Westminster Academy’s approach to its curriculum is inspired by an understanding of the Classical Liberal Arts and 1,500 years of proven success in producing some of the greatest thinkers and doers in history. Our education is based on the following historic context.
In the medieval understanding of education, there were Seven (Classical) Liberal Arts. The same concepts present in the medieval model apply to our Classical Christian approach to education. Those seven arts are precisely what the name indicates…arts. These seven “arts,” which were used in Western Civilization for 1500 years from the Ancients on, have two broad categories: (1) the Verbal Arts (the Trivium, or “three ways”) and (2) the Mathematical Arts (the Quadrivium, or “four ways”). In this way, Classical education differentiates between the “art” (the skill) of a study and the “science” (or formal study) of a subject.
In Classical education, the focus of the Trivium is first and foremost the development of the art of language through literature and grammar (see Early Training and the Dorothy Sayers essay). With the focus on language development, the child(ren) would use a wide scope of great literature in various fields to achieve this, including fables, great literature, the Bible, the stories of history, and other works and subjects. The goal in these formative years is the development of those skills that aid in formulating and expressing meaningful thought. These skills are Grammar (linking concepts to symbols), Dialectic (reasoning correctly - see Why Logic?) and Rhetoric (communicating truth appropriately and persuasively - see Why Rhetoric?). After training in these skills, the student is applying the arts to all subjects, such as science, math and history in the pursuit of true understanding and purposeful knowledge. With these “tools of learning," a student is trained to pursue wisdom and virtue, meaning and purpose, in all subjects with the ability to communicate these ideas to the community at large.