Upper School 7th-12th
The Upper School at GFA represents the last two stages of the Trivium: Logic and Rhetoric. One of our goals at GFA is to teach students how to think, and this begins in earnest in the junior high years. With the onset of puberty, students change dramatically. They transition from the sweet innocence of the Grammar School to the often-times oblivious surliness of the junior high years. One of the characteristics of this age is students start thinking deeply about the world and their place in it. This results in a lot of “Why?” questions. For example, if you tell a junior high student to go make their bed, you’re liable to get a “Why?” question: “Why? I’m just going to sleep in it tonight and mess it up anyway.” If students are going to think deeply about the world and their place in it, we want to give them the tools they need to think well. We try to harness this developmental phase by teaching logic in grades seven through nine.
The final step of the Trivium is the rhetoric phase. Somewhere during ninth grade, students typically mature from the junior high years into the teen years. Many good things come with this maturation: students start showering regularly, they start wearing deodorant and making sure their shirt is not dirty, they start combing their hair, etc. All of this is emblematic of a giant shift that has occurred as students go from being infamously lacking in self-awareness during the logic phase to now obsessively self-aware with the rhetoric phase. With the rhetoric phase, students become very concerned with how the world perceives them, especially their peers. As such, we work to provide students with the tools they need to be perceived well, everything from rhetoric training – how to speak to the world in a way that is powerful and persuasive – to social etiquette and manners training.
We do all this with the hope that once graduates leave GFA, they have been equipped with much knowledge about the world, they have been trained to think deeply about important issues and to arrive at sound and valid conclusions about those issues, and they can then articulate their conclusions to the world in a way that is powerful and persuasive. This is a small part of what it means to be classically educated.
