TOS Styles Column welcomes Guest Speaker Susan Wise Bauer to share insight on the subject of Classical Education. Welcome Susan!

All modern-day classical education is actually "neo-classical"-it adapts an old pattern to suit the present day. This old pattern, which sees education as a three-part process, is commonly called the trivium.

The first years of schooling are called the grammer stage." During these years, the foundation for all other learning is laid. In the elementary school years-what we commonly think of as grades one through four-the mind is ready to absorb information. Children at this age actually find memorization fun. So during this period, education involves not self-expression and self-discovery, but rather the learning of facts. Rules of phonics and spelling, rules of grammar, poems, the vocabulary of foreign languages, the stories of history and literature, descriptions of plants and animals and the human body, the facts of mathematics-the list goes on. This information makes up the "grammer," or the basic building blocks, for the second stage of education.

By fifth grade, a child's mind begins to think more analytically. Middle-school students are less interested in finding out facts than in asking "Why?" In the second phase of classical education, the "Logic Stage," the child begins to pay attention to cause and effect, to the way relationships between different fields of knowledge relate, to the way facts fit together into a logical framework. During these years, the student begins algebra and the study of logic, and begins to apply logic to all academic subjects. The logic of writing, for example, includes paragraph construction and learning to support a thesis; the logic of reading involves the criticism and analysis of texts, not simple absorption of information; the logic of history demands that the student find out why the War of 1812 was fought, rather than simply reading its story; the logic of science requires that the child learn the scientific method.

The final phase of a classical education, the "Rhetoric Stage," builds on the first two. At this point, the high school student learns to write and speak with force and originality. The student of rhetoric applies the rules of logic learned in middle school to the foundational information learned in the early grades and expresses his conclusions in clear, forceful, elegant language. Students also begin to specialize in whatever branch of knowledge attracts them; these are the years for art camps, college courses, foreign travel, apprenticeships, and other forms of specialized training.

For the classical student, all knowledge is interrelated. Astronomy (for example) isn't studied in isolation; it's learned along with the history of scientific discovery, which leads into the church's relationship to science and from there to the intricacies of medieval church history. The reading of the Odyssey leads the student into the consideration of Greek history, the nature of heroism, the development of the epic, and man's understanding of the divine.

This is easier said than done. The world is full of knowledge, and finding the links between fields of study can be a mind-twisting task. A classical education meets this challenge by taking history as its organizing outline-beginning with the ancients and progressing forward to the moderns in history, science, literature, art and music.

We suggest that the twelve years of education consist of three repetitions of the same four-year pattern: Ancients, Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, and Modern Times. The child studies these four time periods at varying levels-simple for grades 1-4, more difficult in grades 5-8 (when the student begins to read original sources), and taking an even more complex approach in grades 9-12, when the student works through these time periods using original sources (from Homer to Hitler) and also has the opportunity to pursue a particular interest (music, dance, technology, medicine, biology, creative writing) in depth.

The other subject areas of the curriculum are linked to history studies. The student who is working on ancient history will read the tales of the Iliad and Odyssey, Chinese and Japanese fairy tales, and (for the older student) the classical texts of Plato, Herodutus, Virgil, Aristotle. She'll read Beowulf, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare the following year, when she's studying medieval and early Renaissance history. When the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are studied, she starts with Swift (Gulliver's Travels) and ends with Dickens; finally, she reads modern literature as she is studying modern history.

The sciences are studied in a four-year pattern that roughly corresponds to the periods of scientific discovery: biology, classification and the human body (subjects known to the ancients); earth science and basic astronomy (which flowered during the early Renaissance); chemistry (which came into its own during the early modern period); and then basic physics and computer science (very modern subjects).

This pattern lends coherence to the study of history, science, and literature-subjects that are too often fragmented and confusing. The pattern widens and deepens as the student progresses in maturity and learning. For example, a first grader listens to you read the story of the Iliad from one of the picture book versions available at any public library. Four years later, the fifth grader reads one of the popular middle-grade adaptations-Olivia Coolidge's The Trojan War, or Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales of Troy. Four more years go by, and the ninth grader-faced with the Iliad itself-plunges right in, undaunted.

This systematic study also allows the student to join what Mortimer Adler calls the "Great Conversation"-the ongoing conversation of great minds down through the ages. Much modern education is so eclectic that the student has little opportunity to make connections between past events and the flood of current information. "The beauty of the classical curriculum," writes classical schoolmaster David Hicks, "is that it dwells on one problem, one author, or one epoch long enough to allow even the youngest student a chance to exercise his mind in a scholarly way: to make connections and to trace developments, lines of reasoning, patterns of action, recurring symbolisms, plots, and motifs."

Susan is the co-author of The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home (written with her mother, Jessie Wise) and the author of the new world history series The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child (Peace Hill Press). She is currently working on a second book for W. W. Norton, Training Our Own Minds: Classical Self-Education for Adults. Susan was taught at home for most of elementary and middle school, and all of high school; she was a Presidential Scholar and National Merit finalist, and earned a B.A. in English, a Master of Divinity (from Westminster Theological Seminary), and an M.A. in English Language and Literature (from the College of William and Mary). She currently teaches American literature and writing at William and Mary, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies. Susan and her husband Peter now live in rural Virginia, where Peter is the minister of a nondenominational church. They educate their three sons and one daughter at home.

The Old Schoolhouse Magazine is thankful for Susan's willingness to share, and she'll be back to enlighten us further in the Winter issue, so look forward to it! Another TOSâ„¢ Styles guest speaker, Pamela Maxey, owner of Classic Apple, will present a 3-part series on learning styles and unit studies, which will appear in the Fall, Winter and Summer issues.

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