This episode is brought to you by the Master of Arts and Catholic Education program at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology.

Dedicated to the renewal of Catholic education, this degree equipped school teachers and administrators to bring Christ to the center of every classroom

through a focus on sacred scripture, theology, Christian anthropology, and the Traditional Liberal Arts. Chris Hall is the founder of Always Learning Education, an author of Common Arts Education,

renewing the classical tradition of training the hands, head, and heart.

He joins us to talk about a different element of classical education, one perhaps overlooked in

previous discussions we've had here on the podcast. Welcome, Mr. Hall.

Thank you. It's good to be here, Mark. Thank you.

Great. Now, you believe that the academic foundations of classical education do not alone guarantee a full

formation, the trivium, quadrivium.

Something important is missing from those two sides.

What is that missing element?

In my research, I would say that that element is the

common arts. And the common arts are the skills that provide for our basic human needs

through the creation of artifacts and the provision of services. If you have an education

where most of it is of the head in a kind of abstract way, then oftentimes we can't do things

with our hands. And I think we're seeing an increase of report from everything from culinary

to medical schools that are telling us this as we're looking at our culture today.

Very good. In this, especially in this information economy and in the digital age, why do we need those common arts?

I think there's a couple of reasons why probably have the most fundamental one to me is that they provide an encounter with a givenness of creation, a certain order that's written into the cosmos.

And we can think about that with the sciences and with mathematics and with language, of course,

but there's a, you can't grow a tomato on your own terms, for example, right?

Growing food or raising animals or crafting in wood or metal or leather. You simply can't do that without a deep

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