Leo D.M.J. Aurini - February 21, 2015


The Medieval Trivium

Topics
Medieval Trivium vs. Modern Education
Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Grammar Hammond Barini
The Cure to Social Justice is Self Respect Lust in the Time of Heartache (Short Film) (HD Version)

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

139.38

Word count

1,345

Sentence count

96

Harmful content

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Medieval Trivium was the foundation of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, and without these things you can t reason in a proper manner. These three things were what was required for a liberal arts degree and without them, you just could not reason properly.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey folks,
00:00:29.980 in this video I'd like to tell you about the Medieval Trivium,
00:00:33.980 the foundation of the liberal arts degree that you would get in the time,
00:00:37.980 and why it is so superior to the modern joke that is liberal arts.
00:00:43.980 Now the Medieval Trivium came actually from ancient Greece,
00:00:47.980 you can find this in Plato's writings,
00:00:49.980 and it took up three parts, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, in that order.
00:00:57.980 These were the foundations of systemic reasoning,
00:01:02.980 of rational thought and public discourse,
00:01:06.980 and without these things you really cannot reason in a proper manner.
00:01:12.980 Now it certainly sounds strange to us today.
00:01:15.980 Grammar, logic, and rhetoric?
00:01:17.980 You know, logic sounds like an education,
00:01:19.980 but rhetoric is just what they have on commercials.
00:01:22.980 And grammar, well, does it really matter if you use the correct grammar in your writing?
00:01:28.980 Except there was a method to all of this.
00:01:30.980 There was a reason for it.
00:01:32.980 There's a reason that this tradition lasted for thousands of years,
00:01:35.980 and it was only recently that we threw it all out with our modern educational theories.
00:01:41.980 And it is this.
00:01:44.980 You start with grammar.
00:01:46.980 Grammar is about the basic building blocks of language.
00:01:51.980 It's not the didactic form of grammar that we have nowadays,
00:01:55.980 where you have to memorize how everything goes,
00:01:57.980 and you get it right or you get it wrong,
00:01:58.980 and why is this the way we do things?
00:02:00.980 We don't know, it just is.
00:02:02.980 Answer correctly on the test.
00:02:04.980 That's not what grammar used to be.
00:02:06.980 Grammar used to be about actually understanding how a language works,
00:02:12.980 how sentences are constructed, how they interact with one another.
00:02:17.980 And furthermore, studying grammar, Latin grammar specifically,
00:02:22.980 taught you history because you studied grammar by reading ancient texts,
00:02:28.980 historical works, medical works, so on and so forth.
00:02:32.980 You learn about the real world as you're teaching yourself grammar.
00:02:37.980 Not this lazy fox jumping over the log nonsense.
00:02:42.980 You're actually reading worthwhile material as you teach yourself the grammar.
00:02:47.980 And by understanding the grammar, understanding Latin grammar in particular,
00:02:52.980 English is a mutt tongue, and we don't understand half the rules 1.00
00:02:55.980 because there's no obvious consequence for any of the rules.
00:02:59.980 Who, whom? What's that? What's an accusative case?
00:03:03.980 In Latin, all of this makes sense.
00:03:05.980 Latin is a fundamentally rational language
00:03:08.980 where all the constructions are very well worked out and make a lot of sense.
00:03:13.980 And so by disciplining your mind to use words in these correct manners,
00:03:19.980 you discipline the basis of your thought.
00:03:22.980 Now, once you've studied grammar, you move up to logic.
00:03:27.980 Logic, and I'm sure some of you have studied the philosophy of logic.
00:03:31.980 It's the basis of electrical engineering.
00:03:34.980 All electric circuits work on Boolean logic.
00:03:38.980 Logic is taking these sentences that are grammatically correct
00:03:43.980 and manipulating them, having them interact with one another
00:03:47.980 to create a new synthesis, to create something new that you did not have
00:03:52.980 before you when you just had the grammar.
00:03:54.980 The grammar is the facts, and now you're using logic to take the facts
00:03:59.980 and build something new, to build a machine out of it.
00:04:02.980 And finally, rhetoric.
00:04:05.980 Rhetoric is the art of persuasion.
00:04:08.980 But, just like logic is built off of grammar, rhetoric is built off of logic.
00:04:15.980 To have a rhetorically sound argument that convinces people,
00:04:19.980 you need to have done your homework.
00:04:21.980 You need to have studied the material.
00:04:23.980 You need to have worked the logic of it all out,
00:04:27.980 how all these things interact.
00:04:30.980 And then rhetoric is the art of presenting it to other people,
