LIBERAL ARTS FOR CONTEMPORARY CATHOLIC SCHOOLS?KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO SYDNEY CATHOLIC SCHOOLS PASTORS AND PRINCIPALS DAY

WATERVIEW CENTRE, HOMEBUSH, 31 JULY 2024
I’m so grateful for the literary diet served me in my Catholic secondary school, named for St Ignatius whose feast it is today. We read Austen, Beckett, Blake, Bolt, Bronte, Chaucer, Chekhov, Conrad, Dickens, Donne, Dostoevsky, George Elliot and T.S. Eliot, Goethe, Homer, Hughes, Huxley, Joyce, Keats, Melville, Miller, Milton, Orwell, Paton, Pinter, Plath, Plato, Poe, Seymour, Shaw, Solzhenitsyn, Sophocles, Steinbeck, Swift, Thomas, Twain, Wordsworth, White, Wilde and Williams, along with two Shakespeares every year, and some Bob Dylan songs. A few weeks ago I saw the Bell Shakespeare production of King Lear. Robert Menzies was outstanding as a physically frail yet emotionally explosive Lear, Melissa Kahraman excelled as both Cordelia and the Fool, as did Alex King as Edgar and Tom O’Bedlam.[1] Lear’s is “a domestic crisis wrapped in a political crisis inside an existential one”:[2] his downfall from king to homeless madman, the dysfunction in his family and kingdom, his character flaws and fatal misjudgements, and his raging against the storm he had brought on himself—all are means for exploring questions of identity and diminishment, authority versus ambition, order and chaos, justice against cruelty, meaning as opposed to nihilism and insanity. I heard great lines like: “Many a true word hath been spoken in jest”; “Nothing can come of nothing”; “I am a man more sinned against than sinning”; “Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes”; “When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools”; “Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind”. The lines, characters and tale have held my attention ever since. But it was my Catholic school education that taught me to appreciate this colossus of plays. What a gift!
I. Know thy enemy, know thyself
The best-known adage of the Chinese general and philosopher, Sun Tzu, is know thy enemy. The longer form of it is “Know your enemy and know yourself and you will win a hundred battles.”[3] Tzu’s point is simple yet critical: whatever our challenges, key to success is understanding what we are up against and what we bring to the challenge. Otherwise, we are shooting in the dark or being highly efficient at doing the wrong thing. We must be clear-eyed about our goals, challenges and resources, and develop a considered approach as much on the sports field as the battlefield, in the classroom as in the boardroom, in our schools as in our parishes.
So, what are the threats? At our last Pastors and Principals Day, I referred to the situation of Catholic schools today as something of a gordian knot.[4] There are many, complex and interconnected challenges, and we have to be judicious about which are most pressing and which we are best placed to address, while not being distracted from our main game by the endless hiccups. We know that there are real challenges and opportunities in the arena of academic results—our excellence or learning-gain agenda. And so, too, in the areas of funding, staffing and access. Then there are problems regarding transmission of faith: later today, Bishop Danny Meagher and some school leaders and chaplains, will outline some implications of our changing enrolment patterns. Suffice it here to observe that in less than twenty years (since 2006) the proportion of enrolees in Sydney Catholic Schools identifying as Catholic has declined from 85% to 68%, while the proportion of other Christians, other faiths, and those of “No religion” keeps rising. Despite steady enrolment growth we can expect the majority of students in NSW Catholic schools to be non-Catholic a decade from now—that’s already the case in 187 of our schools—and Sydney will not be much better off.[5] Nominal Catholics are becoming a minority in our schools; serious Catholics a much smaller proportion; and this could be an existential challenge.
This is not the only pressing challenge to our religious mission. We should also be concerned with the religious literacy, commitment and practice among the students entrusted to us.[6] According to the recent Archdiocesan Survey of Religious Attitudes and Practices, only 30% of our Catholic students attend Mass more than monthly—and that’s probably an overestimate—and half as many read the Bible with any sort of regularity.[7] Almost 40% never receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation, while less than 20% do so with any regularity. Most (54%) think it’s OK to pick and choose religious beliefs, and even more (61%) think morals are a matter of personal choice with no definite rights and wrongs. Fewer than 3 in 10 (29%) are part of a religious group and only 2 in 10 (21%) active in some social justice or service initiative. When it comes to what students know about the faith, the data are difficult to parse, but many of our graduates seem to know less about the Faith than their predecessors. How many are saints, or saints-in-the-making, is even harder to estimate. But unless we squarely face the changing religious profile of our students, we will be failing to give them what they most need, and our Catholic identity will flounder. We must also recognise the cultural obstacles beyond our schools’ control, especially the society-wide phenomenon of secularisation.
