“…I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing
disintegration, over the same period of persons and communities.”
Wendell Berry
Standing by Words, p.24
I aim to teach the effective use of language. A person uses language to communicate in four principle actions: (1) speaking, (2) listening, (3) writing, and (4) reading. According to the medieval scholastic tradition, language—comprised of these four actions—is best studied by means of the trivium, the liberal arts of language. The arts of the trivium are grammar, logic, and rhetoric: respectively, the art of making and arranging symbols, the art of thinking, and the art of effective communication. If communication is the ultimate end of language, then rhetoric is the highest art and the primary goal of an education in the language arts. The other arts, grammar and logic, serve rhetoric and may be seen as means to the end of mastering rhetorical discourse. Therefore, I aim to be a teacher of grammar, logic, and ultimately rhetoric.
However, while I endeavor to be a teacher of rhetoric, I also aim to teach a special use of language—poetics. Poetics, like rhetoric, may encompass all the speech acts: drama for both speaking and listening, and verse and prose fiction for reading and writing. Like rhetorical discourse, poetic discourse may also be studied through the trivium; for since poetry is made with language, it may surely be understood through the liberal arts of language. By understanding poetry through grammar, logic, and rhetoric students learn the arts in which the great poets themselves participated—Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, for example, were all thoroughly educated in the trivium. These liberal arts of language, then, form the cornerstone of an education in the two traditions of language—the rhetorical and poetic. As a teacher of the effective use of language, I aim to teach both rhetorical and poetic discourse through the liberal arts of language, for these arts are the tools by which a student may become liberally educated—freed to know the world as it is and to speak accordingly.
