A learning community

The Arts of Liberty Studium is a learning community of the Boethius Institute’s Arts of Liberty project, welcoming students, teachers, and lifelong learners. It brings the Institute’s study guides and resources into a shared practice of reading, reasoning, and conversation. Through that work the Studium seeks to cultivate the understanding and judgment that liberal education puts to the service of a thoughtful and virtuous life.

In practice that is ordinary enough. You follow a reading course through a great book, marking what strikes you and saying why. You go to the board with Euclid and construct the figure yourself. You keep what you write, and prepare a question to put to readers who have read the same pages.

I. Education for freedom

Liberal education is education for freedom. Not the freedom to do as one likes, but the freedom to judge well: to weigh what an author actually said, and to hold a position because the evidence carries it. The arts that serve it are called liberal in the old sense of the word, meaning what liberates the mind and heart. Four things a reader does here are where that purpose becomes practice.

• Attend to what an author wrote, closely, before deciding what to make of it.
• Follow an argument, and say what in the text supports your reading of it.
• Put your understanding into your own words, and frame a question worth asking.
• Listen to a reader who saw something you missed, and be willing to think again.

These are habits, not assignments. A reader who has practised them on Plato has them to hand for a contract or an argument with a friend. What that comes to in a life is the reader’s own, and no application should promise otherwise.

II. Who it is for

The Arts of Liberty project has always meant its resources for everyone, from a newcomer with little acquaintance with the tradition to a scholar who has taught in it for years.

• Students building the habits of reading and reasoning the rest of their study rests on.
• Teachers and seminar leaders preparing to guide a conversation.
• Lifelong learners making serious reading part of an ordinary week.
• Readers working alone, and readers working in a circle or a cohort.

No acquaintance with classical education is assumed, and where a page uses a term of art it explains it. Nor is any of it easy. These are demanding works, which is why they are worth reading with guidance and in company.

III. How study works

A course is a sequence of readings, each an assignment with work attached.

1. Choose a course, and a pace if you want one. Nothing is due: name a day to start and the days you read, and the schedule lays the readings across them.
2. Read the assigned text, in your own edition or through a source the course points you to. The Studium guides the reading; it does not stand in for the book.
3. Confirm the reading, then do its work: answer its questions, mark what struck you and say why, and outline what you read.
4. Frame questions of your own, and gather your work into a preparation for seminar.
5. Keep notes in the Journal, and bring your preparation to a reading circle or a seminar.

A reading’s time counts the reading and its study together, and you may take it over as many sittings as it asks. What you have read stays read, and the preparation gathers what you have done whenever you open it.

Geometry works the same way, with a figure in place of a passage. You read the proposition, then construct it at the board yourself, naming at each step the definition, postulate, or common notion that permits it. When the guided lesson ends the board is yours, and you demonstrate the proposition unaided.

Reading with other people is what the preparation is for. A question you have written down is one you can put to someone, and a reader who took the same page differently sends you back to it with better eyes. Friendship over a shared book is much of what this kind of study is for.

IV. What you will find

The Studium has seven rooms, each with a door in the header above.

• My Examining Life. Your courses, your schedule, and the preparation that gathers your work.
• The Journal. The passages you copied out and what you wrote beside them, searchable and yours to export.
• The Library. Texts and study resources, the Institute’s timelines, the galleries, and the Tradition Atlas.
• The Seven Liberal Arts. A page for each art, with lectures and the demonstrations in the four arts of number.
• Seminar Hall. The discussions a leader convenes, and registration. The video opens through the leader’s own link.
• Community. Reading circles opened around a work, and a word between two readers.
• Teacher’s Studio. How the Institute leads a conversation, and the tools to build a course, for the leaders given them.

V. The tradition behind the Studium

Three things stand behind this site, worth keeping distinct.

The Boethius Institute is a fellowship of experienced teachers devoted to the renewal of liberal education, which it serves by teaching, mentoring, writing, and working with institutions that want the same. About the Institute ↗

Arts of Liberty is the Institute’s project for developing and sharing the resources themselves: the study guides, coursebooks, timelines and galleries this site teaches from. About the project ↗

The Studium is where they are taken up: a place to read with them, keep your own work, and find other readers doing the same.

An account here belongs to the Studium and to nothing else. The Institute’s fellowships and live programs are separate, and joining this community enrols you in none of them; Seminar Hall says what they are. The Seven Pillars certificate is the Institute’s own course, enrolled in and paid for on the Arts of Liberty site.

VI. Begin studying

Learning to be a Student and Plato’s Apology are open to every reader, as are Euclid’s foundations and his first proposition, Proposition I.1. No account is needed to begin, though an account saves your work and carries it between devices. Everything else opens to members. Membership comes by an invitation from the Institute.