Stages of Learning:

Classical Education

• Language-intensive
• History-intensive
• Focuses on memory work at early age
• Trains mind to analyze and draw conclusions
  

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K – 4th grade

• Grammatical Stage
• Acquisition of skills and learning concrete facts through memorization
  

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5th – 9th grade

• Logic or Dialectical Stage
• Beginning to understand these facts and being able to reason and asking Why?
  

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10th – 12th grade

• Rhetoric Stage
• Learning to express what they now understand in the most compelling manner possible
  

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Practical Application

“…a first grader listens to you read the story of the Iliad from one of the picture book versions. Four years later, the fifth grader reads one of the popular middle-grade adaptations Olivia Coolidge’s The Trojan War, or Roger Lancelyn Greene’s Tales of Troy. Four more years go by, and the ninth grader faced with the Iliad itself plunges right in, undaunted.” (Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well-Trained Mind)