Consider This: Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition

by Karen Glass

But what of the trivium? No discussion of classical education can be complete without reference to this time-honored tradition. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric define classical education for many, and I have taken my time to get to them. The trivium, of course, is only a part of the seven liberal arts and is accompanied by the quadrivium of music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. All of these things were addressed or studied in the classical world, but we have seen already that there was not a consistent, uniform approach. Plato, for example, makes music the beginning of his educational program, and he explicitly interprets music to include literature, especially stories. In fact, all arts practiced by the muses were “music” to the Greeks.