A new book by Stratford Caldecott has been released, entitled Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education, with a foreword by Anthony Esolen. [Purchase: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk]

About the book:

BEAUTY IN THE WORD, published by Angelico Press, offers a new Catholic philosophy of education, completing the retrieval of the seven liberal arts begun in Beauty for Truth’s Sake by examining the language arts, the “Trivium”, which Dorothy L. Sayers made the basis of Classical Education in her famous essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning”. But this book tries to go further than Sayers.

New opportunities for school reform and the creation of new schools encourage radical thinking about education. We need a philosophy that can guide us as we found these new schools, or enrich and improve existing schools, or attempt to design a curriculum for teaching our children at home. The curriculum has become fragmented and incoherent because we have lost any sense of how all knowledge fits together. What kind of education would enable a child to progress in the rational understanding of the world without losing a sense of the whole, or a sense of the sacred? We must make an effort to overcome in ourselves false ideas inculcated by the education that we ourselves received, before we can understand the elements that would make a better education possible for our children.

Advance Praise:

James V. Schall SJ: “Everyone recognizes the centrality of education, of introducing what is known to the one capable of knowing. What is often lacking is some sense of the whole, of some orderly way to think about the whole. It is not that we do not have a tradition that looks after the basic things and their order. It is that we have replaced what we need to know with a methodology that is based on a narrow concept of what constitutes knowing. In this insightful book, Stratford Caldecott has presented a way to understand education in a sense that includes philosophy, theology, the arts, literature, the studies of beauty and truth and what is good. It is a rare book that understands the unity of knowledge and what we want to know. This is one of those rare books.”

Aidan Nichols OP: “Beauty in the Word is the fruit of a lifetime’s thinking about the relation between faith and life by a cultural entrepreneur who is also a parent and knows what, educationally, can actually work. Most Catholic education has been confined not only externally, by State regulation, but also internally, owing to an inadequate philosophy of the human being in the full (and I mean full!) range of his or her capacities and needs. Now that successive governments in the UK have freed up the institutional constraints, those responsible for new initiatives in Catholic schooling have a chance to recreate the inner spirit of education and not just its outer frame. They will not easily find a programme more inspirational than the one presented here.”

More information can be found here on the Beauty in Education blog.