Our Mission

The mission of Arts of Liberty is to educate students, teachers, and lifelong learners in the purpose and power of the liberal arts and liberal education. To accomplish this mission, we offer a variety of online, interdisciplinary resources intended to form and to foster a knowledge and a love of the liberal arts and liberal education.

Our resources are for everyone—from the newcomer with a budding desire to learn but with little knowledge of the liberal arts and liberal education, to the seasoned scholar who already knows and loves this tradition of education and is seeking to deepen that knowledge and love.

Our Vision

Our vision is to equip all who seek the True, Good, and Beautiful with the arts that free us from vice and free us for virtue, that ennoble us as persons and enable us to lead others rightly, that begin in wonder and end in wisdom. By providing these resources, we desire to assist all lovers of wisdom by arming them with the arts of liberty.

Our Services

Our resources include lesson plans for entire courses on the classical liberal arts of logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as well as study guides for great books of literature, history, politics, philosophy, and theology. Our image galleries include commentaries on high-quality images of art as these embody the tradition of liberal education. Such images are ideal for helping orient the student by contextualizing the liberal arts and liberal education in time and place; they also bear witness to the way this tradition has had an enduring influence on Western culture. Our civilization timelines includes images and text that tell the story of education in the Western tradition and contextualize that story within the larger scope of world history. We have also recently begun to publish the “Examining Life” podcast. 

These resources will be of use to anyone who wishes to acquire a knowledge of the liberal arts and the great books for themselves or to teach the same to others. The entire web site is a collaborative effort, involving scholars and educators from around the world who are actively engaged in liberal education at the K-12, undergraduate, and graduate levels.

Our History

The Arts of Liberty Project began as an idea Dr. Jeffrey Lehman had as a graduate student at the University of Dallas. He saw the wealth of wisdom in the Western tradition, but he also saw the dire need to recover that wisdom for the modern world. While teaching at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California, Dr. Lehman founded the project. Together with colleagues at TAC and friends elsewhere, he advanced the project from an initial idea to a well-developed website. After leaving TAC to develop an undergraduate program in classical education at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, Dr. Lehman returned to the University of Dallas, where it all began. Today thousands of students, teachers, and lifelong learners from across the world have used our materials to study the liberal arts and liberal education.

Our Impact

The Arts of Liberty has produced 50 scholarly study guides on great books throughout the Western Tradition. We’ve also sponsored and published online 6 books and courses on the liberal arts and liberal education.

Kristen Clarkson teaches Classical Literature and American Literature at Cary Christian School. She earned an MA in Humanities with a Classical Education Concentration from the University of Dallas and a BA in English from North Carolina State University. Because her own classical education shaped her thoughts and affections, Kristen implements classical pedagogy and assessments in her classroom in order to train students in intellectual and moral virtues. She hopes to teach Homer and Flannery until she dies.