Three Times the Charm?

Dorothy Sayers' essay "The Lost Tools of Learning" has achieved near sola scriptura standing among a certain stripe of homeschooler, with a number of curriculums or curriculum suggestions based upon it's grammar, logic, rhetoric thrice-through structure. It's been a while since I'd read the essay (as opposed to books on how to implement the essay's suggestions) so I took a copy along on our recent family vacation and read it over to see how off-shoots fit the original.

Rereading Sayers, I found her essay refreshing, incisive and engaging. She's also, however, much vaguer in some of her recommendations than I had imagined. Although she's quite clear about the stages of grammar, logic and rhetoric (and that the general approaches of these three disciplines should be applied to all subject-matter studied) she doesn't give specific prescriptions on what should be studied in each stage at a subject level. (Indeed, part of her point is that the idea of "subjects" is unfortunate.)

This leaves me still sitting with one of my concerns about several of the "classical education" curriculums that I've looked over. The general approach seems to be to do everything three times. So for instance, you go through world history one time each at a grammar, logic and rhetoric level.

Now, repetition is often good when learning things, but I wonder if this rule of three is actually the way to go. Part of me wonders if the logic stage would lend itself well to a number of 1-3 month intensive unit studies which dug into how exactly particular events or trends came to be, and what their results were. If you've already laid down a good chronological foundation in the grade 1-4 level, you should be able to do a lot of unit studies at the grade 5-8 level (and perhaps a year of strictly American History) and then come back at the high school level to put it all together with another four year run through world history, this time focusing on primary source material.

Thinking back to my junior high years, I certainly consumed huge numbers of straight history and biography (the Landmark Books were a big favorite of mine in grades 4-6) but I also thrived on digging into analysis topics that would lend themselves well to applying logical structure to a unit study such as "Why the South lost the Civil War" or "Why the French Revolution Happened" or "How the Tsar Fell".