Liberal Arts

   To the medieval scholastics, there were seven arts that formed the basis of, or the roads to, a liberal education. These seven liberal arts were the trivium (three roads) of grammar, rhetoric and logic; and the quadrivium (four roads) of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. The larger field of philosophy united them all.
   It's too bad that some of these words, like trivial and rhetoric, have become negative. In their original sense, the trivium meant three introductory roads to knowledge.
   Grammar dealt with how a sentence was constructed, rhetoric was the art of persuasion, and logic was how thoughts were organized for best effect.
   The other four roads, the quadrivium, all were rooted in the concept of number. Arithmetic dealt with number in itself, music was number in time, geometry was number in space, and astronomy (or cosmology) dealt with number in space and time together.

   Are the liberal arts still taught in American schools? Yes, but they are not called that, and are not taught well enough. "Trivial" has come to denote something unimportant.
   "Rhetoric" and its partner "rhetorical" have become associated with sleazy marketing of a concept that may not be true. "Grammar" has become arduous, and "logic" has become boring. Why? In too many classes, the teaching of grammar still uses Latin-based terms, even though they have little or no relevance, and for those concepts that do, there are English equivalents. As for logic, there are only a few terms and concepts, yet an entire (and expensive) book is devoted to them.

   Obfuscation is not education.