At Wyoming Catholic College, our graduates receive a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts.
But what exactly does “Liberal Arts” mean?
When most people speak of the liberal arts today, they typically mean the subjects that do not have an immediate practical end for which one can be trained. Engineering, software design, business, accounting, marketing, nursing, and similar professional subjects are “technical” or “practical,” not liberal. That kind of education is ordered to producing skilled workers for the global economy, not necessarily to developing free people for a free society or opening the mind to larger possibilities. As a result even many technical colleges require a liberal arts component to balance skilled work with a greater vision of what it means to be human.
The liberal arts—artes liberales in Latin—are the academic subjects and skills essential for life as a free person in a free society. liberales in Latin means “generous,” “free” in the ample sense of a person who thinks of doing greater good, not simply of making more money. A liberal education is an education ordered toward this generous liberty, “not the power of doing what we like,” as Lord Acton (1834-1902) put it, “but the right of being able to do what we ought.”
Traditionally there are seven liberal arts divided between the Trivium and the Quadrivium.
Grammar, logic, and rhetoric comprise the Trivium, the foundation of all education. Grammar teaches the ways language works, logic the ways thought works, and rhetoric the most effective ways to express ideas and convince others. The Quadrivium is comprised of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, the curriculum outlined by Plato in The Republic. Mastering these modes of thinking prepares the student to undertake higher subjects such as theology and philosophy.
At Wyoming Catholic College, we immerse students in the seven classical liberal arts and combine them with the study of theology, philosophy, literature, science, and the fine arts. We believe—and have seen in our graduates—that such a liberal arts education produces men and women who demonstrate good character, spiritual depth, inner joy, intellectual curiosity, flexible leadership, and other high qualities that fit them for lives of genuine freedom as well as for successful careers.
Our nation has a desperate need for liberally educated men and women. Without them, few in our day will see beyond immediate technical problems to the larger paradigms that govern the very way we conceive of reality. With them, the future can be built with hope and confidence upon the greatness of the past.
“It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”
Albert Einstein
At Wyoming Catholic College, the classroom is a sacred space, uniquely shaped by each professor with each group of students. Of the various modes of teaching, two most often come into play in the curriculum.
Lectures provide contextual and factual information, extended argumentation, and wisdom gleaned from prolonged study and experience, and sometimes they are necessary to inform and guide conversational inquiry. But lectures alone can turn students into passive learners and mere followers of “expert” opinion.
Seminars provide a strong corrective. Whole classes sometimes follow from a single question asked by the professor at the beginning of class. But free-flowing seminar discussion, though a vital tool to inculcate the habits of listening, thinking through positions, speaking, asserting, and reconsidering can disorient students if they never experience truly authoritative thought.
At Wyoming Catholic College, professors do not necessarily follow a single method but vary their approaches to suit the natures of the students and the demands of the material. Individual needs and the dynamics of particular classes require them to adjust their modes as necessary, and prudence always overrides strict adherence to a single mode.
“I am not a teacher, but an awakener.”
Robert Frost