II. The secularising effect
For more than a century Catholic education in Australia was self-consciously a response to the Protestant-secular ascendancy; more recently, it has risked being more infected by secularism than antidote to it.[8] But there are many competing secularities.[9] In some parts of the world, it’s said with respect to church and state that “ne’er the twain shall meet”; in others, religious institutions dictate terms to government, society, even non-believers. Some countries mix both extremes.
The Australian take on these things has historically been to distinguish church and state, recognizing that each has its own goals, activities and actors, and seeking as far as possible to live and let live. This disinclines Australians to radical ideological divides and allows church and state to coexist. Mostly they leave each other well enough alone; where they intersect, they can be rivals, but often find ways to collaborate to their mutual advantage. This live-and-let-live, cooperate-when-you-can version of church-state relations has underpinned our educational ecosystem for recent decades: dioceses and parishes put in most of the cost of land and buildings for Catholic schools, the Commonwealth contributes most of the salaries, parents and states put in the rest. Church schools teach the same curriculum as state schools, sometimes with a particular accent, as well as their own spiritual curriculum with which the state does not interfere. It mostly works well, but every generation must make the case anew for this freedom and resourcing, and the relationship evolves over time.
The greatest contemporary theorist of secularisation, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, argues that belief and unbelief have become rival accounts of reason, nature, community and happiness. Whereas in the enchanted world of pre-modernity people’s self-concepts, communities and cosmologies assumed God’s active presence, belief in God has become difficult for many in the progressively disenchanted scientific age.[10] Christianity has itself contributed to some of this secularisation through its insistence that some things are rightly rendered unto ‘Caesar’ and some to ‘God’ (as Jesus said) or that there is a ‘city of God’ and a ‘city of man’ (as Augustine put it), even if the two spheres interpenetrate and we bring the one Christian conscience to both.[11] Liberal democracies and liberal education were ultimately built upon these Christian reconciliations of the sacred and profane.[12] Yet, since at least the Renaissance and Reformation, that ancient compact has been unravelling and for many social elites and some whole populations a godless humanism now severs individuals from society, society from the cosmos, and the cosmos from God. Contemporary society is marked by expressive individualism and a materialist conception of reality, whilst more communitarian and spiritual conceptions are denigrated as immature or benighted. Sustaining life and health, maximising wealth and consumption, and getting our own way are now what matter most, however unsatisfying that might be. In this worldview there are no more angels and saints, martyrs or heroes; bibles and prelates have no magisterium; there is mimesis no longer of the Christian story in education and the arts; and if the old social and cosmic imaginaries have been displaced, the new ones “fail to touch the bottom of anywhere” (to quote Taylor again).[13]
Modern Australia evolved at the height of these cultural shifts. The child sexual abuse crisis served to magnify disillusionment with institutional religion and accelerate disaffiliation and disconnection. Various ideologies and interests now coalesce to marginalise Christians: we might consider recent pressure to remove charity status from church schools and their building funds, to defund and nationalise church schools, hospitals and cemeteries, to forbid church institutions considering faith and witness in hiring staff, to require Catholic health and aged care facilities and professionals to do or refer for things contrary to the faith, and to ‘cancel’ anyone with unfashionable religious-moral views. For all the talk of ‘tolerance’, secularism is increasingly doctrinaire and intolerant both of religion and old-style liberalism. Many are left in a spiritual desert, with no moral compass and no-one to accompany them through life’s struggles.
The corrosive effects of secularisation upon the Catholic DNA are evident in our institutions: many Catholic school teachers no longer themselves practice and are unacquainted or out-of-sorts with substantial parts of the doctrine and morals they are charged with teaching; and the demographic trends to which I previously averted mean the students they teach (and their families) are often indifferent to religion.[14] Other teachers and students, though officially Catholic, have so little connection with Church outside school that they seem lost at Mass. But secularisation is no fait accompli. Christian institutions, including our schools, can be places that push back against a culture closed to the transcendent and enrich the vision and experience of both students and teachers with a spiritual dimension missing elsewhere. And many of our education leaders and staff are up for the challenge.
