The Arts Are The Epicenter

 

All Liberty Common School students receive a proper, comprehensive k-12 education accelerated by an infusion of the arts.  Art education – performing arts and visual arts – is the nucleus of the school’s instructional strategy.  These disciplines are among the school’s “Mos Maiorum” subjects – Latin for “In the tradition of our ancestors.” 

 

The arts form a hub from which all cross-curricular connections radiate into every LCS classroom.  In fact, the school’s devotion to the arts, rightly understood as the Mos Maiorum of a cohesive and classic education, is a centuries-old and well-proven practice.

 

Embracing formal education as a methodic transfer of essential information from one generation to the next, an expected outcome is the moral formation of our descendants – the messengers we send into a distant time.  Liberty’s classic orientation and reliance upon the Core Knowledge Sequence seeks not to train future employees for narrow occupational specialties or to become proficient test takers.  

 

Though these things occur as a happy byproduct, the school’s more ambitious aim is to foster young women and men capable of venerating truth, pursuing goodness, appreciating beauty, and revering perfection.  These ends have guided Western civilization for centuries.  They remain central to Liberty Common School’s mission.

 

Accordingly, the LCS Board of Directors, in 2025, mandated ensemble core classes for 7th and 8th grade as well as expanded art electives.  In contrast, most American public schools treat the arts as extracurricular adornments — pleasant diversions after the “real” academic work is complete.  This is a sad commentary on modern schooling.

 

Liberty’s official School Policy rejects this misguided premise entirely.  Beauty is not ornamental to civilization.  It is foundational to it.  Music, drawing, painting, sculpture, drama, and the disciplined study of artistic excellence train the affections as surely as mathematics trains the intellect to reveal order, beauty, and perfection.

 

American students today languish in surroundings of noise, distraction, and disposable entertainment.  The fine arts command something increasingly rare in modern culture – attentiveness.  One cannot rush a musical ensemble.  There is no faking harmony in a choir.  There is no excellent studio work without patience, humility, and practice.  

 

The arts teach students to slow down, observe carefully, and pursue beauty with intentionality.  The school intends for expertly taught art instruction to accelerate broad academic growth and connect intellectual habits with peaceful contemplation, calmness of mastery, cultural literacy, and scholarly fortitude.  

 

The addition of ensemble core classes at the junior-high level (7th & 8th grades) reflects a classical conviction that music belongs near the center of an aggressive academic strategy.  Ensemble work uniquely teaches interdependence.  A student-musician learns quickly that personal talent alone is insufficient.  One must listen carefully to others, subordinate ego to the team, and exercise disciplined self-government.  These are crucial lessons of musicianship, sure.  They are also civic virtues and moral imperatives.

 

Aristotle noted how intensively music education shapes the soul.  The ancients understood harmony in music cultivates harmony in character.  Liberty’s instructors embrace these truths as sacrosanct.

 

Likewise, an expansion of art electives in grades 7-12 reflects growing student interest, remarkable faculty leadership, and the school’s commitment to artistic instruction within the classical tradition.  Liberty’s Art Department emphasizes a “dual-triadic” mission aimed at fostering both “Great Minds” and “Great Hearts” through art education.  Students are taught not merely technique, but the pursuit of beauty, truth, goodness, and perfection through disciplined artistic practice.

 

The results are evident.

 

Liberty students continue to outperform national averages in Advanced Placement Art and Design as well as AP Art History.  In 2025, Liberty Common High School students achieved an average AP Art & Design score of 3.67 against a national average of 3.28, while AP Art History students earned a remarkable 4.06 average compared to the national average of 3.11.  These numbers matter.  They demonstrate how serious classical-arts instruction produces serious academic outcomes.

 

The school’s arts-education reputation opens post-secondary doors for LCS alumni.  The curriculum itself indicates intellectual depth and cultural literacy.  Junior-high studio courses now incorporate studies inspired by German Expressionism, Matisse, Bauhaus design, and Joan Miró.  Students engage great artistic movements not as passive consumers but as thoughtful participants in a centuries-long cultural conversation.

 

This is what classical education, centered upon cultural refinement, has always sought to accomplish.

 

Liberty’s Board of Directors did not expand ensemble and arts offerings because such programs are fashionable.  Quite the opposite is true.  In an age increasingly dominated by screens, fragmentation, and artificiality, the Board recognized the growing importance of cultivating what is enduringly human.

 

When LCS students gather in ensemble, they learn cooperation, discipline, shared responsibility, and leadership.  When they create works of art, they learn fortitude, prudence, temperance, and justice.  When they encounter beauty, they recognize how human expression memorializes human nature carrying forward moral and transcendent meaning.

 

The arts are not peripheral to proper education.  In keeping with ancestral tradition, they are the epicenter.