This isn’t a great quality picture. (I had my ISO cranked up to 1600 because of the low light situation, which makes for a grainy photo, but the flash would have totally spoiled the mood, I thought.) But I love it so much. Noah is printing letters on his MagnaDoodle, Phoebe is showing off her knowledge of them, and Ellie is repeating every letter’s name after Phoebe. Awww. I love my babies. So special.
As I was looking through my photos and came across the 10 or 12 that I had taken of this little scene, I smiled to myself and thought, “Wow, Noah’s teaching. He’s rhetorical!” And then, for anyone who’s read my previous posts about classical education and perhaps still may not understand exactly what it is, I thought I’d break it down into chunks with something we can all grasp: how we each learned to read.
The Grammar: It’s obvious, of course, what the grammar of reading is. It’s the alphabet. Once upon a time, we all memorized that a bunch of arbitrary symbols on paper represented letters; like a small circle with a tall stick on its left side, for instance, was a lowercase “b.” For a while that “b” would have been pretty useless information to us, right?
Logic: But then, as we learned that each memorized letter made a unique sound, and that those sounds could group together to form words, and that words together made sentences, and so on…well that grammar wasn’t so useless anymore, was it? The memory work was all beginning to fit together and it was beginning to make sense. It was the key to opening up the world of reading!
Rhetoric: Now a proficient reader, you’re ready to teach or share what you’ve learned. And actually, as the photo above portrays, you don’t even have to be a proficient reader to teach your little sisters the grammar of reading. 
So, in the classical model of education every new subject we approach should be tackled in these three steps. Rote memorization is so important! It’s the missing tool of learning in our schools today. My kids’ noggins are being inundated with grammar in these early years and it’s AWESOME. Their brains are being trained to retain. Later, as they become logical (and in some ways Elijah and Zeke already are) and then rhetorical, they will have a mass of core knowledge to take with them where ever they go. And better yet, they will have the tools of learning under their belts: grammar, logic and rhetoric.
Have I mentioned that I love classical education?
