Trivium 21c: Preparing Young People for the Future with Lessons From the Past

324 Pages·2013·2.34 MB·English

by  Martin Robinson

Praise for Trivium 21c
Martin Robinson sets out on a quest to discover the kind of
education he wishes for his daughter and we all learn a great
deal in the process. I love his writing: wise, well informed,
provocative, thinking-out-loud. Robinson engages his reader
from first to last. A terrific feat.
Melissa Benn, writer and author of School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s
Education
Part reflective autobiography, part educational manifesto,
Trivium 21c is both a richly erudite and engagingly relevant
exploration of the purposes and philosophies underlying the
enterprise of education. From ancient Greece through to
contemporary controversy, Robinson draws resonantly on his
experience as a student and a teacher to demonstrate that the
‘trivium’, the ‘triple way’, of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric,
still lies at the heart of a ‘good education’, albeit in new forms.
With refreshing realism, he recognises that teachers in their
work in the classroom often transcend many of the political
storms about education. Citing almost every contemporary
protagonist from our own era, he advances an approach which
he describes as ‘progressive traditionalism’. Trivium 21c is
essential reading for all educators and observers of the
seemingly endless public debate about education who wish to
go beyond simplistic polarities and find a way to integrate and
relate in a historical context seemingly contradictory
approaches.
Ian Bauckham Head Teacher and President, Association of School and
College Leaders (ASCL) 2013-14
In schools today, a focus on contemporary relevance too often
trumps educational depth. Martin Robinson makes a
compelling case that turning instead to the tradition of the
liberal arts can open the minds of a new generation.
Marc Sidwell, co-author of The School of Freedom, Managing Editor City
A.M.
This is a charming book which is fun to read; it is
contemplative and self-reflective and at the same time it is
well-researched, informative, and genuinely scholarly. What
the book does very well is to unpick the tensions between
educationalist progressives and traditionalists and it attempts
to identify differences but also importantly to seek common
ground. Indeed it is a historical tour de force examining the
origins and development of the ‘liberal arts’ from the early
Greeks through Shakespearian times to the present day. What
makes the book so readable is that it is a journey of self-
reflection on what it means to be educated from the point of
view of the author as a schoolboy, a teacher, and then a parent
seeking an appropriate school for his daughter.
The early part of the book looks at the author’s own schooling
and the frustrations he experienced. Learning appeared to be
chaotic and many pupils were apparently left to ‘fail’ by not
being equipped with the skills necessary to succeed at school.
The book then traces his later employment and his experiences
as a schoolteacher and how he changed the way he taught to
make learning more meaningful and authentic for his pupils.
His journey is one of becoming a teacher who adopts innovative
approaches to teaching: teaching for meaning, values, and
deep learning.
The argument of the book is for a ‘trivium’ of grammar,
dialectic, and rhetoric. The three elements of the trivium would
be developed simultaneously, and once mastered it is expected
that a student would have acquired the knowledge, the
reasoning skills, and the ability to communicate well, which
would stand them in good stead for a good life. What Robinson
is asking for is the building blocks for thriving at school, the
underpinning principles of learning that many teachers assume
that pupils already possess but which many do not. I am not
convinced that this book will unite traditionalists and
progressives in a mutual quest of school improvement, but for
the open-minded reader there is much to learn. I agree with
Robinson that for students to acquire a sound blend of
knowledge, questioning expertise, and communication skills
(i.e. the trivium) is the basis of a great education.
Dr Jacek Brant, Head of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment (CPA),
Senior Lecturer in Business Education, Institute of Education, University
of London
Martin Robinson embarks on a highly engaging personal quest
to discover what matters in education. By drawing not just on
lessons and frustrations from his extensive experience as an
educator, but also on the hopes and anxieties that he feels as a
new parent, he transcends the often stale trench lines of many
arguments about education between ‘traditionalists’ and
‘progressives’, recognising that rival important insights about
the foundations of learning and knowledge need not be polar
opposites. Robinson’s own synthesis offers an ambitious vision
of how to pursue an educational ideal as a practical project.
Anybody interested in education, citizenship, or how we want
our children to learn would find this a thought-provoking read.
Sunder Katwala, Director of British Future, the independent think tank

