From your south campus principal, Grant Bickell
By this point in the year you know that there are three stages in our school – Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. You have heard these words at your interview, at the school, and generally in life but what do they really mean? Over the next few weeks we will talk about the individual beauty of each of the stages of Classical Education. Today, we talk about where this idea got started in the first place.
Twenty-six years ago in Moscow, ID a man named Douglas Wilson started the Association of Classical, Christian Studies and the classical education resurgence as we know it today began. He got his idea for this style of education from an essay by Dorothy Sayers called The Lost Tools of Learning (download the PDF here – https://bit.ly/30rOF1E). In her essay, Ms. Sayers goes through how education should happen, in her opinion, and how we begin to recover the “lost tools” of the greatest civilizations. She proposes that learning for a child could be found in three distinct stages – Poll-Parrot, Pert, and Poetic.
We will talk about each of these stages in the next few weeks by referring to them as the stages of Grammar (Poll-Parrot), Dialectic (Pert), and Rhetoric (Poetic) but for now we continue with where all of the came frome.
Maybe you think in this moment, ‘Surely Ms. Sayers did not come up with this idea out of thin air.’ You are right. She was an Oxford grad that looked back at Medieval education and saw that which they had done beautifully. She took those influences and saw they looked back even farther into the past to the very founding of Rome and Greece and to the creation of the world. Let us leave it here for now with the parting words of Dorothy’s essay:
“For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”
Special Note
Each year we ask for parent input on how long homework and home days are taking you. See below for the links:
South Trad: https://bit.ly/3n9H0Py
South Blended: https://bit.ly/3l2JwVN
South Dialectic: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd6acZUkfYYdOUM3EgNjhy-LPt9pfMSXfe6ZSLqXW0KAMZWsw/viewform?usp=sf_link
All surveys need to be turned in by October 14.
Upcoming Events:
Notes:
House Verse – This month we are memorizing Romans 12:12 as part of our yearly study on the Fruit of the Spirit. If they memorize it and recite it to Mr. Bickell, they will receive 5 House Points.