Somewhere around fourth grade, the growing mind begins to switch gears. The child who enjoyed rattling off her memorized spelling rules now starts noticing all the awkward exceptions. The young historian says, “But why did Alexander the Great want to conquer the whole world?” The young scientist asks, “What keeps the earth in orbit around the sun?” The mind begins to generalize, to question, to analyze—to develop the capacity for abstract thought. In the second stage of the trivium, the student begins to connect all the facts she has learned and to discover the relationships among them.
