Author Archives: cleithart

I am alive and have two legs. This state of affairs will hopefully continue for quite some time.

What Dorothy Sayers Really Said: Grammar Stage Curriculum

This is the third of a series of posts about Dorothy Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” I think that’s sufficient introduction for anyone who reads this blog. Here are the first and second installments.

Also, I’m going to call her Dottie throughout, because I want to.

Some in the world of classical Christian education disparage Dottie because of her emphasis on teaching the “tools of learning,” which the educated student can apply to anything he pleases. They insist that the quality of an education depends on what is taught as well as how it is taught, and they believe that Dottie’s approach doesn’t take this into account. True, Dottie is somewhat agnostic about content. She says that the teachers must look upon their classes “less as ‘subjects’ in themselves than as a gathering-together of material [her emphasis] for use in the next part of the Trivium. What that material is, is only of secondary importance.”

As we’ve seen already, Dottie comes close to contradicting herself at various places in the essay, and this may be one of those places. After all, she spends quite a lot of time talking about what should and shouldn’t be studied in the Grammar Stage. But I think the operative phrase in the quote above is “less as.” The teachers will teach subjects, truth, stories, facts, information, but they must see these things as all of a piece. Everything they teach can be used later on, which means nothing memorized is completely useless. It does not mean that the teachers should break advanced subjects into pieces and get the kids to memorize the pieces. But that will have to wait for another post. First, let’s look at Dottie’s curriculum recommendations for the Grammar Stage.

Grammar

To master Grammar itself, students should learn the grammar of an inflected language. (This rules out English, as we saw earlier.) Dottie is ok with Russian, Sanskrit, and Classical Greek, but she recommends Latin—Medieval Latin, that is, not Classical. I don’t know of any classical school that starts with Medieval Latin, but that may be due to a lack of textbooks.

Dottie also suggests starting a contemporary foreign language at this age. She recommends French or German. Honest question: Do any classical schools teach modern languages in the Grammar Stage?

English (Literature)

Dottie recommends memorizing (and reciting) poetry and prose and telling many, many stories, including ancient myths. Do not, says she, do not use ancient myths to practice Latin grammar. I suppose she doesn’t want young people to spend time poring over the unfiltered words of pagan authors.

History

I don’t want to point fingers, but I want to emphasize here that Dottie recommends History consist of dates, events, anecdotes, and personalities. Memorizing a timeline of dates and events does no one any good unless those dates and events are tied to real people and what they did. The particular dates, she says, don’t matter. What matters is having a historical framework of some kind—accompanied by “pictures of costumes, architecture, and other ‘everyday things.” Got that? Worry less about memorizing five hundred dates and more about getting a full picture of one or two historical time periods.

Geography

Geography, like history, is presented as facts associated with visual presentation: “customs, costumes, flora, fauna, and so on.” She encourages memorizing capitals and collecting stamps.

Science

Dottie recommends teaching science through “the identifying and naming of specimens.” Notice that word “identifying.” How is a student going to identify a devil’s coach-horse, Cassiopeia, a whale, or a bat without observing them? There is nothing in her description of Science that would require a student to even be inside a classroom. Excursions into nature seem like an obvious extension of her suggestions.

Math

I know people who scoff at the phrase “the grammar of Mathematics” because they view “grammar” as a linguistic term. But if we take Dottie’s own definition of grammar as “learning what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works,” then we can easily see how the term applies to math. She recommends memorizing multiplication tables, geometrical shapes, and “the grouping of numbers,” followed by simple sums in arithmetic. I’m not sure that these activities by themselves will result in a student’s understanding “what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works,” but then, I’m not sure that any of Dottie’s Grammar Stage recommendations fulfill that promise.

Theology

Here, more than anywhere else, Dottie emphasizes that the student does not need to fully understand the material, merely to be familiar with it. She recommends teaching the Biblical narrative as a complete story of Creation, Rebellion, and Redemption, as well as the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. I think she underestimates the students here. A nine-year-old can easily understand all of those things—not fully, perhaps, but sufficiently.

How I Find Films to Watch

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For nine and a half years, I’ve kept track of all the movies I watch start to finish. At the moment, that number is six hundred and thirty-four, an average of one movie every five days.

What they are depends on the year. When my daughter was around three, we watched a bunch of Disney and Pixar movies together. When my son was born, I slept on a pull-out sofa in the basement and watched James Bond movies before falling asleep.

For most of 2014 I had no money and lived in a studio apartment without internet. Every Tuesday at work I’d check 99rental.com to find out which movie iTunes was renting for a buck that week. Most of the time I’d never heard of it. I’d download it anyway and watch it at home.

I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter, not talking, but listening. Twitter was a gold mine of information about movies & writing, straight from sources who knew. That was back when nobody knew that @Bitchuation was Steven Soderbergh and Rian Johnson was still unverified and dangerous. John August once argued with me about the ending to one of his own movies. All of these filmmakers constantly mentioned the movies, directors, screenwriters, editors, and cinematographers they loved, and I took note.

