What is the three learning styles?

Marcus Tullius Cicero, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Marcus Tullius Cicero answers

The question you are putting to me — whether learners divide neatly into three types, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic — is not a division I would recognize as the fundamental one. What I know of learning, I know from teaching oratory, and the divisions that matter there are different. What I can tell you is this: the art of the orator is itself divided into five parts — invention, arrangement, elocution, memory, and delivery — and a man who wishes to learn must work through all of them, not settle into the one that suits his temperament.1

The handbooks give you rules for each. I do not despise the rules entirely; they offer the student something to aim at, a set of points toward which he may direct his effort so as not to wander.2 But the rules did not produce the great speakers. Rather, certain observers noticed what eloquent men did naturally and wrote it down afterward — so that art follows eloquence, not the other way around.3

The practical consequence for learning is this: preliminary exercise is necessary, but it must be exercise on real material, cases similar to those that arise in the forum, not abstract drills.4 A man learns to speak by speaking, learns to argue by arguing, and the style he eventually commands — whether the plain and acute, the middle and temperate, or the grand and copious — must be the result of having worked through all three, not of having retreated permanently into the one that comes most easily to him.5

The grand style deployed by a man who has never disciplined himself in the plain is mere noise; the plain style in a man who has never reached for amplitude is poverty dressed as virtue. So: three learning styles, as a fixed typology of persons? My writings do not record that division, and I suspect it flatters the student by telling him his natural preference is a category rather than a habit to be overcome.

Sources

  1. since all the business and art of an orator is divided into five parts, he ought first to find out what he should say; next, to dispose and arrange his matter...then to clothe and deck his thoughts with language; then to secure them in his memory; and lastly, to deliver them with dignity and grace.
    On Oratory and Orators
  2. it conveys some hints to admonish the orator, as it were, to what he should refer each part of his speech, and to what points he may direct his view, so as not to wander from the object which he has proposed to himself.
    On Oratory and Orators
  3. eloquence has not sprung from art, but art from eloquence; not that, as I said before, I entirely reject art, for it is, though not essentially necessary to oratory, yet proper for a man of liberal education to learn.
    On Oratory and Orators
  4. I like that method which you are accustomed to practise, namely, to lay down a case similar to those which are brought on in the forum.
    On Oratory and Orators
  5. this orator of ours, whom we consider the first of orators, dignified, vehement, and earnest, if this is the only thing for which he appears born, or if this is the only kind of oratory to which he applies himself, and if he does not combine his copiousness of diction with those other two kinds of oratory, is very much to be despised.
    Orations Vol 4