Trivium Mastery: The Intersection of Three Roads: How to Give Your Child an Authentic Classical Home Education

by Diane Lockman

Teach Three Skills to Mastery
 
Classical education has seen an explosive rebirth in the past few years in the homeschool community.  Experts shout for your attention with advice like "teach world history in four distinct units," "learning Latin is mandatory," and "finish the logic stage before moving on to the rhetoric stage."

You could easily spend weeks pouring over all the different requirements, curriculum, teaching resources, and interpretations out there...and you would feel overwhelmed with the burden of trying to comprehend and apply all that you learned.   You only have a few years to shape your child's heart and mind.  With so much at stake and so little time, which way should you go?

Diane Lockman has been through a similar journey, and she wants you to know that what she discovered was liberating.  Classical education, if taught like it was for most of Western history, can be enormously fun and energizing!  All you have to do is teach three skills to mastery (language, thought, and speech) while discussing meaningful ideas like truth, goodness, and beauty. 

Home school parents need practical instructions for turning the idea of a classical Christian home education into reality.  Diane shows you exactly how to teach these three skills through 12 real-life case studies with children ranging in age from 5 to 13 years old.  Using her "must-know" checklists, Diane develops customized strategic semester plans for each child, a to-do list for the parents, and a to-do list for the children.  Use these personal "makeovers" as a guide to develop your own strategic plans.
 
National leaders on two continents have been successfully trained by the classical method for over two thousand years.  At this critical time in history, the common twelve-year educational paradigm cannot begin to prepare your children for the calling on their lives.  Like Diane, you and your family can recover your inheritance. What are you waiting for?

Genres: Education, Nonfiction

299 pages, Paperback

First published February 20, 2009

Reviews

[Michelle Padrelanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’ve been homeschooling for some years, you would know that there are several homeschooling philosophies. There’s Charlotte Mason, unschooling, eclectic, unit studies, Montessori and then there’s Classical Education. I have to admit that I did not really understand much about this particular kind of educational philosophy. In fact, I had the chance to review a complete classical curriculum in the past, but I hardly understood it! Despite having read pages and pages of its explanation, the how’s and the why’s, I can’t say that I have understood it. Actually, it left me even more befuddled than before.

Now, I have the opportunity to understand Classical Home Education once more through Trivium Mastery – The Intersection of Three Roads: How To Give Your Child An Authentic Classical Home Education by Diane B. Lockman. Let me first say that out of all the homeschool books that I have read so far, Trivium Mastery has clearly brought home to me what my children needed to learn and how to go about it.

Ms. Diane Lockman, a CPA and a homeschool mom, first talks about the foundation of Classical Education, how it has evolved to follow the model of public school system of education, and how to reclaim in our homes the true classical education we can give to our children.

The first part of the book talks about the intersection of the three roads to Classical Education. The three roads being Language, Thought and Speech. She says that these three roads must be taught to our children to the point of mastery. There are no grade levels in Classical Education, no particular years that you can say your child is educated. But mastery of these three roads by the student will fully equip him to keep on learning throughout his lifetime.

The second half of the books shows five family case studies. Each family is unique and all wanted to transition to classical home education. Ms. Lockman shares here how the families were able to transition to classical home education.

Surprisingly, we can do the same thing because the last part of the book has the same assessment tools that Ms. Lockman uses to evaluate the families. Not only that, Ms. Lockman’s website, The Classical Scholar, has a free Parent Workshop that we can do ourselves. The workshop will allow you to evaluate your family’s strengths and weaknesses and will show you where your child is weak academically and where the child is already strong.

I’ve done the workshop myself and even though it took me some time to finish it, I’m really glad that I did it. After completing the workshop, it became clear to me what my children still needed to learn. Now that I have a better understanding of Classical Home Education, I am no longer intimidated by it and am assured that I can give my children the quality education that they need. If I can read only one book about homeschooling, this is it.

Thanks to Ms. Lockman for agreeing to send me her book for free for review purposes. I was not required to write a positive review and all opinions stated here are entirely mine.

