The Seven Liberal Arts
Educators during the European middle ages mounted a systematic effort to reassemble the identity of Western Christian civilization, our cultural inheritance. The basis for that effort was embodied in an approach to education that emphasized seven cornerstones. The first three, known as the trivium, were grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Later, the quadrivium was added, which included arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. The trivium was meant to equip the student with tools to learn how to learn, and the quadrivium was the place where those tools were applied for exercise and development. Mastering all seven was intended to produce people who could approach the world and its questions boldly. This tradition has been handed down to the twenty-first century as the liberal arts, or the "freeing" arts.
"Imagine the younger
generation
studying great books and learning the liberal arts. Imagine an adult
population continuing to turn to the same sources of strength,
inspiration, and communication. We could talk to one another then."
—Robert Maynard Hutchins
At Northfield School of the Liberal Arts, we strive to inculcate the use of the trivium, the basic building blocks of learning, in our students so that they might go out from us as learners for life exploring, discerning, and making valuable any field of endeavor in which they might find themselves, with an understanding of the truth as their final objective.
