Students coming to an introductory course of study in our time are not expecting to find something like how the classical tradition presents material to be learned. Modern textbooks in the humanities, and modern grammar and writing books, begin in many different ways, and each textbook or each discipline tends to begin in its own way.
Many of them, however, follow a common pattern. The chapter begins with a story or problem that is supposed to set up the material in the chapter. Students are then given a short account of the material, followed by examples that the textbook goes through, and then problems that the students are supposed to do. Often there are questions and key terms at the end of the chapter.
The classical tradition, on the other hand, sets things out in an ordered presentation. Let’s consider the example of grammar (and this is broadly how grammar is taught here in Ars Grammatica):
- Grammar is the art of correct speech and interpretation.
- Speech is sound.
- But sounds can be either significant, like a word, or not significant, like a cough.
- Significant sound can either be confused (like saying “Ouch!”) or determinate (like the word “horse”).
- Significant sounds with determinate meaning are words.
- Some words have determinate meaning in what they refer to (like “horse” and “dog” and “black”); other words have determinate meaning only by relation with other words (like “and” and “for” and “if”).
- Words can change either when we use them to mean different but closely related things (like “John” and “John’s” or “to run” and “ran”) or over time as the language itself changes (like “holiday,” which no longer means “holy-day,” as in a saint’s day, and just means a day of no work).
- Words often go together in an order, where one depends on another (like “black horse,” with “black” depending on “horse,” or “the city,” with “the” depending on “city”).
- More than one word taken together can form an order in a phrase (like “in the woods” or “boys and girls”).
- Phrases can be literal (like “with great ease”) or figurative (like “with the ease of a cat”).
- Phrases can be ordered together with other words to form a clause (like “when I arrive” or “because she was already home”). A clause is a semi-complete thought because it has a subject and a verb, but it is not complete in itself, since we still expect something more.
- In a sentence, the words form a complete thought. Sentences can be made up of more than one complete thought ordered together to form a whole thought that is more than merely the sum of its parts; this kind of sentence is a period (from Greek “peri-odos,” meaning a going all around something).
A student first reading discussions of what sound is and how sounds can be significant or not will not find an easy problem or story that motivates the subject. Part of the reason for this is that the classical tradition presents subjects from their principles, so that they can be known most generally at each stage first. The student comes to understand sound and its varieties as related to language and then proceeds to the next subject. The doctrine is valuable both in itself, since the arrangement of it gives an unfolding order, and also for the sake of the next parts of the subject, to clarify them in the best way.
The classical tradition, then, is aimed primarily at understanding; even practice follows after understanding for the simple reason that in an intellectual discipline you cannot practice in the best way without understanding at least what you are practicing. This is rooted in the belief that a student should have a firm grasp on the realities in question, so that he can proceed with confidence as he builds up knowledge. It does mean that such studies can sometimes seem less exciting at first, and it is better for students to know this beforehand than to be discouraged when they meet it.
None of this is meant primarily to set the classical tradition against how modern education is conducted. That would be a separate discussion. The goal here is simply to make clear what the difference is so that students can be better prepared for the classical approach.
Continue to Grammar.