The education a prince would have received. For your child, or for you.
For a thousand years the West taught its own the seven liberal arts: first to speak and reason truly, then to read number, figure, harmony, and the heavens as an ordered creation. It was the education of those expected to govern — first themselves, then others. Almost nobody is given it now. This is that course of study, laid out honestly, with the hours counted.
What we are actually trying to make
Not a transcript, and not a test score. A formed person: someone whose language is exact, whose reasoning is sound, whose speech can move a room, and who sees number and music and the night sky as parts of one ordered whole rather than as unrelated school subjects.
Two people are welcome here on the same terms — a child following it from the beginning, and an adult who was never given this and intends to have it anyway. The reading list does not condescend to either.
Three and a half hours a day
Six days a week, forty weeks a year. The seventh day is for worship and rest; twelve weeks are left for feasts, seasons, and ordinary life. That comes to 840 hours a year, and the whole course of study to about nine years.
The syllabus: the books, the courses, the written work. This is what the app keeps track of.
The instrument practised past the point of practice. The telescope on a clear night. Scripture read because you want to. Long conversations. Wandering attention.
The measured hours are a floor, not a quota.
The thing this design exists to prevent is the child who finishes the hours and switches on a video game — treating formation as a tax paid to buy back the day. The structured hours are meant to plant appetites that spend themselves in the unstructured ones. A student who does the hours and then reads for two more out of curiosity is succeeding at this. A student who does them perfectly and shuts the book is not, whatever the app says.
The seven arts
Three arts of language, four of number. Each is built the same way: three levels of two hundred hours, then a five-hundred-hour capstone — eleven hundred hours to finish an art.
7
arts
7,700
hours in all
91
books
1,100
hours per art
The Trivium — the arts of language
Grammar
Latin, Greek, and English — the words themselves, handled exactly.
Logic
Terms, propositions, syllogism, and the fallacies that fool careful people.
Rhetoric
Speech that can persuade an assembly, and the conscience to use it well.
The Quadrivium — the arts of number
Arithmetic
Number itself, from counting to proportion and the theory of numbers.
Geometry
Euclid, proof, and the shapes the builders of cathedrals worked in.
Music
Harmony as a mathematical art — the monochord, the modes, the chant.
Astronomy
The sphere, the astrolabe, and the motion of the heavens.
There is no finish line
The number is large — seven arts, 7,700 hours — and the first question anyone sensible asks is what happens at the end of it.
The hours are where the scaffolding comes down
We stop at eleven hundred hours an art, and at seven arts, because that is the point where a person can teach themselves whatever they turn to next. These are called the liberal arts because they free. The number marks the end of the help, not the end of the learning.
What is made along the way is the point
The notebooks filled by hand, the essays, the fables written after Aesop, the proofs set out in Euclid's form, the disputations argued from both sides — none of that is evidence of progress toward something else. It is the thing itself. A student who finished the hours and had nothing to show for them but a completed counter would have missed it entirely.
So it is not only for children
A child follows it from the beginning at three and a half hours a day. An adult sets their own cadence — an hour on weekdays is a real pace, and the app computes in it rather than holding you to someone else's. And an adult who already knows the ground can take the unguided path, where every level and capstone is open from the first day. Nobody here is behind.
How a book is read here
Every book on the list — ninety-one of them — comes with the same four-part assignment. It is the old monastic way of reading, made into something a student can be handed.
1 Lectio — receive it accurately
Reconstruct the argument. Outline the structure. Parse the passage. Solve the propositions. You cannot rise from a text you have misread, so this comes first and is never skipped.
2 Commonplace — copy out the treasure
Two or three passages copied by hand into your own notebook, each filed under a heading and glossed in a sentence: why this, why here. The universal practice of the old schools.
3 Imitatio — make something like it
One short piece in the book's own genre: a fable after Aesop, a hymn stanza in Ambrose's metre, a proof in Euclid's form, a letter after Cicero.
4 Anagoge — lift it upward
One question, written by hand for that particular book, relating what was studied to God. Not "what did you learn." This is the movement that makes the work Catholic rather than merely classical.
For instance, after Euclid's first book:
Euclid demands you grant postulates he cannot prove. How is this like the act of faith — and, carefully, how is it not?
The shape holds at every level; the weight changes. Short structured answers at the start, essays by the third level, and at the capstone a formal disputation in the medieval manner — argued both ways, then decided.
The commonplace book is paper
Every assignment sends the student to a physical notebook, and there is no digital version of it. Two reasons, both deliberate.
The hand must not be lost
A student who types everything forgets how to write. Copying a passage by hand is slower than reading it, and the slowness is the instruction — it is the one part of the work where the body does the learning.
It has to outlive the software
After ten years and ninety-one books, the student owns a private treasury of the tradition in their own handwriting. That belongs on a shelf they can take down at forty — whether or not this app still runs, or exists at all.
Two kinds of progress, kept apart
Prayer, Mass, confession, the daily hours. The gauge for these cools if you stop, because that is what the practice is actually like. It cannot be banked, and it is not a score.
Every hour studied is kept and never decays. It answers a plain question: what have I actually put in? Study earns no spiritual credit, and prayer earns no academic credit. They are different things and the app says so.
Levels open on two conditions — the work marked finished, and the hours actually logged. Ticking a box is a judgement; the hours are the evidence.
This app is an aid, not the education
It keeps the hours, holds the syllabus, and asks the questions. It does not hold the formation. The test of the whole design is simple: a student who walked away from the software at fifteen should still have the education — the books read, the notebooks filled in their own hand, the habits kept.
That is the point of counting the hours honestly rather than making them feel good.
Begin
Whether you are teaching a child at home or repairing your own education, the course of study is the same, and it starts at the first level of the first art.