Quiddity

Back in May I referred to the following quotation from Susan Wise Baur.

Rather, “classical” refers to a pattern of training the mind first used in medieval education, and followed in European and even in American schools until relatively recently. Classical education proposes that learning take place in three stages. The early years of school are spent in absorbing facts, systematically laying the foundations for advanced study. In the middle grades, students learn to think through arguments. In the high school years, they learn to express themselves. This classical pattern is called the trivium.

At the time we had a brief dialogue, primarily about the history of the words being used. Having reflected on this question ceaselessly for about 13 years, I have concluded that, at least the way it is phrased in the previous paragraph, the formulation of the trivium as three stages as classical education is positively harmful.

For one thing, it names things incorrectly. The ancient and medieval world never theorized stages of a child’s development. They used common sense to note changes in a child’s growth, but I have been able to find any theoretical framework of stages. That arises from Rousseau, Pestallozi, and other Romantics and Progressives. I am open to correction on this point.

But I would need a good bit more persuading if someone were to find evidence of the stages of a child’s growth and then go the next step and say that in the middle ages they developed a three stage curriculum that matched these stages and called it the trivium. This is simply not so.

The trivium was three arts, three foundational skills, that were preparation for the higher studies. They were not usually even taught in the order of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

Nor were they taught as preparatory to the quadrivium. In Plato, the quadrivium does come later and that seems to be where Dorothy Sayers got the notion of them being specialized subjects for study after mastering the trivium (though Plato did not see them that way).

Indeed, by the middle ages, the quadrivium was regarded as every bit as foundational as the trivium. The quadrivium (the mathematical arts of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) ran parallel to the trivium, inasmuch as it was considered in relation to it at all.

And why not, that is how most classical Christian schools, regardless of their theories, teach them? Arithmetic begins in kindergarten, after all. No school I know of waits until the child has mastered rhetoric before beginning to teach him arithmetic.

That leads to my second point. By naming things incorrectly, we disable our ability to order things rightly.

The seven liberal arts were, in the middle ages, the foundation of all later learning. This insight arose from a commitment to the nature of things. One can take a class called “literature” in third grade, but one cannot become a master of literature (which is to say, one cannot know literature in the light of the four causes of literature: its idea, purpose, material, and agents/instruments) until one has mastered all seven liberal arts.

In other words, you aren’t really teaching literature to a third grader. You are teaching reading and writing. So in the middle ages, since they were fixated, as Christians, on reality instead of theories, they didn’t want to call it something it wasn’t. So they called it “letters” or, using a term from the Greeks, “Grammatikos,” from which we get grammar.

Grammar, therefore, is not just the parts of speech. It is learning how to read and write. But learning how to read and write is not the same thing as literature and history, neither of which can be “done” by a person who can’t read or write.

So in the middle ages, they didn’t offer a class on history in the elementary school. They were honest. They called it a class in “grammar.”

And that, it seems to me, is where Ms. Sayers seems to get her notion of the grammar of history and literature, etc. This is one of her frequent and valuable insights. The problem that has arisen is that we have taken her analogy too far and we think we are teaching history when we are really teaching reading and writing.

To clarify this point we need to redirect our attention. We are obsessed with content. Sayers was not. She said the problem we have is that we teach subjects, but not how to think. So lets redirect our attention to what Sayers was looking at -not content but thinking.

In the grammar years, the mind of the student is learning to read and write. The “fodder” of this reading and writing is drawn from history and literature. But we now think of history and literature as domains of content. In reality and in the ancient, medieval, and early modern curriculum (and to a large extent still in the graduate schools), history is not a domain of content so much as a manner of inquiry - an intellectual act, not, primarily, the object of that act.

Needless to say, the manner of inquiry determines the content and object of the inquiry. But it is important to give priority to the inquiry because that is precisely how subjects are divided according to nature. In other words, math is math because it is a different form of inquiry than literature.

By placing the manner of inquiry first, as they did in the ancient and medieval curriculums, we can be more closely aligned with the reality of what the student is studying and what he needs to learn to perfect that study.

My thesis is that nobody can study history until, or at least beyond the degree that, he has mastered the seven liberal arts. Why does that matter? Because if we think we are teaching a child to do history when in fact we are actually teaching him how to read and write (grammar), then confusion will arise, we will step outside of the God given reality of the nature of learning, and errors and injury will follow.

