Liberal Arts (Foundation Series)
When people first hear that a school is a liberal arts school, there are a lot of questions left up in the air, and rightly so! The term liberal arts today has unfortunately been used by many schools to simply differentiate themselves from a more mainstream school, but a true liberal arts education has a few key items that I will lay out below. Let me also say that this article is only meant to scratch the surface on a very big topic. There are many aspects to the liberal arts tradition as you can see by the illustration at the end of this article, but this article is meant to discuss some of the big picture items.
1. Aim at Life Preparation
It has become mainstream for schools to talk about college and career readiness. If a school is labeled a “prep” school, it is automatically considered to be top notch and rigorous. In fact, “prep” schools are often considered to be accepted as the most intellectual of schooling programs out there. It’s interesting considering the fact that every single school is a prep school whether they put it in their name or not. All schools are preparing their students for something whether they say it in their school’s name or not. This word, “prep,” has become purely a marketing ploy. I guess you can’t blame schools looking to draw families in. If it works, it works, but let it be on the record that the word means nothing!
With that said, the first thing to notice about a liberal arts curriculum is not whether we are a prep school or not, but what it is we are preparing students for. In other words, what is our end aim in a liberal arts education?
The answer is that we are preparing students to act with wisdom and eloquence in all of life.
This is a significant difference from pretty much any other modern educational model out there right now. At Tall Oaks, since we are a liberal arts school, we are not focused on college readiness or for career readiness. We are not interested in focusing on preparing our students to be a cog in the machine of the modern work place, or prepare them to rack up as many student loan debt as possible. Rather, we are in the business of preparing students for everything that life has to throw at them. If we shoot for preparing students for all of life, that will certainly include a job, vocation, and college readiness if that is what God has for them, but this is not our end aim. We believe that life is more than a job, and there are immensely important questions to life that need answering. There are incredibly difficult decisions that we will all face in life that doesn’t have anything to do with a job or career. We want our students to be prepared to answer all of those questions and be able to do so wisely. This is what a true liberal arts education is all about.
2. Training in how to think
Flowing out of the desire to prepare students for all of life, a big piece of this is training students how to think well and make wise decisions in any situation. There are 7 liberal arts (3 language arts, and 4 mathematical arts), and the idea is that once you have mastered all of the arts, you are considered educated and equipped to make wise decisions. The interesting thing about these 7 arts is that when being trained in them, a big emphasis is training to students to see how all knowledge is interconnected. God created a world of connected parts, not a series of disconnected physical and abstract items.
Paul tells us that, “And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” - Colossians 1:17
Because of this truth, we want to show and consistently point to the interconnectedness of creation. We do this because we want to honor God in His creation, but we also know that to understand and function in God’s world well, we must understand it. If all things are interconnected, we must show it to be such to our students! If we don’t, we are leaving out a vital piece of creation and doing our students a disservice.
Now, much of this makes simple sense if you take a step back and think about how we all make decisions naturally. We hardly ever think about things or make decisions by only using one area of knowledge. We make important decisions by synthesizing many different pieces of information from many different subject areas all at the same time. At least, we do this if we are to make wise decisions! Sometimes a decision we have to make has economic implications, but it could also involve relational, spiritual, health, and cultural implications as well. This is certainly true for making the decision of whether you are going to move your family to a new location. Think about all the factors that go into making the decision of who your spouse will be, how many children you will have, what job is right for you, and how we involve ourselves in the politics of our local community. The list could go on forever, but I think you get the point. A liberal arts program wants to focus on training students how to see interconnectedness and make wise decisions throughout life.
3. Theology is the chief of all knowledge
There are seven liberal arts for students to master, but transcending all of that is theology. Theology is seen as the chief of the arts as we acknowledge God at the center of all knowledge, for it was created by Him. If God created all things, any pursuit of knowledge that is done outside of the context of it being God’s world and creation is blasphemy and leaves out the most important piece of the puzzle. This is why the secularization of our education system has failed us so dramatically. In fact, we believe that any education apart from the pursuit of knowledge that leaves out the Creator is not true education at all.
This is also why at Tall Oaks, we strive to not simply call ourselves a Christian school on paper. We don’t want to call ourselves a Chrsitian school because we have a chapel time every morning, or because we have a Bible class. We call ourselves a Christian school because we infuse an acknowledgement to God as the Creator of all knowledge in everything we do. This acknowledgment doesn’t just take place in chapel or Bible class. It takes place in math, science, reading, and writing as well. It takes place in logic, civics, economics, philosophy, leadership, et cetera.
The image below shows how theology transcends everything else that is done in a liberal arts curriculum. This was an image sketched out by a young student at a classical school. You will also see that there are other pieces to the liberal arts puzzle that I have not touched on in this article. I have provided a basic overview of the liberal arts tradition with larger ideas. In future articles, I will dive into some more details related to the other items you see in the image below.
