The first years of schooling are best concentrating on what is called the Grammar Stage of learning. Here the focus is on language. Language is the operating system of the mind and the means of communication written and oral. One’s ability to think and speak cannot rise in depth or complexity above one’s facility with language. Knowledge and skill with language are the building blocks for all other learning, just as grammar is the foundation for language.

​Ideally, in the elementary school years – what we commonly think of as grades one through four – the mind is best ready to absorb information. Children at this age actually find memorization easy and fun. So during this period, education involves not self- expression and self-discovery, as is common in progressive education strategies, 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 “grammar” or the basic building blocks for all higher forms of knowledge and education. On the level of grammar, instruction is direct. The instructor carries out the role in education as a lecturer who provides the needed information and facts, terminology, history and structures of whatever is being learned. A student learns the grammar and language of history, of anatomy, of geography, etc. But just hearing or reading the information is not enough. It must be committed to memory in order to be internalized. Here students must work to make the grammar their own and the teacher needs also then to function as a coach who supervises practice, devises drills, motivates performance, and works one-on-one for mastery. In three words the grammar stage is digested – memorize! Memorize!

Memorize!In the middle grades, a child’s mind begins to think more analytically. Middle-school students are less interested in finding out facts than in asking “Why?” The second phase of education in the language skills, the Logic Stage, is a time when the child begins to pay attention to cause and effect, to the relationships between different fields of knowledge, to the way facts fit together into a meaningful framework. A student is ready for the Logic Stage when the capacity for abstract thought begins to mature. During these years, the student begins the study of critical reasoning and logic. He begins to apply critical thinking 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 inductive reasoning.

The final language skill in a classical education is rhetoric. The Rhetoric Stage builds on the skills of grammar and logic. At this point, the high school student learns to write and speak with force and originality. Here the student doesn’t just memorize or analyse what others have contributed to the conversation in the inquiry into knowledge. Here the student joins the conversation offering his own insight. The student of rhetoric applies the rules of logic learned in middle school to the foundational information learned in the early grades and then expresses his conclusions, applications, and evaluations in clear, forceful language.

A classical education is more than simply a pattern of learning. Classical education is language- focused; learning is accomplished primarily through words, written and spoken, rather than an emphasis on images (pictures, videos, and television). Why is this important? Language-learning and image-learning require very different habits of thought. Language requires the mind to work harder. In reading, for instance, the brain is forced to translate a symbol (words on the page) into a concept. Images, such as those on videos and television, allow the mind to be passive. In front of a video screen, the brain can “sit back” and relax, but faced with the written page, the mind is required to be intensely active.

A classical education, then, has two important learning aspects. It is language-focused and follows a specific three-part pattern of learning: the mind is first supplied with facts and images, then given the logical tools for organization of facts, and finally equipped to express conclusions. Moreover, in the classical model, all knowledge is understood as interrelated. Astronomy (for example) isn’t studied in isolation; it is 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.A classical education integrates most ideally by using history as its organizing outline – beginning with the ancients and progressing forward to the moderns in history, science, literature, philosophy, religion, art, and music. The classical model is highly systematic – in direct contrast to the scattered, unorganized nature of so much secondary education. Systematic and rigorous study have two purposes. They develop virtue in the student – the ability to act in accordance to what one knows to be right. The virtuous man (or woman) can force himself to do what he knows to be right, even when it runs against his inclinations. Classical education continually asks a student to work against his baser inclinations (laziness, or the desire to watch another half hour of TV) in order to reach a goal — mastery of a subject.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. Progressive education has become so eclectic that the student has little opportunity to make meaningful connections between past eventsand 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.”

With this educational model, the need to prepare students for cultural assimilation and a good job gives way to a curriculum, learning strategies, and goals that will provide an education for the making of a life. It is intent on raising up a competent life-long learner who is in touch with the God who saves, the world that He has created, and a virtuous walk of faith. Students of this kind of education become equipped to deal with the most pressing issues of human existence: the world’s fight and the soul’s salvation. The learner will have some knowledge and a growing appreciation and passion for truth, goodness, and beauty. This is an education that, in the words of Cardinal Newman, teaches the student “to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fit any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility.”