As the Ancient Greeks used the Trojan Horse to deceive the Trojans, so Dorothy Sayers used a faulty conception of the trivium to deceive those seeking a true classical education.
Following Dorothy Sayers, modern classical educators hold that the trivium arts—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—are not mere subjects of study. Rather, they are psychological stages of development. Dorothy Sayers writes,
“Looking back upon myself (since I am the child I know best and the only child I can pretend to know from inside) I recognize in myself three states of development. These, in a rough and ready fashion, I will call the Poll-parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic….Now it seems to be that the lay-out of the Trivium adapts itself with a singular appropriateness to these stages: Grammar to the Poll-parrot, Dialectic to the Pert, and Rhetoric to the Poetic age.”
– Dorothy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning.
Sayers’ conception of the trivium as stages is championed by contemporary educators like Douglas Wilson, who wrote a whole book based on Sayers’ The Lost Tools of Learning, and Dr. Christopher Perrin, who neatly summarizes Sayers’ view using the following image below.
– Christopher Perrin, M.Div., Ph.D. An Introduction to Classical Education: A Guide for Parents, Page 22.
For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that the trivium conceived as stages merely rebrands Elementary, Middle, and High School education in the same way Starbucks rebrands their cups by changing the names of small, medium, and large to tall, grande, and venti. Let us suppose that we accept Sayers and her followers’ view of the trivium. What follows?
If the trivium are psychological or developmental stages that children progress through, then they are stages that either apply to some or to all children. If the stages only apply to some children, then classical education is aristocratic, not democratic. But this view contradicts modern classical educators’ conception of classical education. For example, Robert Hutchins, a founder of the Great Books model of education, writes,
“We all practice the liberal arts, well or badly, all the time every day….The liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are unavoidable. Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one.”
– Robert M. Hutchins, Enyclopaedia Britannica – Great Books of the Western World, Volume 1 – The Great Conversation, edited by Morimer J. Adler, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1952), 4-5.
Hutchins claims that there is no escape in practicing the liberal arts, as they are tied to the nature of a human being. Under this view, since the liberal arts are tied to being a human being and since the trivium are stages of development, they are stages that apply to all children, not some. Since modern classical educators would contradict their own view by holding that the stages of the trivium apply to some children, let’s assume for the moment that the stages apply to all children.
If the psychological stages of the trivium apply to all children, then they must apply to children both in and outside of classical schools. In other words, students receiving a modern education also experience the Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric stages. Since the trivium are considered to be an essential attribute for classical education, it follows that all schools are classical. But this is absurd. Therefore, the trivium are not stages of learning that apply to all learning. But it was also shown that they are not stages that apply only to some children. Therefore, and on the grounds of the modern classical education movement alone, the trivium cannot rightly be conceived of as stages of learning.
If we hypothetically accept Sayers’ view of the trivium, absurd conclusions follow. But there’s another issue with her view. Not only does it espouse absurd conclusions, it is also grounded on erroneous assumptions.
Again, let us assume that the trivium are psychological or mental stages of development. Since psychology in this sense is a relatively modern subject, the classics did not study psychology. (They called the study of the soul “psychology,” but did not use the term in the same way that we do in our own day.) But if the classics did not know of modern psychology, they could not have known that the trivium were psychological stages of learning. Therefore, though the term “trivium” is used by both classics and modern classical educators, the meaning behind the term is different. In other words, the term “trivium” is used equivocally, where modern educators use the same words as the classics, but mean something completely different. What this proves is that Sayers’ understanding of the trivium does not return to the thought of the classics. Rather, her view is really a criticism of the classics, since the classics failed to “rightly” understand the trivium. In other words, the classical educators of the past were not classical educators, which is absurd.
Following Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, “A small mistake in the beginning is a large one in the end.” (On Being and Essence, Prologue.) The modern classical movement’s acceptance of Sayers’ ideas is an instance of this. If we wish to truly receive a classical education, we need to look to what the saints learned, saints like St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, and St. Albert the Great. It is this kind of education that the Classical Liberal Arts Academy offers.
