The medieval trivium has been central to the American classical education movement of the past three decades. For many of us it is our defining concept, our method against public school madness, even our child psychology. And so it may surprise us to discover that in a book subtitled An Introduction to the History of Classical Education, the trivium is not once mentioned. The title of this book may also surprise us: Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators. Don’t worry, this isn’t the secular, atheistic humanism of our own day. The original humanists, the Christian humanists of the Renaissance, were teachers who revived a love of the Greco-Roman classics and of the early church fathers—and they didn’t do it through the trivium. No, they were determined to replace medieval education with what they believed were more classical aims and methods, and it was only through their labors that classical education survived as long as it did into the modern age.[1] However we may feel toward them for dethroning the trivium, let’s hear them out and see if we can learn from that greatest of classical revivals. What follows are some highlights from the above-mentioned book and Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance, both written by William Harrison Woodward around the turn of the twentieth century.

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