{photo by Jace Grandinetti}
Our educational model at SLOCA is “Classical Education (with a twist).” While there is certainly a wealth of information about classical education to be found online (including our website), and excellent books have been written on the subject, today we begin a blog series about the different stages of classical education at SLOCA. Written by our talented and dedicated teachers, each with a different voice, these posts are resources to help you better understand each stage of our classical model.
While the content will be similar to what you might find in the Field Guides for each level, here we will focus on the following four stages: the Pre-Grammar stage (our Little Wonders), the Grammar Stage (grades 1-4), the Logic Stage (grades 5-8) and the Rhetoric Stage (grades 9-12).
Today we begin with the Rhetoric Stage and will work backward from there in the coming weeks. This will give you the “big picture” first – what the ultimate goal of Classical Education looks like, and what the other stages are working toward. So let’s hear from our high school English teacher, Paul McCullough, all about the Rhetoric Stage at SLOCA:
Living the Questions
The Rhetoric Stage is the culminating phase of the classical trivium. If the Grammar Stage explores the Who/What/Where/When? of a subject, and the Logic Stage the Why?, then the Rhetoric Stage focuses on the How? It aims at applied knowledge, self-understanding, and wisdom.
Although the Rhetoric Stage is designed to build upon the previous two, it seems to me that the most difficult questions we ask here are often the simplest:
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“How do I know what I think?” |
How do I know what I think? And how do I learn how to say what I think?
One could be forgiven for assuming that the answer to this first question is obvious. Self-evident, even. What could be more apparent to me than my own thoughts?
But the fact is that most of us don’t know what we think until someone asks us. Our thoughts think us, as Emerson says, not to other way around. Taking our cues from Socrates, classical educators understand that true thinking is often the result of a question that is posed, an obstacle that arises, or a challenge that must be met.
The Rhetoric Stage puts students on the road to thinking for themselves by using Socratic inquiry to initiate them into The Great Conversation of Western thought. Through the books we read and the conversations they inspire, students are invited to become part of a living intellectual tradition.
To belong to such a tradition is to find oneself more firmly rooted in the present moment, now seen in richer context. Rather than memorizing pre-digested answers, students begin to ask better questions about the world around them. Questions that must be lived. Questions that Google cannot settle. Questions that “introduce us to ourselves,” in Paul Tillich’s phrase. Questions that invite us to shift from the pronoun “I” to the pronoun “we.”
The Rhetoric Stage in Practice
While the Rhetoric Stage is the capstone of classical education, the ideal we strive for, Rhetoric never passes “beyond” the Grammar and Logic stages. Rather, Grammar and Logic are included within Rhetoric. To borrow an axiom from C.S. Lewis, “the higher does not stand without the lower.”
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Romeo and Juliet, attributed to Benjamin West and studio. |
To venture an example, a student in the Grammar Stage (1st-4th grade) might study the plot structure of Romeo and Juliet. They might then memorize a speech (perhaps the famous balcony scene) and some facts about Shakespeare, the times he lived in, the genres he wrote in. In the Logic Stage (5th-8th grade), a student will go further, perhaps exploring the conflicting demands of romantic love and familial duty in the play.
A Rhetoric Stage student (9th-12th grade) might be asked to draw on all this background knowledge to formulate their own original thoughts about, say, the clash between feudal family structures and emerging ideals of Renaissance humanism, or about Shakespeare’s defiance of Aristotle’s Three Unities. Above all, though, students in the Rhetoric Stage will attend to the how of Shakespeare’s literary language—not just what is said, but how it is said, how thought comes life through words.
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“…color, line, and shape in the hands of a skilled visual artist become a language.” {Six Persimmons by Mu-ch'i / Public Domain} |
Put another way, what really distinguishes the Rhetoric Stage is its focus on language as the medium of thought. Of course, “language” here can’t just be restricted to verbal languages: math is a language, music is a language, as we all know; color, line, and shape in the hands of a skilled visual artist become a language. Logic is a language, and so is physics. The fundamental insight of classical education is that every subject—literature, math, history, the sciences, philosophy, art—has a grammar, a syntax, a semantics, and we can become fluent in these in stages, with practice.
The Rhetoric Stage aims at giving students a foundational fluency in the languages spoken in the academic disciplines. This fluency of thought will allow them to thrive in any post-secondary field or course of study. Because we are preparing students for a future that is largely unknown, the Rhetoric Stage aims at teaching students how to think, not just what to think. We all learn to think—well or poorly, sooner or later, enthusiastically or begrudgingly. Why not practice thinking in the classroom, where we have the assurance that we’re in it together?
Here are some further approaches that make the Rhetoric Stage distinctive at SLOCA. They are employed in and across each subject at our high school.
- Flexibility and Specificity. Older students are allowed to ease up in some disciplines (say, foreign languages) in order to concentrate in others (say math), according to their developing interests and strengths.
- Open-Ended Thinking. Long-term assignments (including a capstone Senior Project) will have a more open structure, allowing students to practice the fundamentals of academic inquiry—the art of asking and answering meaningful questions.
- The Unity of Knowledge. Students are encouraged to connect topics they are studying across the curriculum, participating in the great conversation of Western thought.
- Great Books. Taking the great books as our models of rhetoric in action, students will study primary sources whenever practical, attending to not only what is being said, but how it is said, and to whom. Great books invite us to become great readers.
- Metadiscourse/Metacognition. Students will practice self-reflection, developing a critical awareness of their own thought processes and communication strategies.
- Study of First Principles. Students will attend to the fundamentals that define each subject as such and that will allow them to delve deeper into a subject on their own terms.
- Character Formation. Students will have opportunities to reflect on and develop their personal character, conceived in an Aristotelian sense as the habits and dispositions of right action that lead to full human flourishing.
- The Socratic Method. Students will not passively consume the ideas of others, but actively engage with them, learning to articulate their own thoughts from a posture of wonder, receptivity, and humility, taking as their model Socrates’ knowledge of his own ignorance.
A brief illustration: In an advanced science lab (1: Greater Specificity), a student might be given an open-ended assignment (2: Open-Ended Thinking) that requires her to engage with some fundamental principle of biology (6: Study of First Principles). She would then write a report that exhibits a clear, objective scientific writing style (5: Metadiscourse), learned in part from reading classic scientific documents (4: Great Books). This report may also require her to consider the sociological and ethical implications of this research (3: Unity of Knowledge). She will then be in a position to appreciate not only what she knows, but also what remains unknown about this topic (8: Socratic Method), thereby achieving a level of understanding that goes beyond mere technical mastery and opens outward toward wisdom and humility (7: Character Formation).
This student is learning to dip her toes into The Great Conversation. She knows that she does not know everything there is to know about high school biology; but she is learning to think in the parameters of the discipline—to become fluent in its language, to develop a biological cast of mind, to think biologically, as it were. Such thinking can be deeply rewarding, personally and professionally. Students who develop this type of rhetoric-stage thinking across a range of subjects are well-prepared, not just for college but for life itself, wherever it may take them.
[N.B. In this post, I am not intending to say anything new or original about classical education. Much of what I’ve said here is said better in Susan Wise-Bauer’s The Well Trained Mind and in Dorothy Sayers’ “The Lost Tools of Learning.” I cite them here in a broad sense as my sources, and with a debt of gratitude.]
Here are links to the other posts in this series:
