Well-Trained Mind

- What is classical education?

- Classical education organizes learning around the strengths of children's mind
as they progress from one phase of their maturation to the next
- Classical education places the focus of education on the tools the mind uses to
learn
- Memorization
- Organization
- Expression
- Children are only expected to learn how to use these tools when their minds are
ready for them
- The pattern of classical education is called the trivium, which consists of
three stages:
- Grammar - the early years
- These years are spent absorbing facts, laying out the foundations for
advanced study.
- Logic - the middle years
- During these years, students learn to think through arguments.
- Rhetoric - the high school years
- Students learn to express themselves during this final stage of the
trivium.
- To the classical mind, all knowledge is interrelated.
- Astronomy (for example) isn’t studied in isolation; it’s 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 world is full of knowledge, and finding the links between fields of study
can be a mind-twisting task.
- Classical Education meets this challenge by taking history as its organizing
outline
- All subjects areas of the curriculum are linked to history studies
- The twelve years of education consist of three repetitions of the same
four-year pattern:
- Ancients (5000 BC to 400 AD)
- Middle Ages (400 to 1600)
- Renaissance and Reformation (1600 to 1850)
- Modern Times (1850 to present)
- This pattern lends coherence to the study of history, science, and
literature — subjects that are too often fragmented and confusing.
- For example, during the year where the focus is on the Ancients, students
will learn literature and history from that time period as well as the sciences
that correspond with that era
- Biology, classification and the human body were subjects known to the
ancients
- Other Science subjects
- earth science and basic astronomy (which flowered during the early
Renaissance)
- chemistry (which came into its own during the early modern period)
- then basic physics and computer science (very modern subjects)
- The classical education is, above all, systematic — in direct contrast to the
scattered, unorganized nature of so much secondary education.
- This systematic, rigorous study has two purposes
- Rigorous study develops virtue in the student
- Aristotle defined virtue as 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.
- The 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.
- Much modern education is so eclectic that the student has little
opportunity to make connections between past events and the flood of current
information.
- Grammar Stage
- Grades 1 through 4 are called the "grammar stage" because these are the years
in which the building blocks for all other learning are laid, just as grammar is
the foundation for language.
- Children at this age find memorizing fun.
- The focus is on learning facts
- rules of phonics and spelling
- rules of grammar
- poems
- vocabulary of foreign languages
- stories of history and literature
- description of plants and animals and the human body
- etc
- Logic Stage
- At this stage, a student's mind has the capacity for abstract thought and
critical thinking
- Critical thinking means that the student starts to ask "Why?"
- Why do you multiply the tops and bottoms of fractions?
- Why did the North and South really go to war?
- Why do scientists believe that nothing can go faster than the speed of
light?
- How do we know that water boils at two hundred twelve degrees Fahrenheit?
- Students start higher order thinking
- They memorize formulas and figure out why it works
- Then they extrapolate from it to cover other situations
- For example, they learn how to calculate the area of a square, learn why it
works, and how to adapt that formula to find the area of a triangle
- Fact gathering is still done but it's done in conjunction with critical
thinking
- A fifth grader cannot analyze the fall of Rome until she knows the facts
about Rome's decay
- The objective of the logical stage is to teach middle schoolers to evaluate, to
trace connections, and to analyze the arguments of others.
- They will begin to apply logic to all academic subjects
- Language Arts
- students will begin to study syntax—the logical relationships among the
parts of a sentence.
- They'll learn the art of diagramming (drawing pictures of those
relationships).
- The grammar-stage student wrote compositions that summarized information—
how the Egyptians wrote, the important battles of the Civil War, the life of George
Washington. Now, compositions will begin to focus on structure: how to assemble
facts and ideas into central and supporting points, how to develop an argument in a
way that makes sense, how to present information in an orderly, clear manner.
- Literature
- Logic-stage students will also begin to read literature more critically,
looking for character and plot development.
- Math
- grammar-stage math is concerned with arithmetic—adding, subtracting,
multiplying, and dividing actual numbers.
- Arithmetic isn’t theoretical.
- Arithmetic problems can be worked out in apples and oranges and pieces of
bread.
- Logic stage students begin mathematics proper—the study of the many
different relationships between numbers both known (10^3) and unknown (2y ÷ 6x)
- History
- The students will still be responsible for dates and places, but you’ll
encourage them to dig deeper into the motivations of leaders, into the
relationships between different cultures that existed at the same time, into forms
of government and causes of war.
- Morality should become a matter of discussion as well. Was this action
(this war, this threat) justified? Why, or why not?
- How the subjects are taught
- Logic
- Starts with logic puzzles and moves on to formal logic studies
- We're working from the Mind Benders workbook
- Math
- Mental image mode vs Symbolic Mode
- The broader focus on mathematics becomes possible only when the child’s
mind is making the transition from the mental image mode (picturing objects to go
along with numerical symbols) to the symbolic mode (using numerals alone).
- A problem such as 9 × 2 simply requires you to picture two sets of nine
objects
- A problem such as –5x = –15 requires you to deal with symbols that have
no easily pictured reality behind them. If I don’t know what x is, how can I
picture it? And what mental image can I make of a negative number?”
- The move from concrete to abstract thinking depends on mental maturity
and can’t be rushed.
- The better the student’s grasp of arithmetical concepts and operations,
the simpler the transition will be.
- Your curriculum should involve plenty of practice—and no use of
calculators. Until the transition to the symbolic mode of thought is complete,
students must continue to carry out their own math operations.
- At the beginning of the logic stage, you should concentrate on solidifying
the student’s understanding of, and skill in, arithmetical operations.
