Why Modern Learning Strategies Are So Complicated (And How to Bypass Them)

An Introduction to the Trivium and First Steps Towards Simplifying the Learning Process

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The Modern World and It’s Complications

Our world is complicated, and in many ways too complicated. But sometimes the complexities—or at least our discoveries of them—lead to our benefit. Take, for instance, our current model of the solar system, which is one that alludes to the fact that the sun does not simply rise and set each day (thanks Galileo). Because of our understanding of this complexity, we have been able to achieve many things, namely the use of satellites and the ability to pursue space exploration. But when it comes to the complexities of learning and thinking, I can’t help but wonder if our modern discoveries have been, in some ways, more harm than good for most learners.

If you’re a self-learner, student, teacher, or anyone who has taken on the task of learning in recent years, the current trends in the learning community—a space littered with frameworks, hacks, maps, and an ever-growing list of essentials one must know if they wish to learn effectively—are things you’re probably familiar with. I do not intend on grouping myself in this camp. Will I be providing you with my thoughts on how you can learn well? Yes. Will I be, through my own intellectual journey, constantly developing strategies that I think could help you on yours? Absolutely. But am I really doing the same thing as all the others? I hope that, after reading this article, you can understand that what I’m attempting to achieve is the exact opposite as the rest, thus hopefully providing more benefit.

I’m not saying that any of the others are inherently wrong. But what I am saying is that the way in which they have complicated things for the learner has not been much of a beneficial complication. Unlike the discovery of the complex nature of our solar system—which simply constructed off of our pre-existing notions—the complexities we’ve introduced into the learning space have been a deconstruction. In the case of the solar system, we broadened our view. In the case of learning, we’ve taken things apart, and in the words of Gandalf the Gray (yes, I’m quoting from The Lord of the Rings in order to help us understand our current deconstructed state of thinking):

He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

This is not to say that what we have discovered has been for naught, but rather that instead of expanding on a fundamental learning framework, much of our discoveries pertaining to thinking and learning have been atomized parts of a much larger whole—a whole that, for many, is all that’s necessary for learning and thinking to take place, requiring the human mind alone.

Re-Subverting the Subverted

The modern perception of learning and thinking could be summed up to three points:

• Learning/thinking is not intuitive.

• The learning/thinking process is complex.

• If we wish to achieve our intellectual goals, supports are permanent necessities.

But all of this correlates to the idea that learning and thinking is, in many ways, an inhuman process that is not only difficult, but requires a permanent helper. This is why so many learning technologies have become popular in recent years, and instead of allowing us to grow, they’ve alleviated an inherently human act that is sold to us as being unintuitive, all-the-while making us believe that what we’re doing is acquiring our highest form of thought. Examples of this issue can be found throughout much of history, beginning with the promise of the pencil and paper: If you write something down, you’ll then know it. How many of us know how untrue that promise is!

So why, then, do we so quickly subscribe to the all-too-similar promises of the modern world? Because they cater to our misconstrued perception of what thinking and learning is. They play towards our weaknesses rather than our strengths. Obsidian, for instance, may prove to be a great tool for archiving information, but when used for learning results in more information recorded than could be done on paper (all to be forgotten quicker). AI may prove to be the most efficient tool in history that can curate information for the learner, but when used for the purpose of learning quickly becomes the savior for the modern thinker’s plight: that learning is unintuitive, complex, and necessitates more help than not. The result then becomes little-to-no thinking on behalf of the learner.

The issue lies in the fact that so many of us want to achieve our highest forms of thought, but our perception on the subject of thinking itself cuts us at the roots. There’s some wisdom in knowing that if you go into a situation feeling defeated, you’ve already lost. Our modern perception of learning and thinking—despite any desire for it to be different—sets us up for a losing battle. And even worse, we raise ourselves higher than we probably should. What makes us think that if we lack the patience and discipline in order to pursue learning by reading whole texts, writing for ourselves, and speaking in earnest to fellow humans about such things, we will have the patience and discipline to use powerful tools such as AI ethically and to our benefit?

The highest form of thought originates from the fullest form of thought, which is something that has become fractured so much that now, when we need it most, is somewhat hidden from us. Instead of contributing to this issue, my goal is to remedy it. Instead of deconstructing further, I will begin reconstruction. That is my aim for The Classical Mind and what I can only hope will set me apart and make all the difference for those willing to consider what I have to say.

So where to start? By going back to how almost every ancient thinker—pillars of the intellectual life that we can only hope to live up to, even with the tools we have at our disposal—perceived learning and thinking:

• Learning/thinking is what makes us who we are (it’s natural for us).

• Learning/thinking is structured and follows predictable patterns.

• If we wish to achieve our intellectual goals, supports may be used, but only at a minimum and temporarily.

