Volume XXXII, no. 1
By David Seibel
In Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education, Stratford Caldecott (1953-2014) shines a fresh light on the classical Trivium to remove the fog hanging over schools today. This is not a manual for acting but a contemplation of foundational truths beneath the surface of a healthy classical Christian school utilizing the ancient Trivium. In a digital and polarized age obsessed with knee-jerk action and reaction, a sturdy text on stable foundations provides a needed perspective for classical Christian thought leaders. The foundation of this book is Caldecott’s recasting of Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric as Remembering, Thinking, and Speaking in a handy triad. The bulk of this review will focus on that Trivium triad with two preliminary thoughts on foundations and two parting thoughts on the work as a whole.
At first glance, it might seem unnecessary to many educators to consider the transcendent foundations of a concept as practical as the Trivium. Because we live in a time that worships the self and wants to tear down institutions, authorities, and transcendent foundations, we need Caldecott’s clarion call to protect those absolute load-bearing beliefs that provide a structure to reality and unity to the classical Christian curriculum. Beauty in the Word focuses on the language arts of the Trivium, whereas his other work, Beauty for Truth’s Sake, examines the mathematical arts in the Quadrivium. Beauty in the Word focuses on the philosophical and theological foundations of the classical Trivium and was first published in 2012. As the floods of hostility against absolute truth continue to rise in the 2020s, it is only a matter of time before one’s hidden foundations become visible and obvious. Warren Buffet once noted that you can see who is swimming naked when the tide goes out. What Caldecott does in Beauty in the Word is clothe us with transcendent truths that undergird the ancient Trivium popularized by Sayers in the 20th century.
On second glance, Caldecott helps the reader more deeply see the need for Trivium foundations by noting, “It is as though we were attempting to construct the top floor of a building without bothering with the lower floors or foundations.” In other words, Caldecott is describing a shifting sand culture that shows curricular fragmentation, historical amnesia, and methodological incoherence. Caldecott is echoing Mortimer Adler (1902-2001), who decried the “barbarism of specialization” and the “decline of the cultured generalist.” Specialized training has largely replaced the classical model in the United States. Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984) also noticed the need for foundations when he wrote, “In our modern forms of specialized education, there is a tendency to lose the whole in the parts, and in this sense, we can say that our generation produces few truly educated people.”1 Instead of training, true education thinks across disciplines to discover a unity of truth that is only possible through firm foundations. Our classical schooling movement needs a new generation of foundation-strengthening thought leaders to carry forward the intellectual work of Adler, Schaeffer, and Caldecott. Without these educational foundations, our civilization settles for mere specialized training, and Western civilization forgets its spiritual and intellectual inheritance.
The Remembering-Thinking-Speaking (RTS) triad is the heart of Beauty in the Word. The RTS triad is first announced in the introduction and then developed through chapters two, three, and four. While there are six chapters, these three are the meat. Protestant Evangelical readers may be unconvinced at some point by some of Caldecott’s Roman Catholic distinctive, but this in no way needs to diminish the validity of his use of the RTS triad to elucidate the Trivium.
First, in the RTS triad, Caldecott represents “Grammar” with the foundational “Remember.” “Remembering” highlights the fundamental need for stocking the memory of our students with true words of delight, stories that form the moral imagination, and the history of cultural and spiritual inheritance. In Remembering, Caldecott exposes our constant and collective forgetting from generation to generation. This section calls for preservation through memorizing key facts and truths. He points out that the rise of the internet, like the printing press, has led to memory decline in our schools. Why memorize something when Siri, ChatGPT, and Google are able servants? Caldecott notes, “The computer has become an indirect cause of our inner poverty due to leaning on these mental crutches.”2 The iPad or iPhone is a digital pacifier if the computer is a mental crutch. While forgetting can be a mark of weakness, it can also be a dangerous sign that certain truths are neglected and priorities are out of order. Chesterton wrote, “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.” Neglecting grammar means losing our spiritual and intellectual inheritance, which is the soul of any society. Caldecott highlights that the machine-like and mechanical instantaneous transfer of information is a threat to meaningful spiritual formation.3 For schools that subscribe to the classical Trivium, remembering is the first stage of foundational learning.
