Having its roots in antiquity, classical education has been the nursery of Western Civilization for over two thousand years. The ancient Greeks and Romans taught the liberal arts to citizens intended to become political and cultural leaders. The Latin word liber mean “free:” the liberal arts were for free men who could think for themselves and rightly govern themselves. During the Middle Ages, the liberal arts were classified into the widely recognized trivium and quadrivium, which consisted of grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. All of these subjects were understood as being interrelated and foundational for understanding the true sciences, philosophy and theology. For the ancients, philosophy was the apex of all learning; for the Medieval Christian, theology was “queen of the sciences.”
All the subjects of the liberal arts can broadly be categorized into the language arts and mathematics. The language arts (grammar, linguistics, writing, rhetoric) give us the tools to understand the Scriptures, to understand the wisdom of the ages, and to thoughtfully engage our present culture. Mathematics gives us the tools to think critically and to understand the beauty and order of God’s creation.
From this great intellectual heritage came many of our early church fathers, the Reformers, the founders of the United States, and many other of the world’s most influential people. This rich tradition was carried on in the United States until the 1880s, when progressive educators took the public school system into a new era of utilitarianism and pragmatism. Today, the focus of education is teaching children how to make a living, not how to live.
In 1947, classical education resurrected when Dorothy Sayers delivered a lecture at Oxford University entitled “The Lost Tools of Learning.” In this lecture, she argues that though we do well at teaching students subjects, we fail miserably at teaching them how to think for themselves. In the 1980s, Douglas Wilson opened a classical school in Moscow, Idaho, a school which has served as a paradigm for many other classical schools across the country.
While not an end in itself, the liberal arts curriculum is a time-proven and effective program for training Christian young people to be persuasive, winsome leaders and people of godly influence in the world.
