberal, secular tradition, Satan’s rebellion against god makes sense. He was challenging the autocratic rule of a deified ruler who demanded both unconditional love and obedience from his subjects. This would be akin to the revolutions on the late 18th and mid-19th century (against autocratic rule). Granted, Satan’s not doing this for egalitarian goals (as you said, he wanted power, not freedom, and he wanted to rule instead of God). What’s interesting is that, for me, it feels like Milton was trying to make Satan deceptive and untrustworthy; just like a religious or state-funded historian would write a slanderous history of a rebellion in which the leader of the rebellion is characterised as cruel and manipulative. Would this story have read differently if Satan was portrayed as a Gandhi, Mandela, or Washington as oppose to a Caesar or Robespierre. The conclusion of the story, the tyrant remains in charge, and God uses this to not only solidify his dominion but also uses it as a cautionary tale to dissuade others from attempting similar feats. Is that truly a good outcome? Learning about other people’s interpretations of these great works has always interested me. Where and how we were raised, and how we’ve lived, hugely influences how we chose to interpret what we see, hear, and read. Sometimes it’s important to stay grounded and realise that there’s no ‘right’ interpretation, and all should be valid. Through discussing what divides us, we open ourselves to greater meaning.

Enjoying this summary and discussion! I wondered also about God placing those creatures at the gates of Hell, but in the annotated edition I read, a footnote said that Milton was creating an analogy, or maybe allegory is the right word here. Sin leads to Death, which leads to Hell. So that's why Sin and Death are "guarding" the gates of hell.

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Finishing this book today, and weapons of mass instruction arrives on Tuesday so I can crush through it. The other 6 books are here now too. Stoked! When is the video on Weapons of Mass Instruction slated for release so I can plan out how quickly I needs to read through it before video release Sir?

I have probably benefitted from as close to a classical education as is possible. I have also come to study classics even more as I age though not without balancing it with continuous learning of modern science. I remain wary of pure apologies of the classics. The greek philosophers made some important conceptual errors. The Roman state building was also not without major flaws. To discern these issues, you must accept to explore at the very least the Enlightenment and probably go at the very least to WWII when some key modern ideas were introduced. Conceptual knowledge is a key component of classical training that needs to be highlighted. It contrasts with the dumbed down current education centered on technical skills. It's the key to real understanding ent therefore the ability to correctly think and apply knowledge under changing circumstances.

I oughtta read this one. Where do you get these books from?

"If you have the privilege to vote, you have the duty to read."

Thanks for doing these videos. I'm blessed to be able to send my kids to a classical Christian school, and I'm currently working through the Great Books to remediate my government schooling. Glad to see other people pushing themselves.

Did Glaucon just run away from a question? I wonder how many others.

Dude, so well done.

All well and good, but the people best changed by reading are the ones burning the books. How do I have a rational conversation with the obvious "red hats" and their more insidious fellow "gun whites"?

Great topic and presentation. Thank you will be back to enjoy and learn.

A great video. Upon discovering your channel a couple of weeks ago I became inspired and invigorated with a desire to learn more and more deeply. Therefore I have set myself the ambition of achieving a Classical Education by learning Latin, Ancient Greek and Biblical Hebrew while reading all the literature, studying all the history and culture which goes along with it. I want to thank you for the inspiration and I am looking forward to your future videos!

In which way learning Latin and Greek changes our brain and helps you thinking more clearly? Imo training public speaking, argumentation and talking to people of all ages and different fields of work, learning different modern languages, helps more than learning dead languages. Can you point me to scientific studies instead of an individual opinion?

Your videos serve as a guide for my intellectual enlistment. Thank you.

Please do a review on john dewey’s education philosophy

Learned a fun thing about sylvans being lights so Penn's sylvans are like "fireflies in the forest." Watched a nature program about these little creatures and how they light up and communicate. Definitely rocket science. Indescribably Majestic Penn may have been out there by himself but he certainly wasn't alone.

