Preface

Founded in 1978, Thomas More College is a relatively new institution. As a school of liberal arts, however, it participates in one of the oldest enterprises of Western civilization: the initiation of youth into responsible membership in . . .

Preface

Founded in 1978, Thomas More College is a relatively new institution. As a school of liberal arts, however, it participates in one of the oldest enterprises of Western civilization: the initiation of youth into responsible membership in the human community. That community includes not only the students' contemporaries, but their distant predecessors in history, as well as the generations who will live after them. Many of the relationships students must recognize, then, are invisible ones (to nature, the family, the political order, the dead, and the divine), which tend to be obscured in a secular society. The liberal arts college must take on the crucial task of learning to discern these relationships, especially when they no longer are clearly represented in the laws and rituals of society.

Mission

The education at Thomas More College is conceived as being not so much the acquisition of information or the aggregation of skills as a gradual transformation in which students of a wide range of abilities come to understand the major ideas and modes of thought of our civilization, to examine situations and make judgments, and to proceed to original thinking, which they are able to express clearly and felicitously – both in speaking and in writing. Education at Thomas More College is not a matter of classroom hours only but of community: daily conversations and activities are welded together with ideas and thought. Students as well as faculty members contribute to the teaching and learning process, which is dependent on the formation of harmonious friendship among all participants in the life of the institution.

Thomas More College is dedicated to providing a Catholic education to students of all faiths. It recognizes that reflection on the specific nature of liberal education has been entrusted to the Church in a special way and so assumes as its task the rediscovery and articulation of this tradition in our own time.