Classical Education FAQ

Q: "What is Classical education?"

A: Classical education is the method of teaching and learning that has been used throughout western history, and has many facets. A current renaissance of this movement is spreading through the country, both in schools and homeschools, and we are proud to be a part of it. One term to describe the particular branch of classical education that we support is “trivium-based education”, shortened here to TBE. This movement within classical education was inspired by Dorothy Sayers and Douglas Wilson to restore the trivium as a model for shaping primary and secondary education. Other emphases of a classical education are the integration of subjects, the study of a classical language, often Latin, and the reading and discussion of the great books.

Q: What is the Trivium?

A: The term trivium comes from the Latin "tri-via" or "three paths" and it was the first three disciplines or subjects taught in Medieval education. Those three disciplines were grammar, logic and rhetoric.

Q: "How does TBE differ from conventional models of education?"

A:  For a more thorough answer, we encourage you to do some research, reading one of our classical education booklets, pictured here, and for further research, Douglas Wilson's Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning or Dorothy Sayer's essay "The Lost Tools of Learning." Here, in brief, are a few things that TBE schools and home-school curricula tend to have in common:

• A focus on songs, chants and rote learning in grammar (elementary) school. Beginning the study of Latin (or sometimes Greek) very early, generally around 3rd grade.
• A focus on thinking skills and critical thinking in the "dialectic" or "logic" stage which is generally seen as covering grades 7-9.

• Beginning the study of logic in 7th or 8th grade.
• A focus on self-expression, public speaking and practical application in the "rhetoric" stage, which is generally seen as covering grades 10-12. Beginning the formal study of rhetoric in 10th or 11th grade.

Q: "What is a paradigm discipline?"

A:  Within the TBE community, the disciplines of Latin/grammar, logic and rhetoric that form the trivium, are often referred to as the "paradigm disciplines." The term "paradigm" means "model" and in this sense, the "paradigm disciplines" are the disciplines that set the tone for the rest of the student's subjects at each stage of the student's education.

A Recent History of the Classical Education Movement

For about 15 to 20 years, the U.S. has witnessed a trend toward going back to the past to find intellectual, educational and artistic stimulation. In the popular jargon, this trend is referred to as "going retro." As modernism wanes and a new "postmodernism" begins to supplant it, our culture is generally struggling with the loss of meaningful "paradigms" that directed the culture, set its boundaries and provided the questions that we were to answer. Even, postmodernists, then, who have no interest in a vigorous classical education per se, are still interested with the past, even if only to play with it, or learn to be fascinated by it.

Trivium-Based Education (TBE) has been recovered and begun to grow in the U.S. since about 1980, with the creation of the Logos School in Moscow, Idaho, under the leadership of Doug Wilson and some of his colleagues. Since that time, a "movement" has slowly begun in which more and more TBE schools have started, the great majority of them being in the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS). A great deal of homeschoolers are turning to TBE as well. Other streams of education reform can also be called "classical" but are not Trivium-based.

Classical Academic Press intends to supply educators from classical schools and homeschool with the valuable resources they need in the pursuit of academic excellence.