With technology taking over so many jobs we have a choice before us. We can just devolve into blubbering couch potatoes drooling over the latest video games from the time we get up to when we go to bed or we can use the classics as what Mortimer Adler called a sharpening stone to improve our minds and give meaning to our lives

Democracy is gay anyways

Rob, I just want you to know I really appreciate what you’re doing. This is important. It’s important for today and important for the future.

Hello Rob! Thanks for a great video and solid overview of Livingstone's work. As a scholar of Latin (but not ancient Greek-at least not yet), I can definitely appreciate the ways in which learning these languages and appreciating the works of Cicero, Vergil, and others in their original form is incredible. I would say, though, the most essential group of works missing from a classical education (assuming the classical education is focused on the humanities) are those of the Enlightenment, without which many of the central ideas of the Western world are left undeveloped, including democracy (Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws is a must-read!). An education in the classics, though, should be the cornerstone of a wider education in the great books and ideas of world culture, which in my view should continue on to the works of the modern day--without a sampling of the many eras and viewpoints of human history, it can be difficult to get a full understanding of both human nature and where the world is today. I thank you for your well thought-out take on the importance of the classics!

Your hitting it right nose, on our educational system

I would add farming. If some big disaster happened. It would be best to know some farming to be able to SURVIVE . Another thing to look at. Books today may be around an 8th grade reading level. Back when I was much younger, books had closer to a 13th grade.

Great video Rob! I totally agree with you that our children are truly missing out on true education. And we are paying for it in our communities & workplaces. Amazing how my younger teammates can’t seem to say a normal sentence without adding “like” after every other word! So annoying! Looking forward to you next video! God bless!

I would add farming. If some big disaster happened. It would be best to know some farming to be able to SURVIVE

"If our object is to train exactness of thought, modern languages are far inferior to Latin." What does exactness of thought mean? How does Livingstone measure it? Why does he believe that modern languages are inferior to Latin in training exactness of thought?

Good job as always

This is the first video of yours I have seen, and I really enjoyed it. I started following you. Jeff

Rob, great analysis of the topic. It is frightening today to see so many of today’s “students “ lack critical thinking or any real knowledge of history. The future is grim unless things change dramatically. Have you read The Cave and the Light by Arthur Herman? It’s a great read about the influence of Plato and Aristotle on Western thought and how their philosophy influenced important events and Western culture.

Every American should have at least some classical education, some knowledge of the Great Works, and history. In our constitutional republic, all citizens shoulder some responsibility in self-governance. In order to best participate, everyone should have some of the knowledge and wisdom our Founders xarried within them. I know several working class individuals who are quite the history buffs and who can wrestle with ideas as well as machinery.

Thanks!

Education, Education, Education 👀 I would love to see a video in which you to write out how to implement some of the education related things in our current education system. Would it simply start as a statewide "classics credit"? In which every student in your state would be required to take at least one of the following: Greek, Latin, grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, and maybe agriculture or farming? As part of a high school diploma, an additional graduate requirement, a fully funded summer school/camp/voucher program, shattering the normal high school experience into specific life paths? Btw if you're going to read about modern European education in attempt to work backwards I highly recommend the German Gymnasium wiki article for being filled with hilarious titles like: ""Great equaliser" or "breeding ground of privilege"?". As someone who went to an old school with old values: I think that learning Latin and Ancient Greek brings many benefits such as clarity of mind but also come with many cons. If someone is planning on living life with precision it often requires a certain level of wealth, stability, and/or order. Trying to live life according to some sort of golden path sounds nice but the transition phase can be quite troublesome. If everything is perfectly calibrated it can get knocked out of place when we change our clocks twice a year, or when talking to adults that aren't even at an 8th grade reading level and explaining each individual word used, expressing everything accurately might be quite risky if at the bottom of the totem pole, etc. But it's not just precise and accurate thought not meshing properly. If for example someone with autism is raised with an education of under stimulation, they won't know how to interact with people who communicate through memes and vibes. Hot take: I think level 1 of 5 languages is better for most people than level 5 in 1 for an intro to that society.

great start to the series Rob! This book has been on my TBR for a few weeks now, ever since I heard them mention it on one of the Memoria Press podcasts... Definitely one i want to pick up! and i think the biggest thing most people discount is the fact that even if you didn't have a classical education, you can still choose to SELF-educate and move more towards that kind of understanding and way of viewing the world. So many people discount the fact that you need to be constantly learning and growing and improving yourself or else you'll stagnate and die. The goal is create and consume something true and beautiful every single day - do that and you'll be alright! :D Thanks for another awesome video my man!

