The Liberal Arts

liberalis – Latin for "characteristic of free men [as opposed to slaves]"

ars – Latin for "an activity requiring a specific skill"

- (during the Middle Ages) studies including the trivium [grammar, logic and rhetoric] and the quadrivium [arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music]

The idea of “liberal arts” arose in Greece and Rome as a reference to the set of skills common to the free men who were responsible for considering the issues and making the choices necessary to guide civic life … skills that permitted them to identify, relate and debate the issues and choices of the day. Training in and advancement of these skills soon coalesced into three formal and sequential disciplines that became known individually as grammar, logic and rhetoric … and collectively as the trivium.

During the middle ages, European educators supplemented the three original skills with four contemporary subjects … arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music … because a gentleman should grasp the important science and culture of the day. These four subjects of study became known collectively as the quadrivium.

Thus, the trivium trained the student how to learn about anything at anytime. The quadrivium presented the student with what to study in contemporary science and culture. The seven together were a perfect number … symbolizing the oneness of learning and knowledge.

But in the age of STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math], the “liberal arts” pass over us unnoticed like the faint shadows of distant clouds … unworthy and irrelevant relics of less enlightened times. And yet, when properly understood, the “liberal arts” still contain the precise, powerful and indispensable tools of learning as well as the mandate to deploy them with skill and diligence to identify, relate and debate the important scientific and cultural issues of the day in order to:

• transform simple boys and girls into thinking men and women
• who can inform contemporary thought and invoke moral authority
• to improve community life and sustain culture.

Our historically recent [but increasingly rapid] failure to honor and engage the liberal arts in the midst of the proliferating arrays of scientific and cultural issues that are actually and virtually forming and then exploding around us today is driving us to confusion, conflict and chaos that has already damaged [perhaps, irreparably] communities as well as the foundations of Western civilization. Strong words? Perhaps … but the need is great for another renaissance of the truth behind the liberal arts … and Northfield wants to be a part of that movement.

More on the Liberal Arts

“History of a Liberal Arts Education”

For a comprehensive panorama of the myriad forces at work in the virtuous exercise [and unprincipled abuse] of the liberal arts in Athens, nothing surpasses Plato’s account of the dialogue between Socrates and Gorgias. And as you will see when you read it, things have not changed much over the intervening centuries.

In Robert Hutchins’ “The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education” you can read the arguments that caused Hutchins and Mortimer Adler to publish “The Great Books of the Western World” in order to reveal how notable western thinkers identified, related and debated the “timely issues” of their day as well as the “timeless issues” that always have and always will face mankind in every age. These “great books” remain an important source of study at Northfield and at any true liberal arts school.

Association Tying Liberal Arts Schools Together [AT LAST blog]