The Trivium: Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric

Last spring,  I went to the Great Homeschool Convention in Fort Worth, TX with a big question. For a couple of years, I had been studying the liberal arts on my own. I'd read pretty widely and thought I understood the first three arts, the trivium.  As I began to try to understand the quadrivium, I had read The Liberal Arts Tradition by Clark and Jain, as well as Beauty for Truth's Sake by Stratford Caldecott. I still didn't even begin to understand what the quadrivium was about. I went to the conference ready to ask people for their thoughts on how to teach the quadrivium.

I left pretty unsatisfied. I got varying answers from "teach sol-fa for music" to "let them take a drafting class" to "teach them what home means."  I knew I would not make any progress at this point without a guide.  

A few weeks later, I heard that a new class was being offered by the CiRCE Institute. It would be The Atrium with Andrew Kern on the seven liberal arts. It took me about two minutes to decide to register. 

We spent the fall studying the trivium. I realized I didn't know near as much about them as I thought I did. At the end of the semester, Andrew asked us to answer this question: 

What is the Trivium and why does it matter? 

Here's my answer!

What is the Trivium and Why Does it Matter?

The Trivium is a word referring to the first three arts in a series known as The Seven Liberal Arts. It consists of Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric.  These liberal arts have been the foundation of education for the majority of human history, were cultivated in early Greece and Rome and practiced into the Middle Ages , were refined and trusted as a path to free persons by the early Church and beyond until very recent times.  

The liberal arts became the foundation of education because the goal of education was to humanize a person, to enable them to perceive truth, to grow in wisdom and virtue, to order their loves toward Truth, Goodness and Beauty.  The liberal arts were a means to this end.  To become a more humane person was to become what we were created to be, which is a nourished, healthy, robust soul living in the example of Jesus Christ, whose words and actions are blessings to their community.  This is an education not only that all human beings deserve, but all are capable of receiving by virtue of being a human. 

An art has many different definitions and connotes a variety of ideas. In the past, different kinds of arts were recognized. There were service arts which were handicraft and craftsman skills and today would be things like electricians, carpenters, or any other job-skill set that qualifies a person to perform services as an expert.  There were also fine arts, which were arts that were an end in themselves. Their name “fine” comes from Latin, finis, the end. These arts are practiced to bring beauty into the world and to entertain as an end in themselves; their enjoyment is their purpose and meaning.  A third category of arts were the liberal arts, which might be better termed the liberating arts. An art is that which joins imitation of other masters and one’s own reason to create something new.  The liberal arts are ideas that once learned, give a person the tools of learning. When those tools and abilities are joined with our human reason, it creates a human being that is capable of learning anything else they want to learn. By making us independent learners, the liberal arts release us from dependency on others and make free human beings. 

The seven liberal arts liberate a person by helping them to perceive truth, which is also to see the one central unifying idea in everything. In a liberal arts education, truth is real, and Jesus Christ is the unifying idea, the Logos in Greek, of everything that we can possibly learn. It all reveals Him to us as students. 

The seven arts are divided into two categories: the trivium (three-fold path) and the quadrivium (four-fold path).  Our world is made and governed by two things: language and mathematics, words and numbers. Our world was spoken into existence through the Word of God, and it is held together by mathematical rules God designed to govern everything in creation. The liberal arts are focused on these two things: understanding language and mathematical arts. The Trivium arts in particular can be understood as arts of language.

The Trivium is compromised of the arts of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, which are all foundational to mastering the use of and understanding of language. Language is unique to human beings, and it came to us as part of being an image bearer of God. 

In beginning with grammar, we help our students get to know their world and giving names to everything they encounter. Grammar is about naming things, about remembering that which is worth remembering, and beginning to form a relationship with the world.  In grammar, we also go beyond naming and help our students find the meaning of things and interpret the symbols they encounter every day. The meaning is found in the relationship between the thing and other things. 

A basic example of this is the progression of letters to words to sentences to whole texts.  Each letter is a symbol for a sound; letters form a relationship to make a word that is a symbol for a thing; words form a relationship to make a sentence that is a symbol for an idea or action; sentences form a relationship in a text that is a symbol of a larger idea or a symbol of many things. Grammar involves naming, relating, attention, contemplation, story, participation in community, and grounding in traditions. The content that is studied in grammar can literally be anything! It does involve lessons in language syntax and etymology and especially in literary tradition and culture, but it can and ought to be a general introduction to anything and everything that could tell a student who and why they are. The universe has meaning on large and small scales, and grammar is the beginning of uncovering that meaning. Teaching our kids to discover the meaning of symbols is the beginning, and the interpretation of that meaning can be a great challenge and delight! Interpretation leads us into Dialectic. 

