Thanks to the magic of VPN’s, I have made my return to Return of Kings. And just in time to write an article about why the school system sucks.

Seeing as a few weeks ago I wrote an article on the decline of fitness training as an organized discipline, and possible ways to redeem it, I started thinking about whether or not this process could be applied to the state of education as well—education being something that I think we all can agree sucks the big one. And much like fitness, modern education has a few deeply buried nuggets of ancient wisdom that can be dug up and polished and made to serve a new generation. But to see that, we must first look at ancient education…

The first “educated” men were those who had to learn the needlessly complicated systems of writing that existed in the past, such as in Mesopotamia. Once writing was simplified enough for the masses, we see a sea-change in which it appears that the training of any “gentleman” in the past was to make him something of a polymath. For example, in the West, Greco-Roman education involved music, poetry, drama, history, wrestling, ethics, and rhetoric, as well as several different methods of pedagogy such as the famous Socratic method.

…The point I’m making is that “mens sane corpore sano” was an ideal across the globe, and continued to be for centuries.

Naturally, from these ancient tomes came the various rebirths of classical education in both East and West, allowing the concept of the well-rounded gentleman polymath to live on around the world for centuries.

Hell, a look at a modern school curriculum still has you to fulfill all general requirements ranging from English to math to the sciences and many other subjects, so deep down, buried under the sands of time, the ideal is still there. But clearly, we’re not raising a generation of brilliant polymaths, so what the hell happened?

You can read the article here