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.

Independent Scholarship

As the Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design is self-directed, as an educational experience its similar to post-graduate education (although apparently its considered to be about an 'A Level' qualification). The handful of tutorials included in the cost are less contact time than the average masters degree, and the task of getting educated is largely left up to you in terms of both form and content, with the accreditation criteria a framework goal.

Some voices would like to pattern permaculture education into a more recognised tertiary education format, indeed this is something of what Gaia University has done, by creating degree programmes for eco-social education. I'm not so sure about the value of doing that however, especially in the more mundane context of meshing with the UK HE sector.

Free Thinking not Fee Thinking

With a bachelors degree and two masters behind me, I increasingly question exactly what is going on in universities, what value they provide and at what cost. Cost is obviously increasingly an issue in the UK, as tuition fees rise and government support retreats. Universities are cutting departments, students are getting into debt and as paying customers rightly demanding a different experience base don their actual needs. I doubt whether universities can ever meet some of those needs any more. The financial and resources crunch has implications for education as it does for everything else. Paying thousands of pounds for a course taught at some institution far from home for years as a prelude to a working life characterised by the need to pay that money back is going to be a less and less viable path of education.

The recognition of this is rising, with anarchist free schools making welcome reappearances, skill-shares and skill-swaps occurring elsewhere, the University Project, open source education, commentary from Kio Stark, James Marcus Bach (see videos below) etc.




There's a long history of independent scholarship of course, and a great resource to check out is Ronald Gross's work, especially his The Independent Scholar's Handbook, which is downloadable legitimately and for free from here, but would be worth paying for just for the bibliography.