Why Only the Trivium? Part II
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.
[i] Douglas Wilson, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, Crossway Books, Wheaton, IL, 1991, appendix A, Dorothy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning, p.146
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid, p.154