Trivium and Quadtrivium

 This reading was very eye-opening and stimulating. One of the first things that jumped out at me was this idea of the liberal arts, "the very word 'liberal' implies that these arts belonged to the education of free men, not to the technological training of slaves." The Greeks wanted to ensure that free men would be contributing future members of society, and associated 6-8 different types of learning as essential to to their learning. One thing that is really stands out to me is how did these ancient scholars distinguish what is worthy of a free man? Why were technical skills, like medicine and architecture, looked down upon in those societies? I think this is especially interesting because I do think our society is quite the opposite now. For example, the BC high school curriculum was really focused on STEM careers, and primarily only had a variety of grade 12 class options for those in the math/science stream. I remember the whole curriculum changing in 2017 right after I graduated, where many arts and humanities classes were just introduced for grade 12 students, such as philosophy and genocide studies. Now, we can see this shift of accepting arts classes as "important", however this was not the common perception when I was in high school. 

Another thing I found interesting was that "the seven liberal arts were denounced by such Christian writers" due to the opposition of paganism, however this changed once Christianity became recognized on a more widespread basis than paganism. Once Christians did not view paganism as a danger anymore, they were then accepting of the pagan education system. I found this interesting because growing up in a western society, there is no intersectionality between religion and education, therefore I had forgotten how a difference in religion between two groups could have an impact on standardized education like this. 

One more thing that stuck out to me was that the "essential" nature of arithmetic was due to an "emphasis on the art of computation, especially the method of establishing the date of Easter." Again, it is really interesting to see this influence of religion on education. At the time, Christianity was dominant in European society, and therefore being able to compute the date of Easter was "essential" and "important". It appears that society will place emphasis on certain disciplines based on their needs at the time. Today, technology is arguably the focus of our society, and we can see this not only in our increasing use of technology, but also the increase of students choosing to study computer science in post-secondary to adapt to our society's changing needs. 

Overall, I do think education is strongly correlated with society's perceptions at the time, and this was a common theme in the article as the author discussed the different periods of mathematical development.