A few weeks ago, I started a job up at Hillsdale College as a Classical Pedagogy Trainer. As a CPT, I will support classical pedagogy in classrooms at Hillsdale Member K-12 Schools. My background is largely in the Upper School, teaching subjects from 6th to 12th Grade — 6th Grade History, 9th Grade Literature and Trivium, and 12th Grade “Integrated Humanities” particularly at my previous role at Valor South Austin. However, my role on the team is not to simply jump into the Upper School boat and begin an Upper and Lower School cultural divide amongst the seven of us, but, alongside my other teammates, be able to speak into pedagogical and curricular principles that ground K-12 Education across grade levels.
With this in mind, it was my privilege to go to our New School Training at St. John’s Classical Academy in Fleming Island, FL. Instead of having a teaching role during the training, I was free to be a student of our literacy program (Literacy Essentials), alongside teachers who have taught Literacy Essentials and those who have not.
Literacy Essentials (LE) is subversive yet logical; robust and effective, to say the least. It is subversive insofar as it challenges modern notions of “sight-words” and indicates that there are orthographical rules that govern words like “have” or “would” while respecting that some words are strange, but governed by other rules, sometimes rules from other languages like “Wednesday” or “receipt” (These are called “two-way words” in LE).
Moreover, modern phonetic education believes that the basic unit of language is “the letter”. This is actually illogical, for language is not originally something written as a letter is, but spoken. Speech precedes the written word. In terms of the Trivium (the first three of the seven classical liberal arts), by rhetoric we learn both grammar and logic. We learn to speak from the speech of our parents (as well as their grammatical and logical patterns!). According to the creation story in Genesis, God’s Speech constructs reality itself, “then God said” (Gen. 1:3-31, emphasis added); in John’s Gospel the Word is the ontological foundation of the world, “All things came to be through him” (Jn. 1:3). In terms of what is human, how could our world exist without our own ability to speak? We cannot have family or government or scientific discovery without the ability to speak, to bring others in our immediate vicinity into our own thought. The basic units of language then, are not letters but “sounds”.
The English language has 42 sounds or “phonemes” which are represented in writing with 26 letters or “graphemes”. These sounds can be represented with letters in 72 spelling patterns or “phonograms”. Students are expected to learn them all.
This is where “robust” and “effective” become adequate descriptors of LE. The first effect is that students are expected to think about words not in terms of what letters construct that word, but in what sounds they make. Instead of thinking of the word “love” as “l”, “o”, “v”, and “e” they think of it as three sounds /l/-/o/-/v/. In addition, students memorize different rules that help them understand why the written expression of these sounds is not merely “l”, “o”, and “v”, but that in the English language, words never end in “v”, so there must be a silent “e” following this “v”.
In the classroom, we see a dynamic teacher guiding their students through these sounds. In fact, the whole pedagogy of Literacy Essentials is incredibly sensory with students repeating aloud steps and rules of the phonograms they form. They look up at the teacher, speak alongside the teacher, then look down and pick up their pencil, and repeat the actions of the teacher while repeating the same instructions. Students do not even form letters with their pencil without audibly describing the strokes they are making with memorized chants!
The virtue students learn from Literacy Essentials is clear: students learn to care meticulously for words in both speech and composition. We spell and speak words correctly. Each kind of word, whether it is articles, adjectives, or pronouns, deserve our attention, for each word serves a purpose in conveying meaning.
This meaning is not arbitrary, it is something real signified by language. It is important to remember that words are not literally what they signify. The sounds I speak, or the spelling patterns I write, to describe a “tree” are not literally the entity that I am describing, they are sounds I make with my voice, or markings I make with my hand. However, words seem to participate in the being of the described entity, such that the sounds or written markings could not be anything but the entity described. St. Augustine says that words are metaphysical “signs”, and Heidegger says that a human “shepherds” being with language. I would not say “tree” when I see a “dog”. Students come to see that word formation then, is essential for any kind of community and the communication within. We all must agree, as a people, that words bear certain kinds of meaning, otherwise a city will collapse. This is perhaps why God introduces new language in the story of the tower of Babel to undo the city, the people do not agree on what different sounds mean.
Another ancient text came to mind during this extensive training, the Platonic dialogue called Gorgias. Across the Mediterranean Sea, perhaps 500 years after the story of Babel was written down, Plato examined what happens when there are human forces that actively take advantage of language to their own purposes in a city-state. Next week, we will take a look at the relationship between grammar and rhetoric, the two arts that Literacy Essentials is most concerned with, and the political community.