Most directors are avid movie fans. In the course of a ten-minute interview, Steven Spielberg might mention a dozen movies, some of which I’ve never heard of. He might say that one of them is “Fellini-esque,” leading me to look up Frederico Fellini and add a couple of his most highly rated films to my watchlist.

Speaking of watchlists, I use IMDb to keep track of what I want to watch, partly because it makes it easy to find out where a given film is streaming, and partly because it’s so easy to follow a thread from one film to another. For instance, watching The Untouchables a few years ago, I noticed how well the chase scene was shot (not to mention the reference to Battleship Potemkin) and looked up the cinematographer (Stephen Burum). One of the films he shot (The Escape Artist) was directed by another cinematographer named Caleb Deschanel (yes, Zooey’s dad). Never mind that The Escape Artist has a 6.8/10 on IMDb and a 58% on Metascore. A great cinematographer directed it and another great cinematographer shot. It goes on the list.

When picking a movie to watch on a Saturday night, and after convincing my wife to watch something obscure that may not be any good, I filter my watchlist by one of the streaming services we have access to (Prime, Netflix, Hulu, IMDb Freevee) and poke around for something that looks interesting. I know I’ll never get around to watching all the films that are on my list (there are exactly 1000 of them at the moment), and I know that not all of them are good. That’s fine. My watchlist functions like an anti-library, reminding me of all the movies, good and bad, that are out there. And once in a while, I do stumble across a gem. Here are ten of the best lesser known movies I saw for the first time in the last nine years:

  1. Short Term 12
  2. All Is Lost
  3. The Mirror Has Two Faces
  4. To Be or Not to Be
  5. Locke
  6. Sweet Smell of Success
  7. Moonstruck
  8. Paterson
  9. Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
  10. Sullivan’s Travels

What It Means to be Reformed

The Reformation, whether led by Luther or Calvin, was a full-fledged liturgical reformation. You didn’t just come to Geneva in the 1500’s to learn doctrine; you came to learn how to worship God. You came to be formed into a worshipping community. You were trained to sing. To sing your faith. To sing the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. To sing the Te Deum. To sing your prayers. To sing the Lord’s Prayer. Especially, to sing the inspired hymnbook of the Church, the Psalter. You were trained in a new manner of living fitting for the Gospel. You were trained to be incorporated into a Christian army of Psalm-singing worshipers. You came to Geneva or Wittenberg or Strasburg in the mid-sixteenth century and you experienced what Paul meant in Colossians 3:16, “Let the word of Christ richly dwell among you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” This is what it means to be a Reformation Christian. You are a singing Christian, a participant in a congregation of singing, justified believers.

Jeff Meyers, The Lord’s Service

What Dorothy Sayers Really Said: Grammar

This is the second of a series of posts about Dorothy Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” I think that’s sufficient introduction for anyone who reads this blog.

Also, I’m going to call her Dottie throughout, because I want to.

The Trivium, as Dottie explains it, is a way to “teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning.” It means mastering a language in three stages: Grammar (the structure), Dialectic (the reasoning), and Rhetoric (the expression). So does the Trivium only apply to language? Well, yes and no. All three parts of the Trivium are language arts, but as Dottie says, “language itself is the medium in which thought is expressed.” Human beings need language to think, which means that mastering language can aid us in mastering thought itself. This paves the way for mastery in any subject whatsoever, whether geometry, music, astronomy, medicine, theology, or law. That’s the idea, anyway.

I won’t take time here to talk about whether there can be such a thing as “the grammar of math.” I know people have strong feelings about that. Instead I want to ask whether any classical Christian schools are actually following Dottie’s suggestions when it comes to the Grammar stage.

Dottie defines the Grammar stage as learning what a language is, how it’s put together, and how it works. She matches this onto what she calls “the Poll-Parrot Age,” in which “learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable.” (Later in the essay she gives an age range of nine to eleven years old.) Many classical educators treat the Grammar stage as a time of pure memorization. “Don’t worry about whether the students understand,” they say. “They’re just gathering material.” In general, kids like to memorize stuff, so everything appears hunky-dory. Grammar—check.

But pure memorization doesn’t teach a student what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works. To do that, you must teach actual grammar. Some classical schools teach English grammar in the early years, so that students know what direct objects and subordinate clauses are before they leave elementary school. But Dottie’s actual suggestion is teaching Latin grammar. Because Latin is an inflected language, its grammar is better than English grammar for teaching “what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works.” In the Grammar stage, then, Latin should be more than chanting declensions and conjugations. Students should know what direct objects and subordinate clauses are in Latin before they leave elementary school.

Again, according to Dottie, the Trivium is a three-tier system: you must master the first stage before you ascend to the next. If you want to study Dialectic (the study of argumentation), you have to understand Grammar—which means Latin grammar. But nearly every classical school moves students to the “Logic Stage” based on age, not ability. Doesn’t that blow the entire system apart? How can a student learn to use language, to define terms and make accurate statements, to construct an argument and detect fallacies without knowing what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works? And forget about Rhetoric! How can a teenager who hasn’t mastered the structure of language and arguments to express himself well?

