Cross-talk: What Should a Classics Curriculum look like?

Fleming at Chronicles has an answer up at his Autodidact column.

Here's a snippet:

The Trivium and Quadrivium were relevant to their own time, but have little use today. In the Medieval period, astronomy was important for several reasons, notably in showing there was a divinely arranged order in the universe. [...] Just as children should be encouraged to learn the names of trees and flowers, they should learn the major stars and constellations. There are also, to take another topic, better ways of teaching rhetoric and dialectic than were practiced in the Middle Ages.

The Middle Ages produced magnificent works of poetry and philosophy, which—contrary to the snobbish inclinations of many classicists including myself at an earlier age—should be included in the curriculum, but there is a lack of order and structure in so much Medieval literature that makes it far less useful in training the young.

Interesting take. The Trivium (but never, so far as I know, the Quadrivium) have been oversold in the homeschool market, I suppose. In a sense this is useful--where would we be in Classical Christian Education (CCE) without Sayers Lost Tools of Learning and Doug Wilson, I don't know. But the real Trivium, not Sayers' or Wilson's, is woven into our educational method as the distinction between Grammar School and College. The inherited, Traditional, order, is Grammar-Rhetoric-Logic. Logic or Dialectic, certainly, has had an unstable place due to the controversy over Ramism and later Academic in-fighting over Aristotle. Even in the Scottish Enlightenment period, though, the basic form of College with Rhetoric (Cicero) first, and Logic next, persisted. In other words, we have (or had) the Trivium right up until Latin and Greek were not taught in Colleges. 1750 or 1830 is hardly Medieval!

Now, the Quadrivium is certainly in need of an update. Keep your eyes on Traditio Nostra and you may see one, even!