CLASSICAL EDUCATION

A Rich Cultural Heritage

The classical model of education has been developed and utilized for over 2,500 years, an approach still common in this country as recently as the early 20th century. Building on the cultural heritage of the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, a classical education has trained nearly every great leader, scientist, and scholar of Western civilization.

The Purpose of Classical Education

Classical education was used in the Greco-Roman civilization to train young men for leadership. The goal of this education was to cultivate moral and intellectual virtues for self-governance which prepared students to lead others. The ancient Greeks used the term paideia – virtue inculcated by means of the trivium and quadrivium – to summarize their model of training that set as its ideal the development of the complete man. This approach was adapted for use by the church and used throughout the medieval and modern periods in the West.

The Seven Liberal Arts

A classical education is organized around the seven liberal arts, which are divided into two subgroups, the trivium and the quadrivium. The trivium is composed of three subjects: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. These subjects train students in the use of language which prepares them for the quadrivium: music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, which today would include physics and natural science. Theology, the study of the knowledge of God, is historically considered the queen of all the sciences. As a classical Christian school, Rogue Christian Academy believes that a systematic study of the liberal arts informed by biblical truth cultivates a knowledge and love of the Triune God and an understanding of human nature. The glory and honor of God and a love for one’s neighbor are the primary aims of all our academic pursuits.

A Recent Revival

Much of contemporary Christian classical education traces its roots to Dorothy Sayers’ 1949 Oxford speech, now referred to as “The Lost Tools of Learning,” wherein she defined the skills associated with the ancient trivium in terms of three stages of child development: the poll-parrot stage, which corresponds to the inculcation of grammar; the pert stage, corresponding to the use of dialectic and logic; and the poetic stage, which corresponds to the skills of rhetoric.