In other words: the learning and thinking process is natural, and although requiring a certain level of work, follows a structured—oftentimes predictable—pattern where the only tool that should be prioritized and emphasized is the mind, itself.

Modern Learning Taxonomies

In the pursuit of reconstruction, what I’m advocating for is a return to our learning roots. In the realm of learning and thinking, there’s no better place to start than with learning taxonomies: tools that help us define the type of work that our minds should do in order to go from unlearned to learned. Since its introduction into the learning space, Bloom’s Taxonomy—along with some revisions—has been considered the gold standard for how learners should traverse the learning process.

But for anyone well-versed on the subject of how to learn, the complexity of Bloom’s model only gets more complex as you break it apart, with each stage consisting of a myriad of tips, tricks, hacks, roadmaps, and opinions on how each should be achieved. As a public-school teacher, I’ve witnessed a constant churn of ideas on how each of these stages are best completed, with some of the greatest methods only lasting a few years before falling from grace, not because of how great the new method is, but because of how less-than-ideal the old method proved to be. The result of all of this has been, in many cases, less learning and thinking occurring amongst students as the years go on (a contributor to the literacy crisis we’re experiencing, I’m sure).

In the ever-growing space of homeschoolers, I have witnessed this surplus of confusing information confound parents and make them question their own abilities to teach their children, when they should instead have the utmost confidence. In the autodidact world, the sheer amount of information railroads the mind down a slightly neurotic path that focusses more on the methods of learning than the simple act of learning itself. All of this is to say that many of us are seeking the simplest and most effective way to think and learn in an age that continues to complicate the process, resulting in many of us turning to tools that make it all too easy to bypass thinking altogether.

Again, I’m not saying that any of the wealth of knowledge is uninformed or incorrect (although it can be in some instances), but rather that it has become too cumbersome for both learner and teacher, and oftentimes misused due to how the methods and the tools become the entire focus of the learning process. So how can we relieve this burden? I believe Dorothy Sayer’s says it best in her essay, The Lost Tools of Learning:

“I want to inquire whether, amid all the multitudinous subjects which figure in the syllabuses, we are really teaching the right things in the right way; and whether, by teaching fewer things, differently, we might not succeed in “shedding the load” (as the fashionable phrase goes) and, at the same time, producing a better result.”

Sometimes, for what may seem like a complicated problem, the simplest of answers proves to be the truest fix. We’re an age that because of how much knowledge we do have and how enlightened we think we’ve become, we think the only fix to our modern problems is to seek more knowledge and become more enlightened. But the result of such methods can be a complete breaking of something that wasn’t very broken to begin with, caused by our insistence to deconstruct the issue, piece by piece. To give an analogy based on something that happened to me recently: sometimes when a furnace stops working, it’s merely due to a thermostat malfunction rather than a faulty gas valve or motherboard failure.

The Trivium

To reconstruct the thinking and learning process, one must not start at Bloom’s Taxonomy, but rather a simpler taxonomy that Bloom seemingly deconstructed—one that is highly effective, time-tested, and closer to the rich depths of history. What I’m alluding to here is what is known as the Trivium, and it’s something I’ve touched on before in previous writings. It’s even the core of my own note-taking system. But fundamentally, it is the starting point from which all learning occurs.

In it’s most classical sense, the Trivium is the foundation for the medieval idea of the 7 liberal arts, which is comprised of the arts of grammar, logic, rhetoric—that being the Trivium—and arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—that being the Quadrivium. Dating all the way back to medieval scholasticism, the arts associated with the Trivium were the primary arts of study before any other learning took place. What the medieval minds—like Hugh of St. Victor and John of Salisbury—understood was that thinking required the use of language. The better you were with language, the better thinker you could be. In the words of Hugh of St. Victor, in his Didascalicon:

“Grammar is the knowledge of how to speak without error; dialectic is clear-sighted argument which separates the true from the false; rhetoric is the discipline of persuading to every suitable thing.”

Many of us today—especially those who have taken learning into their own hands—apply this same ideal without realizing it. If you want to learn something, one of the simplest ways to start is to approach the subject in one of three ways: by reading about it, writing about it, or speaking about it. Not only does our partaking in such activities help us learn, but the increase in difficulty between the activities only furthers our learning. If you’ve ever read about a subject, written an essay on it, and then given a presentation about it, you know what I mean.

It’s this basic learning structure that Dorothy Sayers noticed, which allowed her to perceive the Trivium as something much more than a curriculum. In The Lost Tools of Learning, she advocated for a Trivium-based developmental learning structure—well before Bloom—that utilized its three arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric) as a means to describe the type of activities the mind should undergo at certain stages of a child’s development. To her, not only did the Trivium represent a curriculum, but a process that should be followed to allow the mind to reach its fullest potential across its development. This equated to the grammar stage (when the developing mind is keen on memorization), the dialectic/logic stage (when the mind becomes capable of clear argumentation), and the rhetoric stage (when the mind becomes aware of its unique self, and can use the knowledge learned in the previous two stages to learn anything for themselves and apply it to their own lives).

