The Trivium – Arts or Stages?
Introduction
Almost everyone today in the classical education movement is familiar with the notion of the trivium as the foundation of liberal learning. However, we must make sure that we are clear about what we understand and mean by the ‘trivium’. In my experience as a teacher in the classical school community, most people who are new to classical education or who have not spent time studying educational works of the Western tradition will use the term ‘trivium’ to refer to three supposed stages of education corresponding to what moderns might name ‘elementary’, ‘middle’, and ‘high’ school education. Following Dorothy Sayers who proposed this understanding in her 1947 essay “The Lost Tools of Learning”, many current teachers, parents, and educators refer to the Trivium as stages of a child’s education or a student’s development. I believe many are already familiar with Sayers’ account of how these modes of grammar, logic, and rhetoric map onto the corresponding capacities and inclinations in the students during the given years of their education, so I will not take time to explain that in depth here other than the most cursory overview. (1) In this model, the ‘grammar’ stage (corresponding to roughly ‘elementary’ school) focuses on memorization of fundamental facts, concepts, and stories. The ‘logic’ stage (corresponding to roughly ‘middle’ school) focuses on logical inquiry into causes and relations in various disciplines. And the ‘rhetoric’ stage (corresponding to roughly ‘high’ school) focuses on the student’s own ability to synthesize, create, produce, persuade, and write from what he has learned. In line with this paradigm, many classical schools have distinct academic departments for ‘Grammar School’, ‘Logic School’, and ‘Rhetoric School’, based upon this idea of the trivium as stages of education.
While this model of the trivium as stages of education is predominant in many classical schools that have been planted in the recent few decades of the contemporary revival of classical schooling, my point is to briefly assess whether this is a valuable model or if it misunderstands the trivium. While the growth of classical schools we have seen in recent years is certainly laudable, I remain convinced that, for the long-term health of classical education, we must ensure we actually understand the tradition we claim to be teaching and passing on. I am willing to politely propose and contest that the trivium are first and foremost distinct arts, not primarily stages of a child’s education. The contemporary shift in understanding the trivium is not entirely harmful, but it does risk losing a comprehension of the consistent classical tradition that is represented in works such as the Metalogicon by medieval twelfth-century scholar John of Salisbury (c. 1115 – 1180). The Metalogicon is written as a defense of the trivium against critics in the twelfth-century, so it would behoove us to consider it (and other similar works from the tradition) if we want to take up the modern mantle of defending and transmitting the trivium.
Trivium as Arts
In the view of John of Salisbury (and all the other significant authors in the classical tradition prior to Dorothy Sayers), the arts of the trivium are first and foremost arts. Their names may be applied analogically to stages of a child’s education (following Sayers’s model), but this should not transfer our meaning away from the notion of the trivial arts as arts. Each art of the trivium, as an art, possesses a body of reasoned, ordered knowledge about a subject-matter that enables us to make or do something. As John defends, grammar is the art of communicating through verbal signs and the sentence most specifically. Logic is the art of reasoning which discerns truth. And rhetoric (though John does not address it in detail; other classical authors such as Aristotle or Cicero could help us in that regard) is the art of persuasion. Thus, we cannot fail to acknowledge that each of these arts is a discipline in its own right to be studied and perfected, yielding a corresponding skill that liberates the mind and prepares it to progress in further studies. We risk diluting our understanding of these formative disciplines of the trivium if we see them primarily as stages of education. For example, if we understand ‘grammar’ to mean all of the elementary studies learned in an elementary mode of fact memorization proper to our youngest students, that mistakes the fact that the art of grammar is actually primarily about communicating correctly through verbal signs.
Not only that, but considering the trivium as stages of a child’s education obscures a significant fact about a student’s true mental development. For almost all students, thoroughly understanding the art of grammar entails a level of cognitive organization and difficulty that will rarely be mastered truly before the student attains the age of reason, which would probably be called the ‘logic’ or ‘rhetoric’ stage in most current classical schools. Similarly, the robust philosophical reasoning that Aristotle lays out in his logical works (the Organon) cannot truly be taught to ‘logic’ school grades, if those are middle grade students, because their minds are not sturdy and trained enough yet to handle that kind of difficulty and depth of reasoning. In all three arts – grammar, logic, and rhetoric – the true mastery of the art is not really possible prior to the latter years of primary education (what is normally called the ‘rhetoric’ stage). Transferring the names of the arts to stages of the student’s education can obscure this important fact.
