- Log per day - 2026
- Following on from Re wanting to learn how to think, 2026-03-04
- Just a copy-paste of my conversation with Claude
Talking with Claude
Prompt
i’ve attached some context re: my education [the Re wanting to learn how to think, 2026-03-04 post]
my first question is - I’m curious what I might have been taught in a private school, or via a “classical”/aristocratic education of a bygone era, vs what I learned in the English state school system of ~2000 - ~2014
Reply
This is a really rich question, and I think there are essentially three layers to it: the classical/ancient education, the English “public school” (i.e. elite private school) tradition, and then the modern elite private school — each of which would have given you something quite different from what you got.
The classical tradition (the “bygone era” education)
The foundation of Western education for about two thousand years was the seven liberal arts, split into two stages. The trivium consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium consisted of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Wikipedia The trivium came first — it was essentially training in how to think with language. Grammar teaches the mechanics of language, logic is the mechanics of thought and analysis (composing sound arguments, identifying fallacies), and rhetoric is the art of communicating thought persuasively. Wikipedia
The quadrivium then trained you in how to think with number and quantity — but in a much more abstract, philosophical way than modern maths class. Arithmetic was understood as pure number, geometry as number in space, music as number in time, and astronomy as number in space and time. Wikipedia
Note to self - David Foster Wallace writes about the trivium/quadrivium in Infinite Jest
“the Enfield Tennis Academy is the only athletic-focus-type school in North America that still adheres to the trivium and quadrivium of the hard-ass classical L.A.S. tradition”
The key thing to notice here, given what you wrote about your own education: the trivium ==literally starts with logic — learning to construct valid arguments, spot fallacies, reason deductively. This is exactly the thing you describe having no exposure to until your rationality sprint in 2025, when you didn't even know what epistemology was. In the classical model, this wasn't an advanced elective — it was the second thing you learned, after grammar, before you were allowed to move on to anything else. The trivium was the requisite course of study for bachelor’s candidates==, while the quadrivium formed the core of a master’s education. Liberal Arts
Vs an entire populace of kids going to public schools and not being taught logic. Why is it only rich kids who are taught how to think????
The English public school tradition (Eton, Winchester, etc.)
The great English public schools were originally founded on this classical model, though narrowed considerably. At Eton, boys were tutored in Latin and Latin alone, with an emphasis on writing verses and learning by heart, and Greek was only added in the early 1600s. Historyofeducation As late as the mid-19th century, Latin and Greek were still the only subjects officially taught by the school. Eton College Collections
I read Donna Tartt’s novel “The Secret History”, really great book about kids at an expensive university studying Ancient Greek
What this meant in practice was relentless training in two things: close reading of difficult texts (in their original languages), and composition — writing your own Latin and Greek prose and verse. The entrance examination for Eton tested candidates on Latin composition in both prose and verse, translation from Latin and Greek, and mathematics including arithmetic, algebra, and Euclid. Edwardian Promenade
Similarly, I have the book “How To Read A Book” - close reading, and reading well, is not taught in English state schools (or at least, it’s taught in a very non-rigourous way)
This sounds arcane, but it was doing something important: it was training habits of precision, argument construction, and careful attention to how language works. When you translate Thucydides from Greek, you can't just "vibe" your way through it — every word matters, every clause has a logical relationship to every other clause. And when you write Latin verse, you’re working within incredibly tight formal constraints, which forces a kind of disciplined creativity.
After the 1868 Public Schools Act, the curriculum broadened. Each boy had to take up “extra studies” including German, Italian, higher mathematics, history, physical geography, chemistry, political economy, logic, and comparative philology. Historyofeducation But the core remained classical until surprisingly recently — it wasn’t until the 1960s that Classics finally ceased to be the most important subject at Eton. Historyofeducation
Modern elite private schools (the version that would have been available to you)
A modern school like Eton or Winchester during your era (2007-2014) would have looked quite different from the classical model, but would still have given you several things your state school didn’t. Eton today offers 28 subjects, including nine modern and classical languages, with teachers who are subject-specialists holding prestigious degrees. Eton College Private schools offer smaller classes, promoting individual attention and personalised learning experiences. The Scholar
How much money do I need to earn if I want to send my kids to an elite school? Fucking loads right (or, homeschooling)
But the biggest differences wouldn’t just be the subjects — they’d be things like: being surrounded by peers who expected to go to top universities and took intellectual life seriously; having teachers who were themselves deeply educated and could model rigorous thinking; being expected to write extended essays and defend arguments in tutorials or seminar-style discussions; and having the cultural assumption that being well-read and intellectually curious was normal rather than unusual.
The standards at state school were so low dude. If you’re a smart kid, you can get all As and
A*sat GCSE with barely any intentional study, that’s how easy it is.
So what did you miss?
Reading your piece, the specific gaps that jump out are:
Logic and argumentation. The classical tradition put this front and centre. You describe arriving at 25+ with no grasp of valid vs. sound arguments, basic epistemology, etc. A classically educated person would have drilled this from age 12 or 13.
Fuckin RIP, lol
Rhetoric and essay writing as a thinking practice. You note that you never wrote essays to test your knowledge — flashcards were as far as you got. The entire classical and public school tradition was built around composition as the primary method of learning. You learn by writing arguments, not by memorising facts.
Eeee this is so exciting dude. I’ve already written so much on this website, all I need to do is pivot to writing more rigorous essays. I don’t have to get over an aversion to writing, I’m ready to go
Mathematics beyond arithmetic. You stopped maths at 15 with no algebra or pre-calculus. Even the Victorian public school curriculum expected all boys to know algebra and Euclidean geometry. A physics or maths A-level at a good school would have given you the experience of rigorous abstract reasoning where you genuinely can’t bluff.
Oh 16 year old Alex why were you too lazy to do a Maths A Level smdh
A canon of texts to think with. Whether it was Homer and Thucydides in the classical tradition, or a broader humanities curriculum in the modern private school, the point was giving you a shared body of ideas and arguments to reference and build on — frameworks for thinking about politics, ethics, human nature, history.
Mad that I didn’t know anything about politics or history when I was 18, no, fucking 21 !!! I remember being in my first job after university and asking my friend Dan what the difference between left wing and right wing was, and really struggling to remember what he said because I had nothing to attach the concepts to in my brain
The habit of active intellectual engagement. Tutorials, debates, Socratic questioning, peer discussion among intellectually ambitious people. This is what you seem to be getting now from your mentor, and what you describe as transformative.
Vs in a state school, it’s considered nerdy and unusual to genuinely be interested in a subject, to ask questions beyond the curriculum, etc
The honest truth, though — and you seem to already sense this — is that a lot of what the public schools historically provided was as much social confidence and cultural capital as it was genuine intellectual training. The Latin verse composition at Eton was partly about learning precision, but it was also partly about signalling membership in the ruling class. The real intellectual benefit was less about specific subjects and more about being in an environment where thinking seriously was the norm, where you were expected to be articulate, and where you had mentors who could see your blind spots — which is exactly what you’re now building for yourself, just later.
Shining a light on the shame
- With this whole thing (“I’m not well educated”) as a thing that I never looked at in a clear-eyed way, because of shame and embarrassment, it made it feel much worse (I’m not writing well right now)
- It’s like, my implicit frame has been “I’m poorly educated, and it’s my fault”
- And as soon as you actually look at the thing properly it’s like, of course it’s not my fault. This stuff just wasn’t taught in state schools. I didn’t go to a private school. It’s a systemic issue affecting many tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of kids. It’s not a failure on my part