I had some contact with Swiss homeschoolers. The ones I talked to are not in favor of public school. One of the reasons why they dislike it is the following. They think the public school system is a tool of the industrialization. They think the sole purpose of public education is to turn humans into cogs of the machine called the industry. Or in other words we are forced to learn what outside forces want us to learn at the time they want us to learn it. They oppose that extrinsic form of education and favor an intrinsic form of education. They think any child has a built in learning schedule that runs on its own time. Perhaps you don't want to learn to read at the age of 6 but you may want to learn it at the age of 9. So why don't we let the child learn it at 9? After all if you force someone to learn something that he doesn't want to learn then this will just kill all motivation to learn as a whole. I can understand their argument. But I think there are several problems with that. - One of them is that they have no reason to belief that this is true. If they think we are a product of evolution then which selective process gave us the desire to read at age x? After all reading is a very recent phenomena. Sure, if they are Christians then they can say God gave that intrinsic learning plan. But so far nobody gave me a reason why that should be the case. And I won't do the job for them. - They say that each child has its own inner plan of when it wants to learn stuff. I think that is false. I think there is another reason that makes the child want to learn. And that would be the desire to fit in. At some point a child will find out that every other child can read but they can't so this child wants to learn it to have access to what the group is talking about. But what would happen if 20% of society can't read anymore? Will that desire still push a child to read? Or what about more complex stuff like an electrical engineering degree? There will always be a select few humans who have the desire and discipline to learn technical jobs on their own. But will those outliers be enough to maintain all of that infrastructure which grants us the luxury to ask those questions? - I was always an average student. I always did more than the minimum to pass, but I was not pursuing excellence. If my education were driven by intrinsic learning then I'm pretty sure I would be nowhere near where I am now. And when I look at my fellow students then that seems to be the norm. - Some things are better learned when the brain is developing those areas within the brain. If we let the child learn it at some other time then that may come with a lower capacity of learning. - One advantage of extrinsic learning is that you also train delayed gratification. Also I don't think the child is necessarily the best judge of what type of knowledge is best later in it's live. Especially when it comes to basic knowledge and skills. After letting those thoughts run wild for a while in my subconscious, I have come to a temporary conclusion of what education would look like, if I had to design it. I would say half of the day should be dedicated to learning the basics in an extrinsic fashion. With basics I mean math, language, reading & writing and logic. The rest of the day should be focused on intrinsic form of learning and there it is about application. For example if someone loves electronics then they should have plenty of time and support to tinker around with electronics. In that intrinsic part of the education they should also be confronted with various other things that they don't know yet. And when it comes to stuff like health, gardening, sports and so on then it should not be taught but instead it should be lived out by the parents. The children will mimic that automatically. If you have children and you could freely determine their education, how would you go about doing it?

