For most of my career I have grappled,publicly and privately, with the issues of liberal education—and written close to a dozen papers/presentations on the subject—while serving two institutions that celebrate in their mission statements a commitment to the core values of the liberal arts.  Having said that, I wouldn’t pass myself off as an expert. Far brighter and wiser minds than mine—in Gordon Kingsley’s wonderful phrase, “persons the velcro of whose Nikes I am not worthy to unwhoosh”—have written about and practiced the liberal arts for more than two millennia.  Indeed, whatever value my own reflections may have will come from standing on their shoulders. Meanwhile, I trust those who know more about my subject than I do will be patient and generous.

So, in a series of posts over the next several weeks, I want to frame the issue of liberal education, as I understand it, in both a contemporary and a historical framework, including an honest confrontation with the debates about its meaning and value; then I want to try to draw a synthesis from these antithetical points of view and, finally, suggest some personal and programmatic applications of this view of liberal arts education.

I.  STATING THE ISSUE

A student editor some years ago, critiquing the draft of a catalogue for a new college, three times deleted the words “liberal education” from the draft. Coming upon it again, she circled the words and wrote in the margin: “What in the world is it?”  It’s a fair question without an easy answer.

Let’s acknowledge three realities up front. 

•   First, every survey I have seen in recent years makes it clear that one of the primary goals of a college education for most students and their parents is to help secure a satisfying and well-paying job.  Career orientation in education—secondary and post-secondary, public and private–has been a growing reality on the American scene at least since the 1960s.
•  Second, it is equally clear from recent national surveys of public attitudes toward liberal arts education that the public has a negative view of such education, seeing it as “impractical.”  Job prospects for liberal arts majors are often described as dim in comparison to those with professional or technical degrees.  No wonder Robert Gates Garber in his book, Valuing Useless Knowledge, says that the “liberal arts may be defined as essentially those areas of knowledge in which practical-minded parents hope their children will not major.” 
• Third, over against these public attitudes, we must set some recent surveys that make it equally clear that a majority of corporate CEOs and Human Resource Managers do not share these negative views and argue, rather, that “liberal learning” develops important career skills in such areas as problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, and a host of other characteristics that deserve to be valued in the world of work. 

That states the issue as plainly as I know how to put it. 

This rather unsettling ambivalence might move us to ask ourselves how we ever arrived at such a definitional and attitudinal impasse with regard to the most honored educational tradition in the western world.  It is not a new problem and the answer is, in part, historical.

The earliest tradition, and the one most often associated with a “purist” view of the liberal arts, is the so-called “philosophical tradition” which begins with Socrates and Plato and, from them, stretches to Boethius, the medieval scholastics of Paris, the thinkers of the Enlightenment and, in some quarters, to the great research universities of today. 

It affirms learning for its own sake; cries out that knowledge is its own end and reward, requiring no practical application for its justification. 

Plato and Socrates were critical of the Sophists and of the students who flocked to these teachers because they sought knowledge as power in politics and commerce. The great advocate of this “purist” point of view in the 19^thcentury was John Henry Newman in his classic volume, The Idea of a University, where he contrasts a liberal education with a commercial or professional education: 

“. . . that alone is liberal knowledge, which stands on its own pretensions, which is independent of sequel, expects no complement, refuses to be informed by any end, or absorbed into any art. . .”(Newman in B&G, 66-67).

The contrasting view is associated with Cicero, the Roman Stoic thinker and statesman, who lived some three centuries after Plato and in whose writings we find the earliest recorded use of the term“artes liberales”—liberal arts.  Cicero affirms that the value of education is in its social and political utility, for public expression and persuasion, and for training in citizenship. 

Modern proponents of this view might include John Dewey, born about the same time Newman published his classic book.  In 1938 Dewey wrote: “[knowledge] is not an end itself, but a means by which social relations, distinctively human ties and bonds, may be understood and more intelligently ordered” (Experience and Education, p. 103l. Emphasis mine.). 

And in 1916, Bertrand Russell wrote: “Education should not aim at a passive awareness of dead facts, but at an activity directed towards the world that our efforts are to create” (Principles of Social Reconstruction, p.167. Emphasis mine).

Clearly, this conflict is not new.  Aristotle was willing to confess that even in his day there was no settled opinion about the aims of education.  The relevant passage from the Politics is instructive and sounds almost modern:

“At present all peoples do not agree as to the things that the young ought to learn, either with a view to virtue or with a view to the best life. . . . and it is not at all clear whether the pupils should practice pursuits that are practically useful, or morally edifying, or higher accomplishments—for all these views have won the support of some judges. . . . ” (Politics, 1337a41f, in Smith, 108.  Emphasis mine.).

The traditional curriculum in medieval institutions—the so-called trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic) and quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy), reflected this continuing disagreement in a fragile compromise; later philosophy and theology were added, eventually science as it emerged in the 17^th century, and later the knowledge of a classical language. 

So today, the liberal arts usually comprise studies in the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities, the fine arts, and language (although usually modern rather than classical).

 So, enough historical overview to make the point: the argument between education as an end in itself—needing no other justification than the intrinsic value of knowledge for its own sake—and education as a means to greater ends—as a preparation for civic life and for productive career—is a tension that has existed for twenty-four centuries!

Unfortunately, the common public understanding of the liberal arts these days tends to define them negatively.  Students often characterize themselves as being a particular “major” or pursuing a certain professional course of study and often bemoan having to endure that other realm of general or liberal education as something to “get out of the way” so they can get on with what’s important. 

The demand for vocational relevance is sharp, clear, and—one must confess—understandable.  Part of the tension is the public demand for accountability, for societal outcomes of education in the workplace, for more “bang for the buck”—the familiar insistence that those who “pay the fiddler should call the tune.”

I hasten to say that I am not willing to leave us with such an impasse; nor do I think it is necessary to do so.  So next up is my attempt to draw a synthesis between these points of view.  I hope you will stay tuned!