Ages and Stages vs. Subjects

[Gabrielsyme]

Anyone want to help me think this through? I often hear people argue that grammar, logic and rhetoric are not truly ages and stages and that a genuinely  "Classical" approach is that the Trivium are the key subjects to be studied. I can't quite find my way to settling in either camp. Isn't it both/and?

I am sort of in the early middle years of homeschooling and when I was parenting only very young children I had no problem scoffing that ages/stages was bunk because it seemed obvious to me that teaching children how to think began immediately and never really came to an end. Now I'm not so sure that there isn't some validity to approaching the Trivium as a loose framework of stages. My young children are less complex thinkers and they do suck up information (especially before age 7 or so) and my older children are much more attracted to logical analysis than their younger siblings. it's a little harder for me to see Logic and Rhetoric as separate stages but maybe that's because I haven't watched that unfold first hand. On parallel lines, it still seems obvious that no matter the choice of grist for my particular mill (Latin, mathematics or anything else) the Trivium drives the structure and method of my teaching. In other words, I'm always teaching all three and they are the ultimate "subjects" I want my kids to learn. Anyway, I'm usually the type who doesn't mind a little ambiguity and I'm happy to do the work of teaching and parenting in the way that is best for my kids with little fuss over semantics but I sometimes find myself "caught out" and unable to articulate the way I see these things. 

[forty-two]

I'm kind of both/and.  I don't think the ages/stages thing is really a feature of classical education as such - I think grammar, logic, and rhetoric are first and foremost *subjects*, albeit subjects that also need to be taught in a classical manner - but I have come to see the ages/stages concept as a helpful rule of thumb.  First get a good intuitive understanding of the basic facts of the subject along with their formal definitions (bearing in mind that the "grammar of a subject" isn't rote memorization of facts divorced from their context, but is the facts joined to their animating idea); fundamentally, first learn what a thing is - learn to know it intuitively and to be able to call it by name.  Then, learn to explain what things are and why they are like that.  Learn to put that intuitive understanding into words, learn to *use* those names and definitions to explain what things are to others.  Learn to use what you know to *prove* your intuitions, instead of just assert them.  And then, learn to explain things *well*, to explain them *convincingly*, to apply your knowledge of "how to explain what you know" to your knowledge of "how people are", "how life is".

I do think that it's important to not divorce your understanding of the ages/stages from the nature and purpose of the subjects themselves.  I actually came to appreciate how the ages/stages model accurately described what I saw in my kids and their progression once I had a better understanding of the role of grammar and logic.  In classical education, grammar and logic are meant to help you better study and understand *reality*.  Grammar study is about learning to use words and phrases and sentences to accurately describe *reality*; all those fine grammar distinctions exist because people noticed fine distinctions in reality and wanted to be able accurately describe them.  Learning grammar helps you *see* the world with greater precision.  And logic is about taking one's ability to describe reality with fine accuracy and delving deeper into the nature of reality, learning how to explain *why* things are, learning how to deduce new true things from the true things you already know.  So there's philosophy inherently baked into grammar and logic study.  How you describe reality, and how you think words connect to reality, and how you think logic connects to reality - that all affects how you teach grammar and logic.  And how you connect your grammar and logic study to everything else you are doing. 

I think a lot of people teach grammar and logic to kids the way you'd teach grammar and logic to computers: rules divorced from context.  Rules that don't depend on what a statement means, rules that you can use and apply in a rote manner to generate correct output from correct input, without having to consider what either the input or output means.  It's like a grammar game or a logic game: internally consistent, but with no connection to anything outside itself.  Computers need that because they don't understand what things are, what they mean.  They rely on their programmers to give them meaningful input, and they apply their rules by rote to transform the input into (hopefully) meaningful output, without ever understanding *what* any of it means or *why* any of it matters. 

But classical education is supposed to teach *human* grammar, *human* logic.  It relies on the quintessential human ability of knowing *what* a thing is.  A four year old child can look at a chair and say "chair", but that is an intensely hard task for a computer.  Grammar study - both as a subject and as a stage - is rooted in that ability to *know* what a thing is.  Grammar study teaches us how to accurately describe our intuitive sense of what a thing *is*; logic study teaches us how to accurately prove the truth of what we know; rhetoric study teaches us how to effectively communicate what we know.  Classical education is rooted in the belief that humans can know true things about the world.

ETA: I think that age/stages isn't classical itself, although it can be helpful in classically educating.

Edited March 18, 2019 by forty-two

[Penelope]

If you want to make the brain explode even more, start looking into what dialectic (which is the more original term rather than “logic”) means vs. what it meant in ancient times and medieval vs. what the neoclassical educators mean by it.