To be fair, Dottie is a little inconsistent here. When she describes the Trivium, she emphasizes its tiered structure (Rhetoric is built on Dialectic, which is built on Grammar). Later, when describing the “Pert Age,” she says it begins “so soon as the pupil shows himself disposed to Pertness and interminable argument” or “when the capacity for abstract thought begins to manifest itself.” These benchmarks seem more tied to a child’s psychological development than how far he’s progressed in Latin.

If the Trivium consists of three stages laid firmly atop one another, and if we follow Dottie’s definition of Grammar, a student must study enough Latin to understand “what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works” before moving on to Dialectic. How many classical schools actually operate this way?

The People Vote with their Dollars

A man (said he) who writes a book, thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.

Boswell’s Life of Johnson

Push In Your Chips

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We planted a couple of trees in our front yard a few weeks ago—one fig and one persimmon. The guy at the plant nursery said they were good choices for beginners since they’re tough and fruit early. (An apple tree takes years to give you anything.) “You’ll have to water it, though,” he told us, “since you’re planting so late in the year.” A small price to pay for a bushel of persimmons. So, twice a week, I give each tree enough water to fill a foot-square pan half an inch.

Planting something as permanent as a tree inevitably makes one think of the future. Google tells me fig trees can live a hundred years, a longer prognosis than I would give our house, which looks every one of its thirty-eight years old. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the tree outlasted the house. That tree may still be standing in 2085, producing little snacks for hungry children whose parents haven’t yet been born. Or it might be cut down. We leave our work to those who come after us, and who can tell whether they will be wise or foolish?

That was the topic of an episode of the Stories Are Soul Food podcast a few weeks ago (or, as I call it, “The Nate and Brian Show”). The episode was called “The Problem of Solomon’s Inheritance,” which is a great title. The guys talked about the trap that so many successful parents fall into, that of raising kids who are completely unable to handle the success they inherit. How do we escape it? Nate’s advice was twofold: first, make sure your kids know their family history. Who were their grandparents? What did they give up to put their descendants where they are today? What risks did they run? What mistakes did they make? How did God write their lives? Tell the stories so that your kids understand that they’re playing roles in a drama that’s much larger than they are. Drama? Let’s call it a dramatic comedy, and encourage them to take pratfalls.

Nate’s second bit of advice was to be willing to risk it all. Push in your chips. Teach your sons to “risk it on one turn of pitch and toss,” as Kipling would say. You may lose it, yes, but what’s a great inheritance for, if not to back some noble wager?

Trees turn to stumps eventually, but that doesn’t mean they should never have been planted.

Ignorant of Greatness, Historically Alone

This means that typical freshmen entering college lack the texts of their potential humanity, even their spiritual survival. They will also face, possibly before they graduate, surely before they are thirty or forty, the loss of close friends or a family member, the loss of love, disappointed hopes. Ignorant of those heroes of ancient Greece, ignorant of Biblical heroes, ignorant of greatness, they will think themselves historically alone, confronting a new condition unaccompanied.

John Silber, Straight Shooting

I hope that one day even these ignorant will realize they don’t have to face the future unaccompanied. They will want, and will find, words to suit the moment.

What Dorothy Sayers Really Said

This is the first of a series of posts about Dorothy Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” I think that’s sufficient introduction for anyone who reads this blog.

Also, I’m going to call her Dottie throughout, because I want to.

One of the first things Dottie does in her speech is propose “to deal with the subject of teaching,” for the purpose of producing “a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society.” Like every thirty-two-year-old academic, she aimed high, at no less than an overhaul of modern education, to correct the woefully slack thinking that ran rampant through the England of her day. She helpfully lists some examples of the problem she wants to solve:

  • People are susceptible to propaganda.
  • Professional writers fail to define their terms.
  • The average educated person can’t tackle a new subject for himself.
  • The average educated person can’t make connections across subjects.
  • Academics can’t distinguish between material and final causes.
  • Academics assume what they are trying to prove.

Serious problems, these. Worth addressing.

Here’s where things get sticky. Does the average graduate of a classical school fare any better than his public school peers when it comes to:

  • Susceptibility to propaganda?
  • Defining his terms?
  • Tackling new subjects?
  • Making connections across subjects and disciplines?
  • Distinguishing between material and final causes?
  • Begging the question? (Or misusing the phrase “begging the question?”)

I’m sure Dottie would agree that, even in her day, exceptional students avoided these pitfalls. Her proposals weren’t meant to improve the lot of the exceptional, but of the average. We’re talking about the typical CCE student, the Classical Child-Not-Left-Behind.

If average graduates of classical Christian schools routinely make the mistakes Dottie lists above, then either a) her proposal doesn’t work or b) we haven’t implemented it correctly.