Second, in the RTS triad, Caldecott represents “Dialectic” with the foundational “Think.” Thinking is the natural fruit of Remembering as the child matures and moves forward in the classical curriculum. Here, Caldecott shows that all boys and girls are philosophers who need to place the Bible in conversation with philosophy. Caldecott has Moses punching back against the intellectual viruses inherited from Rene Descartes.4 Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was a famous mathematician and metaphysician who famously said cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), claiming that beginning with doubt of all but the self was the pathway to certainty and truth. Caldecott writes, “The problem.. is that Descartes did not begin with memory, with Grammar; he went straight to Thinking before going through Remembering.… he confined his reflection to the present moment.” Caldecott notes that a better starting point for self-existence would be the statement from God in Exodus 3:14, “God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’ And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: “I am has sent me to you.”’” Caldecott says faith and divine relation are a far more certain foundation than doubt and human reason. Without Remembering in Grammar, students have no meaningful content for Thinking in Dialectic.
Third in the RTS triad, Caldecott represents the “Rhetoric” with “Speaking.” Although this chapter lacked the clarity of the Remembering and Thinking chapters, it answered the question, “How do we teach ethics and morality to children?” Caldecott writes, “…the best way to communicate morality is not through endless dry lists of what should and should not be done, but once again through the imagination – through stories, drama, and living examples.”5 Upper School teachers must remember that Rhetoric is all about being persuasive–charts and lists comparing worldviews rarely penetrate to the inner man. The beauty and glory of truth and goodness merit a combination of show and tell. Carl Trueman has been known to quip that the best and most persuasive argument against Christian marriage is not a syllogism but the sitcom “Will and Grace,” where homosexuality is normalized and made to look human, harmless, and ordinary, which is ultimately a rhetorical move rather than a propositional tactic of logic. The best Speaking is the fruit of previous Thinking and Remembering, so we must learn these arts to counter-catechize the next generation in Truth, Goodness, and Beauty rather than the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Glancing at the whole, the book’s length is manageable, with 159 pages including endnotes, yet its philosophical argument punches well above its weight. The six pages of bibliographic data include intellectual heavyweights such as Aristotle, Augustine, Bonaventure, Chesterton, Lewis, Mason, Pieper, Plato, and various Popes from the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, the book is more of a 201 intermediate text for those in liberal arts circles than a 101 popular-level treatment. Teachers coming to this book for real-world applications, as found in Gregory’s Laws of Teaching, will leave disappointed. This is a book about ideals. The best person for this book is one looking for a fresh perspective on the task of education rather than a set of application steps. While many lower school teachers have a Trivium application chart somewhere in their desk or their employee manual, this is insufficient for the philosophical and theological foundations of the Trivium. There has been debate around Sayers’s ages and stages model, and the RTS triad could be a helpful framework to find common ground between Sayers’s fans and those who want a more historically accurate way of describing the Medieval Trivium. Caldecott only mentions Sayers twice in the work, demonstrating he has more than the 20th century in mind when he describes the three language arts of the Trivium.
At a final glance, the book is creative and original, as shown by the chart on page 16, which connects the Trivium to the Father, Son, and Spirit as well as Mythos, Logos, and Ethos in a figure entitled, “A Key to the Book: Eight Threes.” Any fan of theologian Dr. John Frame will rejoice in such a table of triads. Frame has an appendix in The Doctrine of God with more than 100 triads in life and he even includes the classical Trivium in his list (#67). While comparing the Trivium to the Trinity may feel like a stretch to some, Caldecott is not alone in doing so. Caldecott’s Beauty in the Word is worth the investment of attention primarily due to the RTS triad but also due to some spectacular quotes spread throughout the work. An example is: “We have been searching for foundations and the natural place to expect them is under our feet. But we have been looking in the wrong place. The foundations of reason, of Logic, are over our heads. The world does not stand on them; it hangs from them. … it is in the vertical dimension that universals exist.”6 Human reason is most useful when it hangs from the foundation of divine revelation. Tolle lege.
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David Seibel is Head of School at Coram Deo Academy in Carmel, Indiana. David aims to cultivate a generation of scholar-disciples who are passionate about learning. Husband to Brooke and father of two current and an additional two future Coram Deo Academy students, David holds a Doctor of Education from Southern Theological Seminary, an M.Div. from Southern Theological Seminary, an M.Ed. from Marian University, and a B.A. in Economics
and Spanish from Wabash College.