III. The liberal arts model
To this end, I want to make a case today for the Liberal Arts as one strategy for resisting a narrowing secularism and reopening the world to God.[15] The Roman philosopher-statesman Cicero was the first to use the term ‘artes liberalis’, literally the knowledge worthy of a freeman,[16] and advocated a broad yet comprehensive education that equips a person to live as a free-thinking citizen, not merely a tradesman. He was heavily influenced by Athenian models of ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία or general education preparatory for a public life.[17] And so, from classical Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages[18] and Renaissance,[19] to the Christian humanism of St Ignatius and the Jesuit schools,[20] the Scottish enlightenment,[21] U.S. college system[22] and John Henry Newman,[23] this broad programme of teaching and learning ‘for its own sake’ was foundational for many schools and universities in the West.
:10 Some conflate the term liberal arts with the humanities, or parody it as an impractical rival to the STEM education that gets you a job, or reduce it to an elitist, regressive, colonial diet of supposedly Great Books.[24] But a liberal arts education is much broader and richer than these caricatures. In the classical period it began with the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric to teach critical thinking and effective articulation, followed by the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music to encourage wonder about creation and confidence in navigating it. These grounded the range of humanities and sciences, and were supplemented by physical and spiritual education.
So a genuine liberal arts education is not ‘anti-science’ or fixated on ‘the classics’: it prizes literacy and numeracy, and all that is based on each, and enquiry for its own sake and not just for utilitarian ends. It resists early specialisation in vocational disciplines and seeks to form the whole person, cultivating intellectual virtues and skills for seeking meaning and purpose, and moral virtues for good character and choices. It promotes critical and interdisciplinary thinking, and raises the big questions popular culture evades and many contemporary curricula dumb down. By equipping students to appreciate the depth of human existence, the wonders of the universe, the coherence of rational inquiry and the genius of human creativity, the Catholic intellectual tradition sought to enlarge hearts and horizons with truth, beauty and goodness.[25]
IV. An education for life
Modern education is often focused on technical mastery, ATARs or job-readiness, to the neglect of what ultimately fulfills the human person. In The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education, Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain recently made a case in philosophy of education for a rich curriculum of the seven liberal arts, along with other parts of philosophy, history, the visual and aural arts, debating, gym and theology, for the holistic education of mind, body, will and affections.[26] From a very different point of view, in The Evidence Liberal Arts Need, Richard Detweiler looked at the hard data on the lasting effects of such education upon success, leadership, altruism, learning and fulfillment over a lifetime.[27] In The Liberating Arts Jeffrey Bilbro and team argued that, far from being luxuries in a world where getting a job, building relationships, feeding the hungry, and reversing climate change must be the priorities, only the liberal arts will ground the empathy, passion and depth to address such concerns.[28] Far from allowing dead white males to keep colonising the world, they open people up to other perspectives and impel them to work for a better world. Paradoxically, a broad humanistic education makes people more employable not less, even in computing, accounting or engineering. And then there’s life beyond work—a life of family, friendship, knowledge, beauty, leisure and sport—for which the liberal arts set people up for life.
If the SCS Amadeus Programme offers every child the chance to learn a musical instrument, it’s because this will extend for some at least in ways that they’ll appreciate for the rest of their lives. There’s also plenty of evidence that music study makes students more successful across the board academically—even in STEM subjects.[29] It also allows for some market differentiation in the rivalry for enrolments; some parents, at least, will care that we are making the most of their child’s potential. In an increasingly competitive education ‘market’ and an age where tribalism no longer guarantees Catholic enrolments, distinguishing our schools becomes a matter of survival. What do we offer beyond a religious-moral-pastoral ethos that will draw parents to entrust their children to us and pay for the privilege?
