So far (except, of course, for the Latin), our curriculum contains nothing that departs very far from common practice. The difference will be felt rather in the attitude of the teachers, who must look upon all these activities less as “subjects” in themselves than as a gathering-together of material for use in the next part of the Trivium.
—Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning”
Houses rest on foundations. Journalists gather all the facts before writing their stories; scientists accumulate data before forming theories; violinists and dancers and defensive tackles rely on muscle memory, stored in their bodies by hours of drill.
A classical education requires a student to collect, memorize, and categorize information. Although this process continues through all twelve grades, the first four grades are the most intensive for fact collecting.
This isn’t a fashionable approach to early education. Much classroom time and energy has been spent in an effort to give children every possible opportunity to express what’s inside them. There’s nothing wrong with self-expression, but when self-expression pushes the accumulation of knowledge offstage, something’s out of balance.
Young children are described as sponges because they soak up knowledge. But there’s another side to the metaphor. Squeeze a dry sponge, and nothing comes out. First the sponge has to be filled. Language teacher Ruth Beechick writes, “Our society is so obsessed with creativity that people want children to be creative before they have any knowledge or skill to be creative with.”1 Your job, during the elementary years, is to supply the knowledge and skills that will allow your child to overflow with creativity as his mind matures.
That doesn’t mean that your first grader has to learn about complex subjects in depth or that you’re going to force him to memorize long lists of details. In the first four years of learning, you’ll be filling your child’s mind and imagination with as many pictures, stories, and facts as you can. Your goal is to supply mental pegs on which later information can be hung.
Think of an experience most adults have had. You read about a minor movie star, and suddenly you see his name everywhere. You learn a new vocabulary word and instantly notice it sprinkled through all sorts of different texts. You happen across the name of a tiny, obscure foreign country and in the next few days notice a dozen news items about it.
You might remark to your spouse, “What a coincidence!” Usually, though, that information has surrounded you all along. The movie star’s name, the new word, the foreign country were already in the magazines and newspapers at the checkout line, but because the information was unfamiliar to you, your eyes passed over it without recognition. Once the information entered your memory, you recognized it and began to accumulate more and more details.
This is what you’ll be doing with your elementary-school child. You might read a book about the planet Mars to your second grader. If it’s the first time he’s heard about Mars, he probably won’t grasp all the information you’re giving him. But he may hear on the news that night the most recent information from the Mars space probe, and suddenly something that would have passed by him clicks in his mind. You’ll tell him, in history, about the Roman god Mars, the father of Romulus and Remus, and he’ll hang this detail on the peg you provided when you read that book about the planets. When he runs across the word martial and asks what it means, you can tell him that it means warlike and comes from the name Mars, god of war—and the information will stick.
The whole structure of the trivium recognizes that there is an ideal time and place for each part of learning: memorization, argumentation, and self-expression. The elementary years are ideal for soaking up knowledge.
A classical education assumes that knowledge of the world past and present takes priority over self-expression. Intensive study of facts equips the student for fluent and articulate self-expression later on. Too close a focus on self-expression at an early age can actually cripple a child later on; a student who has always been encouraged to look inside himself may not develop a frame of reference, a sense of how his ideas measure up against the thoughts and beliefs of others.
So the key to the first stage of the trivium is content, content, content. In history, science, literature, and, to a lesser extent, art and music, the child should be accumulating masses of information: stories of people and wars; names of rivers, cities, mountains, and oceans; scientific names, properties of matter, classifications; plots, characters, and descriptions. The young writer should be memorizing the nuts and bolts of language—parts of speech, parts of a sentence, vocabulary roots. The young mathematician should be preparing for higher math by mastering the basic math facts.
NOW OR NEVER
Why are the first four grades a particularly fruitful time to concentrate on content?
This is the first time your child will encounter Egyptian embalming rites or the atmosphere of Venus; this is the first time he will understand what light is made of or why Americans rebelled against the British. He will never get a second chance to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or hear The Hobbit read aloud for the first time. Seize this early excitement. Let the child delve deep. Let him read, read, read. Don’t force him to stop and reflect on it yet. Don’t make him decide what he likes and doesn’t like about ancient Rome; let him wallow in gladiators and chariot races. He wants to find out how things work, how ancient people lived, where Mount Vesuvius is located, and what Pompeii looked like, covered with volcanic ash. This thirst for sheer accumulation won’t ever die completely, but it is more easily satisfied later on. And the wonder of that first encounter with a strange civilization will never come again.
The immature mind is more suited to absorption than argument. The critical and logical faculty simply doesn’t develop until later on. The typical second grader will take great joy in singing the latest television commercials to you word for word but will stare at you slack-jawed if you ask him why the advertiser wants him to buy the product, or what the merits of the product are, or whether it’s reasonably priced. There is nothing wrong with a child accumulating information that he doesn’t yet understand. It all goes into the storehouse for use later on.
Susan recalls that somewhere around second grade she learned to chant the entire list of helping verbs. The uses of a helping verb weren’t clear to her until much later on. But she finds that list popping into her mind whenever she’s checking her own writing for grammatical errors or learning a foreign language.
Finally, there’s the enjoyment factor. Children like lists at this age. They like rattling off rote information, even if they don’t understand it. They enjoy the accomplishment, the look on the face of an adult when they trot out their stored knowledge, and the sounds of the syllables rolling off their tongues. As adults, we may tend to “protect” our children from memory work because we find it difficult and tedious. But most young children enjoy repetition and delight in the familiarity of memorized words. How many times have you read Green Eggs and Ham to a four year old who already knows the entire book by heart?
HOW TO TEACH THE POLL-PARROT STAGE
As your child’s teacher, you’ll serve as a source of information. In the early grades, you’ll be telling your child stories, reading to him from history and science books, teaching him math facts. And you’ll expect him to be able to repeat back to you the stories and facts he’s heard. This process—which we’ll outline in detail for each area of the curriculum—will train him to grasp facts and express them in his own words.
Don’t make K–4 students dig for information. Fill their mind and imagination with images and concepts, pictures and stories. Spread knowledge out in front of them, and let them feast.
PRIORITIES
Schools struggle to make time for all the subjects students need and want—grammar, writing, reading, math, history, science, art, music, religion, typing, sex ed, and so forth.
Part of the school dilemma results from the school’s assertion of a parental role; since you’re already filling that position, you won’t have to decide between sex ed and mathematics. But home schoolers also struggle with the mass of material that could be covered. There are so many good history books, science experiments, works of classic literature, piano pieces, violin concerti, art techniques. How do you pick and choose?
In the elementary grades, we suggest that you prioritize reading, writing, grammar, and math. History and science are important. But if you don’t cover all of biology in first grade, it doesn’t matter: the child’s going to get biology at least twice more before he goes to college. If you skimp on reading or writing, though, you’re likely to hamper the child’s educational progress. History and science are reading-dependent. A child who reads and writes well will pick up surprising amounts of history and science as he browses. A child who has difficulty reading and writing will struggle with every subject.
In first grade especially, the child’s mind is busy with new skills. You spend an immense amount of time in one-on-one tutoring. Language skills and math will take up most of that time. If you do history and science two or three times a week, that’s fine. If you don’t start music until second or third grade, the sky won’t fall. If you don’t do art until fourth or fifth grade, nothing drastic will happen. Don’t feel that you must teach every subject in depth.
Remember, classical education teaches a child how to learn. The child who knows how to learn will grow into a well-rounded—and well-equipped—adult…even if he didn’t finish his first-grade science book.