Portia’s Powerful Tongue: The Ethics of Lady Rhetoric in The Merchant of Venice

Posted Patrick FriddlePosted in Liberal Arts, Liberal Education

What Shakespeare finally understands is that in the ethical moment of disposing means to end, the rhetor is only imperfectly in command of a fallen world, and if this limitation can lead a woman of Portia’s moral and intellectual virtue to error in her sacrificing a tragic usurer to secure comic marriages, we ought not be overly confident in either the virtue of our own rhetoric or the exactitude of our own generic terms.

Arts of Liberty: An Introduction

Posted emily2Posted in Liberal Arts

The mission of Arts of Liberty is to educate students, teachers, and lifelong learners in the purpose and power of the liberal arts and liberal education. To accomplish this mission, we offer a variety of online, interdisciplinary resources intended to form and to foster a knowledge and a love of the liberal arts and liberal education.

“The sparks that kindled the fire in me:” Reading, Love and Conversion in Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Commedia

Posted Joe BoylePosted in Liberal Arts

Augustine’s narrative forms a master pattern for the Commedia, mapping the progression in Dante pilgrim from education through a flawed text, which limited and even malformed him as a reader, author, and lover, to reformation through the transformative and holy words of Beatrice. Within this perspective, the Commedia itself becomes a testament to the power of divine, “reformative” speech to convert the soul, reform its loves, and make it an agent of further transformation.

A Reading of Augustine’s “Confessions” and Its Implications for Education

Posted Patrick FriddlePosted in Liberal Education

In effect, we encounter two Augustines. First, there is the Augustine narrated, the boy and young man whose actions and thoughts and feelings are brought forth out of memory. Second, there is Augustine who is the mature, teaching bishop writing his confessiones and situating the biographical parts within the larger “speech act” of the whole of his work. It is the overarching intent of the text as a whole that carries implications for understanding the meaning and practice of education.

Cicero on Education: The Humanizing Arts

Posted Patrick FriddlePosted in Liberal Education

Quite independent of political theory, his  thoughts on education, whether reflected in or drawn from his own educational  experience, appear to be worth gathering and exploring in the light of our own need for  models or for the elements that would allow us to construct principles and directions  for models appropriate for our time. Cicero is, in many respects, a model as well as a  conveyor of models.

Six Essential Dialogical Virtues

Posted emily2Posted in Liberal Education

Why engage in Socratic conversation? Certainly, one seeks through Socratic conversation to encounter truth, goodness, and beauty. Beyond this encounter, however, effective Socratic conversation also brings about changes in the souls of those who practice it. Among its other advantages, engaging in Socratic conversation is an excellent way to encourage the cultivation of what may be called “dialogical virtues.”[1]

Liberal Education: A Working Definition

Posted emily2Posted in Liberal Education

Put in simplest terms, classical education is an education for freedom. That is why for most of the Western tradition from its origins to the present day, the majority of authors have used the term liberal education to denote what is often called classical education in our time. In this brief article, when I use the term liberal education I do not intend to make a distinction between it and classical education. Instead, I employ the term in order to bring to light the essential nature of what commonly goes by the name classical education among K-12 educators in the United States today.

Today’s Trivium: The Comeback of Classical Education

Posted emily2Posted in Liberal Arts, Liberal Education

It is a little known secret—though it should be no secret at all—that classical education has been making a comeback of late.  In some circles, classical education needed no revival, for its life was never really in danger; for instance, at the undergraduate level, schools like St. John’s College, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Dallas have quietly continued, to greater or lesser degrees, to carry the torch of classical learning.  The revival I speak of began in the 1980s, and it has been taking place chiefly at the primary and secondary levels.