Teaching the Trivium to children.

Teaching the Trivium to children is of interest to many of us learning it for ourselves right now.  While this subject requires more than a few simple comments, I wanted to share with you a comment I made in a post at the Tragedy and Hope Online Community (link below) in which the original poster was asking questions about teaching his children.  I'm posting my reply because it represents some of my more current thinking about how to understand the Trivium, as well as some indications of teaching this, or any, material to children.

You'll have to join up at the T&H forums to read the full thread, but if you're studying the Trivium and interested in engaging online (or just reading what others are posting) it is well worth signing up (it's free!) and joining in!

LINK: http://tragedyandhope.ning.com/group/teaching-the-trivium-to-children/forum/topics/personal-observations-with-teaching-to-trivium-to-children

A few years ago a good friend of mine started showing me the way around audio editing software as we were co-producing a podcast and he already had a good amount of experience with music production techniques.  Of all the things he said to me over the years one of the comments that sticks out the most relates to the Trivium and to Art in general.  He said that basically you had to develop various "tricks" and learn to use them in novel combinations, always looking for opportunities to try new things.

He was a skater as well and so he related the similarity in approach to his skating experiences, (approximate conversation) "Dude, I had a few tricks that I learned right away, and those took me far.  Then you learn a couple more difficult ones as you go along, and you're mixing all of these things together every day, like, new combos and just sort of attitude.  So you start developing your moves, your tricks, and pushing yourself and that just opens you up to even deeper understanding of your skill or craft or whatever."

As I let things I've learned about the Trivium boil and stew in my subconscious mind, more and deeper connections begin to form and I can see bits and pieces of potential patterns that I may be able to draw together into new and novel ways to describe the vast territory that is accessible to those holding the Trivium map.  These days, I'm starting to see it more and more as a collection of skills, or moves, or tricks, that are all found under one roof-- the Trivium -- and that perhaps one could even begin to look at the Trivium as a Toolbox.  Here you have the wrench of proper grammar, the hammer of logical fallacy, the saw of powerful rhetoric.  Less poetically, you have something even as simple as taking a cue from the Topics of Invention (see the Canons of Rhetoric) and asking questions of a subject by noticing its similarities and differences to other things, or by defining exactly what the thing in question is (whether it be person, place, event, idea, etc). 

We have the Trivium Method which is the figurative use of the three subjects--- the learning model of absorption, organization, and communication ---and that allows us to always keep in mind the general process we must undergo to learn anything.  Then we have the subjects themselves which are daunting to undertake for many but which yield fruits well beyond the typical reward to be expected from the study of subjects merely for their economic potential.  Digging deeper into those subjects, you can start to see that there are very many cognitive "tricks" or ways of handling information that are now available to you.

Teaching the Trivium to children requires the utmost in creativity, sensitivity, and intuition, but it can be done by all of us through great effort.  It requires that we teach in a very natural, organic way, which means that our understanding of the Trivium cannot be forced, it takes time to absorb it all and even then only to the best of our ability.  Rigidity should be avoided; keep things loose even while giving them a lot to chew on.  We teach best by example, kids pick up the little things we overlook sometimes and that means being very open to our subconscious patterns and habits.  The more tools we have at our disposal, and the better we are at using them, the more options we will have in what structures we build that lead our children to higher understanding.  All good things point to wisdom.

There is no "one right way," start-to-finish, algorithmic diagram that explains how to take you (see: You Are Here) from beginning to end with the result being a highly enlightened wielder of Trivium wisdom.  The Trivium is meta-disciplinary, it's organic, it is eternally chameleon-like as it fluidly adapts to whatever vessels contain it.  It is the Map but not the Territory.