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The Trivium
Classical education differs from most educational philosophies in that it attempts to step back from the parade of educational theories that seem to keep us in a state of continual bewilderment and asks "what was education like in the past?" "What books were used?" "What goals were thought important?" Dorothy Sayers, in her essay "The Lost Tools of Learning", attempted to answer these questions and in so doing gave us some very sage advice for education in our own day. She began by investigating the medieval model of education called the Trivium.
The Trivium contains three stages; Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. Each of these three areas is specifically suited to the stages in a child's mental development.
- The Grammar period (roughly corresponding to the elementary school years) includes a great deal of language, including Latin, that will require the child to spend a great deal of time learning and memorizing its grammatical structure. During their younger years children possess a great natural ability to memorize large amounts of material even though they may not understand its significance. This is the time to fill them full of facts, such as the multiplication table, geography, dates, events, plant and animal classifications; anything that lends itself to easy repetition and assimilation by the mind.
- During the Dialectic period (generally corresponding to the middle school years), the child begins to understand that which he has learned and begins to use his reason to ask questions based on the information that he has gathered in the grammar stage. The curious middle school student is naturally argumentative. Thus, teaching methods focus on instructing students in the art of formal logic and on teaching them how to question, analyze, and reason well through the teaching of subjects.
- The Rhetoric period (generally corresponding to the upper school years). During this period the child moves from merely grasping the logical sequence of arguments to learning how to present them in a persuasive, aesthetically pleasing form.
Faith Christian School uses the Trivium as a model for designing the curriculum. The Trivium is one piece of the Christian classical education. For more details, see our Academic Philosophy. |
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