One Sixteenth

Classical Education

I've said, for years, that in our homeschool we do classical education. The truth is that my definition of classical education has completely changed, and our homeschool along with it.

When I first read The Well-Trained Mind I was jealous. That was the education I had always wanted for myself! It was rigorous. It was thorough. It tackled hard subjects like Latin and Logic. It required students to read original texts. It emphasized language and history. Classical education! I knew immediately that it was what I wanted for our children.

It took a couple of years to learn how to implement TWTM in our family. The schedule examples in the book are unrealistic (Susan Wise Bauer didn't want to include them for this very reason, but says the publisher insisted). It took a great deal of tweaking and experimenting to get the benefits of TWTM without feeling that we needed to spend hours chained to a desk. We kept going back over our educational goals and philosophies, to find which parts of TWTM were worth keeping, and which we needed to ignore. In the end we made it work.

Funny thing about reevaluating your underlying philosophies: you tend to keep doing it. You tend to keep thinking, analyzing, reading. At this time a few threads popped up on TWTM message boards, challenging us to define "classical education." I was surprised to find that the defintions the WTMers came up with were vague. In the end, it seemed that no one could definitively say exactly what a "classical education" is. And frankly, neither could I.

How odd.

This is what led me to read Climbing Parnassus earlier this year. When I finished the book I found I was not only able to define classical education, I was able to define it in two different ways. The first definition is: education which is rigorous, language/history based, and uses the educational stages of the Trivium (grammar stage, logic stage, rhetoric stage) as an organizing principle. This is the definition TWTM uses. The second definition is much simpler: classical education is education that focuses on classical languages, literature, history and arts, and uses the educational subjects of the Trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) as its organizing principle.

The former definition is currently the most popular. When you hear that a school, or a homeschool, provides a classical education, they are most likely pursuing a rigorous education with the process of the Trivium as their organizing principle. However by using the Trivium as process instead of content, one school's classical education can look very different from the next school's version. The content of the education can be tailored to fit modern expectations, or state requirements. Latin is desirable, but not at all necessary.

As for the latter version - well, it seems to lack relevance. How is a modern student going to manage in the modern world if most of his studies are spent on learning Latin, Greek, the Trivium as content, and classical history and literature? This classical education is nothing without Latin. Latin is the foundation upon which all other education is built: Latin grammar, the logic of Latin syntax and translation, the rhetorical skills necessary to express oneself not just competently, but well in Latin, and by extension in English.

In this kind of education grammar, logic and rhetoric are what you learn. You learn how language works, you put the pieces together and you use it well. You learn Latin. You learn Greek. You read Latin and Greek, and in reading Latin and Greek you read the philosophy, history, values and aesthetics that are the foundation of our Western culture.

How did this split in definitions come about? The modern interest in classical education was largely spearheaded by Dorothy Sayers' essay The Lost Tools of Learning. In this essay, Ms. Sayers gives us a blueprint for taking the elder concept of the Trivium and using it to fit a more modern form of education. It is she, I believe, who first talks about the Trivium as process, instead of content. (If I'm wrong, let me know! Please!) By defining the Trivium as a process (first you learn the grammar of a subject, then you make logical connections within the subject, then you express original thoughts on the subject), classical education could be freed from the confines of its historical content. Latin, for instance, is still desirable and beneficial; but by using the educational process of the Trivium, you can get the effects of studying Latin but focus on more modern subjects. This idea has caught on like wildfire, and if you search the internet for "Trivium" you will find description after description of the psychological/educational process of learning.

But this is not what classical education used to be. The Trivium has been a part of "classical education" for hundreds and hundreds of years. Originally the Trivium simply meant grammar, dialectic and rhetoric - the three areas of study that were foundational to higher learning. Grammar meant Latin grammar, as the primary focus of any decent education was to enable the child to speak, read and write Latin. Once the Trivium was mastered, a student could go on to the Quadivium: Music, Arithmetic, Geometry and Astronomy. The Trivium was not a conscious process: you simply had to learn grammar first in order to become proficient in Latin. And you were not educated unless you knew Latin. First that, then everything else.

I've always been attracted to the education of bygone times. It did the job, and did the job well, for many hundreds of years. That's got to mean something. After reading Climbing Parnassus I have become convinced that modern, neo-classical education, while rigorous and excellent, is not my idea of what classical education should be. Classical education is the study of the classics: language, literature, arts, philosophy, aesthetics and history. I agree with the statement that you can't just add Latin to a curriculum and call it classical education. However, I am drawing my line in the sand: if you're not teaching Latin, you're not doing classical education.

"Classical education" has become one of those terms that is so desirable, everyone wants to claim it. It's almost as if a "rigorous" education isn't good enough any more - no, it must be "classical." Or maybe it's simply that "rigorous" is becoming synonymous with "classical." Last week I overheard a woman describing a friend's homeschool as "... school at home, classical education. You know, like Bob Jones or Abeka." Er, what? Neither of these programs are classical. Abeka certainly is rigorous, but neither of them fit either definition of classical education. It doesn't have to be that way. An education can be excellent, thorough, and rigorous without being classical. A classical education is not the only way to be well-educated.

If you're going to do classical education, however, I don't think it makes much sense to throw out the tried and true content. Sure we have to bend some in our modern world. Some of us have state requirements to meet. In some areas it would just be stupid to cling to doing things as the Romans did. But we can keep the Latin, and use that as our foundation.

Posted by Steph at November 30, 2004 12:14 AM