Review

Abstract

Scott Newstok aims to reclaim the language-based, rhetorical education of the Renaissance for twenty-first century teachers. Each of the very brief fourteen chapters contrasts some aspect of Renaissance schooling with modern education, with a special animus towards electronic/media instruction. The chapters, however, do not merely defend Renaissance education; they exemplify it. Each chapter models the copia that was the aim of Renaissance education by weaving into the text a tapestry of quotations and references from classical and Renaissance writers. Newstok footnotes these quotations and references, but he also provides something more useful for his target audience: the last section of the book contains a brief annotated bibliography of modern theoretical and theoretical works that support Newstok's argument in each chapter.Newstok's first chapter, “Of Thinking,” justifies his method and sets the agenda for the whole book. Shakespearean thinking, he says, demands “a deliberate engagement with the past to help you make up your mind in the present” (11). He first points out that Shakespeare usually figured thinking as a craft, like pottery or forging metal (3). He contrasts this with the educational theory of the “No Child Left Behind” legislation and the practice of Bill Gates's digital instruction, which see education as merely transferring information. Instead, he argues for that mainstay of Renaissance education—the commonplace book. Recording striking passages and one's impressions for further use is an active educational practice and more valuable than the passive reception of electronically transmitted, prepackaged information.The author continues his assault on contemporary education in chapter 2, “Of Ends.” Newstok attacks the managerial approach to education, not with statistics but with anecdotes. For example, he recounts how he asked his seven-year-old daughter if she had learned any new words at school; she replied “assessment” (18). To replace assessment-driven instruction the author proposes rhetoric, the art of language that comprised nearly the whole curriculum of Renaissance education. He segues from rhetoric back to “craft” in chapter 3. He explores and explains the ramifications of education as a craft: the craftsman as a maker, a creator; the craftsman as participating in a tradition; the necessity of a master–apprentice relation. All these he contrasts with the passive, nonpersonal practice of contemporary instruction. Chapter 4, “Of Fit,” is in fact a defense of the Renaissance concept of decorum, the “fitness” of expression adapted to a situation or audience, as opposed to the “one size fits all” approach to “critical thinking.” Chapter 5, “Of Place,” defends the medieval and Renaissance collegium, the place in which communal (and convivial) learning takes place, as opposed to the isolation required by “personalized instruction.”Newstok's attack on current education theory and practice continues in chapters 6 and 7 which are a frontal assault on educational technology. Chapter 6, “Of Attention,” repeats the modern complaint that media have created an information overload that makes careful attention to any one thing extremely difficult, and chapter 7, “Of Technology,” is an appropriately erudite defense of books and reading as superior to electronic media.Halfway through the book Newstok shifts from a critique of current education to a defense of (updated) Renaissance practice. Chapter 8 defends imitation as a beneficial educational technique, what the author calls “creative imitation” (75). Newstok even prescribes a vernacular version of the Renaissance practice of double-translation in which students rewrite an older text into modern English—and then back again! Newstok amplifies this recommendation in chapter 9, “Of Exercises,” in which he urges his readers to resurrect the classical progymnasmata, especially recommending those exercises that require a student to compose on both (or more) sides of a theme or subject. His defense of this practice as an antidote to adolescent certainties is eloquent and persuasive. The next chapter, “Of Conversation,” continues his defense of dialectical thinking, this time in conversation rather than in written exercises. Then in “Of Stock,” he refers back to chapter 3 and defends “stocking” one's mind with ideas, phrases, and longer pieces. The author's emphasis on memory and recall flies in the face of much modern educational theory and practice that emphasizes mental “skills” or behavioral objectives rather than knowledge retention.The final three chapters deal with larger, more general themes than the pedagogical prescriptions of the earlier chapters. Here Newstok challenges the contemporary fascination with creativity on the one hand, exemplified by creative writing courses, and the contemporary fascination with physical objects on the other, exemplified by STEM courses. These chapters, “Of Constraint,” “Of Making,” and “Of Freedom,” defend training students within formal limits. He argues that the idea of creativity should be replaced by the idea of making; the former implies absolute freedom to make something out of nothing, while the latter means producing something out of something else and according to a prescribed pattern. Newstok eloquently defends his rhetorical model of education as leading to real freedom through empowerment, and he concludes the last chapter by citing Dr. Martin Luther King's use of Shakespeare in the famous “I have a Dream” speech, bringing his work to a “fitting” conclusion.This stirring paean, however, is not the end of the book. In the last section, Newstok supports his recommendations with a select, annotated bibliography organized chapter by chapter. These books and articles provide the readers with current theoretical support for the author's arguments in each chapter as well as with practical sources that will help them follow Newstok's recommendations. This bibliography also shows that the book's argument is not as dated or reactionary as it may appear at first glance. However, there are some aspects of Renaissance education that Newstok glosses over and of which a contemporary enthusiast for rhetorical education should be aware.Oddly enough, Newstok does not mention the rhetorical topoi. These are a systematic way of “inventing” material on any subject: definition, cause and effect, contraries, etc. This mainstay of rhetorical education ought to have played a major role in Newstok's chapters on invention and “making.” Newstok also does not allude to the adversarial nature of Renaissance education. Rhetoric was studied in the context of debate and controversy. Scholars of Renaissance rhetorical education like Walter J. Ong have remarked that “thinking” in the Renaissance usually meant thinking for or against somebody or something. Controversy was the backbone of the Renaissance's own assessment method. Students were continually engaged in competitive recitations, and advanced students engaged in debates with each other and sometimes with their teacher on prescribed traditional topics like “Is it lawful to kill a tyrant,” a school exercise familiar to every grammar school student when Brutus and Marc Antony debated it in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Newstok leaves open the question of whether the Renaissance methods he advocates can or should be practiced without their adversarial tone. Third, the Renaissance classroom was the scene of appalling brutality and physical abuse. Whipping and caning were accepted without question. Newstok does not address whether contemporary students would accept Renaissance educational practices, or if they would be successful, without the coercion that marks their history. Finally, despite Newstok's and others' hymns to the virtues of liberal education free of mundane concerns with future employment, Renaissance rhetorical education was openly vocational. The curriculum prepared students for careers in government, the law, or the church, careers for which there was a sustained demand during the Renaissance. The realities of the marketplace would have to be confronted before Newstok's ideas could be widely adopted.The chief advantage of this book is the author's replication of the Renaissance style he advocates. He makes his case with a hurricane of citations, references, and analogies that would have made Erasmus proud. The reader, carried along by this erudition, will find it difficult to withhold assent to the argument, and it is an argument, participating in the adversarial nature of Renaissance rhetoric even if the author does not avert to it. And perhaps this may be the strongest argument for rhetorical education: the Renaissance model may prepare students for the rough and tumble of social media far more effectively than the privatized, isolated pedagogy of the media based classroom.