For Lotte
In 1842, a young Karl Marx wrote:
‘It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing
a great mental dividing line between past and future, but
of realizing the thoughts of the past … it will become
evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is
consciously carrying into effect its old work.’
In a letter to Arnold Ruge
Foreword by Ian Gilbert
It’s difficult to read the news these days without seeing some
story on education being played out in governments, think
tanks, conference rooms, staff rooms, classrooms or even
streets somewhere in the world. And rightly so. Education is
both a mirror of society as it is now and also, crucially, a
reflection of what that society will become. What we do with
the minds of our young people today will come back to help us
– or haunt us – for decades to come.
Or, in the words of Christa McAuliffe, the teacher on board the
ill-fated Challenger space shuttle expedition in 1986: ‘I touch
the future … I teach’.
Often, though, when education is being talked about there is no
agreement as to what, specifically, is actually being discussed.
For example, when teachers talk about education, they are
more often than not referring to a process in which they teach
and children learn. All being well. When the politicians and
strategists talk about it, however, they are often referring to
the system within which that teaching and learning process
operates. Parents may mean something else altogether, one
perhaps more related to discipline, employment chances, and
life skills. And the young people themselves? Well, often they
never get the chance to voice an opinion about just what
exactly they are spending the major portion of their first 20
years or so doing.
Yet beyond the world of processes and systems – or maybe
underpinning them – there is another debate too, one that goes
on often unnoticed and has vexed some of the greatest minds
for millennia. It is the question of what we want schools and
schooling to achieve for our children, of what having ‘an
education’ entails, of what ‘being educated’ actually means?
It is a debate over which the ancient Greeks battled and that
still fills the letters pages of national newspapers and the
comments sections on news websites and blogs today. And it is
a debate that is very much at the heart of this fascinating and
important book.
Through a combination of extensive historical research, face-to-
face dialogue with some of the main protagonists currently in
the debate and his personal experience both as a teacher and
as a parent, desperately trying to find the right sort of
education for his daughter, Martin weaves a complex and
compelling story. It is a journey that stretches back to the
ancient Greeks and the ‘fork in the road’ they encountered that
evolved into the Trivium of the medieval world and that rages
in the 21st century educational diaspora of academies, charter
schools, free schools, national and common core curricula,
standardized testing and assessment, and practically every
aspect of educational policy and discussion worldwide.
If you are involved in education in any fashion – from teacher to
parent to governor to educator to inspector to policy maker –
and you have an opinion about what ‘an educated person’
should look like, then you have joined the debate. What’s more,
that opinion means you will have taken sides, whether you
know it or not. This book will help you make the right choices
for the right reasons and, who knows, may even help us create
the sort of consensus that will bring all sides together. In doing
so, we can all help forge an education system and an education
process that genuinely does what we want it to do – bring the
very best out of, and put the very best into, every child.
Ian Gilbert
Hong Kong
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword by Ian Gilbert
Introduction: An Unexamined Life is not Worth Living
1 A Trivial Pursuit?
2 The Trivium
3 Our Dramatis Personae: The Grammarians, the Dialecticians,
and the Rhetoricians
4 The Liberal Arts: A New Curriculum is Born
5 The Rise of the Rational: The Fall of the Trivial?
6 Trivium: A Clash of Cultures
7 A Crack in Everything: The Imperfect Arts
8 Grammar: From Rules of Language to Cultural Capital
9 Dialectic: Logic, Dialectic, and Logos
10 Rhetoric: Communication, Citizenship, and Community
11 We Have a Montaigne to Climb
12 The Professors