Dialectic is the second art in the Trivium.  The simple definition of dialectic is the art of reasoning. Dialectic is learning to think. But we can’t just learn to think; we must learn to think about something. The something worth thinking about is the truth. Thinking is the mental process of separating truth from falsehood. All seven of the liberal arts are arts of truth perception, and dialectic is an integral tool to this end. The search for truth is fundamental to our humanity. Dialectic is mainly taught in two ways: by teaching logic, which is comprised of skill and ideas, and by Socratic teaching, which is a teaching method, or pedagogy. 

The skills gained in logic have to do with being able to reason well. Reasoning means the power of mind to think, understand, and form judgments. Making sound judgments and interpreting things well is a vital part of an education. Logic teaches how to analyze arguments by learning informal fallacies and syllogisms of thought. 

Socratic teaching is the art of asking good questions. The goal of asking good questions is to harmonize our minds with reality. “The search for truth keeps us sane because it always brings us back to reality.” (Kern)  Learning to ask the right questions also helps us keep faith and reason in harmony with each other. They depend on each other. Faith opens reason to a transcendent horizon; it encourages reason to aspire to greater truth than that which we can simply observe with our five senses. On the other hand, our faith needs reason in order to penetrate ever more deeply into the mystery that has been revealed, to unfold its implications and explore the world in its light. “The quality of one’s life depends on the quality of questions being asked.” (Kern)

Dialectic is an aid to the main goal of education: the expansion of the self. “It has to be understood that learning, which is the expansion of the self, takes place in community. The expansion of the self, we might say, requires the development of empathy and courtesy - empathy in order to be able to see another’s point of view, and courtesy to act as though one were not the center of the world.” (Caldecott p. 81)  Recognizing where all we have and all we know comes from leads us to humility, repentance, and ultimately gratitude. Gratitude could be considered the highest form of thought, and therefore, the the ultimate of dialectic. 

The art of rhetoric is traced back beyond Aristotle to Homer and even to the prophets of Israel.  Rhetoric is often though of as the art of persuasion, but it is more about becoming a good communicator of truth. Teaching rhetoric can be a dangerous endeavor if the central unifying truth is forgotten or ignored. and the ability to persuade is focused on without being grounded in the truth of Christ.  Without Jesus, all the liberal arts are learned in vain. Rhetoric especially has a temptation to lead people to thirst for power through their ability to persuade others with words, not caring whether or not they speak the truth.  In Christ, however, rhetoric is the work of being a person fit to speak and act in a way that displays truth and blesses others.  When truth enters our soul, it immediately starts trying to find a way out; to radiate out. (Hebrews 1:3) The truth enlarges the soul and love is the outward expression of it. If dialectic is the pursuit of truth, rhetoric is the love of apprehended truth spilling over and expressed in words and actions that bless. If the highest form of dialectic is gratitude, the highest form of rhetoric is worship. 

Each of these Trivium arts, grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, are learned not in succession, but on a gradual continuum that may vary from student to student.  For example, a student is doing rhetoric level phonics when they read their first book independently and understand it and can tell the story. They are using all their knowledge of individual letters, sounds, and the meaning behind each word and sentence to understand a whole story.  Young children can be performing at a rhetoric level in some subjects, and older students will need to begin challenging high school subjects with the grammar of the subject: learning the symbols and terms unique to an area of study so they can begin to ask questions and then communicate the truths they discover. We are always using the art of grammar to learn something new, while also using the art of rhetoric to communicate other truths we already know. 

The Trivium, the first three of the seven liberal arts, matter for every human being. By learning these arts, students begin to have the ability to know reality and the truth, to think deeply and well about the reality and the truth, to ask good questions about reality and the truth, and communicate to others what they have discovered.  In this way, our children become more like what they were meant to be. They become more human, their soul is enlarged, their mind harmonized with reality, and their loves fixed on the truths that so delight and satisfy  them.