Classical Christian Education

The Old Schoolhouse “Spotlight” for the month of April, 2012, is on Classical education.  Stephen and Kellyann Walker from Charleston, SC, share a bit on an often overlooked part of Classical education, the quadrivium.  This is thought provoking reading if you’ve ever wondered where math and the sciences fit in a classical education.

As passionate supporters of a classical education, we feel that sometimes a portion of the classical curriculum is overlooked–the quadrivium. So we would like to explore this area a bit more.

If you have read anything about educating classically you have probably heard the term “trivium” because that is greatly discussed within the confines of a classical curriculum. However, grammar, logic, and rhetoric are but the first of three stages of education as laid out by Plato in The Republic. The second stage, the quadrivium, is composed of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (or harmonics). The final stage is both dialectic and philosophy, where dialogue between two or more people with different views on a specific subject use reasoned arguments to establish the truth of the matter.

Though each of these subjects has practical value, Plato espoused their study in a pure sense, to help the learner be more thoughtful in all his studies, making him a better leader. In looking at Plato’s own words about the mathematical sciences, it is clear that these subjects and a theoretical approach to teaching them is a part of a classical curriculum.

“‘You see therefore,’ I pointed out to him, ‘that this study looks as if it were really necessary to us, since it so obviously compels the mind to use pure thought in order to get at the truth.'” ~ Plato

The study of arithmetic is not simply the learning of fundamental operations with numbers. It is the study of the rules and relations of numbers to one another. This includes the study of number patterns and sequences, equations and their methods for solution, and all the proofs that go along with these ideas. A basic example of this is our multiplication tables. Beyond just memorizing them, it is important to understand that multiplication is just repeated addition. ex. 3X4 = 4+4+4. In a similar manner, exponents are repeated multiplication as in 5² = 5×5. Most people today would consider these “honors” courses, yet Plato found this to be foundational to a good education.

Geometry is considered in a likewise fashion. Though the study of geometry can center on memorizing numerous formulas for all kinds of problems, Plato’s approach is quite different. His approach looks at definitions and patterns to rigorously prove any conjectures put forth by the student, again making the student more pure or rigorous in his thoughts. An example would be proving the similarity of different figures.

“‘We shall therefore treat astronomy, like geometry, as setting us problems for solution,’ I said, ‘and ignore the visible heavens, if we want to make a genuine study of the subject and convert the mind’s natural intelligence to a useful purpose.'” ~ Plato

Astronomy at this point is not a study of the constellations, but is instead an examination of the equations for the movement of the heavenly bodies. Music is also approached mathematically and not as performance. Here it is looking at patterns and ratio. The purpose of a student’s study is, again, to find patterns, develop proofs, and discover truth.

The study of algebra, geometry, physics, trigonometry, and calculus forces us to be careful in our thoughts and greatly appreciate the beauty and complexity of creation. Plato would likely agree with a great many scientists who say that “mathematics is the language God has written the universe in.”

It is much easier to solve real world problems when you understand how mathematics works and not just have a long list of methods to solve a myriad of problems. Using this approach we begin to see the interconnectedness of all the mathematical sciences. Studying the quadrivium would be perfect for high school students who are ready for a more in-depth look at all these subjects. There are many good programs available to us as homeschoolers that emphasize a conceptual/theoretic understanding of mathematics. Pairing one of these with a thorough great books study will help round out your classical curriculum.

The Old Schoolhouse Blog

One of the things that makes Veritas Academy unique among educational choices is the fact that it is Classical in approach, Christian in worldview, and based on a University Model that meets two to three days a week and allows families to select the courses that best suit their family’s needs.  The modern trend toward university model education has its roots in the early 1990s with establishment of Grace Preparatory Academy in Arlington, Texas.

Former Grace Dean Dr. John Turner  is now the Family Ministry Specialist for the National Association of University Model Schools.  While we aren’t affiliated with this organization, many of the keys to successful university model education that Turner shares are also keys to success in a Classical Christian school like ours that follows this model.

Turner believes all approaches to education are strengthened when parents are meaningfully involved, but he is quick to say that the university model absolutely depends upon such participation.

“To lay the responsibility for America’s educational crisis only on the schools is to fail to understand the issues,” Turner said. “Even in the best of school situations, teachers and administrators must work with children who are products of home environments that both precede them and extend beyond their scopes of supervision. Parents are the ones responsible for preparing their children to show, at the very least, reasonable respect for authority and basic consideration of others so
that, once in school, their instruction can be accomplished in an ordered environment conducive to learning.”

