The Seven Liberal Arts
For over a thousand years, the traditional western educational system was fit within the rubric of the seven liberal arts--liberal, because they liberate man from the slavery of his animal nature and elevate his soul through the study of books (Latin, libris). The first three disciplines: grammar, logic, and rhetoric form the trivium, and were the foundations of all intelligent discourse and how one came to know God. They are now the foundations of the humanities curriculum. Astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and music formed the quadrivium, and were the core mathematical arts.
Below is a series of woodcuts (c. 1500) from an English treatise on education. Notice their allegorical/symbolic nature--these were how people made sense of all experience for centuries.
The Seven Liberal Artes
Click on the icon to get Adobe Reader 8 
.