You, O Lord, are my King and my God, and in your service I want to use whatever good I learned as a boy. I can speak and write, read and count, and I want these things to be used to serve you…((
Saint Augustine, The Confessions; The City of God; On Christian Doctrine, ed. Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goetz, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin, J. F. Shaw, and Marcus Dods, Second Edition., vol. 16, Great Books of the Western World (Chicago; Auckland; Geneva; London; Madrid; Manila; Paris; Rome; Seoul; Sydney; Tokyo; Toronto: Robert P. Gwinn; Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1990), 8.))
When I was growing up, teachers often talked about the three R’s of education: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. Perhaps this expression is familiar to you. It has been attributed to a number of sources but I’m unsure if anyone knows where it first originated in its creatively alliterated style.
What many modern educators probably don’t realize—if they still even use this expression—is that reading, writing and arithmetic are truncated Synecdoches for the classical seven liberal arts, represented within the trivium and quadrivium, and represents the whole—or nearly the whole—of what any educated person is thought to have needed to know.
Reading stands in for grammar. The concept of grammar is much broader than the mere grammar of one’s language, although it did include that. Grammar makes up the foundational building blocks for all other aspects of one’s education. And one can only adequately establish those building blocks by way of reading. By learning to read, students are able comprehend the basic facts about the various attributes and aspects of the cosmos, as well as their own place in it, through the stories mankind tells about his nature and experiences.
Writing stands in for logic and rhetoric. Writing teaches students how to put words together to communicate, how to develop arguments, and how to persuade their peers. As I often teach my students, the best explanation of what it means to write is “good writing is clear thinking made visible.” These two R’s encompass the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Without the mastery of reading and writing, one can not accomplish the logical tasks associated with the third R, arithmetic.
Arithmetic, of course, is Synecdoche for the quadrivium: mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and music. Arithmetic in this sense teaches students to assess harmonies, measure attributes, grasp cosmic reality, and bring the physical universe into its proper perspective.
On some occasion, I heard someone suggest a fourth R, Art. And I think this too is essential to a properly educated person because there is a sense in which art is a representation of life itself. Understood in this way, we move pedagogically from the basic liberal arts to the higher forms of the humanities. In the classical view and definition of art, we are blessed with “an intelligible aesthetic representation of the world and of humanity.” And in all its essential forms—painting, sculpture, poetry, literature, drama, music, and architecture—art provides us with a rich aesthetic vocabulary for expressing complex ideas and perennial human experiences that are meaningful, and in most cases, beautiful.