Homeschooling High School: Rhetoric Stage Research

You can’t possibly teach your kids, in the time you have them, everything they ought to know. They’ve got a lifetime to learn. Before they leave home, though, they do need to learn how to learn. The Classical education model separates learning into three stages: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Each stage has its own set of learning tools and skills. Even if you are not using the Classical method to homeschool your children, it is helpful to review these stages in order to plan what learning skills your children will need.

During the grammar phase of learning something new, you must learn a new vocabulary, learn some basic rules, and memorize lots of facts. Young children seem to be wired for this, and so early education emphasizes this type of learning. Even an adult, though, learning a new subject, must first learn that subject’s grammar—no matter how difficult that is for us old folks. (Ask me sometime about a forty-something-year-old frumpy housewife struggling to learn Greek.)

During the logic phase, one learns the structure of a subject—how it is organized, what the parts are and how they relate to one another. At this stage the information starts to become useable. The skills of this stage include logic and organization of information. In the logic phase we learn not only the facts, but why things work they way do, or why things happened the way they did. We learn to weigh opinions and understand different perspectives. Children are developmentally ready for an emphasis on this kind of learning somewhere around their early teens.

The final phase of learning is the rhetoric stage. At this stage the subject matter is not only useful to you, but you are able to contribute original material to the field. A real scientist doesn’t just know a lot of science; he is able to conduct research and he is able to analyze and communicate the results of that research. The same is true of every field. The basic tools of the rhetoric stage are research, analysis, and communication. By age 16 or sometimes a little earlier, students should be developmentally ready to do some original research.

Often what are called, “research papers” in high school programs are really logic stage research rather than rhetoric stage research. At the logic stage a student may gather information from many sources and organize it into a paper or project, but add little, if any, original conclusions to it. Stating which prevailing opinion one favors and defending that position is not original research, though such projects are very appropriate for logic-stage students and should be included in middle and high school curricula.

Rhetoric stage research involves an analysis of the existing information, asking a question that has not been answered before, and pulling together the information needed to answer the question. In science, that may mean setting up and conducting a controlled experiment. In literature, it may mean conducting an in-depth analysis of a writer’s work to assess his worldview or his use of literary techniques. In history, it may mean extracting information from original records. While I don’t believe high school students need this level of experience in all of their subjects, I do think they need it in some.

If you are, as I am, the product of the public schools, the rhetoric stage of your own education may be somewhat weak—or even non-existent. (Many universities now assume their freshmen students have no research skills beyond the logic-stage level, and some do not expect it of their students until the graduate level.) Also, this type of learning requires, in many cases, access to more sophisticated tools or a good research library. How then, can we give our homeschooled children experience with this type of learning in at least some of their subjects?

That will be the subject of future posts on homeschooling in high school. I will share some of my ideas and I would love to hear some of yours.

Comments

[Cindy]

I am using Format Writing (among other things) with my 14 & 16 yos sons. I consider it helpful but as you state it seems more logic level than rhetoric level. The interesting thing is that my son in Freshman English in college is being taught the same format which I consider a "Mickey Mouse" outline.

[thebizofknowledge]

I stumbled upon this site as I was in the process of doing some online research. You really made some fascinating points here and said everything so clearly and concisely as well.