As one of 38 schools in the Archdiocese of Denver, St. Anthony’s is committed to the teachings of Christ and the traditions the Church has upheld throughout history. Since Vatican II, the Church has encouraged schools to renew their energy in seeking the Truth through Scripture and Tradition. St. Anthony’s is dedicated to this charge of Catholic Intellectual Tradition through a Catholic classical education.

A Catholic classical education, or a Catholic liberal arts education, seeks to educate the whole person: heart, mind, body, and soul. It is an education ordered to a life that is worth living for its own sake. It is virtue education: it teaches intellectual, moral, physical, and emotional virtue.

To be wise tomorrow, students must learn the wisdom of yesterday. They must study not only the wisdom of the Church, but also the wisdom of those who discovered the beauty of virtue without the help of divine Revelation. The wisdom of the ancients is preserved in the many Great Books that have shaped our Catholic Intellectual Tradition. These Great Books are the foundation of any classical, liberal arts curriculum.

Traditionally, The Non-liberal Arts are those productive or “useful" arts that are practiced for the sake of something else, such as medicine, farming, painting, architecture, etc. The Liberal Arts are those arts which are learned for their own sake. They teach skills which one possesses within the soul, such as the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry, etc.). These skills are learned for the sake of acquiring Truth, which is an end in itself.

A person must learn both the Non-liberal Arts and the Liberal Arts in order to be a well-rounded individual. One learns the Non-liberal Arts through training in a specific field of study in order to satisfy a person’s innate desire to “work".

The Liberal Arts teach one how to “be"-how to be human as God intended. Since a person is a unity of heart, mind, body, and soul, his classical education is also unified. The classical approach, therefore, (as is feasible) ties all learned subjects together, so the student learns in unison-not in separate, disjointed subjects. The integration of the Trivium and the Quadrivium is essential to the success of the classical approach to education. Students learn to order and synthesize the information they receive in their history, science, math, geography, and religion classes in a logical way.

Students are taught the Trivium at different stages according to their intellectual development. First, students learn Grammar. Grammar, in elementary school, is learning what a student can of the base of something, i.e., the grammar of theology, the grammar of music, the grammar of science, etc. This is a time in the child’s development in which he wants to know that something is more than why it is that way.

Next, the middle school years focus on Logic which shows students how to make order with God-the mind argues with things to understand them. Beginning around fifth grade, but especially in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, the student asks the question, “Why?" The middle school student is prepared by the foundation of the Grammar stage for understanding how the mind works and for practicing the art of thinking clearly and rationally.

The next stage begins to flourish around the end of the eighth-grade year and continues into high school; it is the Rhetoric stage. The practice of Rhetoric fine-tunes or polishes the clear-thinking learned in the Logic stage into a work of written and verbal eloquence. Rhetoric is the culmination of the Trivium. Within each of these stages the other subjects are integrated, so that the student comes to understand the many different subjects through the unity of the Trivium.

Thus, in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the goal of classical education is the student himself. That is, the goal is to form a child’s heart, mind, body, and soul, so he may live a life with the wisdom that prepares him for heaven. The over-arching purpose of the classical approach to education is to fill the child with a deep and pure sense of wonder -to discover for himself the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, so the child is able to see himself as created in the image and likeness of God.

In a homily on the First Letter of John, St. Augustine said this about man’s existence: “Man was created for greatness-for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched." This, then, is the purpose of Catholic classical education: to stretch students to discover the greatness which God has planned for them.