V. An education for eternal life
A broad education will hopefully excite our students’ curiosity about many things, including the divine Logos behind them all. A Catholic liberal arts education will cultivate both their humanitas and their religious sense. Instead of science and religion being rivals for their loyalty, they will come to see the order and beauty in creation as intimating a divine Orderer and ultimate Beauty; the enormity, tininess, sublimity or sheer wonder of the natural world will raise questions not just about why things are as they are, but why there is anything at all, the Cause behind all the causes. Rather than being a vestige of old-world superstition, philosophy and theology will provide foundations for all their studies and draw their various dimensions together. Science and religion will be natural partners; religion and the arts also.
Too often we see maximising learning gains and transmitting faith as two distinct projects requiring a custom response to each. Of course, there are different subject matters, methods and teachers. But we cannot put all the weight of transmitting the faith on 1 to 3 hours per week of religious education, the odd school liturgy or retreat, and a few religious symbols and practices. Nor can we reasonably put all the responsibility upon the shoulders of Principal and R.E.C., R.E. teachers and a local priest. Especially when there’s little back up from home, no contact with the parish, and indifference or hostility to faith in the broader culture, we need to think outside the box about how we might use all the means available at school, not just the R.E. classes. Here, again, the liberal arts have much to offer, for much of what informs our religious understanding, character, memory and imagination comes from outside the R.E. curriculum—from history, visual art, sacred music, literature and philosophy. But if we are to make the most of these opportunities, we will have to be much more intentional about it. Unless we think bigger, we risk fewer genuine Catholics emerging from our schools and entrusting the next generation to us: again, that’s an existential challenge, not just an evangelisational one. And again, it speaks to our concern for whole-child education.
Which means all subjects and staff must be harnessed for religion, all given the p.d. they need to be willing and able to open up spiritual questions in their discipline. The whole school should be a centre of the new evangelisation, not just one corner or a few teachers. Not that our Science teachers (or primary teachers when doing science) would be teaching ‘Creation Science’, but they might delight in the spirals of a galaxy or a shell and wonder aloud what God was thinking. Not that our English teachers would make the Catechism or the Bible their study texts—though the latter is great literature—but rather that they’d choose novels, poems and plays that raise the big questions; they might ask, for example, whether Lear’s Gloucester is right to say, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: They kill us for their sport.” Not that our History teachers will be framing all history as a battle between good and evil, Catholics and the rest, but they will identify the power of individuals, institutions and ideas, including religious ones, to influence the course of history for the better.
Thus education becomes a project where mind, body and spirit are formed, where the riches of faith are explored, and where every dimension of human learning becomes a tile of a mosaic of great beauty and wonder. In Why Choose the Liberal Arts Mark Roche develops three overlapping arguments: the intrinsic value of learning for its own sake, including exploring the questions that give meaning to life; cultivating intellectual virtues necessary for success after school, including in our lifelong calling; and thirdly, the development of character and a sense of higher purpose and vocation.[30] In Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition Gene Fant, echoing St John Henry Newman, suggests a liberal education can form students as spiritually and intellectually empathetic people, passionate about serving God, Church and world.[31]
Such an education, to return to Charles Taylor, will help students break free from the ‘immanent frame’ that limits their world to the observable, controllable and buyable, and open up for them an enlarged world and more transcendent awareness.[32] Only such an open educational environment will make space for sacred memory, imagination and will, enable a compelling case to be made for Christian belief, prayer and life, direct the natural curiosity of the young towards God, and resist cultural pressures to make our schools indistinguishable from secular ones. While by no means the whole answer, the liberal arts can help make our schools places of sacred culture, of encounter with Christ in adoration, pilgrimage, catechesis and service—whetting the spiritual appetite, communicating the ineffable, and persuading the rationalistically resistant.
Conclusion
So I leave you with some questions: What would be the benefits and costs of a serious liberal arts turn in Catholic education? How might we cultivate a more expansive educational environment whereby all academic disciplines interconnect and serve the transmission of faith and development of the whole child? What are the implications for how we structure, lead and resource our schools; educate, select, develop and support our teachers; settle curriculum and pedagogies; and develop relationships with families and parishes?
