Abstract

The enduring persistence of the examples and exercises used in handbooks of the traditional arts of the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) suggests that they were recognized as perennially effective as ways to inculcate intellectual virtue in many generations of students. Yet an examination of those examples and exercises suggests that only the ones in the rhetoric curriculum were able to resist acquiring the bad habits of the sister arts of grammar and logic. Sensitivity to facts and meanings and the ability to manipulate theses do not by themselves guarantee the formation of active and competent citizens. Only when those virtues are combined in the interests of eloquence-the art of disciplined expressioncan they be fully realized