The liberal arts are traditionally intended to develop the faculties of the human mind, those powers of intelligence and imagination without which no intellectual work can be accomplished. Liberal education is not tied to certain academic subjects, such as philosophy, history, literature, music, art, and other so-called “humanities.” In the liberal-arts tradition, scientific disciplines, such […]
I have never been a fan of so-called “success” books. You know the kind I mean: They have titles like The Road to Riches, The Eleven Laws of Leadership, Seven Secret Strategies for Success. The titles promise to reveal some secret to you, the knowledge of which could change the course of your life. The titles above are made up, […]
The Liberal Arts The liberal arts denote the seven branches of knowledge that initiate the young into a life of learning. The concept is classical, but the term liberal arts and the division of the arts into the trivium and the quadrivium date from the Middle Ages. The Trivium and the Quadrivium The trivium (1) includes those […]
Kathryn Jean Lopez: When you write about classical education, you mean more than learning enough Latin to help with the SATs. What is a classical education? Tracy Lee Simmons: This was the Humanist’s education, in the sense in which Erasmus and Thomas More were Humanists. A classical education used to mean simply a curriculum based upon […]
A few years ago, a vandal seized some forty or fifty thousand books from my college’s library. He didn’t want to read them, or even to sell them. He wanted simply to get rid of them, on the grounds that nobody would read them anyway. Some of the volumes he had branded for destruction were […]
In Pearl S. Buck’s short story, “A Field of Rice,” Wang Sun, a Chinese villager in the early 1950s, is in a situation in which he is told to do something he knows won’t work. Mao Tse Tung has taken over China, and he has sent functionaries out to every village to tell the farmers (who […]
We have begun to see a world in which the classics have virtually disappeared—though they have been woven so tightly into the patterns of our culture that meaning, for us, is hardly separable from them. For a while we may be able to get by on the echoes of their past glory; but when they […]
If colonial America was suffused with classicism, what of Puritan New England? Was the pervasive influence of the classics and classical languages seen as a hindrance—or as a help—to those who labored in the Lord’s vineyard to establish a Christian government and culture in early America? It is an easy question to answer. Not only […]
Mrs. Hogue is standing at the front of the room reading a story from her copy of The Golden Children’s Bible. Every student has a copy open and is reading along with the teacher. She stops reading and looks around the class: “Why did Pharaoh fear the children of the Hebrews?” Every hand in the room […]
By Bryan Smith We all participate in a broad human conversation. Sometimes the conversation is casual and banal, at other times it is more formal. In either case, it can be trite or profound, flattering or confrontational, degrading or uplifting. Books are one of the ways we have packaged our reflections upon our common experiences; […]