Jose Vega, the LaRouche candidate running for U.S. Congress in New York, has announced an education policy platform as an intervention into the present from the educational needs of the future.
His statement opens: “I would emphasize that my commitment to political work has come from being surrounded in an environment of classical education. From my high school years, I was given the chance to participate in several summer school programs which focused on what the Ancient Greeks called the ‘quadrivium'—arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. In the morning, we would begin by singing for up to 2 hours, learning the works of the great classical composers: Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and others. Then, after our lunch break, we would engage in mastering the principles of constructive geometry, and proceed to mathematics as derived from the physical domain. We would construct the five platonic solids from scratch, build astrolabes to determine the position of the Sun and determine the time, figure out why we lived on a round Earth, and from there discover the circumference of our planet, as the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes did many years ago, without a smartphone to look up the answer!”
“This is what I mean by a classical education policy,” he continues. “I was taught that any child, regardless of their circumstances, could be raised to be a genius, if given the right education. This was taught by the great Greek philosopher Socrates to a young slave boy named Meno, who had no formal education, but despite that was able to double the area of a given square without being given the answer beforehand! How was he able to do that? ‘Because,’ Socrates told him, ‘the answer was in his mind from the very beginning, as it is in every human being.’
“To implement some of the economic programs I have proposed for the Bronx and the rest of the nation, such as my ‘Space CCC’ policy, we will need to educate a large number of young people who will be creative scientific thinkers, as well as skilled engineers, builders, and artisans,” he adds, emphasizing the future need for educating young people today.
Vega is currently teaching, with Jason Ross, a series of classes on Lyndon LaRouche’s economic method.
