The Trivium | Ep.1
The goal of classical education is to broaden the mind of the student to perceive the wonders of God’s creation and their place in it. Traditionally, this was done through the means of the seven liberal arts. The first three, the Trivium, are Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, and the last four, the Quadrivium are Arithmetic, Geometry, Cosmology (Astronomy), and Harmonia (Music).
In the late 1940’s the author Dorothy Sayers delivered her speech “The Lost Tools of Learning.” In this speech, she notes the degradation of the education of her day. She makes the case that students no longer know how to learn and she suggest that the movement away from the Trivium is to blame for this problem. She then proceeds to outline each of the first three arts as she understands them from study.
The Grammar stage she equates to what we might call elementary school today. Here students focus on memorizing rather than rationalizing. Students at this stage memorize facts and poems, because that is what they are most inclined to do. She nicknames this stage the “poll-parrot stage,” because at this age children take great delight in memorizing and repeating what they hear. So they are to be given facts that they may remember and learn to use later.
In the Logic stage (middle school), the information gathered in the Grammar stage is put to use. No longer does the student merely repeat information, but now he learns to articulate why what he says is true. This stage Sayers nicknames the “pert stage,” because at this age children are most wont to argue with their peers and instructors, so she argues that one should teach them to do it well.
Once a student has a firm grasp on Logic, Sayers moves them on to the Rhetoric stage (high school). Here the students are taught to take their logical arguments and present them in an appealing manner. After all, it is no good to be right logically if nobody listens to what you have to say.
Sayers further argues that these three stages are the methods used to learn and master any subject. So not only does the study of these arts produce a well informed, well educated individual, but it creates one who knows how to continue learning whatever subjects are placed in front of him. She says, “the intellectual skills bestowed upon us by our education are not readily transferable to subjects other than those in which we acquired them: ‘he remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he learned it. Is it not the great defect of our education to-day–that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.’”
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Dorothy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning
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