The Liberating Arts of Liberal Arts Education

Doesn't every school teach the liberal arts?
Here's the short answer: schools used to.

The vast majority of modern schools, including Catholic schools, focus on the skills students need in the future to succeed professionally and use the liberal arts as a means to that end.

Classical, liberal arts schools explore the liberal arts so that students can become the best version of themselves. While academic excellence is not the primary goal, it is the result of lighting our students' minds and hearts on fire for the things that truly matter.

Rightly ordering our education philosophy to what is first and most important makes all the difference in the outcome. Instead of strictly focusing on STEM, or whatever is trending in education today, we focus on becoming: good engineers, good doctors, and good people.

As St. Francis de Sales exhorted:
"Be who you are and be that well!"

Liberal Arts Education at St. Ann Classical Academy

At St. Ann Classical Academy, we focus on providing our students with a classical liberal arts education. We believe that learning logic and how to think critically is an essential foundation that children can utilize their entire lives.

Once these skills have been acquired, children can build upon them as they delve into other areas of study, resulting in well-rounded students who are intelligent, kind, and take an eagerness to learn with them.

If you’re interested in learning more about our classical liberal arts education, attend our open house and enroll your child at St. Ann Classical Academy for the coming school year. 
 

“The seven liberal arts do not adequately divide theoretical philosophy; but, as Hugh of St. Victor says, seven arts are grouped together (leaving out certain other ones), because those who wanted to learn philosophy were first instructed in them. And the reason why they are divided into the trivium and quadrivium is that “they are as it were paths (viae) introducing the quick mind to the secrets of philosophy.” This is also in harmony with the Philosopher’s statement in Metaphysics that we must investigate the method of scientific thinking before the sciences themselves. And the Commentator says in the same place that before all the other sciences a person should learn logic, which teaches the method of all the sciences; and the trivium concerns logic. The Philosopher also says in the Ethics that the young can know mathematics but not physics, because it requires experience. So we are given to understand that after logic we should learn mathematics, which the quadrivium concerns. These, then, are like paths leading the mind to the other philosophical disciplines.”

–St. Thomas Aquinas (Commentary on Boethius’ “On the Trinity” V.1.reply to 3)