The trivium. It sounds like a daunting word. What in the world is it? This is my fourth year on the classical education journey and it's starting to click.
Need a down to earth explanation? Let's break it down.
In medieval times there were seven branches of knowledge referred to as liberal arts. The lower three were grammar, logic/dialectic, and rhetoric and they are the three liberal arts contained in the trivium. The higher four were arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. These last four comprise the quadtrivium.
The trivium is defined as "an introductory curriculum at a medieval university involving the study of grammar, rhetoric, and logic."
I'd also heard people refer to the trivium as the three roads of learning.
The first road is grammar. Remember when elementary schools used to be known as grammar schools? This stage of learning takes place roughly between birth and 6th grade. The main aspects of this stage according to Dorothy Sayer is memorization, recitation, and observation. So, what does that mean? Lots and lots of memory work!! We memorize a historical timeline, history facts, geographical locations and features, science facts, math facts, latin declensions and noun endings, and english grammar facts. The way it was explained to me is like this: each child has an internal memory pegboard and each fact they learn creates a memory peg on which they can hang future information. Will they understand all the information they memorize? No, not yet. They love memorizing at this age and the harder the words the better! God actually wired them to memorize a vast amount of facts. Think about all the vocabulary words they acquire in the first few years of life. It's amazing. Our family participates in Classical Conversations. One of our tutors explained it so well by saying, "The tutor sets the pegs and the parents hammer in it." As a homeschool mom, I am the primary educator and even though we go to CC once a week, it's my responsibility to help my kiddos memorize the information presented in class and go even deeper in certain subjects. This is also a great stage to choose passages from scripture or poetry and set them to memory for the recitation portion. Hands-on activities and science experiments contribute to the observation aspect of this stage. Kids this age LOVE hands-on activities. The delight on my kids faces when they see the results of cooking recipe they helped with or the thrill of a nature walk is priceless.
The second road is the dialectic or logic stage. Children begin entering this stage in middle school. This is when they naturally begin to question things and begin to argue. This is a natural stage which needs to be embraced by the parent. We might as well teach them to argue and reason correctly and respectfully, right? My oldest son is in this stage now and I love it! We have such great discussions about a wide range of topics. The dialectic stage is when the understanding begins to come from all the knowledge of facts they learned in the grammar stage. They begin to organize the facts on that internal pegboard and learn to recognize truth and error. They can discard error and hold on to the truth.
The third stage is the rhetoric stage. This is where the all the knowledge and understanding culminates in wisdom. Students can begin applying all they have learned in each stage and begin communicating with persuasion and eloquence. Dorothy Sayer's refers to this stage as, "A time to learn the science of communication and the art of expression."
What I love the most about the trivium is the biblical worldview of learning where God is in the center and all the subjects are inter-related to God and each other. We weren't meant to learn math in isolation. We were meant to study math to reveal the order of God and how it relates to astronomy and the order of the universe.
This is the road to learning. I am on this journey with my children. There are days when it's a bit overwhelming because it's so different from the education I received. This is when I am reminded that I am re-claiming my education too! I am classical educating myself right along with my kids. My desire is that my kids love to learn and become life long learners. I'm modeling that desire to my kids by being honest when I'm learning something new. My oldest and I are learning formal logic together this year. It's a great partnership. He is seeing his 40-year old mother tackle a new subject. It's exciting!
Well, hopefully this helped breakdown the trivium in simple terms.
Happy learning!