The point made by some is that the ages and stages idea originated with Dorothy Sayers in the twentieth century so can not possibly reflect the true understanding of Classical Education, though it’s certainly possible over the centuries that some others made similar observations and connections. Another point is that the ages and stages structure totally ignores the Quadrivium. It’s interesting to read about and wrestle with, and a conundrum for anyone who is attempting a form of classical education at home. I wonder whether the modern neoclassical framework misses the boat on what a classical education was. It’s trying to overlay an older framework on the modern conception of academic “subjects” by sort of flipping the understanding of what teaching the trivium meant. I don’t think very many people alive today have the depth of study and understanding into the matter to understand what sort of classical ideal we are trying to target (from what specific time period?) and what that actually looked like, practically. I think it is almost certainly beyond me to figure this out while in the midst of trying to educate children and carry out the rest of a full life, and that is assuming it is even possible and that, if I could see what that looks like, whether I would be able to or even WANT to fully emulate it. 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 18, 2019 by Penelope
Remove link, not the one I meant to use

[PeterPan]

1 hour ago, Gabrielsyme said:

a genuinely  "Classical" approach is that the Trivium are the key subjects to be studied

Is someone actually espousing that now?? I guess that would differentiate your neoclassical and more die-hard classical movements. But really, I can't fathom anyone (except maybe on the fringes) is now saying ONLY the Trivium. A lot has happened in the last few hundred years and we have to adapt and get the ideas while stepping up to the expectations of modern times.

1 hour ago, Gabrielsyme said:

grammar, logic and rhetoric are not truly ages and stages

I think, like you're saying, they kids mature and some skills come to the table that were only hinted at before. The abilities blossom and become strong tools the kids are ready to use. I think it's ok to say your kid had some ability to do xyz at such and such age, and it happens that some kids are doing that sooner than others, just like IQs vary, etc. But as far as when it all comes together and a blossoming occurs, there's a lot that is recognized developmentally. You'll see it in major publisher curricula, where the whole tenor of their questioning and that transition from learning language and learning to read to using language and reading to learn occurs. That's your 4th grade jump, and then you'll see another major jump from 6th to 7th. That 6th-7th jump is HUGE, crazy huge. And it corresponds to development.

So yeah, I'll bet you're going to see it happen and it will roll the way that kids in your family roll. It's fun to watch them unfurl and blossom. The sorrow to me was that about the time my dd became all that I thought a homeschool student should be, she left. Sigh.

It's gonna go really fast.

[Bluegoat]

So, historically, grammar, logic, and rhetoric have no connection to ages or stages.  They really just don't have anything to do with the mental development of children.

Sayers saw a way to talk about learning within that kind of framework, and I think her insights on development have some truth to them.  Clearly younger children of 6 or 7 are more concrete, then around puberty their ability to abstract and reason takes a significant lea, and later again as they enter young adulthood the ability to synthesise and form more complex webs of thought.

I really wonder at how seriously she meant to be taken in terms of some sort of pedagogical method.  I think she was really using her comparison as a sort of jumping off point to talk about the defects she was seeing in modern education.  

Personally, I sometimes use the neoclassical usage as a shorthand when talking with people who know it - I might say for example I prefer to have study of language in a grammatical method more to the logic stage, because I think it requires that ability to abstract.  But I think there are some real limits on how far you can push it, and it can go astray when people try and make is a real first principle - the idea that you can teach young kids great lists of information with little or no context, for example, comes out of that approach.

[Ausmumof3]

oops double post 

Edited March 19, 2019 by Ausmumof3

[Ausmumof3]

I don’t know that the ages and stages are actually the original idea of classical education but they have been really helpful to me.  I really was trying to do way too much abstract thinking too soon with oldest and things weren’t going that well.  It did help me to step away from the modern education idea of “tell me what you think, create a story, writing prompts” to actually teaching real writing skills, teaching science facts instead of just trying to teach “the scientific method”, using more concrete manipulatives.  From that viewpoint I think the concept is really useful.  That it’s not the entirety of classical education is something I’m just learning and reading more about in the gaps in my days when possible.  But honestly I need a method to effectively educate my kids now so I don’t have time to get it perfect.

[Gabrielsyme]

I don't have time to think clearly in the morning with school and managing behavior BUT I adore Sayers as a writer and really can't imagine she meant her (rather clever) lecture to be the foundation for an educational movement. It also seems natural I suppose, that there is a need to distance oneself from agers and stagers who do advocate a strict interpretation of that sort of "poll parrot" stage. My oldest DD attends a Sayers-style tutorial service and her science teacher seems to think this way. Likely ex-CC.

Edited March 19, 2019 by Gabrielsyme

[forty-two]

Interestingly, a blogger I read had this post today: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/eidos/2019/03/classical-yes-trivium-maybe-eventually/