ABSTRACT
Our traditions of secondary education have their origin in the artes liberales of the Middle Ages. These were the seven liberal arts of the trivium (grammar, logic or dialectic, and rhetoric) and of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). Their study involved practice in the arts of communication: Latin, the common language of educated people in Europe, and mathematics, the universal language of numbers. The young students began their schooling with grammar, the lowliest of the seven arts, added the other two “trivial” branches, and finished their arts course with the quadrivium. Wherever schoolmasters and scholars were ambitious, they added a smattering of mental, natural, and moral philosophy.1
