Self-Reliance & the Trivium

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One of the first ways that we can become more self-reliant is honing our critical thinking skills & ability to decipher others ideas while communicating our own clearly. Self-reliant individuals are autodidacts who never give up the love of learning. Learning remains our best skill, and we must constantly strive to learn better & faster. The Internet provides so many paths to learning. I’ve used YouTube.com to learn how to do many of the repairs that I’ve done myself on my home. It’s amazing, & I’ve been able to save money by doing it myself, besides the sense of confidence that I’ve gained once I know how to make repairs that would cost a fortune if I hired a contractor to complete them. As an educator, I’ve spent my career trying to teach students to develop the skills necessary to be life-time learners with varying degrees of success. I’ve developed several skill sets that they need to learn & apply in order to become autodidactic. Self-reliance demands that we practice learning throughout our lives, & I want to share some of the skills & methods that I’ve assembled from a variety of sources to help people learn adeptly. 

  

"Blooms rose" by K. Aainsqatsi - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

First, let’s understand the path of learning through what’s known in education as Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning. This taxonomy portrays a hierarchy of learning from the most basic to the most complex. The path begins with basic ‘knowledge’ followed by ‘comprehension’, ‘application’, ‘analysis’, ‘synthesis’, & ‘evaluation’. This stair-step progression helps to develop a process of learning that should be applied to any learning endeavor. Going from terminology & information to utilizing the information, analyzing the information then creating an interpretation of that information & finally evaluating the information & your interpretation. Educators strive to apply each of these levels of cognition to their lessons & longer plans. It is a process that self-reliant individuals should constantly apply to their learning. If we aren’t learning & evaluating our learning, we aren’t progressing. Self-reliant individuals don’t become complacent with their position, they constantly seek progress (Does that make us progressives?). This is how I interpret Nietzsche’s call for overcoming. We must overcome what we are in order to become what we can be. Humanity must overcome its limitations by a constant effort to progress & not retard that progress. I digress.

While Bloom’s taxonomy has a Wikipedia page that explains it more fully, I want to direct your attention to another method of learning that has been developed quite fully by Gene Odening & Jan Irvin on a website called gnosticmedia. This method is called the Trivium, & it places Bloom’s taxonomy into three categories that autodidacts can use to hone & apply their learning skills. The Trivium applies three levels of thinking: Grammar, Logic, & Rhetoric. Tying these levels to Bloom’s taxonomy means that Grammar represents the knowledge & comprehension levels, Logic is the application & analysis levels, & rhetoric is the synthesis & evaluation levels.
 

Grammar isn’t your English teacher correcting your syntax & usage. Grammar in the concept of the Trivium refers to the first four words of the age-old comprehension questions that teachers use: the "5w’s & h". Grammar focuses on the who, the what, the when, & the where. In the Trivium, we cannot progress until we know & comprehend these. Grammar is the terminology, the facts, the details & the quotes that we are studying. This is the first two levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.

 Logic refers to the next two levels of the taxonomy: application & analysis. Here the learner takes the Grammar & applies that next "w" question, Why? by applying the knowledge to experience & analyzing its value. Why do we need this knowledge? Why does the source put this knowledge out there? 

Rhetoric applies the next two levels through the how question. How doe this compare to my experience? How can I use this knowledge? How does the source use this knowledge? How well or accurately am I portraying the knowledge? How accurately does the source apply this knowledge? This is the highest levels of learning, & where we actually build our learning into wisdom. I created a chart for my students to help them analyze literature, although I use different terms for Grammar, Logic & Rhetoric:

Proficiency Chart by J K Van Nort is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

Another way of seeing the Trivium is to think of the Grammar as absorbing information verbatim, then Logic as analyzing that information for accuracy, fallacious thoughts, & utility, then Rhetoric as evaluating & communicating that information to others. As we say in the education profession: the best way to learn something is to have to teach it to others. A self-reliant individual isn’t afraid to communicate their learning to others. This is why ultimately self-reliant individuals cooperate readily & successfully. How can I make such a bold assumption. Well let’s put the Trivium to work on this rhetoric:

A self-reliant individual isn’t afraid to communicate their learning to others. This is why ultimately self-reliant individuals cooperate readily & successfully. 