Today I have explored one of several ways we could ‘value add’ to the Catholic school and better serve the Church’s mission of whole-child education, transmission of faith and morals, and support for all. There is much more to be said about this, and other ways we could go. But this one has great support in our Catholic tradition. Here I conclude with the account in the Acts of the Apostles of St Paul debating the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in the Areopagus.[33] St Luke reports that the Athenians loved hearing the latest ideas and talking endlessly about them. So they invited Paul to offer his countercultural views. He stood up and said something like this: “People of Athens! I see you are very religious, for wherever I look you have objects of worship and even an altar to the Unknown God. But I want to proclaim to you the God I know. Since He made the world and everything in it, you should know Him too, from your observation and reasoning about creation, from your philosophy, arts and sciences. Your own Cretan philosopher Epimenides rightly said that in Him ‘we live and move and have our being’. Your Cilician Stoic Aratus taught ‘We are God’s offspring’. Well, then, in all your teaching and learning, you should be coming closer to God and bringing others with you.”
[1] Kirk Dodd, “Bell Shakespeare’s new King Lear understands the joy of a good tragedy,” The Conversation, 21 June 2024; Travis Johnson, “King Lear,” TimeOut 27 June 2024.
[2] Description in the programme for the production.
[3] Sun Tzu, The Art of War https://suntzusaid.com/book/3/18.
[4] Anthony Fisher, Faith, Excellence and Access in Challenging Times, Keynote Address to Sydney Catholic Schools’ Pastors and Principals Day, Homebush, 15 September 2023. See also Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, 200 Years Young: Pastoral Letter on Catholic Education Today (2021); Anthony Fisher, Faith Formation and Religious Education in Schools, NCEC Commissioners, State and System Chairs and Directors Meeting, Canberra, 13 September 2023; Excellent and Equitable Catholic Schooling, National Catholic Education Commission Planning Day, North Head Sydney, 12 February 2019.
[5] Catholic Schools NSW, State of the System 2024, p. 159.
[6] Philippa Martyr, “It’s all in the numbers,” Catholic Weekly 12 January 2021; Pallavi Singhal, “Religion in decline in Australian schools,” Sydney Morning Herald 12 August 2018.
[7] Sydney Catholic Schools, Report on Survey of Religious Attitudes and Practices in Years 5, 7, 9 and 11 (2024).
[8] Anthony Fisher, The Corrosive Effects of Secularisation upon our Catholic DNA and the Implications for Catholic Education, Inaugural Kathleen Burrow Research Institute Lecture for Catholic Schools NSW, University of Notre Dame Sydney, 26 May 2021.
[9] See James Arthur ‘‘Secularisation, secularism and Catholic education: understanding the challenges’, International Studies in Catholic Education 1(2) (2009): 228-39.
[10] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard UP, 2007), Introduction. Beyond Taylor there is a whole literature on secularity and secularism: e.g. Hunter Baker, The End of Secularism (Crossway, 2009); Joseph Baker and Buster Smith, American Secularism: Cultural Contours of Nonreligious Belief Systems (NYUP, 2015); Michael Bird, Religious Freedom in a Secular Age (Zondervan, 2022); Joseph Blankholm, Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious (NYUP, 2022); Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (eds), Rethinking Secularism (OUP, 2011); David Campbell, Secular Surge (CUP, 2020); Andrew Copson, Secularism: Politics, Religion and Freedom (OUP, 2017); Terence Cuneo (ed), Religion in the Liberal Polity (Notre Dame UP, 2005); Michael Davis, After Christendom (Sophia Institute, 2024); Bill Donohue, Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis (Sophia Institute, 2024); Rod Dreher, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (Zondervan, 2024); Michael Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago UP, 2008); Collin Hansen, Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor (Gospel Coalition, 2017); Thomas Howard, Chance of Dance? A Critique of Modern Secularism (2nd ed., Ignatius, 2018); Margaret Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment (Princeton UP, 2019); Peter Kurti, The Tyranny of Tolerance: Threats to Religious Liberty in Australia (Connor Court, 2017); Pierre Manent and Ralph Hancock, Beyond Radical Secularism (St Augustine’s Press, 2016); David Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Ashgate, 2005); Rebecca McLaughlin, The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims (Gospel Coalition, 2021); Graeme Smith, A Short History of Secularism (Tauris, 2008); James Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Eerdmans, 2014); and Michael Warner and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (eds), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard UP, 2013).
[11] Mt 22:21; Augustine, City of God. Cf. D.G. Hart, A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State (Ivan Dee, 2006); Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books, 2021).
