The Liberal Arts

With Emma heading out to a liberal arts college next August, I've been thinking about what "liberal arts" really means. I gather that studying the liberal arts means being "liberally educated" and thus acquiring broad and relevant knowledge while developing critical intellectual skills. Immersion in the liberal arts is considered to be educational rather than vocational. The student is not trained as a technician or a money-making machine, but is led to blossom in all that it means to be human, to appreciate and promote what is good, beautiful, and true, and to think, analyze, and communicate clearly and well.

Medieval universities focused on seven liberal arts: the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic), and the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy). There are a few colleges today, mostly tiny Catholic liberal arts colleges with fewer than 200 students, that still try to implement something approaching this curriculum. It would be easy to dismiss what they offer, which appears to be a cutting edge education for ... the twelfth century. I've looked at the curricula of three of these small colleges, and I find them appealing and enriching, although inadequate. They stress arithmetic and geometry, but not, in most cases, algebra and calculus. They tend to be light, even very light, on the sciences. They focus on western civilization while de-emphasizing the richness of global traditions. One of these colleges studies Byzantine and medieval monastic art, but there is little to no exploration of contemporary art.

The Wyoming Catholic College curriculum includes humanities, theology, philosophy, math & science, fine arts, Latin, the Trivium, and "leadership" (which includes wilderness survival and horsemanship). Math and science classes emphasize the medieval quadrivium. Students spend two semesters studying Euclidean geometry, but, while they apparently touch on calculus, there are no courses dedicated to college level math. The science classes also seem very light. No modern foreign language is offered. Northeast Catholic College offers a Great Books curriculum. One can major in theology, politics, philosophy, literature, or fine arts, but not in math, any of the sciences, or any foreign language. And, of course, not in gender studies, psychology, or sociology. The Thomas More College of Liberal Arts similarly focuses on the seven medieval liberal arts (and not much else). It offers a "sacred geometry praticum" in which students use a straight edge and compass (CAD/CAM nowhere to be seen), the tools of the medieval mason, to reproduce (not create) patterned floors, a cloister, Gothic windows, and so forth.

I suspect part of the attraction of these schools to their supporters is that they reflect a time of theocratic Christendom in Western Europe, a time dominated almost entirely by white, Christian men. A professor at one of these colleges even claims that the Enlightenment was a "period of self-satisfied bigotry, the constriction of the arts, and the consigning of centuries of human learning to the flames".  Some of the proponents of a medieval, Christian education that prioritizes western civilization romanticize the Crusades and view the barbarity and depravity of those cruel ventures (otherwise known as "killing brown people for Jesus") as the purest expression of Christian masculinity. Their narrative lends itself to rather black and white thinking in which they appear to be on a modern day crusade against evil modernism. I sense a whiff of ethnic, sexual, and religious chauvinism and of colonialism drifting from their direction. In spite of all unattractive associations, perhaps these curricula fall into the category of "necessary but not sufficient". They provide formative training, but civilization didn't end with the Enlightenment, and students deserve full exposure to the cultural wealth developed in more recent centuries.

Perhaps a broader Great Books education could be obtained at St. John's College, which has campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in Annapolis, Maryland. St. John's also seems somewhat light in science, technology, and modern studies of the impacts of marginalization, but, like the afore-mentioned colleges, it offers a very rich education in many areas. I've read that students from St. John's sometimes go on to study medicine, which surprises me, given that the school doesn't offer majors in biology or biochemistry.

These curricula (not including that of St. John's College) seem to me to be better suited toward high school than college students. Alternatively, perhaps these classes would best benefit those who have already completed college and acquired a practical education that has allowed them to become both financially self-sufficient and familiar with modern trends. I would love to see the courses offered at these schools available on-line (some similar classes already are through, for example, MOOCs and The Great Courses.).