Neo-classical education
One of the focuses of the child-centered progressive movement was the various stages of learning that children experience. This focus can also be seen in the publication of a paper presented at Oxford in 1947 by Dorothy Sayers, in which she draws an analogy between then-current child development ideas and the skills of grammar, logic, and rhetoric presented in the ancient classical trivium, particularly as seen in Medieval times.
She called the early stage of learning the “poll-parrot” stage during which “grammar” (any basic level of knowledge, not only grammar of language) could be naturally and quickly absorbed. The next stage, Pert, was supposedly an ideal time to learn Logic and the art of argumentation. The final stage, Poetic, was a time to focus on Rhetoric skills. She insisted that a return to the “lost tools of learning” was absolutely necessary to see a better effect than more modern educational ideas of her day, and she used the idea of stages of learning to illustrate the wisdom of doing so.
Dorothy Sayers was actually known during her lifetime more for her work as a poet, mystery writer, and a playwright than for her paper about the “lost tools of learning”. She was a contemporary and friend of C.S. Lewis, and was well known as a Christian writer. Her analogy of the trivium and stages of learning actually lay dormant until the 1980s, when it was made popular in a book called Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning. That book gave rise to what is now thought of as the Neoclassical movement, a central point of which is the idea that the trivium primarily referred to three stages of learning: the grammar stage, the logic stage and the rhetoric stage (conveniently corresponding to modern levels of elementary, middle, and high school education). That “neoclassical” approach is what I was originally introduced to as “classical” learning.
One can only wonder if Sayers would have been amused to know that her paper about education would be used as an entire pedagogy for classical education. While not everyone agrees today with the ideas she expressed about stages of child development, there is no denying the influence that they have had on the world of “classical Christian education”.
Today, the phrases "trivium" and "classical education" mean entirely different things, depending on who you ask and which camp they are in. In one sense, as Susan Wise Bauer has been known to say, we are all “neoclassical”, since no one is attempting to exactly recreate the educational system of the Greeks, Romans, or Middle Ages.
In another sense, however, the “neoclassical” movement has clear distinctives such as presenting the trivium as “ages and stages” of learning, and a heavy emphasis on memorization of facts in the early elementary years (Andrew Campbell, author of The Latin Centered Curriculum, explains some additional distinctives in this excellent article). As Mr. Campbell asserts, it is difficult to find any program now that is not in some way influenced by these neoclassical ideas (most classical schools and programs today refer to their students as being in the grammar, logic, or rhetoric stages of learning), but those that are more Latin-centered and literature-centered than history and rote-memory centered tend to lean more in the direction of what I consider “traditional classical” than others.
Click here to read about another woman who made an impact on education - Charlotte Mason.
She called the early stage of learning the “poll-parrot” stage during which “grammar” (any basic level of knowledge, not only grammar of language) could be naturally and quickly absorbed. The next stage, Pert, was supposedly an ideal time to learn Logic and the art of argumentation. The final stage, Poetic, was a time to focus on Rhetoric skills. She insisted that a return to the “lost tools of learning” was absolutely necessary to see a better effect than more modern educational ideas of her day, and she used the idea of stages of learning to illustrate the wisdom of doing so.
Dorothy Sayers was actually known during her lifetime more for her work as a poet, mystery writer, and a playwright than for her paper about the “lost tools of learning”. She was a contemporary and friend of C.S. Lewis, and was well known as a Christian writer. Her analogy of the trivium and stages of learning actually lay dormant until the 1980s, when it was made popular in a book called Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning. That book gave rise to what is now thought of as the Neoclassical movement, a central point of which is the idea that the trivium primarily referred to three stages of learning: the grammar stage, the logic stage and the rhetoric stage (conveniently corresponding to modern levels of elementary, middle, and high school education). That “neoclassical” approach is what I was originally introduced to as “classical” learning.
One can only wonder if Sayers would have been amused to know that her paper about education would be used as an entire pedagogy for classical education. While not everyone agrees today with the ideas she expressed about stages of child development, there is no denying the influence that they have had on the world of “classical Christian education”.
Today, the phrases "trivium" and "classical education" mean entirely different things, depending on who you ask and which camp they are in. In one sense, as Susan Wise Bauer has been known to say, we are all “neoclassical”, since no one is attempting to exactly recreate the educational system of the Greeks, Romans, or Middle Ages.
In another sense, however, the “neoclassical” movement has clear distinctives such as presenting the trivium as “ages and stages” of learning, and a heavy emphasis on memorization of facts in the early elementary years (Andrew Campbell, author of The Latin Centered Curriculum, explains some additional distinctives in this excellent article). As Mr. Campbell asserts, it is difficult to find any program now that is not in some way influenced by these neoclassical ideas (most classical schools and programs today refer to their students as being in the grammar, logic, or rhetoric stages of learning), but those that are more Latin-centered and literature-centered than history and rote-memory centered tend to lean more in the direction of what I consider “traditional classical” than others.
Click here to read about another woman who made an impact on education - Charlotte Mason.