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The Timeless Value of Classical Christian Education

In a rapidly changing world, where education often prioritises the latest trends, classical Christian education stands as a beacon of enduring wisdom and truth. It’s more than just a method—it’s a philosophy that nurtures the whole person: mind, heart, and soul.

By grounding young people in the richness of the liberal arts and the Great Books, we equip them with the tools of learning, fostering critical thinking, eloquence, and a love for truth. But it doesn’t stop there. At the heart of classical Christian education is the integration of faith and learning, shaping young minds to not only succeed in their careers but to live virtuous and meaningful lives.

Classical Christian education reminds us of the importance of what is eternal, teaching students to seek wisdom, goodness, and beauty in all things.

Classical Christian education adopts a mastery approach to learning centred around the Trivium. The Trivium is the philosophy and methodology that forms the bedrock of our curriculum and the three ways of the Trivium, Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric, inform our pedagogical approach.

The Trivium embodies the pursuit of wisdom from a knowledge rich foundational curriculum; It combines hard work to foster learning.

The Trivium provides a staged support/scaffold for the knowledge to memory to skills curriculum, with questioning as an essential part of the repertoire.

Our belief is that if we teach in a way that enables learning, our students will be well-educated, knowledgeable and resilient enough to do well regardless of whatever external benchmarking they may be measured against; this embodies the Trivium ideals.

The pedagogical concepts linked to the three Trivium pathways are exemplified below:

GRAMMAR – knowledge & skills

  • Direct transmission of knowledge & explicit teacher instruction
  • Retention & recall: teaching from memory, learning by heart, low stakes testing; knowledge for its own sake & practice
  • Connecting ideas
  • Explicit teaching to build cultural capital; explicit teaching of subject specific terminology & the skills of reading texts.

DIALECTIC – enquiry & exploration

  • Opportunities to debate, question & challenge
  • Opportunities for hands on authentic experience & experimentation
  • Opportunities for enquiry, analysis, critical evaluation & problem solving
  • Developing understanding

RHETORIC – communication

  • Strong emphasis on structured speech events to share & debate ideas with others
  • Opportunities to perform to make things & to showcase the products of learning
  • Opportunities to contribute to the discourse about the values shared in the school & the wider community
  • Oracy & literacy
  • Connecting ideas and applying them across subjects

Our teaching methodology: the Trivium

Teaching how to learn and think

Grammar refers to the building blocks of each subject, the basic facts, and truths.
Rhetoric focuses on training students to express what they have learned clearly and wisely.
Logic offers a disciplined experience of things, teaching students how to think, not what to think
Rigorous and edifying

It's a rigorous and systematic approach to learning that encourages virtue, hard work and perseverance

Knowledge rich

It studies the great minds and literary works of the past, and encourages pupils to continue their legacy, by exploring, questioning, debating and drawing conclusions.

Sequential

It teaches pupils to see connections between past, present and future events, to trace developments and explore thought processes and patterns of action through history

Language focused learning

It is language-focused learning, which is achieved through written and spoken word, rather than through images such as TV and online videos: watching images the mind is passive, whereas reading words on a page makes the brain work harder.

Critical thinkers and eloquent speakers

Pupils become critical thinkers and eloquent speakers who can synthesize information, arguments, hidden biases, question assumptions and convincingly present their own argument

Registered charity number: 1205811
Suite 1, Queensgate Centre, Orsett Road, Grays. RM17 5DF
Phone: 01375 271017

A forward-thinking classical Christian school equipping children with Godly character, academic excellence and leadership skills

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