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The Liberal Arts: Then and Now

In the classical and medieval eras, to be university-educated meant, first and foremost, to be liberally-educated, to be educated in the arts that free the mind from ignorance and to study other disciplines both theoretical and practical–particularly philosophy, theology, law, and medicine. And to be liberally-educated meant to be educated in the seven liberal arts: grammar, logic (also known as dialectic), and rhetoric (collectively called the trivium or “three ways” of language); arithmetic, geometry, astronomy (like modern-day physics), and music (collectively called the quadrivium or “four ways” of number). Indeed, the “arts” designation in our modern “Bachelor of Arts” and “Master of Arts” degrees refers to these liberal arts.

Sadly, though, most modern colleges and universities have neglected the traditional liberal arts, and most students entering colleges and universities today have very poor abilities in these arts. Although at St. Isidore’s we do not dismiss or ignore developments in learning since the classical and medieval eras, we are convinced that these classical liberal arts remain the best foundation for any learning. They are, in a fancy word, propaedeutic, or needing to be taught before other things.

However propaedeutic the liberal arts may be, however, they are certainly not exhaustive–and were never intended to be. The liberal arts were always seen as stepping-stones of sorts to bigger and better things, to more abstract and theoretical things like philosophy as well as more concrete and practical things like medicine. Indeed, one of our patrons, St. Isidore of Seville, begins his masterwork Etymologies with books on the liberal arts but proceeds from them to discuss just about anything you can imagine (or at least that one could have imagined in the 6th century!).

It also seems likely that even the educators of the classical and medieval eras, if they were alive today, would have a longer list of liberal arts than the original seven. For this reason, we have added Calculus to our list of liberal arts because of its unique contributions to how humans think about the world around them and other academic disciplines. We think Biology and Chemistry could be considered liberal arts as well, but they have their own special places in the Science and Manual Arts Sequence of our curriculum.