The Concept of Liberal Arts

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 5^th 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