Where do you want to begin?

Most students arrive with expectations and presuppositions. They arrive with a reasonable modern preference about what should come first in an education or what the foundations of education are supposed to be. The four paths below take those preferences seriously. Each grants what is true about a given modern approach or perspective, then shows what becomes incoherent if words are treated as secondary, and then returns to a shared foundation in speech, the trivium.

This is a short dialectical exercise, a short exercise in reviewing probable opinions and what a modern educated student might already say. Choose the sentence that sounds most like something you think is fundamental. You can return and take another path later; the contents will remember the last one you chose.

If none of these is the closest to your perspective and why you think we should start with something more than words, go on to Why we begin with words.