The quest for the Logos is the quest for truth, beauty, and goodness. This is the search of the human heart for what it needs to flourish and be happy.

The Purpose of Education:

 A Catholic Primer

by Stratford Caldecott

Our society, indeed what remains of Western civilization, seems to many people to be falling apart. The economic crisis, the moral crisis, the ecological crisis, and the political crisis combine to create a “perfect storm.” But they all stem from one fundamental error. As a society, we have abandoned a sense of cosmic and moral order for the sake of unlimited growth and progress towards an entirely man-made universe.

A similar process underlies another crisis, the fifth crisis, that of education. It has the same root as the others. Education is in crisis not merely because standards of literacy or mathematics have fallen, but because we have no coherent vision, as a society, of what education is for or what it is meant to achieve. We have assumed that, if it is not merely a cage to keep our young people off the streets, its purpose is to train workers in the great economic machine, the same machine that we hope will produce endless growth. But we cannot know what education is for, since we have no idea any longer what man is for, or what a human being actually is.

As Frank Sheed once put it: “This question of purpose is a point overlooked in most educational discussions, yet it is quite primary. How can you fit a man’s mind for living if you do not know what the purpose of man’s life is?” We need a philosophy of education based on an adequate “anthropology” or picture of man, if we are to put education back on the right track.

The Catholic tradition—and more broadly the great tradition of Western civilization—defined humane learning in terms of what became known as the “Liberal Arts.” As described by St Augustine and others, these consisted of seven fields of study, grouped as three arts of language, and three cosmological arts. The first group or Trivium consisted of Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric; the second, the Quadrivium, of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy. Both sets of arts were intended to be preparatory to the higher studies of Philosophy and Theology—that is, the love of Wisdom (philo-sophia) and the knowledge of God (theo-logos).

The Liberal Arts constituted the core curriculum at the heart of the classical and medieval educational system. I have been investigating them in two books devoted to the Quadrivium and the Trivium—Beauty for Truth’s Sake and Beauty in the Wordrespectively—to discover their relevance, if any, to our present educational crisis. This article is an attempt to summarize the conclusions of the two books.

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