Beauty inwards the Word - review

The next review together with summary appeared inward the magazine First Things inward Dec 2012, by Stephen Richard Turley, who teaches at Tall Oaks Classical School in New Castle, Delaware, together with at Eastern University.

Beauty inward the Word, Stratford Caldecott’s sequel to his Beauty for Truth’s Sake, surveys non the historical outworking of the liberal arts tradition but rather the inspiration that lies behind it. Specifically, the author—the managing director of Thomas More College’s
Center for Faith together with Culture inward Oxford together with editor of the magazine Second Spring—raises the notion of an educational “Trivium” composed of grammar, dialectic, together with rhetoric. This Trinitarian construction requires that nosotros remember that nosotros come upwards from the Father, that nosotros think inward accordance amongst the Son the Logos, together with that nosotros communicate inward the communion of the Holy Spirit. 

In the classroom, this system would effect inward a via media betwixt the ii teaching approaches that accept tended to dominate educational theory over the terminal century, what Caldecott price “romantic” together with “classical” tendencies; educational projects that are either child-centered or teacher-centered. Both approaches err yesteryear failing to conceive of the kid every bit a “person,” he says. 

Personhood, inward contrast to individualism, “means the human beingness determined inward his identity. . . yesteryear relationships both chosen together with unchosen.” Thus, he sees the fundamental dynamic of teaching every bit involving a reciprocal human relationship betwixt the pupil together with instructor that manifests a third, namely, the Truth that is implicit inward the human relationship itself.

Caldecott suggests a curriculum grounded inward the philosophy behind the Trivium but non express to its 3 elements. The fine arts, for example, could associate grammer amongst music together with dance, dialectic amongst the visual arts, together with rhetoric amongst drama. He likewise pays psyche to the usage of the identify unit of measurement inward education, especially inward relation to the formation of the child’s moral imagination. The ultimate destination is an “education of the heart,” which “represents non simply a preparation of the emotions, but an integration of feelings together with thoughts into a higher unity.”

This mass provides a rationale for a liberal arts teaching that taps deep, fifty-fifty forgotten, arguments amongst a richness that well-intentioned slogans close the importance of cultural literacy cannot convey. Although Caldecott’s arguments sometimes meander, together with each chapter would accept been strengthened if he included an introduction of or thus sort, this is yet a mass that stands apart inward its genre.

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