Why Classical Liberal Arts Education?

A classical liberal arts education aims to educate the whole person, mind, body, and soul, towards human flourishing. A Catholic classical liberal arts education understands that flourishing as freedom in Christ, found through the cultivation of the natural and supernatural virtues. It draws upon the riches of the Catholic intellectual tradition, a treasury of truth, beauty, and goodness capable of strengthening and unlocking students’ minds. In addition to textbooks, students read carefully chosen classics and “living books” that form their moral imagination, cultivate aesthetic discrimination, and teach the principles of logic. Students are taught critical thinking not so that they may reject their tradition, but rather so that they may measure ideas, actions, and words by their conformity to truth, goodness, and beauty. Students learn to perceive the wisdom and order present in creation through the study of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences. Such an education enables students to think clearly, and to put their daily activities and relationships in the context of a greater whole. It gives students high ideals according to which they can orient their lives, forming their minds, hearts, and wills to know, love, and serve God. 

A classical liberal arts education uses the traditional tools of learning—the Trivium, or the Language Arts of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, and the Quadrivium, or the Mathematical Arts—to teach students to read insightfully, think rigorously, write beautifully, and speak articulately. The Trivium helps human beings communicate with each other using words. The Quadrivium helps human beings communicate with the greater cosmos using number and quantity. Students acquire these tools of learning through imitation and narration. Together, the Trivium and Quadrivium form students’ souls, helping them to see an ordered and unified vision of reality, and to live according to that vision.

Catholic classical liberal arts education has its roots in Hebraic and ancient Greek education. It is an ancient way of educating a person towards wisdom and self-mastery that was taken up by the Church, forming many of her brightest minds and holiest saints, and becoming one of her greatest treasures. Today we are seeing a renewal of Catholic classical liberal arts education that seeks to retrieve this tradition and adapt it to the present by incorporating the best elements of modern pedagogy. STMA is part of this renewal.