Providence Classical Christian Academy
A Univeristy Model School
Classical education is a return to the proven educational methods and theories of the past. In fact, until about one hundred years ago the classical method was the method for everyone in Western civilization. Although the classical approach was not distinctly developed until the Middle Ages, its practice dates back to the Greek and Roman eras. Any list of the great minds of the past will reveal people who were products of classical education –Archimedes, St. Paul, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, John Calvin, Martin Luther, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Edwards, even George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
The goal of education in ancient and medieval times was to teach children how to think and learn for themselves. They were given the tools of learning and then taught how to apply those tools of learning to any subject they encountered.
This three-part process of training the mind is called the trivium.
The first part of the process in training the mind of the children is called the "grammar stage". In kindergarten through the fourth grade, children are taught the building blocks of literature, math, phonics, spelling, and foreign languages. Memorization and drill using rhyme, rhythm and recitation will regularly characterize classroom instruction by a single instructor. During these foundational years, they will learn large amounts of information that is absorbed and stored for the next stage of the educational process.
As children reach the fifth grade, their minds start to think more analytically. The second stage of the trivium is called the "logic stage", where a child is less interested in finding out the facts and more interested in asking "Why?" During the logic stage of the process, students will begin to apply logic to all of the academic subjects. The logic of history, for example, requires students to focus on why the First World War was fought, rather than simply reading the story. Also, children will learn to support a thesis in the logic of writing, as well as paragraph construction. Simply absorbing information at this stage in the process will not be accepted, but students will be challenged to apply logic to every subject.
The third and final stage of the classical education, the "rhetoric stage" is where the student learns to express conclusions, as well as write with originality. A student of rhetoric applies the rules of logic learned from the second stage of the process and combines it with the information from grammar school to express his conclusions in a clear, forceful, elegant language.
Classical education is a return to a tradition with a long history. The earliest Christians drew from the Greco-Roman model, emphasizing language, logic, science, and adjusting it to the demands of Biblical theology. Modern culture has seen basic educational discipline lost in a sea of individual discovery, situational ethics, and floating moral standards. Classical education today seeks to return to time tested methods of teaching time honored subjects in an attempt to rediscover and pass on the lost tools of learning.