Classical education has its roots in the educational system handed on by the ancient Greeks and continued by the Roman Empire. At its core, classical education seeks to form the central faculties of the human person, the senses, the memory, the imagination, the passions, the intellect and the will, all ordered to the pursuit of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. This was done through the seven liberal arts, the trivium and the quadrivium, and in exposure to the great works of their culture that told the stories of what it meant to be a Greek or a Roman. St. Paul received an education in this tradition, which he boldly used for the proclamation of the Gospel. St. Justin Martyr displayed his keen understanding of Greek philosophy in his First Apology, written in the early second century, and it was St. Augustine’s  classical education that so empowered him in his pursuit of truth through bringing together divine revelation and the human intellect.

The Human Faculties

Building upon the works of Plato and Aristotle, the Church, through St. Thomas Aquinas, sees the human being as fundamentally possessing key faculties, or powers. Created in the image and likeness of God, the highest of these faculties are the faculties of the soul, the intellect and the will. However, because all knowledge originates in the senses, it is essential to first form the senses, and then the imagination and the memory, the passions or emotions, and finally the intellect and the will.

The Liberal Arts

The liberal arts are those arts which were originally studied only by those who were free to undertake studies, but also came to be seen as those arts by which one was formed in and for freedom. The seven liberal arts are found in the trivium and the quadrivium, literally the “three ways” and the “four ways”.

The trivium consists of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. These are the arts of communication, what we call the Language Arts in modern education. However, they were clearly structured such that Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, depended on Logic, the art of clear thinking, which was dependent on Grammar, the art of language.

The quadrivium consists of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, which are the arts by which the world is understood as ordered. In modern education, this is the role that STEM plays – the study of created reality, in which we find order and meaning. Arithmetic is the art of number or quantity, while geometry is number extended in space, music is number extended in time, and astronomy is number extended in both space and time.