Classical "Trivium" Education
To be completely forthright, we have no intention of choosing this method for our homeschooling ventures. However, I've included it in our Building Our Homeschool Foundation series because there was definitely a point in time where I fancied that someone (probably not myself, because I'm not that hard-nosed) would be classically educating our children in the most rigid of all possible methods, as I had huge I think it's important that children are given certain "rights" when it comes to their upbringing, much like we, as adults, hold certain unalienable "rights" where our adult pursuits are concerned. One of the rights - or rather, privileges, that I feel a lot of kids are robbed of is having some sort of say-so in how they are educated. Rarely are they allowed to take different paths in the elementary and middle-school stages if they proclaim disinterest, or boredom, or show any type of aversion to the material handed to them by their educators. Most students who are in the public school system simply flunk out if they don't adhere to the curriculum and pass tests, and are labeled as "underachievers" or "flunkies" for not conforming to the education code thrust upon them. I hope that by choosing to homeschool them, my children are afforded a great deal more input into how they learn to learn. I hope to take cues from them and have them naturally lead me towards the best method to teach them.
While Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric all have their places in the standard education model, this Classical Trivium method is, in my opinion, introduced a bit too early in a child's life to be fully appreciated by the student. While the mastery of fact-learning, memorization and reasoning can absolutely be critically important skills in the latter years of education, I fear that too much spoon-feeding rigid courses on the reading, writing and 'rithmitic necessary to pursue secondary courses (science, history, arts) will render the kids dispassionate about learning, as it would seem more like a drill, rather than an individual pursuit. This method relies heavily on textbooks, worksheets, testing and review. It leaves very little room for interpretation (by either the teacher or the student), and I can't bear the visual of their little noses being stuck between the pages of a boring textbook while they pine to be outside, feeling the sunshine on their face, or learning through more hands-on, tactical methods of discovering what there is to be learned at the elementary level.
Again, I hope to prepare them in the traditional K-6 years to have the abilities to read, write, and have a strong foundation in mathematics - just enough to help them apply what they've been taught so that they can have a broad understanding of the other subjects they'll be interested in very soon thereafter. I'd like them to spend a great deal of their childhood delving into the intrinsic, real-world knowledge of How Stuff Works, Why We're Sympathetic To Others, What Makes The Grass Green & The Sky Blue ... things that every young child yearns to learn naturally, without having to be systematically forced into it with a rigid, pre-set, calculated schedule of events. Would I love it if my pre-teens showed an interest in Latin, ancient history and mathematical theorems far beyond my own intellect? Absolutely so. But I feel confident that I'll know my kids well enough from having spent each and every day with them to recognize when this bridge is ready to be crossed. When and if it is, I would gladly turn them over to educators who could meet their scholarly demands. If things go as planned, I'd hope that at the very least, on a high-school level - they'd have their own faculties in place to take their intellectual virtue as far as their own research and self-led instruction could lead them. I'll be there to cheer them on and challenge them every step of the way.
More thorough information on the Classical Education can be found at The Well Trained Mind website. I'll be honest in reporting that not only does the phrase "well trained" leave a sour taste in my mouth, but they lost me HERE, where the commentary on the first years of education includes:
"...Children at this age actually find memorization fun. So during this period, education involves not self-expression and self-discovery, but rather the learning of facts."
Makes me wonder if they were ever children, or if they ever outright asked a 10-year old (who wasn't so brainwashed already into blindly accepting that learning had to be a systematic series of drills) if they really, TRULY found that memorizing historical battlefield dates (that they'll likely never use again past a test), or memorizing the Periodic Table of Elements (that they'll have no use for after the test if they don't plan on becoming scientists), or memorizing what it exactly it is that makes a participle in a sentence "dangle" ... and so forth ... is actually FUN.
No self-expression or self-discovery? No thank you. I want to raise free thinkers, not robotic learning machines who aren't confident in their own decisions of how they should acquaint themselves with knowledge. In my opinion, learning doesn't have to be a well-paved, straight, one-way road. It should be curvy, with many turnaround options, detours, and the ability to backtrack whenever needed. There should be time for self-reflection, self-realization, and a heaping dose of the hilarity of childhood humor sprinkled all over the place.
Links to Parts III-IV:
Building Our Homeschool Foundation - Part III: The Montessori Method
Building Our Homeschool Foundation - Part IV: The Unschooling Method
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