The Trivium

First thoughts on The Trivium critical thinking meme - education #design skills for the #permaculture auto-didact?

I recently stumbled across the contemporary interest in The Trivium in the USA, which has revived my thinking around independent scholarship and the idea of the auto-didact.

This was completely new to me, before listening to this podcast the other day.

The upshot: classical (& Renaissance?) education was based around study of the 7 Liberal Arts - to be studied in a precise order and divided into 2 blocks The Trivium and The Quadrivium.

The Trivium: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric

The Quadrivium: Number, Geometry, Music, Cosmology

The podcast led me to a contemporary US "movement" promoting The Trivium as a model for self-education and resistance to hegemonic power/propaganda. These seem to be the main nodes: Trivium Education,  Tragedy and Hope, Trivium Binder

A more general google search, once you get past the heavy metal band of the same name, tends towards the use of The Trivium in the US homeschooling movement, especially amongst the Christian edge of that.

Other negative associations - parts of The Trivium fanbase seems to include political conspiracy theorists and Ayn Rand style Objectivists.

Other interesting associations - Jan Irvin of Trivium Education also runs Gnostic Media and has background interest in psychedelics, qabbalah etc.; There's also a relation with the radical education views of John Taylor Gatto, spoken about by Derrick Jensen amongst others.

As with anything like this, there's a lot of crap out there, and while there's a wealth of interesting web audio/video - some of the more interesting commentators have terrible droney voices.

Nevertheless, I sense something important in all of this, and would be interested in yr thoughts and any connections/associations with any of this you may already have.