The Trivium

Part 2 of My Series on Classical Education

Welcome back to The Burnett Breakdown. I am continuing my series that I started last week on education. You can read Part 1 here if you have not read it yet.

The “How” of Education 

I concluded last week’s discussion of the purpose of education by saying that the goal of education was “to instill wisdom and virtue” in students.

Now, this may sound great, but I don’t necessarily believe this purpose makes classical education unique to Christian education more generally. If I had to guess, most Christians, and Christian schools, across the United States would likely agree with this purpose, albeit maybe saying it differently.  

What, I believe, makes classical education distinct from Christian education more broadly (and here, I mean modern Christian education as Christian education throughout the centuries has been classical) is how classical education seeks to accomplish this purpose.  

Unfortunately, many Christian schools leave their plans vague regarding how they plan to instill wisdom and virtue in their students. They may have chapel and Bible class, but then they take a “hope and pray” approach for the rest of their curriculum.  

Now, that’s not to say that we alone, using classical education, can teach our students to be wise and virtuous apart from the Holy Spirit working on their hearts; however, we should still be intentional in our efforts to instill wisdom and virtue in our students as the Holy Spirit can and will use it.  

So, how does classical education instill wisdom and virtue? Going back to our definition from last week, we do this by “forming a child...into someone skilled in the liberal arts.” Let’s unpack what that means.  

Let’s start with the phrase itself. When we speak of the “arts,” we do not mean arts as it is typically understood now; that is, of things such as painting, sculpture, or a piece of music. Instead, we mean “skills.” For example, we mean it in the same way that someone who says, “You have mastered the art of public speaking” or the “art of persuasion.”  

“Liberal,” on the other hand, means “free.” This doesn’t mean “free to do whatever you want” but “free and dignified.” So, the “liberal arts” are skills that a man must possess to be free. As Sister Miriam Joseph puts it:  

“The liberal arts...teach on how to live; they train the faculties and bring them to perfection; they enable a person to rise above his material environment to live an intellectual, a rational, and therefore a free life in gaining truth.”  

These liberal arts are distinct from the other arts: namely, “The Manual Arts” and the “Fine Arts.” For perspective, the manual arts are all the skills that have to do with the use of one’s hands (manual comes from the Latin word for “hand,” manus) such as cooking, woodworking, machine repair, typing, etc. The fine arts are those things that are done for their own sake (fine comes from the Latin finis, which means end) such as singing, acting, painting, dancing, etc. We don’t dance or sing for any other reason than they are good to do in and of themselves.  

When I speak of classical education as the cultivation of the liberal arts in students, that isn’t meant to discount the manual and the fine arts. Every well-rounded human being ought to be trained in the fine and manual arts; however, the narrowing of classical education to the liberal arts is for the sake of focus.  

So, what specifically are these liberal arts?  

The liberal arts developed over time to include the linguistic skills of the trivium and the mathematical skills of the quadrivium. One way to summarize the two is that the trivium “pertains to the liberal arts of the mind” and the quadrivium “pertains to the liberal arts of matter.”  I will take these one week at a time starting this week with the trivium.

As the description suggests, the linguistic skills of the trivium deal with language; namely, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. But, before I explain each of these, what does language have to do with education?

Marguerite McGlinn writes:  

“...language evolves from the very nature of being human. Because we are rational, we think; because we are social, we interact with other people; because we are corporeal, we use a physical medium. We invent symbols to express the range of practical, theoretical, and poetical experiences that make up our existence. Words allow us to leave a legacy of our experience to delight and to educate those who follow us. Because we use language, we engage in a dialogue with the past and the future.” 

Language is central to being human. No other part of God’s creation on Earth has language like we do. Whales may make sounds to communicate, but they pale in comparison to the complex linguistic capacity and system of human beings.

Unfortunately, in our world today, language is viewed as just another social construct that needs to be deconstructed. This view misses the point that language is how we as humans organize our thinking and communicate information to other humans. There is no passing on knowledge, wisdom, or virtue without language, so we need to ensure students understand language and can use language well.  

By teaching language skills, the trivium equips students with the mental capacity to comprehend, discern, and communicate reality.  

Now to those specific components of the trivium that I mentioned earlier, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. 

Most people who have heard these terms likely know them from Dorothy Sayers’s talk The Lost Tools of Learning. In this talk, made famous by being republished in Doug Wilson’s book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, Sayers talked about the Medieval Trivium in terms of “stages of learning.” While I think these stages (and if you don’t know them, that’s okay) offer some helpful insights, they are not quite what was intended in the Middle Ages by the trivium. In fact, Sayers, herself, in the talk said that she is sketching out “a modern Trivium ‘with modifications.’” 