For example, if we think we are teaching our students history (as opposed to using history to teach them how to read - which we should do), then when it comes time to assess their development we will assess history instead of reading and writing.

Consider the implications:

First, we will not be attending to reading and writing the way we need to, thus falling short of perfection in these vital areas. We will not think deeply enough about reading and writing because we are distracted by a class we are not really even teaching.

Second, by failing to attend to grammar, we diminish their ability to actually do history later on when they ought to be. Their reading and writing skills will not be sufficiently cultivated. For example, they won’t be able to read ancient texts in the original, which is a vital task for any historian.

Third, we will reduce history to the conveyance of information. For the rest of their lives, students are likely to confuse history with classes that gave them information and tested them on it. Only a few will ever discover the delight of history as a dynamic mode of inquiry.

Fourth, we will burden our students with unnecessary work of a low order when they ought to be doing necessary work of an essential order. For example, we will place an undue amount of emphasis on content retention about things they cannot understand while neglecting to teach them reading and writing (both of which aid in content retention - let us not assume a false dichotomy). And isn’t this precisely what Ms. Sayers was objecting to?

Fifth, we try to teach too much too soon. And we think we are succeeding, because we have confused ourselves about what history is. As a result, we conclude that we have a class full of historians, when all we have is a class full of content retainers.

They are studying the grammar of history, but as a cognitive activity, they are doing far more grammar than history. We should name it accordingly, the way they did in the middle ages.

Sixth, we have too many classes. We shouldn’t have history classes for grammar students. We shoud call it Grammar or Humane Letters or something more accurate. Then, naming things rightly, we can have an integrated curriculum instead of a confused, badly coordinated, overlapping one.

Seventh, we are teaching in a manner that disregards the nature of the subject and also of the child. This is necessarily harmful.

Eighth, we are following a modernist, Enlightenment pattern in our curriculum.

In short, we, being confused about what history is, will pass that confusion on to our children while, being confused about what grammar is, we will fail to cultivate in our children the foundational arts of grammar.

All of these failings and misdirections are differences in degree. Only a fool would suggest that classical Christian schools are failing to teach children how to read, especially compared to their contemporaries.

But we are not teaching our students how to read and write as well as the ancients and middle ages, and I believe we are more concerned about that than we are about where we place on the contempoary degraded bell curve.

I think history can be used as the spine or ordering principle of a curriculum. I have to keep thinking about that.

No, I changed my mind. I don’t think it can. It doesn’t contain enough to order everything. For example, you can’t order math around history. It would be useful to teach math historically, but to order math around history instead of math is to alter math and to be distracted by a different subject.

In effect, it would regard math as a human construct. Math is a human endeavor, but it is a human endeavor into objective reality. Seven plus two equals nine is a mathematical fact, not a historical one.

So history is not an adequate ordering principle for the entire curriculum. Only Christ the Logos is that. And Christ the Logos created and loves His creation and made us stewards of it. That means we must know things according to their natures, beginning with the children we teach.

And that means that we must cultivate mastery of the seven liberal arts before pretending to teach them subjects for which we have not yet prepared them.

Results: fewer, more focused classes; organic efficiency and the joy that brings, more refined minds in our students; a proper understanding of the order and nature of the cosmos; Utopia, eternal happiness, and perfect government on earth as it is in heaven.

OK, I got carried away. Don’t you do the same thing.

The third reason mixing up classical education with the trivium as three stages is because anybody can use this to teach anything and still call it classical. You can teach Marxist materialism through the three stages. Following Wise-Baurs definition at the beginning of the post, that would be classical.

Classical education is not a method. It is the idealistic quest for wisdom and virtue rooted in the belief in a logos, which the ancient Greeks refined beyond anything any other civilization ever attempted and so doing prepared the way for the Logos Himself to fulfill every human desire.

The desire of nations has come. Let’s not reduce the satisfaction to a method.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 8:08 am and is filed under natural philosophy/science, Philosophy/metaphysics, pedagogy, Trivium, Quadrivium, Curriculum, Moral Sciences, Lost Tools of Writing, Humane sciences, Theology, Knowledge/Epistemology, Teacher Development, History of Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.