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Upon successful
completion of a great books high school program, students will have gained a liberal arts education equivalent to that being conducted in four year liberal arts colleges.
Many years ago - in the late Middle Ages - the Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree signified completion of the secondary level of readiness to enter into the third and final level of formal education - the college or university, for specialization in their chosen field, be it teaching, medicine, law, philosophy or theology.
With the introduction of mass education in the West in the 19th century and particularly in the 20th, various experiments in pedagogy were conducted in order to find better ways to deal with the huge demands being put on educational systems of the West. Unfortunately not all of these experiments were successful - in fact most were disastrous (e.g. so-called "progressive education"). The result has been the gradual "dumbing-down" of secondary or high school graduates.
Colleges and universities have had to take up the slack by introducing the 6 R's: remedial reading, remedial 'riting and remedial 'rithmetic, and have rightly pushed back the time to award a B.A. until after completion of four years of such remedial courses and basic humanities education. In effect, high school education has been pushed into colleges with the result that the B.A. is now rarely awarded before age 22 - rather than as formerly at age 16-18. Besides needlessly delaying the educational process, this also delays the transfer of responsibility in our society by four years and hence of the normal process of maturation - yet biological maturation proceeds apace. The result is the phenomena of 22 year-old-children with little emotional maturity or hope of financial stability beginning families. Two consequences are the ever-increasing divorce and bankruptcy rates. Single parent families and latch-key kids pay the price, as does all of our society. Dr. Mortimer J. Adler addressed this problem:
"If I had any hope
that in the foreseeable future, the educational system of this country could be so radically transformed that the basic liberal training would be adequately accomplished in the
secondary schools and that the Bachelor of Arts degree would then be awarded at the termination of such schooling, I would gladly recommend that the colleges be relieved of any
further responsibility for training in the liberal arts... if we are going to have general human schooling in this country, it has to be accomplished in the first twelve years of
compulsory schooling...it would appropriate to award a bachelor of arts degree at the completion of such basic schooling. Doing so would return that degree to its original
educational significance as certifying competence in the liberal arts, which are the arts or skills of learning in all fields of subject matter."
Taking Dr. Adler's words to heart, we
have developed the following approach: Upon successful completion of a great books high school program, graduates will be offered the option of taking the AP, AS, IB, CLEP,
Regent's or other such college crediting tests. We hope to coordinate these tests and/or to develop our own testing for the complete B.A. degree (in the Liberal Arts) to be
awarded by the Great Books University College upon successful completion of such tests, rather than simply credits towards increasingly large portions of it as is the case at
present.
Clearly that is also the direction and logical end of the International Baccalaureate Organization testing and that of several others. Regarding students of great books education: their subsequent performance at graduate schools and in the workplace will eventually prove the wisdom of Dr. Adler's view. Homeschooling itself initially faced this same credibility test and has successfully emerged from it with premier colleges actually recruiting homeschooled students. We have every confidence in the principles and theory of liberal arts education and in the great books classical approach and so look forward to this credibility test of the Great Books University College B.A. degree.
" Is the Trivium (the first three of the liberal arts), then, a sufficient education for life? Properly taught, I believe it should be. At the end of Dialectic, the children will probably seem to b far behind their coevals brought up on old-fashioned "modern" methods, so far as detailed knowledge is concerned. But after the age of 14 they should be able to overhaul the others hand offer fist. Indeed, I am not at all sure that a pupil thoroughly proficient in the Trivium would not be fit to proceed immediately to the university [i.e. not for the 6 R's!] at the age of 16, thus proving himself the equal of his medieval counterpart..."
- Dorothy Leigh Sayers
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