Product reviews for Trivium in Practice

Trivium in Practice is a series of attempts to bring historical -˜high' thought about education to bear in current realities. From what I read about the work of Highbury Grove School, here there is an open-hearted and ambitious attempt to contextualise historical -˜high' thought about how to educate in the -˜modern' needs of a multi-cultural London school. Aside from the introduction, this is the standout chapter as it means to change things for the better for the children. It understands that the ability to investigate ideas and to articulate (and even perform) responses to those ideas is a vital drive in less well-off communities, and it wonders aloud how future generations of our kids are ever to challenge the primacy of entitled buffoons if they do not have the first clue about the linguistic and cultural codes that the entitled use to recognise each other? This school and the chapter they have offered up are trying really bloody hard to do the right things for the right reasons. 



It is a book of strange bedfellows: some of whom are less open to easy penetration than others. But the varied cast here is a symptom of how much of a wind Martin's first book caught. What is interesting is that the state sector's contributions are pealing with enthusiasm about taking the ideas written about in the first book and running with them, using the trivium to help kids transcend their circumstances while the independent sector's responses are in the form of mini dissertations. Carl Hendrick's essay on Bakhtin is a mazy minor key dribble that lingers around the idea of dialogism: broadly, chatting without the need for one position to be victorious over another. Eton College's Mike Grenier sculpts an enjoyable and playfully well-written rejection of industrialised versions of education that makes the welcome and overdue proposition that we all just slow down a little.