What is classical education and how does it benefit the student?
Classical education refers to two principal things. The first is the structure of the curriculum, which follows the medieval Trivium. This consists of grammar, dialectic (or logic), and rhetoric. In her wonderful essay The Lost Tools of Learning, Dorothy Sayers observed that these three stages of the Trivium correspond nicely to three basic stages in child development what she called the poll parrot stage, the pert stage, and the poetic stage. Classical education instills the elements of the Trivium at the ages of the student when acquiring that element is most natural. When the process is over, the student has acquired the tools of learning. The second aspect of classical education refers to the content of the curriculum, which emphasizes the great works of western civilization Homer, Virgil, Herodotus, Augustine, Beowulf, and so forth.