I have an opinion and I don't know how to communicate it to people who haven't thought about it yet. I agree with your statement at 12:18 _"[...] but a long walk with Gibbons through Rome will make you realize, all this material stuff you care about and take for granted is just a few bad decisions away from disappearing."_ I don't think the classical education is the only glue that can hold a country together. China doesn't have it and it had a civilization for thousands of years. Or Switzerland is basically a collection of villages and cities who decide that they want to be together against the rest of the world. In case of modern Switzerland I think the cultural glue are things like public school which connects people across social class or the mandatory military service which connects people across regions. Also the small size of the country and great public transport connects the urban and rural parts of the country in a way which probably no other country does. It's still a problem to some degree, but in Switzerland many companies set their base in some rural village and still export to the whole world. Anyways, we are in agreement with society needing a glue to keep up a high social safety and living standard. Many people I talk to think that it can't be that bad. Another thing that some people also struggle with is the vulnerability of our infrastructure. How much of the milk produced is milked by hand and how much is milked by a machine? How much wheat can still be harvested if there is no oil anymore? How are good distributed if the American military supremacy on the ocean breaks down? Will a less educated populous be able to maintain the electric grid? Will they be able to create and maintain the machines to automate all the manual labor that is required to keep society running? When I talk to non-technical people they all think about the newest smartphone and ask _"What is so bad about it if we take a step back? Even if it is all the way back to the flip phone."_ I agree with them that entertainment electronics is a luxury which is not necessary. But feeding the population and giving energy to the population is. And that is stuff which only very few people have insight into, percentage wise. Or a historian I recently talked to said _"If we look at the entire human history, the desire for a higher comfort rose. So the bigger problem to tackle is how to do technology efficiently, not how to stop a decay."_ I sadly didn't get around to give a response. But in my opinion the society structure provides the upper range of the possible technological level. If you have a tribal society you can't have steel tools, as they require a semi global trade. Same with our current technology. Just because people desire luxury doesn't mean they can build a society that can produce luxury. If we make a few wrong decisions then that means we don't have any companies anymore which produce stuff and which ship stuff just in time so that the people have their luxury. It doesn't matter if there are no people who want to be engineers anymore, if there are politicians who prohibit companies from making stuff or if war prevents trade. If you stop production civilization will break down. And we have too many people and too incompetent people to be able to live in a broken down society. It's quite possible that I view things too dark. But I think it is blissfully ignorant to just assume a solution will pop up when the need arises. Especially if fewer people want to go into the engineering jobs which require logical thinking or the manual labor jobs which require working with the hands. According to the university teachers I know, all technical apprenticeships and all engineering degrees have fewer students applying. But the social jobs and the office jobs which focus on human interactions have more workers than jobs. So far I have not found out how to explain that in an appealing way. If I just say the summary, then people think I'm a pessimistic doom-monger. But I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think the trends and risks are quite large, but it doesn't really affect me emotionally and I have the best education to feed myself through a crisis, as long as it isn't a complete blackout. What do you think about this? Any tips on how to communicate it? Do you have any thoughts on the infrastructure side of civilization?

Finishing the defense of the Greeks portion and on to the Romans next. Homeschooling our children here. Using a Christian and Classical education mix. It’s going amazingly thank the Lord. Oldest child just went 98th%+ on his state equivalency exams. 4th grader reading at the 75th% high school senior level already… Persevere Rob, you’re on the Path

In the name of EDUCATION, the USA is NOT a democracy, but a Cobstitutionally-limited REPUBLIC!

Word of advice: If looking to pull the trigger on the Harvard Classics or GBWW with regard to a liberal education, the GBWW has the texts for 5 of the 7 classical liberal arts, and many of those that students classically moved up to in moral philosophy, natural philosophy, and theology. The Harvard Classics doesn’t really have any that were part of a classical education. It is a good set of classic literature though.

I just finished this book last night. I loved how it changed my views on humanities and the importance of reading the Greeks and Romans. I also saw many parallels between the emphasis on "natural science" in his day and STEM in ours. It seems to me the best benefits of classical education are "soft" benefits, ie better equipped to learn, better morals, more empathy, etc. I would never have considered the humanities as more important than STEM unless I read this book. Also, this dude loves his Greeks. Even the chapter on the Latins was overshadowed by them 😂

Thanks for these very thoughtful presentations.

Thanks!

I believe our "educational reforms" have been a disaster for the United States. Learning Latin and studying the classics not only provides critical thinking skills and provides perspective on other peoples points of view, but learning Latin grammar is essentially learning a highly articulated inflectional system which will help you in learning other systems such as programming or economics.

I just want to spin green beans in a furnace and turn them brown so as to grind and drink later. Reading a good book in the process always pairs well with the process. Great video dude…

Thanks so much for tuning in! Paradise Lost video #4 will be next and then, back to this series! If you need a little caffeine to get you through the series then try some of the coffee I roast. www.cedarotacoffee.com Stay blessed my friends!

yep, minds wander. Who then is there to protect a respect for human beings or stop those who chop the world up for their own pleasure or domination? There are such manipulative forces in our world, maybe not as coherent as big conspiracy theories but willing to shapeshift into any form for power.