What Is a Liberal Arts Education?
The Liberal Arts are those arts that teach us how to learn.
A Liberal Arts education is an education liberate students from ignorance, prejudice, narrowness, and dependence upon others for their understanding. The Liberal Arts are those arts that teach us how to learn. A liberally educated person can read difficult works, ask meaningful questions, weigh evidence, recognize distinctions, communicate clearly, and pursue new knowledge with increasing independence. The Liberal Arts do more than give students information; they cultivate the intellectual habits and skills by which students can pursue knowledge for themselves.
The Liberal Arts are situated within a richer education that cultivates wonder and the moral imagination, The goal is not simply that students become clever, employable, or academically accomplished, but that they become wise and virtuous men and women who embrace what is true, pursue what is good, delight in what is beautiful. The Liberal Arts must ultimately be directed toward rightly ordered loves, the love and worship of the Triune God, and service to one’s neighbor.
This is why a Liberal Arts education serves the larger mission of Smith Prep.
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We are not merely preparing students for the next test, the next grade, college, or a particular career. We are preparing them to live well. We want to cultivate students who can learn independently, think carefully, speak eloquently, serve faithfully, lead wisely, and participate thoughtfully in the Church, their families, their vocations, and the broader culture. Such an education is genuinely liberating because it equips students not simply to make a living, but to live lives of wisdom, virtue, and joyful worship before God.