In chapter four of her book, Echo in Celebration, Leigh Bortins uses a grocery store analogy to illustrate the foundational importance and usefulness of grammar as a tool for mastering any subject. This analogy will hopefully encourage you understand grammar as a basis of learning, but also to realize that subject mastery is entirely possible through the orderly repetition of the Classical model of education.
Grammar in 19th century dictionaries is defined as the science of vocabulary. Every new task, idea, or concept has a vocabulary that must be acquired like a foreign language before a student can progress to more difficult or abstract tasks within that body of knowledge. There is a science or system that the vocabulary defines, describes and organizes.
Every subject is like learning a foreign language until you have a basic grasp of vocabulary and the main ideas associated with the topic. This is called grammar — words and how they work together. Mathematicians have a special grammar; physicists have their own jargon; archeologists and cooks, dancers and musicians all have a "lingo" they use. To learn something new, we must first try to discover the grammar that an expert in that field uses. So the first tool of learning is "Learn the Grammar."
How can we teach our children to do that? Let me begin with a view of the possible rather than the impossible. Let me prove to you that people are all geniuses, designed to store and manipulate large amounts of grammar. Imagine the grocery store you shop in. If I asked you to tell me where the eggs are so I could run right in and grab them, would you be able to do so? Of course you could. The average grocery store carries over 30,000 items and you can quickly tell me where to find most of them. Why? Because it is organized by category, and you have shopped in similar stores repeatedly. In other words, you’ve seen those items over and over again in an organized way, making it easy for you to memorize the store. You can categorize 30,000 items in one location.
Well, I propose a good education teaches a child how to build a grocery store of the mind for every subject. So, to build the brain’s knowledge store, you have to begin memorizing systems. You do that by visiting the "store of words" for any particular subject many times in an organized manner. For a student it means repeating data (revisiting the store) in an orderly fashion (filling the shelves). So we instruct students to repeatedly draw the same continental maps as we build the geography aisle. Then eventually each continent has a shelf. We repeatedly chant the same multiplication and addition tables and laws of math as we build our math aisle. Eventually we can pull down the identity law off of its shelf to use in the "balance the equation" recipe. We repeatedly list the same history timeline as we build our history aisle. Eventually, we can pull down the items "Hitler," "Napoleon" and "Alexander" to mix into our analysis of despotic rulers. We work consistently for a long time until the hard is easy. Whenever we add a new ingredient to the shelf, there is a place for it to logically live.
When the organizational system is mastered, which means quickly accessible and confidently retrieved, the information becomes very useful and can be dialectically synthesized into any new idea. So the first step is rote memorization like children have always had to do. Remember that every child learns to speak from infancy through repetition and memorization and orderly associations.
When I say memorization, I mean it in the truest sense of the word. You have that information at your fingertips always, like the alphabet song, or the Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer. I am not talking about something recited for a season and then forgotten. That’s why we are building an organized storage system with key ideas forming the aisles and shelves. Some facts may fade and ebb, but we work on just enough information to provide a framework of shelves that never disappears.
