A classical education cultivates wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, beauty, and goodness. Students at Verideia pursue wisdom and virtue at every grade level and in each of the many disciplines offered to our students.
The Verideia method of classical education is centered around the Trivium, which contains three areas of study based on the stages in a child’s mental development. At Verideia we focus on the first two stages of the Trivium. The first stage, or the Grammar period, takes advantage of a young student’s great natural ability to absorb large amounts of material, whether math facts, science, or a second language. The Lower School, grades kindergarten through six, teaches the foundational academic content for all future studies, and enriches student lives as they learn poetry and music and Shakespeare.
Students at ages eleven-thirteen are growing new neurons in the part of the bra
in that controls “executive function,” i.e. reasoning ability. The second stage of the Trivium, known as the Dialectic period, takes advantage of this brain development. The Dialectic can also be thought of as the logic or reasoning phase, and this is the focus of the Middle School, grades seven & eight. Here students are ready to take the facts of learning and make logical connections between them, to assess the importance of the academic content, to question and analyze, and seek truth.
In addition, every subject has its’ own grammar, logic, and rhetoric – thus students at all levels begin with the grammar of the subject, and then move to the dialectic and rhetoric within that discipline as they are able.
Other Verideia classical traditions include:
In Literature: focusing on the great books – books read by the intellectual giants of our culture, books that are great teachers
In History: teaching the significance of history as part of the flow of the Western civilization continuum
In Language: teaching Latin in Lower and Middle School
British author and educator Dorothy Sayers wrote a succinct essay promoting the value of classical education. She ends with this statement: “The sole true end of education is simply this, to teach men how to learn for themselves, and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.” Our desire at Verideia is to assist students in every possible way to learn for themselves to cultivate wisdom and virtue.