Understanding the Trivium

Happy Friday!
One of the first things the founders noticed when we truly began digging in to classical education was a consistent mention of the concept of the "Trivium". The word Trivium is (of course) Latin, meaning "the three ways" or "the three roads". The word refers to the three ancient forms of teaching common in  Greek and Roman and through medieval education- the concepts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

These three levels of learning, so to speak, refer to the way that children learn and acquire information over their developmental growth curve. Susan Wise Bauer is likely the most well-known classical educator to discuss the Trivium in her acclaimed article The Well-Trained Mind. You can read her short, but informative article here. This website also has a wealth of other information regarding classical education.

The first stage, the Grammar stage, refers to the elementary school years — what we commonly think of as grades one through four — where the mind is ready to absorb information. Bauer describes this time frame as the place where children seek to learn facts about the world around them and this is where these facts set the stage for all future learning and critical thinking.

The second stage, the Logic Stage, Bauer describes as a time when the child begins to pay attention to cause and effect, to the relationships between different fields of knowledge relate, to the way facts fit together into a logical framework. Children here begin to develop abstract thought and not only ask "what?" but the all-important question of "why?".

In the last stage, Rhetoric, Bauer describes a student of rhetoric who applies the rules of logic learned in middle school to the foundational information learned in the early grades and expresses his conclusions in clear, forceful, elegant language. Students also begin to specialize in whatever branch of knowledge attracts them- the arts, STEM subjects, or liberal arts.

In short, many child development theorists have taken their research from the idea of the Trivium. In fact, probably the most well known child development theorist, Jean Piaget, described stages in which students learn and progress through to develop abstract thinking. Classical education has been using these stages for hundreds of years before Piaget!

Classical education is a multifaceted approach to education of which the Trivium is only one facet, but it does provide a broad organizational structure for the large amount of knowledge students will learn in a classical school. A well-trained mind, indeed.

Ad altiora tendo
(I strive towards higher things),
Kelly