Many Catholics have heard of the liberal arts movement, but most do not associate it with elementary or high-school-level education. 

Catholic universities that specialize in the traditional liberal arts, such as Thomas Aquinas College, Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts, and Wyoming Catholic College, have been popular in Catholic circles for a number of years. Many students come to these universities from conventional private or public education or home-schooling families. 

But a growing movement seeks to introduce students to the Church’s rich heritage of the traditional liberal arts before the university level, and programs like the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education and the Augustine Institute’s Master of Arts in Catholic Education are dedicated to preparing schools and teachers for the work of forming students in this tradition. The Register spoke with some of Catholic liberal education’s proponents to better understand how the faith informs this educational approach.

 

Out of the Catholic Tradition

Michael Van Hecke spent 20 years as the headmaster of St. Augustine Academy, a Catholic classical K-12 school in Southern California. He is president and co-founder of the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE), which “inspires and equips Catholic educators to renew today’s Catholic schools by drawing on the Church’s tradition of education, which frees teachers and students for the joyful pursuit of faith, wisdom, and virtue.” 

“If we believe that God actually exists, then everything else is subject to that,” he told the Register. “If it’s true that the Christian narrative exists, we cannot think otherwise than in order to know truth, which should be one of the principal aims of education. It’s ultimately the transference of culture. The intellectual formation is part of that, but there’s more to it than that. If God exists ... ultimately, an education should be ordered towards him.” 

Andrew Seeley, also ICLE co-founder, discerned the need for a liberal education movement that spanned the pre-college years when reading Pope John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae (the apostolic constitution on Catholic universities). 

Seeley is now the director of advanced formation for educators at the Augustine Institute and the president and founder of the Boethius Institute for the Advancement of Liberal Education, which offers a fellowship for formation in the traditional liberal arts. “[John Paul II] wanted Catholic universities to reform themselves not just as Catholic, but as universities,” said Seeley. “It’s crucial that a university has the capability of integrating all the knowledge that different specialty areas are learning under a complete view of God and man.” 

ICLE has worked toward that vision of integrated education since 1999, providing formative materials for teachers and administrative officials. The institute hosts an annual conference to inspire and deepen teachers’ understanding of Catholic liberal education. 

The institute’s website is also rich with resources for teachers, offering a map of member schools, a job board for teaching positions, case studies on the renewal of Catholic education, and a compilation of Vatican documents that help illuminate the Church’s rich educational tradition. 

 

Championing a Liberal Education 

Some schools within the institute’s network, like St. Augustine Academy in Ventura, California, St. Thomas Classical Academy in Des Moines, Iowa, and Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Classical School in Denver, embrace the term “classical” as a descriptor for their educational practice. 

The “classical education” movement, which has its roots in a 1947 essay by Dorothy Sayers titled “The Lost Tools of Learning,” has had many iterations through the years and is popular in a wide variety of religious and secular circles, particularly within Protestantism. Though the two approaches have certain things in common, proponents of the Catholic liberal education movement suggest that “classical” may not be the most accurate label for their educational philosophy. 

“This is actually a return rather than a reinvention,” said Andrew Beach, the south campus head of school at Our Lady of Lourdes. He often tells parents that, while the “classical education” movement may seem new, the approach is in fact “returning to the wisdom that is inherent in the Western tradition and in the Catholic Church itself.” 

He has seen firsthand how liberal education affects students.

“I would say one of the most beautiful things is the love of learning that we see in our students. The liberal approach to education gets the purpose and ends of education correct in that the learning really is for its own sake and ordered towards truth, beauty, and goodness rather than towards like utilitarian ends of assessment or information delivery,” Beach said. “I think what you see with the students is that they're not just learning the information to pass a test, but the content that's being taught is actually formative. So it's forming not just their mind, but their actual bodies and souls as well, and forming them as a person in virtue. And that's true across the disciplines.”

Beach added, “From everything from literature to math and science to history, the student is beginning to see themselves as taking part in a broader narrative and playing a part in the human story and human experience."

Instead of “classical education,” these educators embrace the term “Catholic liberal education,” which has its roots in the traditional seven liberal arts, rather than in the Greco-Roman historical period generally thought of as “classical.” This traditional form of study, comprising grammar, logic, rhetoric (the trivium) and arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy (the quadrivium) was handed on from Augustine to Boethius and beyond. The study of the liberal arts developed into the monastic schools and cathedral schools of the Middle Ages that eventually became liberal arts universities. 

“I didn’t even realize that Catholic tradition had so much to say about what it means to educate and what it means to be a human person,” said Madeline Joerger, a second-year student in the Augustine Institute’s Master of Arts in Catholic Education program who is planning to teach in the liberal education field. “In reading the fathers of the faith, particularly Aquinas and Augustine, all these thinkers that I’d kind of relegated to the realm of theology — they’re our master teachers. They taught for most of their lives.” 

Joerger, who studied theology as an undergraduate student, initially intended to double major in secondary education, but found her secondary-education classes to be disconnected from the “rich anthropology” that her theology classes presented in the heritage of the faith. Joerger eventually dropped the secondary education major, instead taking more philosophy and theology classes, and enrolled in the Augustine Institute’s master’s program after graduation. “This program is helping me synthesize what beforehand were two separate areas of my brain. I’m very grateful to receive that here.”

 

A Growing Movement 

Joerger is part of a growing cohort of students in the Augustine Institute’s new Catholic education master’s degree program. In partnership with the Augustine Institute, the ICLE offers a hybrid in-person and distance-learning credential program for educators intended to be a Catholic alternative to traditional teacher credentialing. 

Van Hecke and Seeley emphasized that this is only the beginning of a growing movement — reporting that Catholic liberal education is spreading from private and charter schools to diocesan schools, with the support of diocesan superintendents and bishops, as well as internationally at institutions such as Pascal Instituut in Leiden, Netherlands. 

“Liberal education refers to education which is for its own sake,” said Seeley. “The liberal arts develop the human person in the capacities that make him able to live the best kind of life.” 

For Joerger, this message is coming through in her study of Catholic liberal education. She was particularly struck by reading St. Thomas Aquinas’ On the Teacher. “He likens the teacher to a doctor ... he is an aid to nature, not a replacement of it. It’s up to the student to receive the truth and allow it to inform their lives. I found that deep belief in the dignity of the student and the ability of the student to do hard things so beautiful, and it awakened my sense of the dignity of the teacher as well. I get to aid human nature, aid this process of formation into Christian disciples, in a really privileged way.”