Furthermore, the trivial arts are considered propaedeutic arts, meaning that they engender and give rise to the development of other arts and skills in the student who possesses them. The teachers and authors of the classical tradition considered that the content to be learned and the skills to be gained in the disciplines of the liberal arts (which included both the trivium and the quadrivium) were actually unlike other subjects; the liberal arts had the distinct priority of being fundamentally more important than other subjects a student could learn because of the kind of intellectual habits they formed in their students. Thus, it actually matters whether one masters the art of grammar, not whether they learn a bunch of facts in the ‘grammatical’ mode of elementary instruction, and so on.
Another key consideration that flows from this is that the great teachers and authors in the classical tradition held up the quadrivium as an equally vital component of liberal education – the other half, so to speak, of the propaedeutic liberal arts. (2) A detailed examination of the quadrivium would necessarily entail another essay (or better yet, an entire book, and many wonderful books have been authored). In briefest summary, though, the quadrivial arts of geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy (the arts of quantity or number) are also foundational liberal arts in the classical tradition described by Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian, Augustine, Boethius, Cassiodorus, Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, Thomas Aquinas, Johannes Kepler, and many more. To convert the arts of the trivium into supposed stages of a child’s education can inadvertently cause the corresponding liberal arts of the quadrivium to disappear in our curriculum – or at least to become much less significant in the scheme of curriculum. Treating the trivium as distinct and necessary arts is the first step in guaranteeing that we also hold onto the quadrivium as distinct and necessary arts, rather than allowing them to disappear or lose their distinct character in being subsumed in the general curriculum.
Conclusion
My argument is not intended as a polemic against contemporary classical schools or against Dorothy Sayers, nor do I think she would entirely disagree with my points here (the full text of her essay explains her opinions more precisely and demonstrates that she would be in substantial agreement with me on many points). Nevertheless, while I think Sayers might not discount the points I have raised, I think that the overall trend of the current classical education movement has been to shift our understanding of the trivium from distinct arts to be mastered and to redefine it as stages of a child’s education. I simply want to make sure that in taking up the mantle to defend the trivium, we are actually defending the trivium as it was historically taught and understood, not recreating our own understanding of it that shortchanges or dilutes it. John of Salisbury and his forbears truly believed that the subjects taught in the seven liberal arts (and especially in the trivium) were supposed to provide a foundation for the other studies to be pursued subsequently. And, perhaps more controversially, the disciplines of grammar, logic, and rhetoric (and by extension the quadrivium) were deemed more foundational, exceptional, and propaedeutic than other studies that could have been pursued. In treating the trivium as stages of education rather than as these three core arts, we can miss the fact that the three disciplines of grammar, logic, and rhetoric were themselves deemed indispensable content and skills to be mastered. If we want to use ‘grammar’, ‘logic’, and ‘rhetoric’ to apply to grades of school, we can do so but only if we first understand, preserve, and transmit their original meaning, as well as thoroughly teaching those three liberal arts as foundational in our schools.
Dorothy Sayers writes: “Now it seems to me that the lay-out of the Trivium adapts itself with a singular appropriateness to these three ages: Grammar to the Poll-parrot, Dialectic to the Pert, and Rhetoric to the Poetic Age” (11). “The Lost Tools of Learning”, E. T. Heron Publisher, 1948, https://www.pccs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/LostToolsOfLearning-DorothySayers.pdf (accessed September 3, 2023). It is worth noting that Veritas Press (one of the most well-established of classical, Christian publishers) also uses this designation of the trivium as stages of education throughout their materials.
For an explanation of how the classical tradition arrived at the seven liberal arts, I would recommend the essay “The Seven Liberal Arts” by Andrew Fleming West (originally published in Alcuin and the Rise of Christian Schools, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1912) and now accessible online for free from Classical Academic Press as a PDF edited by Christopher Perrin: https://classicalacademicpress.com/products/the-seven-liberal-arts?srsltid=AfmBOorFnWO3yFp-BJt29IaF5pRfqWVMrmCyJeEovu8aFa87lxzU2okq (accessed September 5, 2024).