Because schools reflect homes, Turner finds that “University-Model Schools are accessing the most powerful known
single influence for reforming education in America –meaningfully involved parents.”

Proposed solutions to America’s educational problems typically
recommend more time in class, removing students even further from the teachers they need most, Turner said, referring to parents. “University-Model Schools are not only empowering and ’employing’ parents in their teaching paradigm, they are
also demonstrating the positive differences made when parents know that they are built into the learning process — needed, wanted and expected.”

To read the full text of the source of these quotes, click here.

In a recent “Stand to Reason” podcast Greg Koukl interviewed headmasters Devon Smith of Beacon Hill Classical Academy and Liz Caddow of  Trinity Classical Academy.  This interview is an excellent overview of Classical Christian Education.  Click below to listen on your computer, or right click the link and save the mp3.

Click here to listen 

Mr. Patch Blakey, Executive Director of the Association of Classical & Christian Schools, has written an article entitled “Why Only the Trivium?” for publication on the Veritas Academy Blog.  In this the the third and final installment, Mr. Blakey discusses how the ACCS (and also Veritas Academy) apply the trivium to Classical Christian Education.  A pdf of the entire three part article is available for download here.

This approach, identified by Dorothy Sayers, is the one that the Association of Classical & Christian Schools (ACCS) has committed itself to and actively promotes. That is, ACCS agrees with Sayers that the Trivium includes both age-appropriate instruction as well as its application broadly to all subjects. With regard to the latter, every subject has a grammar to it, that is, it has essential components and vocabulary which must be learned by students; a logic or proper ordering of those components; and a rhetoric, the proper communication and application of the subject. ACCS has seen the positive and successful results of this application of the Trivium in numerous schools over the years. The success is evident in those schools that ACCS accredits and in the standardized test scores compiled by ACCS from its member schools.

Some may object that ACCS does not promote all of the seven liberal arts which include the Quadrivium in addition to the Trivium. ACCS would cheerfully concur. The objective of ACCS is to promote what Sayers called the “tools of learning.” From the perspective of ACCS, the Quadrivium represents subjects that are to be approached and studied once the tools of learning have been mastered. ACCS schools focus on instruction in the Trivium, the tools of learning, so that students will grow up to be lifelong learners, able to effectively apply the tools to any subject. Again as Sayers noted in her closing comment, “The sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”[i]

Others may protest that ACCS is not being true to the historical application of the Trivium as it was initially developed and promoted by our ancient forebears. There are proponents of the classical Christian approach who argue that the Trivium consists only of three specific areas of study with regard to language and the ability to speak clearly and persuasively; but that it does not comprise a method that can be applied to other subjects outside the limited study of verbal and written grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Again, ACCS would cheerfully agree that ACCS takes a broader view of the Trivium. Dorothy Sayers’ observations are of great value in the instructional process and ACCS does not want to revert to an instructional methodology that had not yet made these insightful connections.[ii]

Does this mean that ACCS does not promote or encourage the study of math, science, and music in a student’s instruction? To the contrary, all of these subjects are present in ACCS member schools, and are required for ACCS accreditation. Because of the ACCS focus on the Sayers approach to the Trivium, these subjects are taught with that in mind; they are presented to students in an age-appr0priate fashion so that the instruction coincides with the students’ developmental stages.

Others might question what is wrong with just providing the grammar and the dialectic stages at a school that only goes through the eighth grade? ACCS maintains that the grammar and dialectic stages are preliminary to the rhetoric stage, the capstone of a classical Christian education. To only provide a student with the first two stages isn’t just omitting a third of the learning process, but it rather misses the whole process altogether. As Augustine wrote:

“Now, the art of rhetoric being available for the enforcing either of truth or falsehood, who will dare to say that truth in the person of its defenders is to take its stand unarmed against falsehood? For example, that those who are trying to persuade men of what is false are to know how to introduce their subject, so as to put the hearer into a friendly, or attentive, or teachable frame of mind, while the defenders of the truth shall be ignorant of that art? That the former are to tell their falsehoods briefly, clearly, and plausibly, while the latter shall tell the truth in such a way that it is tedious to listen to, hard to understand, and, in fine, not easy to believe it? That the former are to oppose, to melt, to enliven, and to rouse them, while the latter shall in defense of the truth be sluggish, and frigid, and somnolent? Who is such a fool as to think this wisdom? Since, then, the faculty of eloquence is available for both sides, and is of very great service in the enforcing either of wrong or right, why do not good men study to engage it on the side of truth, when bad men use it to obtain the triumph of wicked and worthless causes, and to further injustice and error?”[iii]

The Trivium is important; it represents what Dorothy Sayers called the “Lost Tools of Learning.” ACCS is committed to recovering the Trivium, to restoring the knowledge and application of these tools through classical Christian schools. They work and this fact is attested to by the growing resurgence of classical Christian schools around the world.

