Stratford Caldecott’s book, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education (Encuentro, 2025, Kindle edition) joins the various intellectual voices proposing an education nourished by the tradition of Western culture and centered on the person. “This amounts,” the author states, “to asking ourselves what difference it makes to consider that a human being is made not for data processing, but for wisdom; not for the utilitarian satisfaction of appetite, but for love; not for the domination of nature, but for participation in it; not for the autonomy of an isolated self, but for communion (p. 8).”

Educating the ways of doing things, fostering students’ skills to facilitate their integration into the workforce, is desirable, but not the only thing in education. It is possible to delve deeper and develop young people who are skilled at solving practical problems and know how to differentiate the price from the value of things. Caldecott proposes three axes in education to develop professional and wise people: remembering (grammar), thinking (dialectic), and speaking (rhetoric). That is, recovering the classical tradition of education that Hugo of Saint Victor (1096–1141) described as follows: “Grammar is the science that enables one to speak without error; dialectic is the clear-sighted discussion that separates the true from the false; rhetoric is the art of convincing about all that is convenient (p. 15).”

For our author, grammar is teaching how to remember because there is a given reality, whose richness is manifested in a diversity of beings: nature, cosmos, people; aromas, colors, textures; immanence and transcendence. It is a similar idea to that expressed by George Steiner when he referred to the grammar of reality or Benedict XVI when he spoke of the grammar of creation. Octavio Paz was able to express it in one of his poems: “I am a man: I last a short time / and the night is enormous. / But I look up: / the stars write. / Without understanding, I comprehend: / I am also writing / and at this very moment / someone spells me out.” Remembering is teaching us to contemplate reality, to touch it, to discover it in its appearance and essence, to spell it out in what is written about it. Learning to inhabit our common home and return to it is something similar to that other experience of returning to the family home: “without memories, there is no home; just a place like any other (p. 57)”.

From grammar, we move on to dialectics, that is, the art of analysis or discernment of truth. “This process of thinking consists in learning to place all approaches to truth in their correct order, seeing how they combine to offer a more complete picture of reality as a whole, for which purpose we need poetry as much as science, imagination as much as reason, empathy as much as mathematics (p. 85).” As we can see, Caldecott has a broad vision of thinking. Calculating reason or technical reasoning is not enough. Exact data is important; without facts, without a spirit of geometry, we cannot grasp reality in its connections. However, data is not everything; equally essential is the spirit of refinement (Pascal), which captures the poetry enclosed in exact data, that which cannot be trapped in a syllogism and yet remains real. Juan Ramón Jiménez was able to express it in this beautiful work: Verse: “Don’t touch it anymore, that’s how the rose is!”

The next area is rhetoric, which should not be understood as a set of techniques to impress (oratory, eloquence) nor as a means to manipulate the will and emotions of others (sophistry, advertising). Its essence is different; it is about liberating the freedom of the interlocutor, showing them the truth in an understandable way. It is the art of convincingly showing the truth contained in the proposal (see p. 109).

Caldecott’s proposal aims to contribute to the civilization of love to which Saint John Paul II referred. His approach is suggestive and will be of great interest to educators and schools whose ideals bear a Christian and humanist imprint. At the heart of his approach is God as Charity, whom he places as the foundation of all human education. Hence, educating intelligence, will, and the heart in their various manifestations, in light of classical tradition, remains a challenging project for continuing to grow in humanity and in the transcendent meaning of life.