A "Liberal" School

Academy Lane
Winter 2005


A "Liberal" School

By Dr. Ken Calvert
Headmaster,
Hillsdale Academy, Hillsdale, Michigan

Early last summer, various media outlets broadcast bits of wisdom from college and university commencement addresses. In one speech, the president of George Washington University announced, "If anybody has a mortarboard, you can move your tassel from right to left, which is what I hope happened to your politics in the last four years." A speaker at Concordia College in Minnesota chose to emphasize the word "liberal" in the term "liberal arts "with the suggestion that shaping students into political liberals ought to be the goal of any college. Though these comments were without doubt meant to be humorous, they nonetheless reconfirm the left-leaning agenda that dominates much of American education. More to the point is the fact that these educators appear to be ignorant of classical learning and what is meant by the word "liberal" within the classical tradition.

Of least importance among these errors was the misinterpretation of the tassel on graduation mortarboards, a symbol originally reserved for doctoral status at Oxford University. In past practice, a student who had completed his bachelor's degree received an academic hood, the color of which indicated his field of study. In current practice, a graduated student received a hood while an undergraduate wears a tassel. Moving the tassel from right to left replaces the act of bestowing a hood upon the degree recipient. No hint of political significance can be found in this tradition.

Of far greater importance is the misuse of the word "liberal" in the term "liberal arts" or, in the Latin, artes liberals. As the Latin word liber means "free," this term might best be rendered "the free arts." Properly rendered, "liberal" defines the arts to be mastered, not the politics of the person or persons learning these arts. And these free arts include three elementary fields of study: the trivium or grammar, rhetoric and logic, as well as four higher fields of study, the quadrivium or the study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy (or physics) and music. The traditional design of the liberal arts education is to introduce to the student a course of study that emphasizes language at the lower levels, moving on to the study of mathematics and science at the intermediate and highest levels of study. It is understood that this approach provides the student with the knowledge necessary to address any particular question. These seven arts are free of specific application and yet are applicable to any problem or endeavor.

Distinct from the liberal arts or "free" arts are the artes illiberales. These are often called the "enslaved arts" and include studies that tie a person to one trade or to a limited set of skills. These arts are learned in a shop class or in a trade school and in today's educational jargon might be referred to as "life skills" or as a more "practical" approach to education. While the traditional liberal arts advocate would never reject mastering a skill, he would also never encourage an exclusive focus on any one of the artes illiberales. Rather, within the classical tradition, a free man should be able to apply himself successfully to any problem.

It is at this point that the term "liberal arts" might be understood as a political idea in that it is an education "appropriate for free men." In other words, the liberal or free arts education provides citizens with the tools necessary to operate as strong, free citizens within a free state rather than as subjects of an authoritarian state. This, of course, should not be understood to mean that a liberal arts education "liberates" the person to act in an immoral manner. The mind trained in the free arts is not one that rejects the moral order that provides necessary boundaries to freedom. Within the American setting, such a mind would not reject the moral principles that are so crucial to the strength of our Republic. Rather, the virtues and principles of citizenship, those necessary boundaries within a civil society, ought to be included as central topics within an American classical education.

The curriculum of our good school is based solidly upon the principles of a liberal arts education. Students at Hillsdale Academy are taught to be free, not enslaved to deception. They are taught to prize intellectual achievement and to develop a strong moral compass. We want them to understand what it is to be a man or woman of good intellect and high moral character. In this we are a truly liberal school.