00:04:35.980 communicating to other people,
00:04:37.980 and taking this synthesis, this new idea that you've developed with logic,
00:04:42.980 and bringing it into the world.
00:04:46.980 Of course, there are some higher arts as well, but the trivium.
00:04:50.980 These three basic things were what was required for a liberal arts degree,
00:04:55.980 and without them, you just could not reason properly.
00:05:00.980 Now, let's contrast that to the modern education system.
00:05:05.980 These days, we start out by teaching kids rhetoric.
00:05:14.980 All of the K-12 education is focused upon rhetoric.
00:05:19.980 Convincing arguments that you memorize, and then you toss them up on the test.
00:05:26.980 And if you remember what the argument is, you get a point.
00:05:29.980 If you get it wrong, you get dinged, and you have to go read the book and memorize it again.
00:05:35.980 So we are chock full of these rhetorical arguments.
00:05:38.980 You know, some of which are wonderfully true and accurate arguments.
00:05:42.980 Others, which are more than a little bit of nonsense.
00:05:45.980 Much of the environmentalism that we were fed back in the 90s was more about picking up garbage than saving the planet.
00:05:52.980 Which, picking up garbage doesn't really have much to do with saving the planet,
00:05:57.980 but they just wanted the kids to pick up garbage for free.
00:05:59.980 So, right there, you get an instance of rhetoric that was complete nonsense, that had a disingenuous motive behind it. 1.00
00:06:07.980 But, of course, kids are too stupid to see through it. 1.00
00:06:09.980 They buy into it hook, line, and sinker. 1.00
00:06:12.980 So we start with rhetoric from the K-12.
00:06:16.980 Here are all the arguments that you need to believe in, and you need to be able to repeat, to be a good citizen.
00:06:23.980 Now, if you move on to university, you might just start learning a little bit of logic.
00:06:30.980 See, in university, you take a whole bunch of rhetorical arguments, you go find a whole bunch of sources,
00:06:36.980 you know, for your English degree, or your history degree, or your, you know, social sciences degree.
00:06:42.980 You find these arguments, and then you logic them together to sort of, but not really, create a new argument.
00:06:49.980 You know, you're given a ridiculous binary question on the essay, and you have to find six sources,
00:06:55.980 cram them together using logic, and say yes or no.
00:07:00.980 It doesn't really matter.
00:07:01.980 Just as long as you have all the sources you should, and it's coherent, boom.
00:07:06.980 You pass.
00:07:08.980 And if you're really, really careful, if you pay attention in life, if you're an autodidact,
00:07:16.980 you just might get to grammar.
00:07:19.980 You might start reading things other than the editorials, other than the official history,
00:07:26.980 the concluded history, the story of history that we're taught.
00:07:30.980 You might actually go above and beyond and start looking up facts.
00:07:35.980 You might start looking up the basic construction of reality.
00:07:39.980 You look at the French Revolution, so I hear it was the greatest thing that ever happened, you know.
00:07:44.980 Liberté, fraternité, égalité, so on and so forth.
00:07:49.980 You might actually go look at the facts, and count how many people died,
00:07:52.980 and look at the mechanisms, and look at how the monarchy was before that.
00:07:55.980 And you might come to a very different conclusion. 0.95
00:07:58.980 This current education system sets us up to be the most opinionated and ignorant people on the planet, 0.96
00:08:10.980 because we start with rhetoric. 0.97
00:08:12.980 Rhetoric is the high-level stuff.
00:08:14.980 Until you've done the groundwork, you have no business doing rhetoric.
00:08:18.980 You don't want a salesman running a technology firm.
00:08:23.980 Heck, that was the message of Jurassic Park, that Hammond, great guy.
00:08:28.980 He was a salesman at heart, not a scientist.
00:08:30.980 He did not understand what he was playing with.
00:08:33.980 He did not understand the consequences.
00:08:36.980 And that's what we are.
00:08:37.980 We are a world, a country, a nation, a society of salesmen, of narcissists,
00:08:44.980 falling for any advertising jingle out there with not even the remotest idea that there are such things as facts.
00:08:51.980 A few of us are logical.
00:08:53.980 You know, you can certainly see this with some of them. 0.98
00:08:56.980 They take these rhetorical arguments, cram them together, and come up with ridiculous nonsense. 0.92
00:09:02.980 You know, this is the core of postmodernism. 0.77
00:09:04.980 It's rhetoric plus logic with no grammar whatsoever, no facts going into it.
00:09:09.980 It's quite a pretty little performance art.
00:09:13.980 But it's not knowledge.
00:09:15.980 It's not truth.
00:09:17.980 It's not systemized thought or reasoning.
00:09:25.980 So folks, that is why medieval scholars were far better educated than these scholars we have today.
00:09:36.980 Barini out.