Caldecott on the Liberal Arts, again

Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of EducationI have recently finished reading Stratford Caldecott's, Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education. The first chapter on the Liberal Arts continues to be the most interesting for me, but the rest of the book brings together the importance of beauty's place in education. So much of the world whether music, mathematics, science, or architecture has beauty and order to it, as Caldecott has shown. It is an excellent book and a good argument for the place of religion in education.


After I finished the book, I thumbed through it for the places I had highlighted. This passage on page 28 still strikes a chord with me:

"The sheer amount of information available in every discipline is far too great to be mastered by one person in an entire lifetime. The purpose of an education is not merely to communicate information, let alone current scientific opinion, nor to train future workers and managers. It is to teach the ability to think, discriminate, speak, and write, and, along with this, the ability to perceive the inner, connecting principles, the intrinsic relations, the logoi, of creation, which the ancient Christian Pythagorean tradition (right through the medieval period) understood in terms of number and cosmic harmony."

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