I’d begin by ensuring that I understand completely all the terms in the statement. Words that need agreement on the definition should be comprehended first. The autodidact would probably identify ‘self-reliant’, ‘individual’, & ‘cooperate’ as words that might be defined differently by different people. So self-reliance - The capacity to rely on one's own capabilities, and to manage one's own affairs; independence not to be dependent; cooperate - Association for mutual benefit, such as for purposes of production or purchase; & individual - A person considered alone, rather than as belonging to a group of people

The basic argument that I comprehend is that independent people (who?) don’t fear sharing their learning (what?) with others which implies that independent people associate for mutual benefit better (when? & where?). So I’ve done my Grammar, I’ve ensured that I have completely comprehended the ‘knowledge’ & ‘information’ in the statement.

Next I’m going to apply logic to the argument. Why does the statement make the claim that self-reliant individuals cooperate better? The author attempts to demonstrate that independence & autonomy lead to cooperation. His agenda is to convince others that self-reliance produces opportunities for cooperation. Why does he think this? First he sees someone with self-reliance as independent & capable, who won’t be harmed by cooperation significantly. Why is he making this argument? He’s making the argument to convince others that cooperation is possible between independent people, & in fact he’s arguing that self-reliant individuals make the best individuals in associations for mutual benefit. Why can he make that claim? He claims that self-reliance makes one less susceptible to being violated, & he also claims that independent people tend to cooperate more frequently & successfully. Why would I disagree with this statement? Well, I know that independent people can still be fooled or harmed by others. I also know that just because one is independent, it doesn’t mean that they will be willing to cooperate. They may very well seek to remain alone & without involving themselves in any associations with others. This doesn’t negate the statement; the statement remains possible & even probable when we consider that self-reliant individuals would likely have the confidence to associate with other self-reliant individuals to accomplish what they cannot accomplish alone.

The third step of the Trivium is rhetoric, where we ask the question how? How does this relate to the world around me? I know that cooperation is not an easy process, & that if I were personally going to create associations for mutual benefit, I would want to pick the people with whom I associated rather than just associate with anyone. How would this work? Well, let’s say that I wanted to develop a business to repair & re-purpose items that I’ve found. I might start the business by myself, then slowly adding individuals who want to do the same thing, build a cooperative that works together for mutual benefit. The association could determine how one becomes a member of the cooperative, & how the mutually shared tools & supplies are maintained & replaced or expanded. How would the cooperative remove members who didn’t fulfill or didn’t participate according to cooperative guidelines? The cooperative would have to establish rules for membership that must be fulfilled or the membership could be revoked. If a member didn’t participate according to the rules but made it difficult to remove him, then the whole association could be disbanded & the shared items distributed according to who provided them or in an equitable manner. Then a new cooperative could be established that didn’t include the non-cooperative member. How valuable is associating with other self-reliant individuals for mutual benefit? I’d value it highly because it offers ways to accomplish more than I could by myself. How should I go about engaging in cooperative associations? Carefully & with the full knowledge that I have to be actively engaged in the process at all levels to ensure that my concerns & interests are protected. That active engagement is what makes me a self-reliant individual, & if I associate with other self-reliant individuals, I am less likely to be abused by cooperating.

As you can see, this process is simply to gain mastery of the information that has been studied. The purpose of the Trivium isn’t to provide a fool-proof method for learning as much as a process for learning that increases the ability of the individual to determine the value & utility of information. The Trivium method can be applied to any learning effort. If I want to learn how to program computers, I’d follow the same procedure. This means that when I’m learning something new, I need to always follow the same procedure. The consistency of applying the Trivium process will make the process more natural for the individual & increase the ability of the individual to learn assuredly & efficiently. The Trivium should be applied to anything we decide to add to our understanding of the world. If we are shopping for siding for our house, we should apply the Trivium process to establish the best siding, the best contractor to install the siding, whether siding is our best option, whether we could install the siding ourselves, how much value would siding provide to our house, how much will it insulate our home? If we are going to answer these questions, we must use every level of the Trivium to learn about siding & make an informed & educated decision. This is the value & utility of the Trivium: to provide the self-reliant individual with the means to educate themselves on whatever area they deem necessary to function as a self-reliant individual. Self-reliance demands that we continuously educate ourselves on the world around us, & the Trivium is an excellent tool to accomplish that demand.