Post Modernism and thoughts on Classical stages of learning

The other morning on The Book Show on RN they were discussing the
teaching of English and History in schools...
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2006/1664443.htm
as happens my brain went off on a tangent (what I love about RN - it's
thought provoking radio) and got me thinking about the tages of learning
our children go through.

I agree with the Classical idea of the 3 stages (vocab, grammer,
rhetoric) in each subject, but do not apply this to each child's learning at the same age.

Anyway, as our children progress through their childhood we can see them
going through these three stages in everything they do.

They learn to speak and understand single words or phrases, then to
speak and understand complex sentences, and finally to discuss how those
sentences are put together and relate to each other in different forms
of speech or information (at about this time reading and writing will
happen spontaneously if they have not appeared already)...

Watch your children as they learn a new skill or take up a new interest,
they will progess through vocab, grammer and finaly rhetorical stages.
(even within those 3 stages you will see similar stages occuring if you
look closely enough)

Schools are failing when it comes to ensuring that each child has
mastered enough of each stage of understanding (vocab, grammer,
rhetoric) in a subject before moving onto the next stage with its
increased complexity - thus you have children that are only barely
capable of the grammer stage (putting the vocab parts together in the
right order) being asked to perform complex rhetorical disections (post
modernist ones in the RN show's examples) of texts that most would not
be capable of till adulthood at uni...

My thought for the morning...