As I write this, the Symbiosis School
for Liberal Arts nears the end of its second month of classes. The classes have
been different to say the least. Gone are the days where we learned history
from boring textbooks and dictated scientific definitions like walking encyclopedias. We are students of Liberal Arts.
But what are the Liberal Arts?
Liberal
What?
The term Liberal Arts refers to a
curriculum or course of seven subjects that are designed to impart general
knowledge while simultaneously stimulating a student’s rational thought
capabilities. If you want to look at it in a much simpler term, the Liberal
Arts are to make you street smart.
The concept of Liberal Arts has its root
in Ancient Rome where liberal arts truly meant, the ‘free’ arts. It was labelled
this as it denoted the status of a free person and their rights to think, as
compared to a slave who only received manual skills.
In the 5th Century AD,
Martianus Capella, a writer from Algeria, classified the Liberal Arts into 7
subjects: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.
These were further subcategorised into two parts, the Trivium and the
Quadrivium.
Trivium
and Quadrivium – Not elements from the periodic table
Trivium was a term that meant the ‘three
ways’ in Latin or rather the ‘three roads’ of medieval liberal arts education.
It included subjects like grammar, logic and rhetoric. The grouping could be best
described as follows:
“Logic
is the art of thinking; Grammar is the art of symbols and combining them to
express thought; while Rhetoric is the art of communication to convey thoughts
from one mind to another.”
The study of these three subjects was considered
a necessity for the subsequent study of Quadrivium, sort of like the medieval
equivalent to an undergraduate course.
Quadrivium means the ‘four ways’ in
Latin and by extension means ‘the place where four roads meet’. The Quadrivium
comprised of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy which used the
preparatory work set in place by the Trivium.
It was during the time of Plato that the
outline of the Quadrivium course was laid out. According to them and early
Pythagorean writings, all mathematical sciences could be divided into 4 parts.
One half dealt with quantity and the
other half with magnitude. These both were described as being two-fold, i.e.,
having two parts, as quantity could be with regards to the character by itself
or, in relation to another quantity. As for magnitude, it could be either
stationary or in motion.
Keeping this in mind, arithmetic studies
quantities; music studies the relation between quantities; while geometry looks
at magnitudes at rest, and astronomy studies when magnitudes inherently move.
The completion of the Quadrivium entitled
the student to the medieval equivalent to our current Masters of Arts degree.
It was from here that the student would dive into the fields of Philosophy and
Theology, sometimes known as liberal arts par
execellence, where the art of thinking and conveyance of thought is
crucial.
So there you have it, Liberal Arts, a
concept of education that reaches further back in time than Newton’s Laws of
Motion. A concept that was used to denote the freedom of the individual in the
Roman Empire is now accomplishing a similar goal once again. By studying
Liberal Arts, we are being giving the ability to think, and to share those
thoughts, so that we can become the shapers of ‘tomorrow’ and not the preservers
of ‘today’.
By Virpratap Vikram Singh
