No to conventional education

I was thinking , connecting to how it would be better to educate a young prince, on how to get a better and more rounded education than conventional. More and more people every year are getting non-conventional education, many are homeschooled, others just some weird schools in the woods of Wyoming.
I’m just interested on what you would do. Let’s narrow this from high school to uni years. I’ll share my opinions down.

Top thought would be personal tutor in the Great Books or in science

There are few good and IMO pretty reliable X accounts that teach Great Books, like Athenian Stranger @athens_stranger at Athens Corner (https://www.athenscorner.com/) and Ancient Philosophy @ancphi

St. Martin's Academy (Great Books high school)

St. Gregory the Great Academy (Great Books high school)

Chesterton Academies (high school)

Wyoming Catholic College (university) (weird school in the woods of Wyoming)

Clear Creek Monastery (if you discern the contemplative life of a monk)

University of Austin (Joe Lonsdale, Alex Priou are involved)

St. Joseph the Worker College (liberal arts and learn a useful trade at the same time)

The important thing to pursue is a coherent, modern program of liberal arts. That's not Great Books. Great Books is a off-target 20th-century reaction to the late 19th-century collapse of the liberal arts.

Here's a good overview of what happened to the liberal arts: https://www.palladiummag.com/2021/11/27/liberal-education-applied-history/

Mind you, I love great books. I'll read them and talk about them all day long. But as a curriculum, it's not the solution. Plato and Aristotle said that philosophy should not be studied until *after* one had mastered mathematics and the other arts. Literature, which I love, should not be the focus of formal study.

The old liberal arts were: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. We need to modernize that. (For example, we can put modern mathematics in place of arithmetic and geometry, and natural science in place of astronomy.) But the rough outline is sound.

Liberal arts are the minimum a free man needs to participate in the polity. That's what "liberal" meant. Philosophy is for very few. Literature is what you read while you sip scotch and talk with friends.

>>2647
First, I agree with most of what you say, though I want to make a case for classical languages like Greek or Latin as the natural means to learn the first three.

As highly inflected languages, to understand Greek or Latin you naturally learn every grammar concept as they all come into play. I have studied Ancient Greek as an adult and it highlighted how inadequate my US public education was with respect to English grammar.

Two, in learning both of these languages, the student is naturally introduced to history, but in the words of great men and those who looked up to the great men of history. There is a reason the founding fathers studied Plutarch and Polybius. There is a reason the Renaissance involved making translations of many of the classics.

Third, these perspectives in history naturally motivate one to study rhetoric, not as a "school subject" as we think of it today, but instead as a natural skill in the art of bringing others in line with your own views. Schools have too much curriculum, so ideally a new frame will narrow down the required areas of study, while simultaneously giving skills that enable them to pursue any interest they acquire.

Hence, I agree that modern mathematics should be the top priority, specifically taught with very high standards and according to the philosophy of V.I. Arnold, where it is grounded in the physical sciences as it was originally. This enables the pursuit of any field of science and engineering subsequently.

The next priority would Ancient Greek and Latin where grammar, rhetoric, history, and literature are all read as a means of learning these languages. Once learned to the standard of an educated 19th century English or German schoolboy, you will be able to engage deeply in most any conversation in the arts, classics, history, or most anything else much better than even modern academics who rely on the same few translations, and even then rarely study the classics.

Beyond these, I see any other subject as electives. Though for my own children I would emphasize physical fitness, and practical engineering through hands on work.