What is Classical Education?
Our educational goal at Saint Thomas More Academy is the cultivation of the whole person. This goal is achieved by the human person being fully alive: free, flourishing, and united to Christ, who reveals man to himself.
Classical education does not aim for technical proficiency or an uncritical absorption of cultural assumptions about the human person and the world. Rather, it is an ancient and time-tested method of education that is commonly called the classical liberal arts.
A classical liberal arts education uses the traditional tools of learning that are rooted in the Medieval system of education:
The Trivium
The Language Arts of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric
The Quadrivium
The Mathematical Arts of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and the Natural Sciences
The Trivium helps human beings communicate with each other using words and 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.
In addition to textbooks for mathematics and the observable sciences, students read carefully chosen classics and “living books” that form their moral imagination, cultivate a love of beauty, 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.
Catholic classical liberal arts education has its roots in Hebraic, ancient Greek, and ancient Roman 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. Moreover, many of the great figures of both American and world history (including the Founding Fathers of the United States) were classically educated, and used their education to advance the common good of humanity.
Today, we are seeing a renewal of Catholic classical liberal arts education that seeks to retrieve this tradition and adapt it to the present, and Saint Thomas More Academy is a part of this renewal.