So the Trivium is both curriculum and descriptor of developmental learning stages, but it’s also a third thing: a learning taxonomy that can be applied at any given point in one’s learning. This is the approach of my note-taking system, Classical Notes, which you can find more about here if you so desire. But this three part ethos of the Trivium is where the fix to our complex modern learning conundrum finds its start, and it’s where I will begin reconstruction which, as is the case with most simple fixes, less reconstruction and more discovery—and in this case, a rediscovery. But the best part is that this approach is simple.

Why This Matters

Although there’s plenty to discuss regarding how to leverage the Trivium as an entire learning process—something I intend to devote much time to discuss in the near future—consider this: if you wish to start learning better, all you have to do is start reading, writing, and talking about what it is you’re learning, preferably reliant on your own mind alone and with another human. If you do those three things with as little help as possible, and you perceive them as learning in action rather than signifiers of your level of intelligence, you’d be surprised just how much of the fine details of learning take care of themselves. All of the intricacies melt away, and you realize how little they really mattered. Even better, you may begin to rediscover learning as some of history’s best minds perceived it as: an enjoyable process that defined them as humans rather than a chore to be outsourced.

Will it be perfect at the start? Surely not. Will it be difficult at times? Absolutely. But like everything else in existence, it’s rarely about the destination. What matters most is the journey—a journey that I hope I can continue to cultivate with you through my future endeavors, including a book club, podcast, and a learning community (all devoted to a life of learning that is free from the bondage that modernity has so graciously tied us to in both perception of learning and its tools).

But to end, I’d like to give a short story of an instance in my classroom that proves my point.

Although I am a classical educator, I still teach at a local public school that subscribes to modernity in almost every sense of the way. Despite this, I do my best to be a light amidst the darkness. Every year, I make it a goal of mine to help students go from “I don’t like learning” to “this is now a part of my life that I will carry with me wherever I go.” It’s a tough battle in an environment that continuously becomes increasingly less human as the years go on. After all, in such a place learning is hard work, complex, unintuitive, and therefore a teacher is not enough to help students in the ways they need help most. The fix for such a conundrum continues to be more and more integration of the latest and greatest learning programs (now optimized by AI), all-the-while the students not only become less receptive to learning, but less optimized, which is the exact opposite of the promise such programs offer.

Anyway, I noticed a student lamenting their disdain for learning one day—an all-to-common occurrence in such an environment—after spending their required time on the latest and greatest tech-driven learning platform that was supposed to cultivate learning rather than undermine it. I knew the student well enough to know that he loved to fish, which was something we both had in common. I struck a conversation with him about fishing, and then mentioned my love for reading, which resulted in him giving me a disgusted look. But before he could rebuttal with why he hated reading, I handed him a book. It was Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. All I asked was that he give it a chance and not treat it as a job, but rather an open invitation for something that he could potentially enjoy. After all, it was about something he was passionate about, and short enough that he wouldn’t be out much spare time if he didn’t like it in the end. He accepted.

Since then, not only has he requested more books from my personal library (like the works of Jack London), but he started carrying a leather journal and buying his own books, both of which are activities completely out of character for him (or at least were). He fell in love with reading, which then turned into a love of writing, and now he spends every spare moment he can afford to talk to me about anything and everything.

A young mind with so much potential, caught in a system devoted to optimization through complex learning strategies and tools, found his intellectual guiding light in something that is antithetical to modernity’s rhetoric: passionate discovery of knowledge through the basic acts of reading, writing, and human interaction. It’s these simple acts that will carry him into the future—an unknown that will inevitably require him to take that passion to help himself and others, which he already is experiencing through the self study of carpentry textbooks in order to prepare him and his friends for a trade-school entrance exam (another subject that we seemingly have a shared passion for).

As a thank you—and to my surprise—he gifted me a vintage fly-reel one day (my preferred method of fishing). It now sits on the top shelf of my secretary desk (the picture for this article), which is where I pursue my own intellectual journey, day in and day out, primarily through reading whole books, writing in a journal, and spending time with other humans to bounce ideas around with. I let him keep The Old Man in the Sea. That reel and book will forever serve as tokens to commemorate the value that reading, writing, and good conversation amongst two humans has in a world that wants to tear such things apart.

So to answer the question of how to start learning in an age that only wants to complicate it, I’ll let the words of Henry David Thoreau—my student’s newfound favorite—ring out:

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!”

And for anyone who wants to think otherwise, at least consider for yourself the offer I granted my student: give it a chance, don’t treat it as a job, and enjoy the ride!

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—Andrew Harker