Revisiting the Trivium | Ep.5
While we already previously examined the Trivium by reading Dorothy Sayers’s Lost Tools of Learning, the authors of The Liberal Arts Tradition offered a different perspective. In their book they make the case that the purpose of studying the Trivium is not to gain a set of tools. The tools are more of a secondary effect. The purpose of studying the Trivium in their view is to study language well. Using words is a way of imitating God, and is a large part of what makes us human. Humans are the only animals that communicate with spoken language. God created all with his word, and by using our words we imitate him by creating new ideas and stories. But our creation is subservient to his, and we can only create things based off of what he has already created.
The purpose then of Grammar, according to this way of thinking, is to introduce students to the art of language itself. Students here are being given an introduction to the types of things that may be known. They learn to name things. Being able to name something implies some understanding of that thing. Imagine, for example, a young child who is learning to speak. He must learn words first, but only after using them does he learn what they mean. In the same way, a Grammar student is introduced to words and ideas and over time learns what they mean. During this time he is also shown what sources are trustworthy for learning true knowledge. Rather than telling the student that he must not question an authority, he is instead shown why a source is to be trusted. They are being lead along on a discovery of objective truth rather than simply being told what to believe is true. They see it for themselves.
What Sayers called Logic the authors here call “Dialectic.” This difference is meant to communicate the idea of a dialogue. Here the student begins not only to repeat words that he hears in a mimicking pattern, but he learns how to engage with what is being said. He is also taught to ask good questions. The point of dialogue is not to produce “right answers,” but to learn how to find what is right or true for oneself. This is the manner Socrates uses in his dialogues. At first a single question is posed, and then that question leads to a string of other deeper questions designed to reveal the nature of a given topic.
Once on has a grasp of how to ask good questions, he is taught to ask them in a compelling way. Here there are less rules than in the Dialectic. The rules of Rhetoric change depending on who the speaker is trying to speak to. The student learns to take the words he is studying and to order them so that they are easily intelligible, and because different people think differently the method of ordering must be adapted to the speaker’s intended audience.
While many of the same basic ideas Sayers presented in her essay are still here, this view of the Trivium focuses less on the use that this type of education will be put to and more on how it shapes the soul of the one who studies it.
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Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education
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