Editor’s Note: this is Part II of a two-part series on classical education. Click here to read Part I.

Enter the Logic Phase

By the time the child reaches fourth or fifth grade, this early stage of learning begins to pass. Now the student has a good basic sense of daily patterns; Children at this age begin to grow impatient with rote memory, with repetition and with drill. It is no longer as emotionally satisfying as it used to be. They’re ready for the next stage of learning.

Neoclassical educators call this the "logic" or "dialectic" phase of learning. Now that the student has been given the basics of each field of knowledge, he can begin to think more abstractly about them.

Consider the differences between grammar and logic-stage learning in two different academic fields. A grammar-stage student who reads a story should be asked, very simply: What happened in the story? He hasn’t yet mastered the basics of following a story from beginning to middle to end and then recollecting the major events. But the logic-stage student has read hundreds of stories. He has seen the repetition of basic story patterns often enough to grow familiar with them. Now he is ready for a new challenge: to explain why the characters acted as they did. He is ready to think critically about literature.

In history, the grammar-stage student learned that Elizabeth I was a great English queen who never married; the logic-stage student goes one step further and asks, "Why didn’t Elizabeth marry?" The grammar-stage student learns that the American Revolution happened in 1776 and the French Revolution happened in 1789; the logic-stage student asks, "What was the relationship between the two events?"

The shift from memory and drill to critical thinking and analysis shows that the child’s intellect is maturing. But there is also an emotional component in the shift towards critical thinking that takes place during the middle-school years. The childish longing for security and sameness is developing into something else: a desire to know why things happen.

If a first-grader asks you whether a burglar is going to break into the house tonight, the wise parent says, "No, there are no burglars around here." That child doesn’t want an entirely accurate answer ("Probably not, but there is a small chance.") He’s asking for reassurance that this night (like the night before, and the one before that, and the one before that) will pass safely. But the fifth-grader who asks this same question is likely to treat your reassuring answer with skepticism: "How do you know? Isn’t there a chance?" The fifth grader has lived through enough years (and news reports) to know that sometimes the world does change, and that your reassurance is not going to prevent this change.