Wait…here comes the good part…
Alexander of Villedieu lived in France in the Middle Ages and wrote a book called Doctrinale, which was not only a Medieval best-seller, but also changed not only his world, but ours.
Confused?
You have probably never heard of Alexaner of Villedieu. I certainly hadn’t until I read BBC History Magazine, which I get each month. But stick with this – it’s interesting.
Before Alexander came on the scene, Latin, the language of whatever education and learning there was in Europe was taught in an incredibly complex and difficult way. Students of the language were required to memorize vast swaths of biblical text. Â There was no concept of a basic grammar, nor was one taught. Instead, years and years were spent simply committing Latin script and writing to memory in the belief that eventually the language would ‘stick’, in some way.
This process of years and years of rote memorization kept the clergy both employed and empowered.Â
Ironically, to a great extent this is how Koran is taught today in a good part of the world, and I myself learned Arabic by committing vast swaths of Koran to memory (which does me good when getting in most taxis in NY).
In any event, Alexander of Villedieu’s great breakthrough was to change the way that Latin was taught.
He was the world’s first grammarian, and he devised not only simple rules of grammar, but taught them in an easy and apparently entertaining way – he converted them to verse and rhyme.Â
He got his first job as a private tutor to the nephews of the Bishop of Northern France. Â The Bishop was so impressed with the rapidity with which his nephews learnt the language that he encouraged Alexander to commit the process to paper and to expand it greatly. Â He did so, and in doing so, laid the groundwork for an entirely new way of teaching a language, and of looking at it.
He also created a new kind of education – one which, we can only hope, continues to this day; not only for language but for anyone aspiring to learn.
Now we come to video. Â
Video, like Latin, is in fact a language.
Anyone who has taken one of our intensive seminars knows that we approach teaching video as we would approach teaching any other language – by learning the basic rules of grammar and applying them over and over.
Since its inception, however, video education has generally hewn much closer to the rote memorization method that was so popular in medieval europe pre Alexander. Â Watch and copy.
As video rapidly become the lingua franca of the digital world, and as millions and millions begin to pick up cameras and try and communicate ideas in video, the standardization – indeed even the acceptance and codification of a basic and very teachable grammar of video becomes all the more important.
