What best prepares students for rhetoric level learning? Receiving a solid, logic level education; one that roots students more fully in faith, reason and familiarity with the great works of the past.
The logic level teaches students to connect and organize information they have learned from their earliest years. They begin to realize that the Code of Hammurabi, the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights are vitally linked and key in understanding our own form of government. For how many of us has this information remained ever jumbled and unusable?
At the logic level students begin to generalize, to question, to connect, to analyze, thus developing the capacity for abstract thought. Thus, a course on formal logic is taught with students learning cause and effect, valid and invalid argument, fallacies and syllogisms. Each of these is then hunted for in historical debate, literature, political campaigns, current events, and dinnertime conversations.
Students begin to dig deeper into the motivation of leaders, the relationships between different cultures that existed at the same time, and into forms of government and their causes of war. They learn to compose arguments that focus on the questions which led to historical development and debated fact. Logic level students focus on symbolic mathematics, working with the unknown, analysis, discovering the central point, and applying the knowledge already acquired in finding solutions.
Each of these newly developed logic level skills rightly position students for the School of Rhetoric, where they will learn and employ the five canons of historical rhetoric. This training equips them to fully develop and defend their thoughts in writing and oral argumentation. Aristotle taught that rhetoric level learning leads to fair-mindedness so that students are apt and able to argue persuasively on both sides of an issue, in order to see clearly what the facts are.
Remember that the goal of classical education is to graduate students who can take in new knowledge, evaluate its worth, and then discard it or put it to good use. It prepares students for a lifetime of learning. Thus, students prepared at the logic level are ready to transition into the School of Rhetoric.
We are in awe of how God is shaping the School of Rhetoric’s inaugural 9th-grade class for 2021/2022. Priority enrollment to the School of Rhetoric for current Arma Dei Academy rising ninth-grade applicants has concluded, and we are now open enrolling new families and students. Soli Deo gloria!
Interested families should reach out to the Admissions department at admissions@armadeiacademy.com or by phone at (303) 346 – 4523. Learn more about the School of Rhetoric at https://armadeiacademy.com/academics/rhetoric/.
