Vitruvius and the Education We Forgot

The ideal of a cultivated generalist resists the modern tendency to collapse instruction into utility, to treat learning as a path to employment rather than to understanding.

The Arch of Constantine and the Flavian Amphitheater

This summer, as I sat at my desk preparing to teach a high school course called Introduction to Classical Architecture, I found myself returning to a curious passage in an ancient book. The course is new, the students ambitious, and my hope is to offer more than a tour through Greek columns and Roman vaults. What I wanted was something closer to an initiation: not only into architecture as a discipline, but into the deeper logic of its form, the why beneath the how. So, I decided to begin the course with an introduction to De Architectura—Ten Books on Architecture—the only surviving architectural treatise from classical antiquity, written by the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius sometime around 20 BC.

The first chapter of the first book does not begin where you might expect. There is no discussion of temples or tools, no diagrams or elevations. Instead, Vitruvius begins with education. He writes that the architect must be “a man of letters, a skillful draftsman, a mathematician, familiar with historical studies, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, not ignorant of medicine, learned in the decisions of law, familiar with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.” These are the opening terms of engagement with the soul.

One of the notable features of reading Vitruvius today is how little his opening vision resembles the modern training of architects, and how closely it aligns with something else entirely: the curriculum of a classical liberal arts school. The same schools, that is, that have quietly multiplied in recent years, often outside the view of mainstream education, offering students a return to Latin, Euclid, and Aristotle. Their organizing conviction is simple, if unfashionable: that to educate a person is to form not only skill but judgment. The architect, in this view, is a person capable of coordinating multiple domains of thought toward the creation of something ordered, beautiful, and public. So too, we might say, is the student.

Vitruvius believed this interdisciplinary breadth was not ornamental but essential. Architecture, he argues, arises not from technique alone but from a wide synthesis of disciplines. “Practice and theory are its parents,” he writes. Practice allows the architect to become skilled; theory enables him to explain and justify his work. But that practice, unmoored from theory, degrades into habit. Theory, without practical judgment, risks becoming abstraction. The trained architect, therefore, must live in both worlds.

This ideal of a cultivated generalist, grounded in philosophy yet capable of drawing a lintel, is not easily achieved. It requires time, mentorship, and an unusual seriousness about the purpose of education itself. It also resists the modern tendency to collapse instruction into utility, to treat learning as a path to employment rather than to understanding. In Vitruvius’s world, the architect does not serve the economy; he serves the city, and through the city, the cosmos.

There is something bracing in this, especially for teachers. Today’s high schoolers grow up in a culture more obsessed than ever with career readiness and technological fluency, even as they drift further from the intellectual inheritance of the West. Vitruvius seems to understand, in ways few do now, that great architecture does not emerge from specialization but from synthesis. To design well, one must think well. And to think well, one must be educated in what classical educators call the “liberal arts”—those subjects that free the mind to perceive order, to delight in harmony, to pursue truth.

Vitruvius devotes long sections of De Architectura to proportions, materials, machines, and civic design. But all of it rests on his first chapter, where he lays the foundation not of a building, but of a mind. He even offers moral guidance, warning that an architect must be “neither arrogant nor self-assured,” but rather modest, receptive to instruction, and aware of his public duty. Beauty in architecture is not merely aesthetic; it is moral and rational. It reflects the harmony of nature and thus demands from its creator not only technical proficiency but moral character.

This is the kind of insight that seems increasingly rare in contemporary discourse, and perhaps more necessary than ever. As cities swell and buildings rise, as digital tools make design faster and construction cheaper, we rarely stop to ask what Vitruvius would have us consider first: To what end? For what kind of life are we building? And who, exactly, are we shaping when we teach someone to build?

Classical schools, with their Socratic classrooms and their reading lists pulled from ancient libraries, are not likely to appear in architectural journals. But in their quiet halls, something like Vitruvius’s old ideal still lingers. There, grammar and logic are not barriers to creativity but its precondition. There, students encounter geometry as a window onto the eternal. There, education begins—as Vitruvius thought it should—with human formation.

It is strange, in a way, that the opening of a Roman manual on architecture should speak so clearly to the aims of a modern school. But perhaps it is not so strange after all. Foundations are meant to endure. And Vitruvius, in his first chapter, reminds us of the one thing every good builder and every good teacher must ultimately share: the knowledge of what must come first.

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human, Ugly As Sin and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.