The Case for Ages and Stages

Universal education created a problem . . .

The resurgence of classical Christian education in North America started with Dorothy Sayers and her seminal presentation, The Lost Tools of Learning. At the very center of her proposal, she maps the medieval Trivium onto the basic stages of children development. She called them the “poll-parrot” stage, the “pert” stage, and the “poetic” stage. She argued that we ought to assign the three components of the Trivium—grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric—to these respective stages, at which point we will find ourselves cutting with the grain. Or, as someone like Sayers might have expressed it, we will find ourselves cooking with propane.