Where to Begin for Higher Studies in General

Most students arrive at the start of higher studies with expectations and presuppositions, and in particular with a reasonable modern preference about what should come first in an education or what the foundations of education are supposed to be. The five paths listed below take those preferences seriously. Each one grants what is true in a given modern approach or perspective, then shows the problems that arise if words are treated as secondary and thus why we ultimately need speech and language to be treated first.

But what do we mean here by “first”? If the classical tradition argues that words should be studied first and the arts of language are primary, should we not be careful to make clear what it means to be “first” and “primary”? To say that the arts of the trivium are first is not to say that every other discipline is somehow less important than the study of words. That is clearly false; the study of words and the arts of the trivium are mainly something that one studies for the sake of something else, for the sake of going more deeply into realities and the natures of things. Nor is this priority necessarily a claim that all instruction and study, for any student whatsoever, has to start from grammar, logic, and rhetoric; obviously, many people have done no formal study of grammar and they can very well end up doing great things. What then is the priority or first-ness of the arts of the trivium here? There are two senses of primary here: on the one hand, the arts of language are first in the sense that everything else depends on them, since everything else uses words to develop and communicate the truth that the discipline has found; and, on the other hand, the arts of language are first in that ideally students just beginning their higher studies (in middle school and high school) study these arts in depth and acquire sufficient mastery of them in order to be able to be highly skilled in language, logic, and rhetoric. Other reasons that the arts of language should be first in the order of learning are that they give the student their first overview of a systematic discipline, beginning with something that they know well, namely language and their own reasoning; that the habits of attention, precision, and judgment they form are needed in every later study; and, finally, that these disciplines contribute to the student’s wider life and capacities because speech is so much a part of social and political life, whether in sports and the home or in business or the classroom. That is the general priority of the arts of language.

But sometimes it is helpful to see what other approaches propose and why they are not best. Each of the following choices is a short dialectical exercise, that is, an exercise in reviewing probable opinions, the things a modern educated student might already say. You have a choice of where to begin. Immediately below are five modern starting points: five positions or perspectives that a modern student might have, which it will be helpful to explore first, to see why the classical tradition does not start with these. After you have explored one of these starting points, feel free to return here and choose another starting point to explore.

Alternatives to beginning with words

Objections to beginning with words

Once you are convinced that none of these views or perspectives are more fundamental than word and language, then you should go on to where the classical trivium itself begins. Click below on Why the Classical Tradition Begins with Words.