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Classical Languages Curriculum, Gifted

When classical education attained its definitive form during the Hellenistic period in Greece around 300 BCE, it was founded on the language arts trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric and grounded in a “great works” literary canon with a broad liberal and moral basis. Its aim was to inculcate facilitas, the ability to speak extemporaneously and appropriately about any subject, before any audience, and on any occasion. This ability depended upon both creativity and judgment, faculties developed by means of a pedagogical method combining precepts, models, and practice in analysis, composition, and public speaking. When the Romans conquered the Greek world, they merely adopted this curriculum, but made it bilingual. This curriculum then remained the institutional model with only minor variations for nearly 2 millennia in those countries influenced by Greco-Roman culture.

History

The father of this curriculum, or paideia, was Isocrates (436–338 BCE), a rival schoolmaster of Plato (428–347 BCE). The contrast between Isocrates' and Plato's educational programs puts in relief the differing philosophies of each and the reasons Isocrates' became more influential. While Plato favored educating the naturally gifted, Isocrates believed that precept, imitation, and practice would enable students with lesser gifts to improve and those with greater gifts to excel. While Plato taught only aristocrats, Isocrates opened his school to all who could pay. While Plato rigidly separated the cognitive and the verbal into two disciplines, Isocrates joined them as two dimensions of language. While Plato emphasized theoretical learning, especially mathematics, logic, and philosophy, taught in a setting isolated from the world, Isocrates emphasized the language arts, situated within social arenas. While Plato sought to produce philosopher-kings or advisors to kings, Isocrates sought to equip pupils for life through a general education that would impart creative problem solving, good judgment, skillful communication, and practical ethics. At the center of Isocrates' philosophy was the belief that reason and speech were the two faculties that separated humankind from beasts and that it was in the perfection of these two faculties that humans, then, became fully human.

Many after Isocrates contributed to the body of precepts and exercises collected to form the Hellenistic curriculum, but it is Isocrates' philosophy and methodology that give the paideia its shape and focus. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), who went to Greece to study, as many Romans of his generation did, was instrumental in making this curriculum available in Latin, translating paideia as humanitas, from whence derives Renaissance “humanism” and our modern “humanities.” A century later, the Roman schoolmaster Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (c. 35–c. 95 CE) records in his Institutio Oratoria the whole course for educating a child from birth to adulthood, providing the most complete description now extant of this curriculum.

Content and Methodology

The curriculum was organized into three stages. At the primary level, boys and girls learned reading, writing, and arithmetic. At the secondary level, they studied grammar, style, and literary interpretation and began practicing the early composition exercises: the fable, the tale, the chreia (elaboration of a famous person's speech or deed), and the proverb (elaboration of a maxim). When the children were ready, they advanced to the third level and to the study of logic and rhetoric, progressing through the remaining 10 preliminary composition exercises (the progymnasmata), which consisted of the confirmation, refutation, commonplace (denunciation for punishment), praise, vituperation, comparison, speech-in-character, description, thesis (defense of a general question), and legislation (praise or denunciation of a law). Then they practiced declamations (gymnasmata)—the suasoria (specific advice to a specific person) and the controversia (a plea either in defense or prosecution)—and real-life speeches, whether display pieces, advisory arguments, or forensic pleadings.

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