Sayers knew the Medieval Trivium and acknowledged that she was deviating from it even if ever so slightly.  

Grammar, in the Medieval sense, is “the art of inventing and combining symbols.”  

Language is merely the use of symbols to comprehend reality. Here’s an example: I have a 1-and-a-half-year-old son named Declan. His grandparents have a dog named Millie. When Declan was younger, he would see Millie. He would touch Millie. He would even try and taste Millie. But, he had no real conception that the thing he was seeing, touching, and tasting was a thing called a “dog”, that dogs have “names”, and that that dog’s name was Millie.  

Millie didn’t cease to exist because Declan did not have a conception of her, but Declan was limited in his capacity to comprehend the reality of Millie because he was limited in his grammar.  

This is why when children are infants, we, as adults, spend pretty much all of our time pointing at stuff and naming it. We are teaching children to associate a certain symbol (word) with a real thing in the world.  

Grammar is also the skill of putting those words in a particular sequence in order to make sense. For example, once you have words for concepts like “sky” and “blue” you can think of the sky as blue and say “the blue sky”. You can even denote change such as the sky WAS blue during the day but NOW the sky is black.  

Again, these are realities that exist apart from our putting words to them, but our putting words to them (the art of grammar) allows us to make more sense of the world.  

Like my son learning his colors, shapes, numbers, letters, and everything else, memory is inherent in the art of grammar. For all the criticism of “rote memory,” it is impossible to have “critical thinking” apart from having a whole bunch of stuff memorized.  

For example, I took a history class in college about the History of Modern Germany. In that class, we read scholarly articles and, in a sense, entered the high-level debates regarding the history of Germany. I mean at one point I remember discussing the demographics in two specific German cities and what that told us about the appeal of Nazism.  

What was the issue with this class? I didn’t actually learn anything because every time my professor mentioned the name of a significant person, battle, or entity, I was too busy trying to figure out what that term was and missed the “larger theme” that I was supposed to understand.  

This is why we mustn’t think of grammar as merely a “stage of development” that children are in when they are in elementary school. No matter the age and no matter the subject, all learners must begin with grammar to learn any new subject.  

You must know the terms and the concepts underlying those terms before you can enter into any sort of in-depth analysis of a topic. This is why if you don’t know what certain legal terms mean, you won’t understand a lengthy legal document even though you can read the words on the page. You don’t have the proper legal grammar so to speak.  

So, again, grammar is the art of inventing and combining symbols.  

Let’s move on to logic. The Medieval art of logic is “the art of thinking.” I know this doesn’t seem like a very productive definition because surely, I have been talking about thinking this entire time, but logic is the art of right and orderly thinking.  

I think logic is the hardest of liberal arts to understand if you have not studied the subject of logic itself but is one of the most intuitive subjects to learn (once you learn its grammar of course). Logic deals with taking those terms that one learned using the skill of grammar and defining them, combining them into judgments (statements that make a truth claim), and creating syllogisms and longer chains of reasoning out of those judgments to draw right conclusions.  

When students are skilled in logic, they can properly structure arguments and think through the content of arguments. This is more than just teaching them fallacies but teaching them right reasoning so that they can identify wrong reasoning.  

Logic equips students to properly define terms, categorize reality, and divide concepts.   

By teaching students the art of right reasoning, we equip them to go from one truth to another truth.  

The last of the trivium, Rhetoric, is defined by Aristotle as, “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” Another way to say it is that rhetoric is the study of how to effectively persuade.  

Unfortunately, the art of being persuasive has the connotation of just being a smooth talker or someone skilled in “winning arguments”. Since this is the case, the temptation then is just to focus on creating virtuous people without regard for their ability to persuade. This is incomplete though; for, a virtuous person can’t help but to promote virtue in others.  

Rhetoric is also more than public speaking, it includes any form of writing where one is persuading or even just explaining an idea. This means that rhetoric is honed throughout a student’s schooling as teachers demand higher quality short-answer writing from seniors than from third graders. This is another reason why we mustn’t restrict rhetoric to a particular “stage of development” but view it as a skill that the students are developing throughout their education.

Once students have honed their linguistic skills in grammar, logic, and rhetoric, they are capable of using language well which means they can think and communicate well. This is why the Medieval educators prioritized the trivium.

God Bless,

Hunter Burnett