The trivium is a three-step process of education that matches the natural development of a child.  In grammar school, students absorb facts, learn to explore history, science, and literature. In middle school, students learn to think through arguments and begin to study logic as they read, hear, and experience more challenging materials. In high school, students learn to express themselves and communicate effectively in writing, in logic, in the arts, in mathematics and science as well as in speech.  

Early elementary school is the “grammar stage,” because grammar is the foundation of language and it is the stage in which students learn the parts that will eventually form the whole. At these ages, children are sponges that absorb new materials, and they love to learn in play and exploration.  Children learn the foundations: rules of phonics and spelling, rules of grammar, poems, the vocabulary of foreign languages, the stories of history and literature, descriptions of plants and animals and the human body, the facts of mathematics, the truths of science, and the fundamental truths of the Catholic faith. The grammar stage forms the basic building blocks for the second stage of education.

By fifth grade, a child’s mind begins to think more analytically. Middle-school students are less interested in finding out facts than in asking “Why?” The second phase of the Classical education, the “Logic Stage,” is a time when the child begins to pay attention to cause and effect, to the relationships between different fields of knowledge, to the way facts fit together into a logical framework.

A student is ready for the Logic Stage when the capacity for abstract thought begins to mature. During these years, the student begins to develop the foundations for algebra and begins the study of logic, and learns to apply logic to all academic subjects. The logic of writing, for example, includes paragraph construction and learning to support a thesis; the logic of reading involves the criticism and analysis of texts, not simple absorption of information; the logic of history demands that the student finds out why the War of 1812 was fought, rather than simply reading its story; the logic of science requires that the child learn the scientific method and do labs to see and observe outcomes.

The final phase of a Classical education, the “Rhetoric Stage,” builds on the first two. At this point, the high school student learns to write and speak with conviction and originality. The student of rhetoric applies the rules of logic learned in middle school to the foundational information learned in the early grades and expresses his conclusions in clear, logical, elegant language. Students also begin to specialize in whatever branch of knowledge attracts them; these are the years for art camps, college courses, foreign travel, apprenticeships, and other forms of specialized training.

A Classical education is more than simply a pattern of learning, though. Classical education is language-focused; learning is accomplished through words, written and spoken, rather than through images (pictures, videos, and television).

Why is this important? Language-learning and image-learning require very different habits of thought. Language requires the mind to work harder; in reading, the brain is forced to translate a symbol (words on the page) into a concept. Images, such as those on videos and television, allow the mind to be passive. In front of a video screen, the brain can “sit back” and relax; faced with the written page, the mind is required to roll its sleeves up and get back to work.

A classical education, then, has two important aspects. It is language-focused. And it follows a specific three-part pattern: the mind must be first supplied with facts and images, then given the logical tools for the organization of facts, and finally equipped to express conclusions.

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 reading of the Odyssey leads the student into the consideration of Greek history, the nature of heroism, the development of the epic, and man’s understanding of the divine.

This is easier said than done. The world is full of knowledge and finding the links between fields of study can be a mind-twisting task. A classical education meets this challenge by taking history as its organizing outline — beginning with the ancients and progressing forward to the moderns in history, science, literature, art, and music.

At Koinonia Academy, the twelve years of education consist of three repetitions of the same four-year pattern: Ancients, Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, and Modern Times. The child studies these four time periods at varying levels — at a basic level in grades 1-4, at a more difficult level in grades 5-8 (when the student begins to read original sources), and taking an even more complex approach in grades 9-12, when the student works through these time periods using original sources and also has the opportunity to pursue a particular interest (music, art, technology, medicine, biology, creative writing, a craft or the trades) in depth.

The other subject areas of the curriculum are linked to history studies. The student who is working on ancient history will read Greek and Roman mythology, the tales of the Iliad and Odyssey, early medieval writings, Chinese and Japanese fairy tales, and (for the older student) the classical texts of Plato, Herodotus, Virgil, Aristotle. She’ll read Beowulf, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare the following year, when she’s studying medieval and early Renaissance history. When the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are studied, she starts with Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) and ends with Dickens; finally, she reads modern and American literature as she is studying modern and US history.

The sciences are studied in a four-year pattern that roughly corresponds to the periods of scientific discovery: biology, classification and the human body (subjects known to the ancients); earth science and basic astronomy (which flowered during the early Renaissance); chemistry (which came into its own during the early modern period); and then basic physics and computer science (very modern subjects).

This pattern lends coherence to the study of history, science, and literature — subjects that are too often fragmented and confusing. The pattern widens and deepens as the student progresses in maturity and learning. For example, a first grader listens to the teacher read the story of the Iliad from a picture book version of the story. Four years later, the fifth grader reads one of the popular middle-grade adaptations — Olivia Coolidge’s The Trojan War, or Roger Lancelyn Greene’s Tales of Troy. Four more years go by, and the ninth-grader — faced with the Iliad itself — plunges right in, undaunted.

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 him or herself to do what he knows to be right, even when it runs against his inclinations. A Classical education continually encourages a student to work, to be self-motivated and joyful in the drive to learn and master a subject, and supports them in the process.

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. “The beauty of the classical curriculum,” writes classical schoolmaster David Hicks, “is that it dwells on one problem, one author, or one epoch long enough to allow even the youngest student a chance to exercise his mind in a scholarly way: to make connections and to trace developments, lines of reasoning, patterns of action, recurring symbolisms, plots, and motifs.”

Throughout this beautiful and immersive program, the faith is taught as the pinnacle, the final answer to what we are seeking: the Truth. There have been many who came to understand the fullness of the Catholic faith through a Classical education, because they discovered the order, the joy, and the miraculous of the Divine through history, literature, the sciences, and the arts.

Koinonia Academy’s Catholic Liberal Arts education implements the trivium, while still inviting every student and staff member to a call of holiness in their everyday lives. Today’s education has become an institution of forming abilities rather than wisdom, robots rather than thinkers, cogs in a wheel rather than mature and free minds, applied education rather than formed hearts and souls, students who know more and more about less and less. Fundamentally, a Catholic Liberal Arts education seeks to truly educate the whole person through a search for wisdom in an organized, systematic manner that supports the student through their natural stages of development. Newman once said that knowledge simply “occupies” the mind, but does not “form” it. A student can be given a lot of knowledge, and yet not be taught to think… In other words, it is not enough to acquire technical abilities or know-how, a student has to have a critical mind, capable of value-judgments. At Koinonia, the goal is to provide both knowledge and formation in the trivium.