[12] In The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life (Prometheus Books, 2008) Austin Dacey, a self-confessed secularist, laments the marginalisation of religion in contemporary social discourse because of its crucial role in underpinning the secular liberal tradition as well as being its foil. Unbelievers like himself, he argues, benefit from encountering beliefs different from their own and are inspired by the Christian determination to secure a rationally informed and compassionate conscience.
[13] Taylor, A Secular Age, 325
[14] Singhal, “Religion in decline in Australian schools”.
[15] There is a large and diverse literature on the liberal arts idea: e.g. George Anders, You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Education (Back Bay Books, 2019); Susan Bauer, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Norton, 2015); Daniel Castelo, Holiness as a Liberal Art (Pickwick, 2012); Mary Crane et al. (eds), Curriculum by Design: Innovation and the Liberal Arts Core (Fordham UP, 2023); Jeffry Davis & Philip Ryken (eds), Liberal Arts for the Christian Life (Crossway, 2012); Jeffry Davis, Interdisciplinary Inclinations: Introductory Reflections for Students Integrating Liberal Arts and Christian Faith (Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, 2016); Wm. Theodore de Bary, The great Civilized Conversation: Education for a World Community (Columbia UP, 2013); Richard Detweiler, The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry, and Accomplishment (MIT Press, 2021); Robert Gannon and James Schall, The Poor Old Liberal Arts (2nd ed., Ignatius, 2018); Miriam Joseph and Marguerite McGlinn, The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric (Paul Dry Books, 2002); Miranda Lundy et al., Quadrivium: The Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number, geometry, Music, and Cosmology (Bloomsbury, 2010); Margarita Mooney, The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts (Cluny Media, 2021); Alexander Rosenthal-Pubul, The Theoretic Life—A Classical Ideal and its Modern Fate: Reflections on the Liberal Arts (Springer, 2018); Michael Roth, Beyond the University; Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale UP, 2015); Jeffrey Scheuer, Inside the Liberal Arts: Critical Thinking and Citizenship (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023); Laurie Thomas, Not Trivial: How Studying the Traditional Liberal Arts Can Set You Free (Freedom of Speech Publishing, 2013); Nigel Tubbs, Philosophy and Modern Liberal Arts Education: Freedom is to Learn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Christopher Ulloa-Chaves, Liberal Arts and Sciences: Thinking Critically, Creatively, and Ethically (Trafford, 2014); Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education (Norton, 2016).
[16] Cicero, De inventione 35; see “Trivium and Quadrivium,” Liberal Arts https://liberalarts.online/ trivium-and-quadrivium/; Bruce Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1995); The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Documentary History (University Press of America, 2010).
[17] See Katheryn Tempest, ‘Cicero’s Artes Liberales and the Liberal Arts’ in Ciceroniana On Line IV, 2 (2020) 479-500.
[18] David Wagner, The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages (Indiana UP, 1983); Kimball, The Liberal Arts Tradition.
[19] Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: The Institutionalizing of the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Harvard UP, 1987).
[20] Paul Grendler, Humanism, Universities, and Jesuit Education in Late Renaissance Italy (Brill, 2022); Ronald Modras, Ignatian Humanism (Loyola Press, 2010); John O’Malley, “How humanistic is the Jesuit tradition? From the 1599 Ratio Studiorum to now,” in M.R. Tripole (ed.), Jesuit Education 21 (Philadelphia: St Joseph’s UP, 2000); David Tuohy, “Learning to love the world as God loves it: Jesuit humanism in education,” Studies 104(414) (Summer 2015): 194-206.
[21] Robert Anderson, Mark Freeman & Lindsay Paterson (eds), The Edinburgh History of Education in Scotland (Edinburgh UP, 2015); Alexander Broadie and Craig Smith, The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (2nd edn, CUP, 2019); Steven Harris & T.F. Kennedy (eds), The Jesuits, vol. II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773 (Toronto UP, 2006); Paul Wood (ed.), The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation (Rochester UP, 2000); Thomas Woods, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Regnery, 2012).
[22] Roger Geiger (ed.), The American College in the Nineteenth Century (Vanderbilt UP, 2000); Christopher Lucas, American Higher Education: A History (2nd edn, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); John Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (2nd edn, Johns Hopkins UP, 2011).
