자유교과의 형성과 전개: 고중세적 맥락에서

Abstract

This essay is a result of the author’s attempt to look at the issues concerned with the liberal arts and the seven liberal arts in the context of the history of the Western education, particularly in the ancient and medieval context. The essay consists basically of two parts. In chapters two and three, the author discusses about some problems found in the approaches of looking at what the liberal arts are from the question of what the liberal education is, and the basis of such approaches as well as how such approaches have been conducted. Aristotle’s famous book, Politics, which is the major reference of the distinction between the liberal and the illiberal, the nature of the intellectual activities called ‘schole’, and the ideal of liberal education related with them are critically reviewed. Also, in these two chapters, the great debates on the ideals of the university education occurred in the 19th century England, what the debates can mean for the issue of liberal education, and the 20th century English analytical philosophers’ theory of liberal education are examined. The discussion in the chapters four and five is made in the somewhat opposite way of those in the previous chapters. Here the author discusses the term ‘liberal arts’ as the translation of the Latin term, ‘artes liberales’, and asks who began to use it, when and where. The disciplines called the liberal arts were transmitted from the ancient Greece to the 1st century BCE Roman scholars such as Cicero and Varro, taught in their public schools. They became weakened as Christianity proliferated. However, these pagan disciplines were accepted Christians as useful tools for studying Christianity from the time of the Saint Augustine on. At the beginning of the Medieval Ages the system of the ‘seven liberal arts’ was established and maintained its status as the standard Medieval curricular system for over 900 years.