Mr. Patch Blakey, Executive Director of the Association of Classical & Christian Schools, has written an article entitled “Why Only the Trivium?” for publication on the Veritas Academy Blog.  In this the second of three installments, Mr. Blakey discusses the twentieth century application of the trivium by Dorothy Sayers in her essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.”

Jumping ahead to the twentieth century AD, Dorothy Sayers noted—in what she thought at the time would be a little-regarded essay—that Western civilization had taken a decidedly bad turn for the worse. In addressing what she thought were much needed teaching reforms in 1947, Sayers stated, “For they [the proposed reforms] amount to this: that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.”[i] Sayers knew that what she was proposing would be considered “reactionary.”[ii]

Sayers central demand in her essay was a restoration of the use of the Trivium for the education of children. But she also had a key observation that was equally essential. She noted that children learn differently at different stages of their lives. This observation is important, and it is foundational to the current resurgence in classical Christian education. In Sayers view, the application of the Trivium comported with the learning traits of children at each of three stages of their God-created development, which she identified as the Poll-parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic. In defining these stages, she says,

The Poll-parrot stage is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult and on the whole, little relished. At this age one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things. The Pert Age, which follows upon this (and naturally, overlaps it to some extent) is only too familiar to all who have to do with children; it is characterized by contradicting, answering back, liking to “catch people out” (especially one’s elders) and the propounding of conundrums (especially the kind with a nasty verbal catch in them). Its nuisance-value is extremely high. It usually sets in about the Lower Fourth [approximately age 12]. The Poetic Age is popularly known as the “difficult” age. It is self-centered; it yearns to express itself; it rather specializes in being misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and, with good luck and good guidance, it would show the beginnings of creativeness, a reaching-out towards a synthesis of what it already knows, and a deliberate eagerness to know and do some one thing in preference to all others.[iii]

Sayers then went on to note the appropriate correlation between the stages of child-learning development and the stages of the Trivium: grammar to the Poll-parrot stage; dialectic to the Pert stage, and rhetoric to the Poetic stage. The Trivium therefore can be applied to all subjects of the curriculum at each stage of the students’ development, not just to the individual subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

Mr. Patch Blakey, Executive Director of the Association of Classical & Christian Schools, has written an article entitled “Why Only the Trivium” for publication on the Veritas Academy Blog.  In this the first of three installments, Mr. Blakey gives an account of the origins of what we today call “the Trivium.”

The liberal arts were defined in the fifth century AD by a pagan author, Martianus Capella, in his seminal and singular work, On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury[i], an allegorical account of the union of an intelligent and productive pursuit as represented by Mercury, to his betrothed, Philology, representing the art of letters or the love of words. In writing the story of this particular marriage, one of the wedding gifts presented by Mercury to bride is comprised of seven maids who are intended to serve her. These seven maids represent the seven liberal arts. The liberal arts in ancient times comprised the education that was worthy of a “free” people as opposed to slaves or drudges. Therefore by inference, a liberal education was one that developed the mind of a noble person in the broadest possible sense, and did not just prepare the recipient for a limited, menial vocation.

The first three of the seven liberal arts are known collectively as the Trivium, while the last four are called the Quadrivium. Trivium is Latin meaning “three ways,” or the place where three roads meet. The Trivium includes grammar, dialectic (or logic), and rhetoric. The Quadrivium contains the studies of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy (or astrology, in which the modern meaning of that word was included in the understanding).

During the sixth century AD, a Christian Roman statesman, educator and writer, Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, usually referred to by just his name Cassiodorus, had a high regard for the seven liberal arts and promoted them for the education and betterment of Christians. He was a serious-minded Christian who believed that the Scriptures were central to a right understanding of all things and hence a right understanding of the Bible was essential to a sound education. He saw the seven liberal arts as the means to help develop a broad understanding of the Scriptures, and not just a simplistic one. This was the form of education employed by Western civilization for about the next millennia.