One of the great joys of raising small children is witnessing their poetic and artistic appreciation of the world–even before they’re ever able to read or even speak fluently. Everything they learn and know is derived from a sensory-emotional experience of reality.
This way of learning or coming to understand the world is what the Greeks called mimesis or imitation. Children naturally have a poetic impulse to reflect what is already there. We’ve all heard the toddler who points to the cow and says “moo,” or the dog and says, “arf!” This is why play is so important for children. They learn by watching and imitating. It’s a real and credible way of learning.
Unfortunately, one of the downfalls of an industrialized and scientifically-driven society is that for older children and especially adults, play is discouraged, even frowned upon. In a culture motivated by progress and market growth, the one being educated is inadvertently reduced to a mere object of utility. And subsequently, his education gets reduced to the acquisition of information or a set of job skills.
In other words, wherever the marketplace and progress are of more value than human flourishing, doing something becomes more valuable than being someone.
But, as Robert Maynard Hutchins once stated, “Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining.” For those parents interested in seeing their children flourish as human beings in both their personal and professional lives–that is, reach the highest point he is capable of attaining–the right kind of education must not neglect knowledge and skill but also remain committed to helping their children be more fully human by maintaining their poetic and artistic appreciation of the world.
So this raises the question, one that I think Stratford Caldecott framed quite nicely: “What kind of education would enable a child to progress in the rational understanding of the world without losing his poetic and artistic appreciation of it?”
I first want to state that I think this is a remarkable question because it acknowledges or assumes three things. First, it acknowledges children inherently possess a poetic and artistic appreciation of the world. Second, it assumes that a rational understanding of the world can be achieved. And finally, it assumes there is a kind of education that will foster the marriage of rational understanding and poetic knowledge.
So, without going too deep or taking too much time to explain, I would like to answer Caldecott’s question and suggest that only a truly liberal arts education can enable a child to gain a rational understanding of the world while still maintaining, and even enhancing, his poetic and artistic appreciation of it.
And here’s the short answer why only a liberal arts education can achieve this goal.
First, a liberal approach to education assumes first and foremost that human beings and not cogs or consumers are being educated. See, cogs and consumers are only valuable until they are no longer useful, but human beings have intrinsic, sacred value. Liberal educators recognize students have souls. Further, they recognize that as human beings, we are all somewhere on a spectrum between undeveloped and enslaved and flourishing and free. Therefore, the goal of the liberal educator is to help the student progress toward the free and flourishing end of the spectrum. Thus, the adjective liberal in the descriptor, is not a reference to a political party, but comes from the Latin libere or liberalis, meaning freeing.
Second, in the liberal arts tradition, poetry, literature, and art “are considered a means of real and valuable knowledge, knowledge of permanent things.” Werner Jaeger explains: “Art has a limitless power of converting the human soul–a power which the Greeks called psychagogia. For art possesses the two essentials of educational influence–universal significance and immediate appeal. By uniting these two methods of influencing the mind, it surpasses both philosophical thought and actual life.”
What he is describing here is the difference between, say, one who studies a language and learns all the declensions and verbs and other forms of grammar and is able to diagram a sentence perfectly and one who learns to speak and read the language so fluently they enjoy shopping at the market or ordering from a restaurant in the country of the language’s origin. Or, say, one who understands music theory perfectly and one who can actually do music. Perhaps, we’ve all experienced the difference between someone who can hit all the notes on the staff of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and one who can play Moonlight Sonata.
Finally, a liberal arts education enables us to progress toward a rational understanding of the world without losing our poetic and artistic appreciation of it because it possesses two essential attributes: a particular order or form of learning and a body of knowledge to learn from, sometimes called the Western Canon, or The Great Books.
This loose canon of literature makes up the best of ideas that have been thought and discussed throughout history. Within this large and deep pool of literature exists everything from history, philosophy, and theology to poetry and other forms of imaginative literature, like novels and short stories. In a liberal arts education, students exercise their minds on these great ideas in a way helpfully described by the 12th century educator and church father, Hugh of St. Victor:
- Students first learn the grammar of a subject, that is the knowledge of how to speak about a subject without error.
- Next, they focus on the dialectic, or logic of a subject, understood as the clear-sighted argument which separates the true from the false.
- Finally, they learn rhetoric as the discipline of persuading others to that which is suitable.
For nearly 2000 years, educators have recognized that there is a kind of education that is more than just the acquisition of information or job skills; it is a kind of education that fosters the development of the whole human being by marrying the student’s ability to reason with his sensory-emotional experience of reality. As I’ve just briefly described, the kind of education that enables students to progress in their rational understanding of the world without losing their poetic and artistic appreciation of it is called a liberal arts education.
To learn more about giving getting a liberal arts education, I recommend looking into Kepler Education.