Rooted in the practice of leisurely wonder, classical liberal arts education pursues the integrated flourishing and formation of students in six fundamental areas—the intellectual, moral, aesthetic, spiritual, physical, and practical. In pursuit of this integrated formation, classical education nurtures students on, respectively, the true, good, beautiful, holy, healthy, and useful. It typically pursues these by immersing students in a thick school culture and leading them through a curriculum that includes gymnastics, languages, the traditional liberal arts, natural science, humanities, fine arts, common arts, and the theoretical arts of philosophy and theology. 

This liberal arts tradition of classical education began in ancient Athens, was refined by Roman orators, and developed by North African Christians. These three Mediterranean traditions—Greek, Roman, and 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. Contemporary “classical liberal arts education” draws on each of these eras, but does not attempt to replicate any one of them. It represents one 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, 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 retain its Mediterranean heritage.

However, this tradition of education has been obscured by an ‘industrial’ or instrumentalist model 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, but with questions of what constitutes human flourishing, what inhibits it, and how education can foster it.

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 this tradition and how they and their students can practice it, preserve it, and pass it on to the next generation.