Classical education is a conscious return to those academic disciplines and methodologies which helped spark the great cultural flowering of Western Christendom over the past 1000 years. It is the belief that true education emphasizes basic thinking and character skills and prepares children for a lifetime and lifestyle of learning. In 1991 Pastor Douglas Wilson published a book for Christians interested in revisiting classical education, entitled Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning. This phrase, "the tools of learning," characterizes the classical approach, which goes beyond the mere learning of facts to teach students to think independently and critically, and to develop in them values, truth, discernment and understanding.

We have chosen the time-honored method of the Trivium to best accomplish these learning objectives. The scholastic stages of the Trivium - grammar, logic, and rhetoric - are roughly analogous to the Proverb writer's emphasis on knowledge, understanding and wisdom. Cornerstone seeks to apply the Trivium in designing the most effective educational practices for each stage of a child's mental, spiritual, emotional, and social development.

And how are the lessons of the Trivium applied? The child in the grammar stage (basically grades one through five) must be concerned with the facts of learning in the content areas (reading, writing, arithmetic), as preparation

Desert Landscape by Elisa R.

for dealing with higher-level thinking. The most emphasized learning activity at this stage is memorization, both for purposes of cognitive recall and for building storage identities for future knowledge acquisition. However, appropriate attention is given to meaning and comprehension, even at this first stage. The next stage, logic (grades six through eight), sees the child as able to learn to argue his or her point, thus taking information, organizing it, and applying it in increasingly sophisticated forms. The child in the rhetoric stage has achieved the ability to communicate, synthesize, and generalize learning across a range of disciplines.

The curriculum and methods at CCA are founded on the best of literature, the broad sweep of history and geography, the enrichment of art and music, the trained observation of nature, the exploration and discovery encouraged by science, and the understanding and wonder of numbers in mathematics. CCA believes that all children must be fed a steady diet of worthy ideas, and that these ideas are found mainly in books - the best books. The curriculum is wide and demanding. Students are trained in habits of heart, mind, and spirit - attention, respect, responsibility, reverence - so as to bring focus to the art and craft of their own learning.