Posted on 01/23/2017
The worst thing you can do for your child’s education is to leave it to the school system. Even if it’s a great system. Even if you send your child to a private school. While you don’t have to be a professional educator, you’ll do well to understand a little bit about the learning process, starting with how all people learn and then moving on to, well, just about everything.
Understanding Three Stages of Learning
While different systems use various terms to describe these three stages of learning, the principle is widely held. Referred to by classical educators as the “Trivium,” the basic idea is that education naturally progresses through three stages, starting with the “Grammar” stage, in which a person learns the basic terminology surrounding a discipline. The second phase, “Logic,” comes next and involves analyzing information. The third stage, “Rhetoric,” builds on the first two and allows demonstration of subject mastery, as communicated through written or oral communication. Not only do adults progress through each stage of learning when we tackle a new skill or topic, but children progress through them developmentally.
Encountering Missed Steps of Learning
Just as it would be foolish to expect a preschooler to engage in meaningful “Rhetoric” regarding any topic, we can cause kids to become frustrated when we require them to function at the Logic or Rhetoric stage about a topic whose “Grammar” they have yet to master. That’s where you come in, as a parent. Perhaps you can help them memorize a list of terms or label a diagram together, even if they were supposed to have learned it last year. There’s no sense in moving on if your child has yet to learn foundational information.
Feel free to talk with your child’s teacher, too. Perhaps other students have similar gaps, and they would be helped as well by some remediation. Even if the teacher doesn’t slow down the entire class, perhaps he or she would offer some credit for the extra foundational work your child has had to do. Maybe not, but it never hurts to ask.
Encouraging Left Out Steps in Learning
On the other side of the spectrum, sometimes kids are ready to progress into Logic and Rhetoric stages of interacting with a particular subject, but their teachers don’t promote it. Regardless of whatever reason the teacher didn’t take the learning to the next level, these missing pieces can provide you as a parent with a golden opportunity to take your child’s education to the next level.
Again, maybe you could find a way for your child to get academic credit for the extra effort. Maybe an extra science project could be used for speech class. Or research into the connection between a historical figure and a modern celebrity could provide an interesting feature article for the school newspaper — and possibly extra credit in History or Language Arts. By providing an outlet or audience for your child’s hard work, you’re encouraging and validating his or her ingenuity and hard work. That kind of pleasure is what keeps life-long learners coming back for more.
Continue reading with Part 2.
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