Trivium Night

Homelab Notebook #02

2024-11-26: I’ve retrofitted a few Homelab Notebook posts for consistency, including this one, for a more consistent format.

The Homelab Notebook series is a recurring section where I consolidate some of our learnings and lessons for paid subscribers. This post includes:

1. Administrivia

2. Content Spotlight

3. Resource Directory

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1. Administrivia

For many years, I assumed there was only one kind of school.

This school comprised twelve grades, teachers, classes, classrooms, tests, and recess (later swapped for study hall). You could buy Nutter Butter bars at lunch. And at the end, you graduated, threw your hat up, and were done.

It was an embarrassingly long time — in college, really — before I understood that this was only one of a great number of possible setups, both in quality and kind. But children don’t need to categorize experiences; they live them. Decisions are for adults. Curricula are for administrators.

In retrospect, I can see there’s a second reason, though, for the lack of awareness. The twelve grades in the standard public school today prioritize structural continuity over content continuity. My school system was excellent—caring teachers, ample options, challenging lessons—but it was mostly a content smoothie. Everything was blended together until it lost any larger form.

This is one reason why a classical education resonated deeply with me when I learned about it. Although it’s a broad term, classical education aims to lead students through world history and the Western literary canon, pushing them to hone their creative, analytical, and rhetorical craft as they become able.

If you’re looking for a primer, The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wise-Bauer is a great place to start. It’s the book that helped us map our loose ideas about homeschooling into a concrete vision. From Wise-Bauer’s definition:

What is classical education?

It is language-intensive—not image-focused. It demands that students use and understand words, spoken and written, rather than communicating primarily through images.

It is history-intensive, providing students with a comprehensive view of human endeavor from the beginning until now. It trains the mind to analyze and draw conclusions. It both requires and develops self-discipline—the ability to tackle a difficult task that doesn’t promise an immediate reward, for the sake of future gain.

It produces literate, curious, intelligent students who have a wide range of interests and the ability to follow up on them.

Key to this approach is the Trivium, which is Latin for three ways.¹ Throughout their primary education, students cycle through learning about and from historical eras (the ancients, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and modernity) with an age-appropriate skill focus. First up is grammar (grades 1-4), then logic (grades 5-8), and finally rhetoric (grades 9-12).

The grammar mentioned here is not of the parts-of-speech variety. Instead, this stage is intended to instill in the child the building blocks they’ll need later. Their minds are thirsty for information at this age, and the goal is to fill them up with as much as possible. It’s a survey stage, and you’re helping the child build their inner map. Breadth over depth.

Logic (cause-and-effect) and rhetoric (argument) take priority when students have a solid foundation and their reading and writing skills are automatic. When they reach these later stages, students may return to content they saw earlier but with an aim to go deeper. It’s developmentally appropriate: middle schoolers are starting to bend the rules, and teenagers are looking for fights. Hormone-driven curriculum planning rides a lot of nature’s waves.

I know there are public school curricula that “spiral” skills across grades. (We have an ocean of educational standards to prove it.) I know teachers are attuned to and push students appropriately in their classes.

I have marveled, though, at how excited our student has been to dig into Roman history, the Iliad, and Robin Hood—content I wasn’t exposed to until high school or college. He’s drinking from a firehose and loves it. At night, when we read through our Middle Ages textbook, he’s on the edge of his seat.

There’s a chance he’ll grow up and wonder, “What were they thinking?” But it won’t be because we prioritized the system first. For this year, at least, school is content. And the content is great.

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2. Resource Directory