[Karen (Living Unabridged) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some helpful advice but it really reads like a diatribe against Susan Wise Bauer and The Well Trained Mind. Every homeschool, even a classical model homeschool, is going to look different from the next. People are different, temperaments are different, styles are different.

You can classically educate your child. Read this book for some advice. Read The Well Trained Mind for advice. Read anything else you want. But ultimately your homeschool situation has to suit you and your child(ren) and not any other author's idea of what a classical education is or looks like.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

For a classical homeschooler, this book had some great tips. But, there was much to be desired. Hearing a podcast, I was drawn to Lockman's ideas and grabbed the book. A criticism of the neoclassical homeschool movement, which we have greatly benefitted from, without citation for her arguments and solid support that the neoclassical is not beneficial as a framework, the book steers families away from Latin and Greek and even suggests that the original quadrivium is obsolete. Lockman's book posits a thorough English and debate education, though lacking intense English grammar. Some families will find this exactly what they are looking for. I, however, couldn't find evidence that Dorothy Sayers essay was invalid. Maybe it was not traditional classical, but I believe it gave a workable map from modern education to return to classical education.

[Natalie Fetzer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is not the primer on classical education philosophy that I was hoping for. Lockman states at the beginning that this is a refutation of mainstream classical education which she considers a "hijacking" of true trivium practice without clearly explaining what the mainstream theory is and how her version is different.

My children are pre-school age and I'm not interested in the nuts and bolts of assessments and curriculum. I'm exploring educational options and philosophies, but if you're looking for something a little more practical this might be useful for you.

[Joy E. Rancatore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trivium Mastery presents a case for a combining of the three branches of the trivium--language, thought and speech--in the foundational subjects before a child is ready to pursue higher subjects (the quadrivium). Diane B. Lockman shares five "case studies" of homeschooling families to whom she gave a semester worth of classical how to instruction.

This book feels, to me, very incomplete. I appreciated her history of classical education and of education in the US. She writes against the 12-year school system we have in this country, but never presents an alternative. In fact, she seems to embrace the K-12 structure later in the book and on her website The Classical Scholar.

She also portrays other classical Christian books as requiring language only in grades 1-4, thought only in grades 5-8 and speech only in grades 9-12. While other books do split the grades in this fashion and--arguably, incorrectly--call these three sections The Trivium, every book I have read shows how the three aspects of the trivium overlap throughout the years and across all subject fields.

Two more points of confusion for me are her "case studies" which only show her suggested semester schedules to address weaknesses and improve upon strengths for some children in five families. She doesn't share the outcomes of those semesters. Second, she repeatedly references Socratic Paideia: Dialogue Leads to Discipline, the sequel to this book; however, four years after the publication of this first book, I can find no existence of this titled and referenced sequel.

I did find the first part of this book interesting and agreed with much of what she said; the book just felt unfinished to me.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you think The Well Trained Mind sounds good but is very overwhelming, this book is great. Diane outlines a history of classical education from its roots to the present and then explains in detail the basic skills of the Trivium (reading, thinking, speaking). She also gives doable ideas on how to help your children develop these skills. She has also outlined a basic "inventory" list for each skill to assess where your children are on the road. Diane teaches that all three skills can be worked on simultaneously at any age (with activities appropriate to the child's age and level). I thought the ideas are very adaptable to a TJEd model homeschool and that these skills will help prepare the student for more serious study in scholar phase. The book includes some case studies showing various plans of study for different children which I enjoyed reading but found some of the suggested ideas repeated frequently between different children. Overall I did like this book and will use it as a reference.

[Blossom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good ideas and information but very simply done. She does present the question of confining the trivium to 12 years. I've not read enough about classical education and the trivium to add my own opinion. The book consists of very little actual 'how-to' but does include case studies.However it does not include the results. Interesting short read but from my limited reading The Well Trained Mind will be of more use to those wanting more of an in depth study of how to implement a classical education, whether or not it is confined to 12 years.

[C · Rating 1 out of 5]

I personally didn't find it helpful.