The multifarious historiography concerning liberal education might induce skepticism about studying its history at all. Notwithstanding “the circular reasoning to which almost all historical thought is liable,”1 it is possible to make headway in this study by examining the historical usage of the terms “liberal education” and “liberal arts” and their direct antecedents, such as artes liberales. Whatever the universality or contingency of the “liberal arts,” there is a record of discussion and reflection explicitly employing this term, and that record can be followed and studied like that of any other cultural tradition and social practice. The usage of the term, in lieu of an a priori definition, thus serves as the empirical basis for the study. Furthermore, whether or not liberal education originated in ancient Greece, it is clear that the Greeks formulated certain issues and tensions that informed the subsequent understanding of liberal arts. From those Greek foundations, the Romans drew the arts and sciences that were gradually codified as the artes liberales. The selections in Section I are drawn from Greek and Roman writings conveying the nature of those tensions and debates that reverberated in discussion explicitly about liberal arts during the following centuries.
The background to these selections lies in the culture of the heroic warrior portrayed in the epic poems of Homer and still found among the Greek ruling class of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. In this traditional “Homeric” view, paideia2 meant the inculcation of areté (excellence, virtue) defined in terms of a code of military honor. In practice, this meant training a ruling, warrior elite, who exercised and perpetuated military, political, and religious leadership among themselves. These three kinds of leadership were closely related: the military to secure and maintain power, the political to exercise power through offices in the clan or the nascent city-state, and the religious to legitimate power by invoking divine authority through performing the rites of the patron diety of the clan or state cultus.
A twofold program of education gradually became conventional for youth preparing for such leadership, as Plato and Aristotle mention in selections #1 and #3 from the fourth century B.C. The two branches of the conventional program were “gymnastic” and “music.” The former apparently included the physical training needed for military leadership and for performing the sacred dance and rites in the state cultus. The latter referred generally to the “arts of Muses” but, above all, to the recitation of Homeric epic poetry which provided technical instruction in speech-making and inculcated the knightly mores and noble ethic of the warrior culture.
In the late sixth and early fifth centuries political and cultural transformations outmoded the purpose and rationale of that traditional Homeric education. On the one hand, Greek culture flowered in all dimensions: sculpture, architecture, philosophy, literature, mathematics, natural sciences. On the other hand, the democratic city-state began to displace rule by the noble, warrior families, as a class of free citizens emerged and constituted popular assemblies to make legislative and judicial decisions. These developments, particularly evident in Athens, stimulated debate about the nature of education that could best prepare those who had both the free time and the political freedom to exercise the new responsibilities of governing the city-state and advancing the cultural achievements. In Greek, the adjective eleutheros expressed this twofold sense of “freedom,” which was conveyed into Latin as liberalis. In its most general and literal sense, then, the meaning of liberal education introduced by the Greeks and transmitted to the Romans was the education particularly suited to the youth who is free. Specifying the precise nature of this kind of education stimulated a continuing debate, for, as Aristotle tells us below, there was no agreement even in the fourth century B.C. about a new curriculum to replace the inherited program of gymnastic and music. The disagreement over the nature of this kind of education came to focus upon logos, the term employed by the Greeks to denote the human faculty providing both the principle and the source of culture or civilization. Understanding logos was the key to explain the new developments in arts, learning, and politics. But the meaning of logos was profoundly ambiguous, as seen in the passage from Isocrates below. To some, it signified “reason,” including its various denotations of a rationale, a faculty of thinking, and an act of thinking; to others, it meant “speech” with all of its meanings: the pronouncing of words, the faculty of talking, and a formal act of communication.
Those in the latter camp included orators and rhetors, who emphasized the newly invented arts of grammar and rhetoric and the skills of composing, delivering, and analyzing a speech. These skills were paramount in a democratic city-state or a republic where persuasion determined the outcome of every question arising in the political and judicial assemblies. The former group were those who regarded rhetoric as an imprecise and practical craft, perhaps useful in politics and trade, but devoid of any fundamental knowledge grounded in the nature of human logos and its true purposes. This group, including Plato and Aristotle, searched for reliable, exact modes of inquiry and regarded mathematics and logic as the arts most securely founded in the nature of logos.
The debate between advocates of mathematics and logic, on one side, and grammar and rhetoric, on the other, passed to the Romans, who introduced the terms ratio and oratio. This terminology reflected both the connection and the tension between reason and speech that were expressed by Cicero in the excerpt below from his major treatise on education. The Romans, being engineers, lawyers, and administrators of an emerging empire, felt most sympathetic toward a theory of education emphasizing public expression, political and legal discourse, and general and ethical training in the literary tradition that described the noble virtues and orderly society of the past. The Roman artes liberales were therefore founded in the study of “grammar,” which included literature, as well as language, and was pursued throughout the course of education. Meanwhile, a modicum of attention was occasionally given to arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, which were regarded as bodies of facts, useful for speeches, but not as theoretical and axiomatic disciplines in the way that Plato and Aristotle had understood them. Music was sometimes studied as practical training for the ear and voice and as an aid to appreciating poetry, but not as one of the theoretical and axiomatic sciences. Logic, or dialectic, was offered as a means of providing the skeletal arguments for public speeches, while rhetoric became the crowning art, which taught the methods of constructing a persuasive discourse on any topic, be it political, religious, military, aesthetic, or legal. This Roman preference for rhetorical, public, practical, prescriptive, and literary education over the precision and clarity of logic and mathematics is exactly what Plato, Aristotle, and many of their students had found objectionable, centuries earlier, in the orators’ interpretation of the liberal arts.
Resonating with echoes of the Homeric background, this debate unfolds in the following selections and sets in opposition the ideals of reason and speech, along with their concomitant tensions in epistemology, psychology, ethics, and politics, as well as in educational models of teaching, curriculum, and institutional organization.