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The Course of Work
Seven liberal arts, taught in this order for roughly six hundred years. Three give the key to language; four give the key to the natural world. Take them in any order, at any pace.
The old schools held that whoever had mastered all seven no longer needed a teacher. That is still the point of this course, and it is why the Institute is organised around the arts rather than around a syllabus of our own invention. We did not design this. We inherited it.
Each art below lists what a member actually studies and, where one exists, the outside examination the work happens to prepare you for. Those examinations are optional. A member who wants portable proof can sit them. A member who simply wants to write a better sentence never has to hear about them again.
The Trivium: the key to language
Grammar
How meaning is assembled and taken apart. Reading closely, writing plainly, and understanding why a sentence does what it does. The first art, because every other art arrives in language.
- Optional exam
- CLEP® College Composition
- Status
- In production
Rhetoric
Argument before ornament, and audience before either. How to be understood by someone who does not already agree with you, in writing and aloud.
- Optional exam
- DSST® Principles of Public Speaking
- Status
- Planned
Logic
Reasoning, evidence, and the resemblance that misleads. How arguments actually fail, how to test a claim, and how to notice when you are being handled.
- Optional exam
- None. No outside examination maps to it.
- Status
- Opens first
Why we built the one art with no test attached first. It is the most useful of the seven and the most neglected, and no competitor offers it. Building it first is the clearest evidence we can give that this Institute teaches for the member rather than for an examination.
The Quadrivium: the key to nature
Arithmetic
Reasoning from what you know to what you do not: proportion, rate, probability, and the arithmetic of money. The part a calculator will not do for you.
- Optional exams
- CLEP® College Mathematics; DSST® Personal Finance
- Status
- Planned
Geometry
Measure, space, and proof. The hinge of the whole course, where the key to language hands over to the key to nature, and the place where you learn what it means for something to be shown rather than asserted.
- Optional exam
- CLEP® College Algebra
- Status
- Planned
Music
Proportion and harmony, and why the arts move us. The old schools placed it last on purpose, to soften what the other six had hardened.
- Optional exam
- CLEP® Humanities
- Status
- Planned
Astronomy
Observe the motions, measure the distances, comprehend the magnitudes, calculate the periods. Four verbs, in escalating order, which together are the whole of empirical method.
- Optional exams
- CLEP® Natural Sciences; DSST® Astronomy
- Status
- Planned
Secondary study
Members who did not finish school can work a parallel track covering the four subject areas of the GED® test: reasoning through language arts, mathematical reasoning, science, and social studies.
The test itself is administered by GED Testing Service through Pearson VUE, and in Kansas what follows from it is issued by the Kansas Board of Regents. It costs $39 a subject, $156 for all four. There is no attendance requirement of any kind. An adult registers, pays, and sits it. Nothing about your work here has to be reported to anyone.
Free preparation is available through Kansas Adult Education Centers, and we will say so plainly rather than pretend otherwise. What the Institute adds is a course of work you keep afterwards, a rank, and people who know your name.
Begin with Logic
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