By Winston Brady

Among the many crises we face in the United States, the chief one is that we don’t know how to be free. Far too many students (and adults) think of liberty not as a condition requiring virtue and wisdom but as a license to do whatever you want. This problem begins in our schools but carries over into other avenues of life; few are taught the proper, foundational arts of how to think, write and find joy in learning for its own sake.

These foundational arts used to be taught in a liberal arts education. We usually think of the liberal arts as anything that is not a practical, job-related skill — such as accounting, plumbing or the hard sciences. But the liberal arts are actually defined as the subjects that free an individual from ignorance and help them learn how to think.

The word “liberal” derives from the Latin word libertas, meaning “freedom” or “liberty.” These studies are “liberal” only in the sense that they promote liberty. They also require a degree of “liberty” from the constraints of daily living in order to have time to study.

In the ancient and medieval world, the liberal arts were made up of seven distinct subjects: grammar, logic and rhetoric (together called the trivium); and astronomy, geometry, arithmetic and music (together called the quadrivium). These subjects composed an excellent, thorough education because these skills allowed students to think through complex issues and enjoy noble activities, like reading an intellectual treatise, listening to a weighty lecture or performing an act of charity for its own sake.

In the ancient world, the people who studied the liberal arts had to have leisure time. If you could read, you must have been free and wealthy enough to have been educated. If you were not free, no one took the time to teach you to read; in fact, you may have been prevented from learning to read. In his autobiography, “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” Frederick Douglass explains that his masters had forbidden him an education, since Douglass would be easier to control if he were ignorant.

The liberal arts also prepared students to enjoy their freedom rightly. A liberal arts education emphasizes reading, writing and speaking — the skills that one needs to speak well in front of a crowd and give a speech with little to no preparation. The ancient world deemed the arts of logic and rhetoric a prerequisite for leadership and public service in the ancient world; how else could a general rouse his troops to take one more charge against the enemy or a Roman senator move the assembly to take up some great cause? But today, few people regard a liberal arts education as essential to their success or failure in the workplace, nor do they know how these arts may contribute to their overall flourishing.

Instead, the liberal arts are viewed as a collection of subjects that students take when they don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. Accountants take accounting, doctors medicine and therapists psychology, but the liberal arts of history and literature are considered a career path for students who have not chosen a career. In modern college course lists, they generally refer only to classes and majors that emphasize a humanities subject or incorporate humanities into the sciences.

However, the modern understanding of the liberal arts, one that completely separates these arts from rightly ordered liberty, has been a grave mistake for students and teachers alike. Subjects are sectioned into their own separate disciplines with little interaction between each other and thus prevent the education of the whole student.

Plumbers don’t learn how to read Plato, so they are left bored and restless when not plumbing, while those who can understand Plato flatter themselves that their understanding makes them better than the plumber. The plumber’s life is not enriched by study, while study makes the academic prideful; neither result is good for America. The liberal arts’ dynamic and liberating habits of thought have disappeared from curricula across American schoolrooms, and, with it, an understanding of what makes a good life and makes humans flourish (and the vocabulary needed simply to talk about these topics).

In the early 1900s, in light of the radical changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution, an education for the whole person did not seem worth it. Skills had become so fragmented from each other that the liberal arts were not deemed worth the time. Educational leaders decided they should be replaced with subjects “needed” in an “industrialized, technologically advanced society.” Once the foundation of a real liberal-arts education was removed from schools, the emphasis on teaching students to read and write slowly but surely faded. It was then replaced by DEI initiatives and ideologically motivated curricula that cannot teach students to read nor inspire them to attempt great deeds.

Today, we have reaped the harvest of a century of progressive education. Yet it is never too late to turn back and revive the “old” ways of an education founded on truth, goodness and virtue; and thankfully, there are countless educators in America who are bringing back a classical liberal-arts education founded on the very best of what has been taught and thought for the past 6,000 years. For the goal of a liberal arts education is to teach students how to know what is good, choose the good, and to persuade others to choose the good, too.

If you are one of those people, we would love for you to join Thales Press on March 21 for the Liberty and Literacy Symposium to draw attention to the kind of education that teaches students to enjoy and use their freedom rightly. If you believe in that mission, we would love to see you on March 21. More information about the conference is available here.

Winston Brady is the director of curriculum and director of Thales Press at Thales Academy, a network of private classical schools in North Carolina. He has taught various humanities classes for the past 13 years at Thales Academy. The column appeared in The Carolina Journal.