I’m not entirely sure why, but I really prefer to know where ideas come from, like who influenced what. Like how did it become mainstream for people to think they could decide their own reality and if they were a man, a woman, or a cat? Even 50 years ago, if someone had said that they were a cat, they would have been put into a hospital until they stopped thinking they were a cat. Which let’s be honest, they would have spent the rest of their lives hopped up on drugs, feeling good, and living off of the state. That is just how the story goes. These thoughts have roots though, and I find it helpful to know where the roots started.
Now, I don’t want to spend time on Catwoman because the pathway is pretty boring. With school right around the corner, I have been wanting to work out my own thoughts on where my current education style of choice comes from and what it is. I’ve talked about this before with parents and they had no idea, so I thought I would put some thoughts down and go from there.
I teach at Evangel Classical School which is located 3 minutes from my house in Marysville, WA. I hope you can tell by the name that it is a classical school. But what does being “classical” mean?
Classical education has changed throughout history. The earliest traces of it would have been in Ancient Greece, and Plato’s Republic does a good job of covering it. To Plato, this would have just been his standard education for ideally everyone but realistically the rich kids. At an early age, one would be taught Grammar, which would have covered his letters, reading, and writing. If he passed that, the student would move on to Logic which would cover how to think correctly. Aristotle wrote the logic books after Plato which is called Organon. They are quite boring to read and will make you thankful for any logic book that has come after them. The Logic curriculum from Logos is great because it is very Aristotelian without being nearly as boring. From there, the student would move on to Rhetoric which is how to argue and present ideas. These three subjects together are called the Trivium.
For Plato in his Republic, these three subjects would be the testing ground for all young people. If someone could only pass Grammar, they would be the lowest level of society which would be the husbandman and farmers. Those that only understood Logic would become the soldiers and generals. Finally, those that finished and understood Rhetoric would become the guardians and would lead the city in politics. This final category, since they had now proven that they were gifted in learning, would go onto the Quadrivium, which would be the equivalent to their college. The four subject that make up the Quadrivium are Number (Arithmetic), Number in Space (Geometry), Number in Time (Music), and Number in Space and Time (Astrology). After one finished all of these things, they would be a fully educated person, ready to lead a nation.
Now Plato lived from around 430BC until around 350BC and from that point until really the Middle Ages, education does not really change. Each of these subjects are expanded as the knowledge of them are expanded. There just isn’t much advancement for the next 1500 years, which is crazy to think about. Algebra didn’t make it to the West until the late Middle Ages, Zero was introduced to the West in the 1500’s. It really is amazing to think about the freedom that came from the Reformation that spawned the Scientific Revolution. (Yes, I know Bacon was before the Reformation, but things didn’t really get going until after).
Now, if you look at how and what Plato taught in his education compared to what I teach at my school, you should probably think that we are not teaching the same thing. Yet, I use the same names he uses and by calling it classical, I do mean to point back to him. So, what gives? We have a crime writer to blame for that. Dorothy L. Sayers, who was a friend of the Inklings, wrote a lot of crime novels among a ton of other things. One thing that she should totally be remembered for is her book The Lost Tools of Learning. If you are considering Classical Education or are tangential to it, you should read this little book/essay. It is well worth the time. In this book, Sayers draws the connection between each of the courses of the Trivium and the natural developmental stages of children. There are also the stages of the Trivium in each subject.
To keep it simple, early elementary students are in the Grammar stage. Sayers noticed that young children were generally gifted at learning large quantity of facts. They could learn parts of speech, how to diagram sentences, all math facts, large timelines of history and the Bible, and even scientific facts like the periodic table and the anatomy of the human body. All of these things are the grammar level of their subjects. It is interesting because the vast majority of Mathematical and scientific education fits within the grammar stage. What that means is that these are things that one must know to grasp the subject but do not take logical thought to know. They are learned through memory work. This is what the grammar stage is gifted at. There is no questioning of truth or creation of new ideas in this stage. Learning through song is a tool that is often used because songs stick in the brain.
Starting as early as 5th grade and going through as late as 9th grade, student begin to transfer into the logic stage. In the logic stage, a student wants to know why something is true. They can still memorize facts decently well, but it bores them easily. They would rather question the world around them to figure out how it works. Teaching formal and informal logic at this stage is essential because it gives the student the tools to look at an argument and break it down. The student should be faced with questions of “why” in order to test how they filter the world. History and Literature are good places to explore this stage. Why would Homer express Achilles the way that he does and what does it say about Homer’s understanding of a hero? How does this change through other epic poems like Dante, Milton, Spencer, and even Tolkien? Compare the hospitality of the Greeks in the Iliad and Odyssey to that of the Hobbit in the shire. In these questions, there is no creation of new thoughts or ideas but rather a comparison of two things that are known. This is the strength of the Logic stage. Again, the vast majority of the sciences are not in the logic stage along with Mathematics, with the exception of Geometric proofs.
Finally, in the later years of education, a student starts to notice how others perceive them. They start to care about how they look, and they have a desire to produce. This transition is normal between 10th-12th grade. In this Rhetoric stage, one is taught how to present their own arguments in order to win others to their position. It is all about appearance and substance. Both are vital here. Philosophy and politics, economics and apologetics, Calculus and scientific experimentation are all part of the Rhetoric stage. Speeches and debates should be used as exercises of these subjects. Calculus is the point in Mathematics that it becomes rhetorical because it is at that point that one designs formulas to explain the physical world in a new way. Derivatives and integrals work to break down the change of an object mathematically. One must work to express their work in a way that is beautiful and winsome in order for someone else to accept their mathematical expression.
This final stage of education is the jewel of Classical education. It is the final step to prepare a person to sit in the gates of the city. Having knowledge and understanding truth are vital parts of education, but if one can’t share their ideas in winsome ways with those around them, what is the point of knowing? Socratic dialogues and public debates were the tools that democracy was built upon. Disagreement was a part of being in society. No stupid idea was safe. It is now thought to be offensive to disagree with someone publicly. Our society has fallen so far because people have not been taught to think logically and disagree winsomely. Logic and Rhetoric have been lost. The citizenry has become barely more than animals, drifting from one satiable factoid to the next.
This is what Classical education is trying to correct. Citizens must know the facts, how to tell what is true, and how to communicate those truths to others. These things must be roots in Christ in order to know what truth is. He is the cornerstone of the whole project, i.e. life. This is why it is so sad to see a parent take their kid out of Classical school because they have “enough” to move along. Without the final years, a student is leaving half-cocked, full of knowledge and truth without the ability to win someone to their side. They become a gun with no trigger, effectively useless. Or as Lewis put it in Abolition of Man, “We castrate and bid the gelding be fruitful” (26). We are working on arming our students to be solid people of a society that understands that Christ is king and the center of it all. Classical Christian education works towards this end. This is why it is one of the tools that we use here at Evangel Classical School.
Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. HarperCollins, 2009.