What is a Liberal Arts Education?
September 4, 2024
“Then let us not leave the meaning of education ambiguous or ill-defined. At present, when we speak in terms of praise or blame about the bringing-up of each person, we call one man educated and another uneducated, although the uneducated man may be sometimes very well educated for the calling of a retail trader, or of a captain of a ship, and the like. For we are not speaking of education in this narrower sense, but of that other education in virtue from youth upwards, which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship, and teaches him how rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only education which, upon our view, deserves the name; that other sort of training, which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice, is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all.”
-Plato
There are seven liberal arts and these are divided between the language arts of the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric) and the mathematical arts of the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy). In the medieval system of education a complete Liberal Arts education was considered preliminary to the highest areas of study, namely, Philosophy and Theology. This idea of needing a complete education prior to studying the highest things is actually much older than the Middle Ages. It is said that above the door of Plato’s school in Athens it was written “Let none but geometers enter here.”1 Throughout the classical and medieval world the language and mathematical arts were taught together, equally valued as indispensable preparation for questions concerning truth, justice, the nature of reality, and the nature of God (or the gods). Without a liberal arts education one would simply lack the tools necessary to attempt to climb to the summit of such matters.