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I don’t want to be misunderstood as suggesting that Latin (and even Greek!) are not important. We do not want to conflate a liberal education with classical scholarship, though they may overlap. And maybe that’s all that Clark and Jain mean, too. You might make a case for that, but in 21st century America, I come down on the side of a “liberal education for all,” and while that should include ancient languages, it cannot be dependent upon them. If a liberal arts or classical education can only be achieved through Greek and Latin, it can only ever be an education for the elite, for the few, and not for the general population. If you became proficient (not to say fluent) in Latin or Greek, you could potentially practice those arts in that language, although only other proficients would be able to understand you.Īnd that brings us to the pivot upon which classical education was brought to its knees in the not-too-distant past (mixing my metaphors-sorry). In fact, when we remember that these are arts that involve doing something, we must see that the language in which they will be perfected is the language in which we are proficient. A noun is a noun in any language, remember? Grammar, dialectic, and persuasive rhetoric may be practiced in any language. The second implication for schools in the Christian classical renewal is that the study of the classical languages plays a central role in the acquisition of the liberal arts of the Trivium.Īnd I can’t bring myself to concede that point. Which begs the question “what language?” because Clark and Jain take this moment to segue into a plea for Greek and Latin. Because language is the matter to be dealt with, reading books, thinking about them, and talking or writing on what has been been read is the practice of the grammar, logic, and rhetoric in a nutshell, and all these arts may be practiced until they are mastered. But the integration-the intersection-is why these are called the “trivium.” I confess to feeling that it is more in keeping with the classical tradition and more needful in light of our cultural tendency to fragment knowledge, to place the emphasis on the integration of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, rather than their separate arts.įully understood, the trivium becomes a three-fold approach to wisdom via words and language. I confess to being a bit confused by their using the word “integrity” to mean separate things. First of all, the three liberal arts of the Trivium must retain their integrity if we are to find the true integration afforded by the classical model. We believe this discussion has two major implications for schools in the Christian classical renewal. Their conclusion to this need to make rhetoric concrete is this:
#LIBERAS RHETORIC HOW TO#
Students studied rhetoric to learn how to be persuasive in their use of language…. However, at its heart we find this:ĭespite its varied implementations through the ages, rhetoric is not to be understood as an abstract concept.
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In short, the role of rhetoric in the classical tradition is not static-it has been approached in different ways at different times in history. If you haven’t read these authors, I’m afraid it might just feel like a list of names, but it really isn’t-it’s a reminder that this tradition is partly an ongoing conversation, part of “The Great Conversation.” In The Liberal Arts Tradition, Clark and Jain treat us to a brief historical view of rhetoric with references to Plato, Quintilian, Aristotle, Augustine, Cicero and Boethius. Rhetoric is the final art of the trivium-the intersection of three roads to excellence in language.