Part 2: Brief Historical Overview

In his book In Defense of a Liberal Education, Fareed Zakaria (2015, pp. 41-42) discusses the origins of the liberal arts: “Basic skills for sustenance were no longer sufficient [in ancient Greece] – citizens also had to be properly trained to run their own society. The link between a broad education and liberty became important to the Greeks. Describing this approach to instruction centuries later, the Romans coined a term for it: a ‘liberal’ education, using the word liberal in its original Latin sense, ‘of or pertaining to free men’” (41–42). Roman statesman and author Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) is believed to be the first recorded user of the phrase liberal arts. The phrase was applied to education in classical antiquity as it was a free person who had the privilege to be educated, particularly in order to participate in the rights of civic life that free people were allowed.

While the phrase liberal arts continued in use, its meaning has changed over time. The twelfth-century English philosopher and bishop John of Salisbury states in his The Metalogicon (translation, 2015, p. 37) that the liberal arts “are called ‘liberal,’ either because the ancients took care to have their children instructed in them; or because their object is to effect man’s liberation, so that, freed from cares, he may devote himself to wisdom.” Instead of a focus on free people who can participate in civic life, John of Salisbury defines liberal as the time and ability to learn. This approach reserves education for those who are not spending their days toiling in fields or otherwise engaged in simple survival.

In the Middle Ages, thinkers and scholars categorized the subjects that make up the liberal arts. They divided them first into the trivium, which was grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and then the quadrivium, which was arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. All seven of the disciplines in the trivium and quadrivium are called “arts,” speaking to the definition of arts mentioned above as a learned skill. In the modern American context, the quadrivium would, with the exception of music, fall into the category of STEM. To many medieval thinkers, music as well as the rest of the disciplines in the quadrivium were part of mathematics, which is rather different from how we usually classify music today, but makes sense considering the skills a person learns studying music.

Today, the liberal arts are mostly a focus of American education. Grant Lilford (2012, p. 194) does demonstrate that “the conversation [about the liberal arts] has flowed around and across continents.” The tenth-century Islamic thinker al-Farabi, known as the “Second Teacher” behind Aristotle, had similar approaches to classifying knowledge. His categories were: language (syntax, grammar, pronunciation, and poetry), logic, introductory sciences (arithmetic, geometry, astrology, music, weights, tool-making), physics (nature) and metaphysics (god), and society (jurisprudence and rhetoric) (Nasr, 2001, pp.  61–62). The fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldûn divided knowledge into logic, natural knowledge (medicine and agriculture), metaphysics (magic and the occult), quantity (geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy), the Qur’an and the Hadith, jurisprudence, theology, Sufism, and linguistics (grammar, lexicography, and literature) (pp.  63-64). Music is included with other mathematics as in the quadrivium, and al-Farabi includes rhetoric, the art of argument and persuasion such as those often taught in college writing or speech courses, in the sciences rather than the humanities as they are today. In the Early Modern period (or the Renaissance), the liberal arts was referred to as humanistic education, but it was grounded in the classical ideas and remained central to European and then American education.

The understanding of where subjects belong in these categories of knowledge have shifted over time, but the main concept of the liberal arts is the same. John of Salisbury writes in The Metalogicon (p. 36): “The liberal arts are said to have become so efficacious among our ancestors, who studied them diligently, that they enabled them to comprehend everything they read, elevated their understanding to all things, and empowered them to cut through the knots of all problems possible of solution.” This is quite the claim! Essentially, John of Salisbury and many other thinkers across the centuries have understood the liberal arts as including everything a human being should know.