I’m sufficiently annoyed to facetiously propose an alternative: that a proper Christian education should be centered on abstract algebra (groups, rings, vector spaces, etc). Reasons:
- Deep exposure to math inclines students to the true philosophy: Platonism. Humanities pay too much attention to words, which inclines to nominalism.
- Ability to manipulate people (rhetoric) has greater moral hazard than ability to manipulate things.
- Unlike the classics, modern math has large contributions from Christians (Euler, Cauchy, Riemann, Cantor, etc).
- Scientists and engineers are hard-working nerds. Writers and artists are bohemian degenerates.
- Math does a better job than rhetoric or grammar in promoting clear thinking and rigorous reasoning. In math, one can’t win arguments by manipulating the meanings of words. True, classical students might study Euclid, which has the virtue of being proof-based. However, it lacks the breadth and profundity of modern mathematics, its training in abstraction, the recognition of identical structure in disparate systems, exposure to deep concepts like generators, homomorphisms, cosets, etc.
- The level of memorization required for a Latin-based education is an unnecessary barrier that math-based education evades.
- Math is God’s language.
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