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A significant part of a classical education involves the attempt to fill students’ imaginations with images of beautiful things. Why should a school do this? Shouldn’t a school occupy itself with teaching truth? Plato points out the importance of instructing students in the Beautiful in the Republic:

“Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to discern the true nature of the beautiful and graceful; then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds , and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and the ear, like a health giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from its earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason.”

He points out particularly the importance of the role of music in education :

“…musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful.”

The Lyceum is countercultural in this regard because the school proposes objective Beauty as well as objective Truth to our students. In a culture where Beauty is determined by the “eye of the beholder,” is it any wonder that many think all truth is relative or even question its mere existence along with Pontius Pilate asking “Truth, what is Truth?”

In his Confessions, St. Augustine utters, “Too late have I loved thee, O beauty ever ancient and ever new, too late have I loved thee.” Catholics know that in God Truth and Beauty are one. By disposing a student’s soul toward a love of the beautiful, a school simultaneously disposes a student to a love of the Truth.