- Real work connections
- The middle-grade student grows easily impatient with material that
doesn’t seem to have any logical connection to real life
- Examples
- figuring out the family’s grocery budget for a week (or a month), or
finding the best buys at the grocery store
- figuring out expenses and profits for a kid-run home business—grass
cutting, pet tending, baby-sitting, baking
- balancing a checkbook (better now than in college)
- figuring out the monthly and yearly interest on a credit-card debt
(ditto)
- calculating the area of a room, a wall, or the entire house for
wallpapering, carpeting, or another home project
- figuring out the cost of driving the car to and from a special event
- figuring out how much a restaurant meal would cost if it were cooked at
home
- calculating the cost in work hours of movie tickets, concert passes, or
other types of entertainment
- We're going to be doing Kahn Academy and continue practicing arithmetic
problems
- History
- In the logic stage, history changes from a set of stories into one long,
sequential story filled with cause and effect.
- History is the training ground where the student learns how to organize and
evaluate information.
- And that’s the goal of the classical education—to produce an adult who
can take in new knowledge, evaluate its worth, and then discard it or put it to
good use.
- Importance of learning how classify information
- Imagine what would happen to that storeroom if you kept cramming in more
and more stuff without ever stopping to organize it.
- Greek history, Chinese fairy tales, biological classifications, the life
of Bach, the concentration camps of the Third Reich—all lie stacked together.
- The student who can’t get beyond this point will never realize that the
laws of Hammurabi, the Magna Carta, and the Bill of Rights are linked.
- The information will remain jumbled together and ultimately unusable.
- And unless the student is given the mental skills to sort through and
classify all this knowledge, he’ll become an adult with (in the words of classical
schoolmaster David Hicks) a “cluttered, disorderly mind—helpless to make the
fundamental connections between basic ideas, or to . . . participate intelligently
in the public debate over the great issues confronting his nation and his times.
- How does the student sort through and classify all this material?
- The study of history will incorporate four elements
- Creating a time line
- Outlining
- Using and evaluating primary sources
- Organizing this information using a history notebook
- The Time Line
- The time line is simply a piece of paper long enough to stretch along one
(or more) walls of the student’s room.
- Time lines help the student make visual connections between events.
- A young historian could study the conquests of Genghis Khan, Francis of
Assisi’s founding of the Franciscan order, and the death of Richard the Lionhearted
without realizing that these events all occurred within the same decade†—until she
saw them marked on a time line.
- There’s not much going on between 5000 and 3000 B.C., but resist the
temptation to make the early centuries short just to save space—the time line must
be kept in proportion
- Part of the time line’s purpose is to give some sense of the quickening
pace of recorded history.
- The time line will not only be an at-a-glance reference tool, but it will
also act as a synthesizer of areas of knowledge.
- Birth and death dates of great writers, scientific advances made in
biology and chemistry, dates of symphonies, paintings, and cathedrals—all will be
recorded on the time line.
- Astronomers, poets, kings, wars, discoveries, and publication dates
will appear, breaking down the walls between science, history, and literature.
- The Outline
- Importance of outlining is laid out on page 272
- A sample of what a fifth grader is expected to do is on page 278
- The Notebook
- More on page 274
- Writing
- By now, the logic-stage student should be able to put ideas into words and
get those words down on paper (the grammar-stage challenge).
- Once he can do this, the technical difficulties involved in the act of
writing have been conquered.
- But until the student can begin to think about the order in which ideas
should be set down, he’ll continue to struggle with written composition.
- Thoughts will spin around in his head like a tangled ball of yarn; until he
can reach into that ball and find the end (the starting place, the main idea that
his paragraph, or page, will be organized around) he won’t be able to get those
thoughts down on paper. He needs an entrance point, an orderly plan that will tell
him:
- First explain this idea;
 - then explain how this and this relate to it;
- then move on to this observation.
- Without such a plan, he will either panic, or wildly set down ideas in
random order (which describes much middle-grade writing).
- The study of spelling and english grammar is also necessary to write
clearly and eloquently
- Resources
- Vocabulary from Classical Roots
- Well-Trained Mind Grammar Books
- Writing with Skill Books
- Sentence Composing for Middle School
- Reading
- Page 344
- "Teaching the Classics" is available for free for six weeks
- Science
- Suggested Schedule
- Logic
- 3 hours per week
- Math
- 60 minutes, four days per week
- 60 minutes, once per week: do real-life math
- History
- 60 minutes, 3 days per week, or 1 ½ hours, 2 times per week:
- study ancient times (5000 B.C.–A.D. 400), using selected history resources,
including primary sources (four over the course of the year);
- do at least one outline (one sentence per paragraph) of five to six
paragraphs; prepare at least one written summary; mark dates on the time line; do
map work.
- Spelling/Word Study
- 15–20 minutes, 3–4 days per week;
- begin or continue formal spelling program.
- Grammar
- 40–60 minutes, 4 days per week;
- formal grammar program.
- Literature
- 45–60 minutes, 3 days per week;
- read ancient myths and legends, epics, versions of classics, books about
ancient writers;
- write brief narrative summaries, ending with a short evaluation; begin to
discuss critical issues orally; memorize and recite poems or passages, three to
five for the year.
- Writing
- Daily, time will vary;
- two narrative summaries per week (overlaps with literature, history, and
science assignments);
- at least one one-level outline per week of a nonfiction source (overlaps
with history); work toward two-level outlines; adjust as necessary if also
completing a formal writing program.”
- Free Reading
- 1 Hour, at lease 4 days per week
- Rhetoric Stage
- This is where students learn to write and speak with force and originality
- They apply the rules of logic learned in middle school to the foundational
information learned in the early grades and expresses conclusions in clear,
forceful, elegant language.