Observations About Stages of Learning

Decemeber 18th, 2021. Republished June 15th, 2024

The following is a observation I had about the three stages of learning, which I call the grammar stage, the dialectic stage, and the rhetoric stage. All three together make up the trivium.

Ok, so one day I was thinking about what I’ve learned about different subjects, and also observing where other people were at in the same subject. This led me to think about the different idea people believe about a subject in the different areas. I noticed that in the grammar stage everything feels strict, in the dialectic stage things start to feel a little less strict, and in the rhetoric stage you feel free from rules and can explore.

In the first stage, the grammar stage, everything feels strict and ridged. During the grammar stage, you are learning the ground rules, the basics. Because these ground rules are all you know, you have to follow them strictly. As an example, when I started learning Latin, everything felt pretty annoying, repetitive, and boring. I also didn’t feel like I would be able to just learn something new about it. I needed the book to guide me. Because of this, I didn’t feel free to experiment with the language, and I actually just couldn’t because of my limited knowledge. Now this has changed as I’ve gotten more familiar with the language and I will talk about that in the next few sections. So overall you can’t have fun with what your learning when you’re in the grammar stage because you don’t know enough.

In the second stage, the dialectic stage, you start to be able to ask questions about what you’ve learned, but you still can’t answer you questions so without a more knowledgable teacher it is still going to be hard to explore. At this stage, you can start to see the fun in the subject that you’ve been studying, but depending on the cirumstances you still often get frustrated with it. In the dialectic stage, you start to be expore but you’re still quite limited.

In the last stage, the rhetoric stage, you are able to ask and answer questions easily. This frees you from the rules, and allows you to have fun with your knowledage. This is the funnest stage and the one you should always be looking forward to. It takes a lot of effort to get to, but, when you get there, it is worth it. From my experience, the rhetoric stage gives you freedom. For example, I’ve been learning how to write using a curriclum called Lost Tools of Writing (LTW). LTW teaches you to write using three stages, invention, arrangement, and elocution. Until recently, I wrote each of my papers by meticilulily following each stage and rule. Figuring out what I’m gonna say, put it in one of their outlines, and write it using their tools and styles. Now that I’ve gotten more into the rhetoric stage. I’ve stopped strictly following the rules. For example, I often combine the invention and arrangement. I also write my own outlines and decide what parts I want to include. Nothing feels strict, instead I feel like I am free to write however I want, and it works!

Overall, this was very interesting to think about, and it should be very encoranging to anyone just starting out at a new subject. It will be strict and ridge for a while, but freedom does come, you just have to earn it.