Rooted in the practice of leisurely wonder, classical liberal arts education pursues the integrated flourishing and formation of students in seven fundamental areas:

• intellectual (the True),
• moral (the Good),
• aesthetic (the Beautiful),
• spiritual (the Holy),
• physical (the Healthy),
• practical (the Beneficial), 
• social (the Neighborly).

In pursuit of this holistic integrated formation, classical education immerses students in a thick school culture that emerges from a faculty of friends at its heart and leads them with pedagogical prudence and skill through a curriculum that includes gymnastics, languages, the traditional liberal arts of word (trivium) and number (quadrivium), the natural sciences, humanities, fine and performing arts, common arts, and the theoretical disciplines of philosophy and theology. 

This liberal arts tradition of classical education began in ancient Athens, was refined by Roman orators, and developed by Christians in North Africa and Asia Minor like Clement of Alexandria, Basil of Caesarea, and St. Augustine.  These three Mediterranean traditions—Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian—bequeathed classical education to monastic educators, medieval professors, Renaissance scholars, European Reformers, early modern thinkers, and 19th–20th century classicists and teachers, leading to the current 21st century renewal as the leading edge of this long and rich tradition. Contemporary “classical liberal arts education” draws on each of these eras, but does not attempt to replicate any one of them. It represents but the latest moment in a long and developing tradition that has consistently incorporated new insights, authors, and practices. Because contemporary classical schools can be found in the United States, Canada, China, Brazil, England, Australia, Colombia, Wales, and across the African continent, with schools that are confessionally Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and non-religious, it is clear that the tradition will continue both to develop and conserve its Mediterranean heritages.

However, this tradition of education has been obscured by an ‘industrial’ or instrumentalist models of education that primarily views learning as a means for acquiring marketable skills for gainful employment because it views human persons as producers and consumers. Dissatisfaction with the implicit conception of human nature present in the industrial model has fostered a renewal of classic liberal arts education, which begins not with questions of how to produce the most skilled workers, or the right kind of citizens, or disciplinary specialists, but with questions of what constitutes human flourishing, what inhibits it, and how education can foster it. As one classical Christian educator explains: “Although the end be last in the order of execution, yet it is first in the order of the agent's intention.” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I II Q. 1)

We believe that the first duty of teachers is to be the kinds of persons they hope their students become. Therefore, the MAT program aims to help teachers understand the classical liberal arts tradition and develop the pedagogical prudence and practical skills necessary to practice it, preserve it, and pass it on to the next generation.