K-5th grades
Appreciation - Our students will become familiar with language, learning what words mean and how that meaning is conveyed. Here we instill wonder and an appreciation for that which is true, good and beautiful. The goal is to bring harmony to a thought.
6th-8th grades
Application - Their minds will be trained to perceive truth and validity and where they can apply the facts of what they know to specific contexts around them in sensible ways. The goal is to bring harmony to your mind.
9th-12th grades
Articulation - Their ears and voices will be tuned to clarity of style and beauty of expression. The goal is to bring harmony to your community.
The quadrivium involves mathematics: reasoning with numbers and quantities. The four subjects that the medievals categorized under mathematics were arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. These arts are developed to refine our ability to use numbers, shapes, and their relations. In ancient academics, these mathematical arts were built upon the language arts.
In 1948, Dorothy Sayers wrote an essay titled "The Lost Tools of Learning". This short essay is an integral work to the beginnings of classical Christian education. In her essay, she discusses her insightful observations suggesting that the three arts of language- grammar, logic and rhetoric are well suited to the stages of development of a child. Young children enjoy repetition, songs, and chants and at this stage learning focuses on memorizing facts and rules and any ‘grammar’ of a subject (i.e. multiplication tables, geography of a place, dates and events in history, etc). As they grow, junior high students become argumentative and want to know why things are the way they are. Here they begin to learn formal logic and start to make connections between the facts that they have learned in previous years. High school students begin having a strong desire to express themselves and at this stage they learn to do so in meaningful, clear and eloquent ways, through the art of rhetoric.
The Terra Nova School
5150 Jackson Dr, Ste A La Mesa, CA 91942
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