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Home > Classical education

A classically-educated person is intensely skilled, highly disciplined, broadly educated, and if taught Socratically, an amazingly supple and accurate logician and rhetorician.

1 The overall organization

Classical education developed many of the terms now used to describe modern education. Western classical education has three phases, each with a different purpose. The phases are roughly coordinated with human development, and should be exactly coordinated with each student's development.

"Primary education" teaches students how to learn.

"Secondary education" then teaches a conceptual framework that can hold all human knowledge (history), and then fills in basic facts and practices of the major fields of knowledge, and developes the skills (perhaps in a simplified form) of every major human activity.

"Tertiary education" then prepares a person to pursue an educated profession, such as law, theology, war, medicine or science.

1.1 Primary Education

Primary education was often called the trivium, and covered grammar, logic and rhetoric.

Ideally, logic and rhetoric should be taught in part by the Socratic method, in which the teacher raises questions, and the class discusses them.

1.1.1 Grammar

Grammar consists of language skills such as reading, and the mechanics of writing. An important goal of grammar is to acquire as many words and concepts as possible. Very young students can learn these by rote. Classical education traditionally included study of Latin and Greek, so that students could read the Classics of Western Civilization in the words of the authors.

1.1.2 Logic

Young adults can learn logic, the art of correct reasoning. Modern logical systems are remarkably easier to learn than classical logic. The traditional text for teaching logic was Aristotle's Logic.

1.1.3 Rhetoric

Rhetoric, debate and composition (which is just written rhetoric) are taught to somewhat older students, who then have the concepts and logic to criticize their own work, and persuade others. Rhetoric is concerned with making communication clear, reasonable, and persuasive. Hopefully, a student has already learned to reason correctly by studying logic. Students would read and emulate classical poets such as OvidFor other uses, see Ovid (disambiguation Publius Ovidius Naso ( March 20, 43 BC AD 17) Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid wrote on topics of love, abandoned women, and mythological transformations. Ovid wrote in elegiac couplets, with.

1.2 Secondary Education

Secondary education, classically the quadriviumThe quadrivium comprised the four subjects taught in medieval universities after the trivium. The word is Latin, meaning "the four ways" or "the four roads," the completion of the Liberal arts. At many ancient universities (eg Oxford) this would have been or "four ways," classically taught astronomy, arithmetic, music and geometry, usually from Aristotle and EuclidEuclid of Alexandria ( Greek: Eukleides (circa 365 275 BC) was a Greek mathematician, now known as "the father of geometry". His most famous work is the Elements widely considered to be history's most successful textbook. Within it, the properties of geom. Sometimes architecture was taught, often from the works of VitruviusMarcus Vitruvius Pollio was a Roman writer, architect and engineer, active in the 1st century BC. He was the author of De Architectura known today as The Ten Books of Architecture a treatise in Latin on architecture, and perhaps the first work about this.

History was always taught, to provide a context and show political and military development. The classic texts were from ancient authors, such as CiceroFor other uses see Cicero (disambiguation Marcus Tullius Cicero ( January 3, 106 BC December 7, 43 BC) was an orator and statesman of Ancient Rome, and is generally considered the greatest Latin prose stylist. Biography Cicero was born in Arpinum and caug and TacitusThis article is about the historian Tacitus. For the Emperor Tacitus, see Marcus Claudius Tacitus. Publius or Gaius Cornelius Tacitus 1 (c. 117), Roman orator, lawyer, and senator, is today remembered as one of antiquity's greatest historians. His major w.

Biographies were often assigned, as well, the classic being PlutarchMestrius Plutarch (c. 120) was a Greek historian/ biographer and essayist. Born in the small town of Chaeronea, in the Greek region known as Boeotia, probably during the reign of the Roman Emperor Claudius, Mestrius Plutarch travelled widely in the Medite's "Lives." Biographies help show how persons behave in their context, and the wide ranges of professions and options that exist. As more modern texts became available, these were often added to the curriculum.

In the middle ages, these were the best available texts. In modern terms, these fields might be called historyHistory is often used as a generic term for information about the past, such as in "geologic history of the Earth". When used as the name of a field of study, history refers to the study and interpretation of the record of human societies. The term histor, natural science, accounting and business, fine arts (at least two, one to amuse companions, and another to decorate one's domicile), military strategy and tactics, engineering, agronomy, and architecture.

These are taught in a matrix of history, reviewing the natural development of each field for each phase of the trivium. That is, in a perfect classical education, the historical study is reviewed three times: first to learn the grammar (the concepts, terms and skills in the order developed), next time the logic (how these elements could be assembled), and finally the rhetoric, how to produce good, humanly useful and beautiful objects that satisfy the grammar and logic of the field.

History is the unifying conceptual framework, because history is the study of everything that has occurred before the present. A skillful teacher also uses the historical context to show how each stage of development naturally poses questions and then how advances answer them, helping to understand human motives and activity in each field. The question-answer approach is called the "dialectic method," and permits history to be taught Socratically as well.

The Socratic method is the only well-known technique to teach people to think correctly and critically for themselves. In-class discussion and critiques are essential in order for students to recognize and internalize critical thinking techniques. This method is widely used to teach both philosophy and law. It is rare in other contexts because it is extremely uncomfortable for many students and teachers, as well as being unfamiliar. Basically, the teacher referees the students' discussions, should ask leading questions, and may refer to facts, but never give a conclusion until at least one student reaches it. The learning is most effective when the students compete strongly, even viciously in the argument, but always according to well-accepted rules of correct reasoning. That is, fallacies should not be allowed by the teacher.

By the time a student has completed a project in each major field of human effort, they often have an excellent idea of what type of profession they would like to pursue.

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