A Book I Am Currently Reading...

A little about the Trivium...

I thought it would be good to speak a little about the Trivium and Classical Education. The longer I am involved with Christian and Classical Education the more wisdom I gain as an educator and parent. I want to take this opportunity to share a little of that wisdom.

Thus, what is the Trivium? It takes learning and divides it into three stages – grammar, logic and rhetoric. Those stages cut with the grain of how children grow and develop. When children are in the grammar stage, they are easily able to store large amounts of information. For example, a few days ago my wife and I went to get our two year old daughter up from her nap. As we entered the room and approached her bed, she looked up at us and began to sing…ABCDEFG…and on went the song until, next time won’t you sing with me. We were shocked. We had sung the ABC’s to her, but she had never sung the entire Alphabet. How was a barely two year old able to remember 26 bits of information? God designed her to be able to remember information, especially when it is set to a tune. Now if I broke the alphabet down and asked her what letter comes after R or even why there are 26 letters, of course she would not be able to answer me. But we have laid the ground work to build on and that building begins in 7^th grade as students formally move into the logic stage of learning, our Dialectic school.

Dialectic school is distinctly different than grammar school because we now begin to teach Logic and we open up the classroom for debate and discussion. The role of the teacher changes from that of a giver of knowledge to facilitator of understanding. Opened ended questions and logical discussions are the order for the day. But we have to have something to discuss, so in the 7^th grade our students begin to read the Classics along with many other Great Books, along with studying Hebrew and Greek. This is when the true academic rigor that the students have been prepared for through the Grammar school begins.

Finally in the 10^th grade our students enter into the Rhetoric School. For us at Bethel Prep, the Rhetoric is our capstone. It is where our students use the facts from Grammar School and their logic from Dialectic School to express their thoughts and ideas on the various subjects they have learned about. Rhetoric School puts a heavy emphasis on being able to clearly articulate and express the student’s wisdom that they have gained over the years.