[23] See for example, St John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (1852 and 1858); “Newman and the Intellectual Tradition,” Portsmouth Review, 11 April 2013.
[24] There is a considerable literature on ‘the Great Books’ curriculum, starting with Mortimer Adler, The Great Ideas: A lexicon of Western Thought (Scribner, 1999) and How to Think about the Great Ideas—From the Great Books of Western Civilization (Open Court, 2000): see W. John Campbell, The Book of Great Books: A Guide to 100 World Classics (Barnes & Noble, 2000); David Denby, Great Books (Simon & Schuster, 2013); Paul Kisak (ed.), The Great Books of the Western World: The Great Conversation about Great Ideas (2 vols, CreateSpace, 2017); Peter King (ed.), The Western Canon of Classic Literature: The Great Books of the Western World (CreateSpace, 2016); Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates: How Great Books Changed My Life (Princeton UP, 2021); Anthony O’Hear, The Great Books: A Journey through 2,500 Years of the West’s Classic literature (Skyhorse, 2023); John Reynolds (ed.), The Great Books Reader (Baker, 2011).
[25] Anthony Cernera & Oliver Morgan (eds), Examining the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (Sacred Heart UP, vol. 1, 2000; vol 2, 2002); John Elias et al (eds), Educators in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (Sacred Heart UP, 2009); Jean Evert & Erwin Mode (eds), The Challenge of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition: Making a Difference in Contemporary Academic Settings (Lit Verlag, 2012); Asadair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); Robert Royal, A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century (Ignatius, 2015).
[26] Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education (3rd ed., Classical Academic, 2021).
[27] Richard Detweiler, The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry and Accomplishment (MIT Press, 2021).
[28] Jeffrey Bilbro, Jessica Wilson & David Henreckson (eds), The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education (Plough Publishing, 2023).
[29] E.g. S. Benz et al., “Music makes the world go around: The impact of musical training on non-musical cognitive functions—A review,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2016): 2023-30; M. Besson, J. Chobert & C. Marie, “Transfer of training between music and speech: common processing, attention, and memory,” Frontiers of Psychology 2 (2011): 94-xxx; A.S. Chan, Y.C. Ho & M.C. Cheung, “Music training improves verbal memory,” Nature 396 (1998), 128-31; E.Costa-Giomi, “Effects of three years of piano instruction on children’s academic achievement, school performance and self-esteem,” Psychology of Music, 32 (2004): 139–52; F. Degé & G. Schwarzer, “The influence of an extended music curriculum at school on academic self-concept in 9-to 11-year-old children,” Musicae Scientiae, 22 (2017): 305–21; F. Degé et al., “Music lessons and academic self-concept in 12-to 14-year-old children,” Musicae Scientiae, 18 (2014): 203–15; C. Dos Santos-Luiz at al., “Exploring the long-term associations between adolescents’ music training and academic achievement,” Musicae Scientiae, 20 (2016): 512–27; E. Dumont et al., “Music interventions and child development: A critical review and further directions,” Frontiers in Psychology, 8 (2017): xxx-xxx; M. Forgeard et al., “Practicing a musical instrument in childhood is associated with enhanced verbal ability and nonverbal reasoning,” PLoS ONE, 3(10) (2008): xxx-xxx; Martin Gunn, Scott Emerson and Peter Gouzouasis, “A population-level analysis of associations between school music participation and academic achievement,” Journal of Education Psychology 112(2) (2020): 308-28; Sasha Jones, “Can music class make students smarter in other subjects?” Education Week, 25 June 2019; E.A. Miendlarzewska & W.J. Trost, “How musical training affects cognitive development: rhythm, reward and other modulating variables,” Frontiers of Neuroscience 7 (2014):279-xxx; Bergman Nutley, F. Darki & T. Klingberg, “Music practice is associated with development of working memory during childhood and adolescence,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2014): 926-32.
[30] Mark Roche, Why Choose the Liberal Arts (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
[31] Gene Fant, The Liberal Arts: A Student’s Guide to Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition (Crossway, 2012).
[32] See Taylor, A Secular Age, 539-93; Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius, 2004), 50.
[33] Acts 17:16-34; cf. Rom 1:18-32.