Liberal arts education

Before they became known by their Latin variations (, , ), the liberal arts were the continuation of Ancient Greek methods of inquiry that began with a "desire for a universal understanding." Pythagoras argued that there was a mathematical (and geometric) harmony to the cosmos or the universe; his followers linked the four arts of astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music into one area of study to form the "disciplines of the mediaeval quadrivium". In the 4th-century-BC Athens, the government of the polis, or city-state, respected the ability of rhetoric or public speaking above almost everything else. Eventually rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic (logic) became the educational programme of the trivium. Together they came to be known as the seven liberal arts. Originally these subjects or skills were held by classical antiquity to be essential for a free person (, "worthy of a free person") to acquire in order to take an active part in civic life, something that included among other things participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and participating in military service. While the arts of the quadrivium might have appeared prior to the arts of the trivium, by the Middle Ages educational programmes taught the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) first while the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) were the following stage of education. Rooted in the basic curriculum – the or "well-rounded education" – of late Classical and Hellenistic Greece, the "liberal arts" or "liberal pursuits" (Latin ) were already called so in formal education during the Roman Empire. The first recorded use of the term "liberal arts" () occurs in by Marcus Tullius Cicero, but it is unclear if he created the term. Seneca the Younger discusses liberal arts in education from a critical Stoic point of view in Moral Epistles. The exact classification of the liberal arts varied however in Roman times, and it was only after Martianus Capella in the 5th century influentially brought the seven liberal arts as bridesmaids to the Marriage of Mercury and Philology, that they took on canonical form. The four "scientific" – music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy – were known from the time of Boethius onwards as the quadrivium. After the 9th century, the remaining three arts of the "humanities" – grammar, logic, and rhetoric – were grouped as the trivium. During the Middle Ages, logic gradually came to take predominance over the other parts of the trivium. In the 12th century the iconic image – (Philosophy and seven liberal arts) – was produced by an Alsatian nun and abbess Herrad of Landsberg with her community of women as part of the . Their encyclopedia compiled ideas drawn from philosophy, theology, literature, music, arts, and sciences and was intended as a teaching tool for women of the abbey. The image Philosophy and seven liberal arts represents the circle of philosophy, and is presented as a rosette of a cathedral: a central circle and a series of semicircles arranged all around. It shows learning and knowledge organised into seven relations, the or Seven Liberal Arts. Each of these arts find their source in the Greek φιλοσοφία, philosophia, literally "love of wisdom". '' In the Renaissance, the Italian humanists and their Northern counterparts, despite in many respects continuing the traditions of the Middle Ages, reversed that process. Re-christening the old trivium with a new and more ambitious name: , and also increasing its scope, they downplayed logic as opposed to the traditional Latin grammar and rhetoric, and added to them history, Greek, and moral philosophy (ethics), with a new emphasis on poetry as well. The educational curriculum of humanism spread throughout Europe during the sixteenth century and became the educational foundation for the schooling of European elites, the functionaries of political administration, the clergy of the various legally recognized churches, and the learned professions of law and medicine. The ideal of a liberal arts, or humanistic education grounded in classical languages and literature, persisted in Europe until the middle of the twentieth century; in the United States, it had come under increasingly successful attack in the late 19th century by academics interested in reshaping American higher education around the natural and social sciences. Similarly, Wilhelm von Humboldt's educational model in Prussia (now Germany), which later became the role model for higher education also in North America, went beyond vocational training. In a letter to the Prussian king, he wrote: The philosopher Julian Nida-Rümelin has criticized discrepancies between Humboldt's ideals and the contemporary European education policy, which narrowly understands education as a preparation for the labor market, arguing that we need to decide between "McKinsey and Humboldt". ==Modern usage==