Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.  Amen.

Quintivium I: The Integration of Inquiry, 1986-2010   (PDF)
Quintivium II: Call To Curriculum Re-Formation, 2012
Quintivium: University Of The Professional Guilds, 2021
Quintivium III: Development History In Pedagogy, 2022

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

Declines in prosperity and morality track back to schools.  There is consensus — because it is true — sufficient to rely on that observation as axiomatic and immutable.

We witness declines in prosperity and morality.  Therefore, something is wrong at schools.  There is consensus on that observation sufficient to motivate an inquiry and correction of what is wrong at schools.

Everyone, when they want to correct whatever they think is wrong, thinks first of correcting something at schools to achieve their purpose.  Everyone is not wrong in doing that.  Correcting something at schools means correcting curriculum.

Curriculum “corrections” at schools have been rampant since the late 1960s.  Nearly all have been bolt-ons ideologically driven by what James Lileks terms “aggressive messianic collectivism.”  (Another term is Maoist revolutionary communism, and another is puritanical secularism.)

The bolt-on “corrections” are dressed deceptively in fine words such as progress, liberation, equality, liberal, peace, justice, fairness, creativity, freedom.  And, following the Maoist-puritanical model, they are enforced with ruthless determination by school operators.

In consequence, the curriculum of the system of education in the United States of America is gutted of satisfaction and utility. Its essential structure is obliterated by bolt-ons.  No one, excepting aggressive messianic collectivists, is happy with schools’ condition, and even collectivists are forced by their own puritanism to ceaseless prowl against scrutiny.  And they send their kids to private finishing laboratories, away from the academic horrors they created for everyone else.  Relaxation, a prius of learning, is not in schools.

The schools are shot.  They do not work.  They destroy the feelings of greatness and grandeur.  Prosperity and morality are not their product.  Madness is.  And utter ignorance.

While the need is for curriculum reformation, systematic re-formation rather than more bolt-ons is indicated.  Partly this means eliminating bolt-ons, which act as parasites on everybody.  Mostly, however, it means using time, money and energy to rethink-rebuild the academic curriculum as a whole, top-to-bottom, side-to-side.  Everything.

There are precedents, quite a few of them, that offer guidance.  Classically, there is the Quadrivium and later the Septivium (and here and here).  Participants in the Scottish and German Enlightenments offer guidance, as does the legacy of classical India.  Indeed, classical solutions to the question of curriculum construction by several countries around the globe help a rethink-rebuild of the academic curriculum of the USA.

Like that of most European nations, American nations’ character derives from the mutually-sustaining legal and technological genii of Latin and, to a lesser extent, primarily in the Southern Americas, Spanish.  The Western or Latin Church, comprising Roman Catholic, Anglican, Protestant and Reformed Christians, made that happen.  The United States rests on the legal-technological genius of Latin and, to a lesser extent, Spanish.  Unsurprisingly, learning of both languages is popular in USA schools despite their deformed condition.

An occasion to rethink-rebuild the academic curriculum is hereby offered.  It’s name is Quintivium: The Integration of Inquiry.  It is systematic in that its organization reflects the five elemental principles of existence, combinations and permutations of which comprise all things: ether (hearing), air (touch), fire (sight), water (taste), earth (smell).

Quintivium contemplates the academic curriculum as a study of phenomena in five dimensions:

Seeing/Philosophy (ether)

Teaching/Science (air)

Guarding/Government (fire)

Producing/Industry (water)

Crafting/Arts (earth)

This study also reflects man’s five major religions and the elemental principle and sensory organ central to the practice of each: Hinduism (ether/hearing), Buddhism (air/touch), Zoroastrianism (fire/sight), Islam (water/taste), Christianity (earth/smell).  Thus organized, pentagonally, the academic curriculum radiates structural strength and unity.  It is the whole.

Fields of inquiry related to Seeing/Philosophy would include: Reference Works, Mathematics (Logic and Philology), Chemistry, Ecology, Aesthetics, Systematics (Etymology, Cosmology, Chronology, Ontology, Epistemology, Archives, Libraries), Exegesis and Diet.

Fields of inquiry related to Teaching/Science would include: Piety, Saints and Sages, Anthropology, Linguistics, Patriotism, Paleontology, Medicine, Physics, Oceanography, Hydrology, Geography, Cartography, Geology, Botany, Zoology, Biology, Atmospherics, Astronomy, Homeschooling, Online Education and K-12 Resources.

Fields of inquiry related to Guarding/Government would include: The Solar Dynasty, Banking, Legislatures, Diplomatics, Executive Authorities, Military, Police, Physical Education, Care of Animals, Law, Agencies, Intelligence and Propaganda.

Fields of inquiry related to Producing/Industry would include: Agriculture, Apiculture, Mining, Logistics, Metallurgy and Manufacturing.

Fields of inquiry related to Crafting/The Arts would include: Architecture, Engineering, Mechanics, Construction, Shooting, Warfare, Seamanship, Trades, Cooking, Cleaning, Sewing, Writing, Painting, Sculpture, Music, Drama, Dance, Photography and Web Design.

Well, Quintivium is an occasion to contemplate this need to re-form the academic curriculum to produce prosperity and morality.  We want satisfaction and utility from our schools.  The academic curriculum of the USA needs re-formation.

Update 1: A statement regarding equating Christianity with Communism:

Several New Testament parables are used, since decades, to equate Christianity with Communism. Virtually the entire “mainline denomination” leadership, to include now Roman Catholics, concurs at least in principle with that equation. Thus the pews empty out, which, remarkably, convinces that leadership to embrace leftist manners and language more tightly: cut loose by God, let’s be saved by politics.

Christianity brightly distinguishes the realm of civil authority and law from the realm of religious authority, which transcends civil authority and law and has no law of its own. Each realm has its utility, powers and necessity (“Give unto Caesar….”) and neither has authority to control or dominate the other.

The relationship between religion and science is the same. They are about different matters entirely, without intersection, confirmation or conflict. Like civil authority and religious authority, however, they are parallel, indomitable vectors of human experience and history.

Update 2: Patrick Buchanan: Is Trumpism The New Nationalism?

Update 3: Traitor To His Class [:-)]  Page 2

Nothing is more terrifying to the elite than Trump’s embrace of a tangible American nationalism.

Update 4: Deformities of this order, and so widely iterated, indicate more than attack on, dysfunction or loss of freedom. They indicate the obsolescence of an architectonic. An old body collapsing from age in normal use. Nothing to lament or stir alarm regarding.

The architectonic expiring is the industrial model of compulsory institutional education. The curriculum is spent and its administration is hysterical. A new body, a fresh architectonic of education must be aborning somewhere, somehow. Probably among homeschoolers and charter schoolers, which means, among mothers and fathers and their children.

The first steps, I should think, are to reacquire the curriculum and de-industrialize the administration thereof.

Update 5: Updates to Department of Education and Department of Justice Guidance on Title VI

Update 6: The Sad State of Higher Education

Update 7: Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA