Liberal arts education is the traditional academic course in Western higher education. Liberal arts takes the term art in the sense of a learned skill rather than specifically the fine arts. Liberal arts education can refer to studies in a liberal arts degree course or to a university education more generally. Such a course of study contrasts with those that are principally vocational, professional, or technical, as well as religiously based courses.
From the time of Plato through the Middle Ages, the quadrivium was a grouping of four subjects or arts—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—that formed a second curricular stage following preparatory work in the trivium, consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Together, the trivium and the quadrivium comprised the seven liberal arts, and formed the basis of a liberal arts education in Western society until gradually displaced as a curricular structure by the studia humanitatis and its later offshoots, beginning with Petrarch in the 14th century. The seven classical arts were considered "thinking skills" and were distinguished from practical arts, such as medicine and architecture.
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. It is one of the three ancient arts of discourse (trivium) along with grammar and logic/dialectic. As an academic discipline within the humanities, rhetoric aims to study the techniques that speakers or writers use to inform, persuade, and motivate their audiences. Rhetoric also provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations.
A medieval university was a corporation organized during the Middle Ages for the purposes of higher education. The first Western European institutions generally considered to be universities were established in present-day Italy, including the Kingdoms of Sicily and Naples, and the Kingdoms of England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Scotland between the 11th and 15th centuries for the study of the arts and the higher disciplines of theology, law, and medicine. These universities evolved from much older Christian cathedral schools and monastic schools, and it is difficult to define the exact date when they became true universities, though the lists of studia generalia for higher education in Europe held by the Vatican are a useful guide.
In contemporary education, mathematics education—known in Europe as the didactics or pedagogy of mathematics—is the practice of teaching, learning, and carrying out scholarly research into the transfer of mathematical knowledge.
Trivia is information and data that are considered to be of little value. The word is derived from the Latin word triviae, meaning a place where a road split into two. It was introduced into English as the adjective trivial in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Cathedral schools began in the Early Middle Ages as centers of advanced education, some of them ultimately evolving into medieval universities. Throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, they were complemented by the monastic schools. Some of these early cathedral schools, and more recent foundations, continued into modern times.
Of Education is a treatise by John Milton published in 1644, first appearing anonymously as a single eight-page quarto sheet. Presented as a letter, written in response to a request from the Puritan educational reformer Samuel Hartlib, it represents Milton's most comprehensive statement on educational reform, and gives voice to his views "concerning the best and noblest way of education". As outlined in the tractate, education carried for Milton a dual objective: one public, to “fit a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war” (55); and the other private, to “repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possessing our soul of true virtue” (52).
Schola Osloensis, known in Norwegian as Oslo Katedralskole and more commonly as "Katta", is a selective upper secondary school located in Oslo, Norway.
Thierry of Chartres or Theodoric the Breton was a twelfth-century philosopher working at Chartres and Paris, France.
The Thomas More College of Liberal Arts is a private Roman Catholic liberal arts college in Merrimack, New Hampshire. It emphasizes classical education in the Catholic intellectual tradition and is named after Saint Thomas More. It is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education. It is endorsed by The Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College.
Classical Christian education is an approach to learning rooted in the long story of Christian engagement with the classical tradition as exemplified first by figures such as the Cappadocian Fathers, Augustine and Jerome as well as the fullness of Christian monastic traditions. Its current revival in American K-12 schools started with three schools founded in 1980 to 1981: Cair Paravel-Latin School, Trinity School at Greenlawn, and Logos School. Various classical Christian schools emphasize and articulate different things in their approaches, but most include biblical teachings and incorporate a teaching model from the classical education renewal known as the Trivium, consisting of three parts: grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
Classical education may refer to:
SisterMiriam Joseph Rauh, C.S.C., PhD (1898–1982) was a member of the Sisters of the Holy Cross. She received her doctorate from Columbia University and was Professor of English at Saint Mary's College from 1931 to 1960. She is the author of several books including The Trivium (1937), a text she developed as part of the core curriculum of Saint Mary's College. In her preface to the 1947 edition, she writes, "This book owes its inception .. to professor Mortimer J. Adler of the University of Chicago, whose inspiration and instruction gave it initial impulse." She also acknowledges debt to Aristotle, John Milton, and Jacques Maritain. It discusses the medieval liberal arts education based upon grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
St. Augustine Academy is a private, independently operated Roman Catholic school situated in Ventura, California. It is located within the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles The school's patron Saint is Augustine of Hippo. The school offers a classical liberal arts curriculum. The liberal arts are divided into the trivium consisting of grammar, logic and rhetoric, and the quadrivium consisting of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. The school is accredited with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, WASP, as well as the Western Catholic Educational Association, WCEA.
The Geneva School is a private, classical, coeducational Christian day school, founded in 1993. The Geneva School is located on a 40-acre campus in Casselberry, FL. Geneva is accredited by the Florida Council of Independent Schools. The total enrollment for 2022-2023 is about 660 students, K4–12.
The classical education movement or renewal advocates for a return to a traditional education based on the liberal arts, the canons of classical literature, the fine arts, and the history of civilization. It focuses on human formation and paideia with an early emphasis on music, gymnastics, recitation, imitation, and grammar. Multiple organizations support classical education in charter schools, in independent faith-based schools, and in home education. This movement has inspired several graduate programs and colleges as well as a new peer-reviewed journal, Principia: A Journal of Classical Education.
During the High Middle Ages, the Chartres Cathedral established the cathedral School of Chartres, an important center of French scholarship located in Chartres. It developed and reached its apex during the transitional period of the 11th and 12th centuries, at the start of the Latin translation movement. This period was also right before the spread of medieval universities, which eventually superseded cathedral schools and monastic schools as the most important institutions of higher learning in the Latin West.
Trivium School is an independent Catholic college-preparatory school for boys and girls in grades seven through twelve. It is located in Lancaster, Massachusetts.
Kim (Keimpe) Henry Veltman was a Dutch/Canadian historian of science and art, director of the Virtual Maastricht McLuhan Institute (VMMI), consultant and author, known for his contributions in the fields of "linear perspective and the visual dimensions of science and art," new media, culture and society.
