Let me begin this second “installment” by calling attention to the fact that I did not entitle this blog “On the Boundaries of the Liberal Arts and Preparation for Career” nor have I defined the issue as a “paradox.”  I do not accept the idea that these are polar opposites—“either/ors”—but would rather argue that the dichotomy is a false dichotomy and that the case can and has been made that even the earliest advocates of each tradition found ways to accommodate the other.

I refuse, in any case, to be captive to the trap set up by those who would argue that any effort to demonstrate the utility of the liberal arts is doomed to failure because the liberal arts cannot be liberal if they are shown to be practical. 

That is to drown by falling face forward in a definitional soup of one’s own making! 

Rather, I take sides with many folk both inside and outside of the academy, who believe that the liberal arts do have a practical side and that one can demonstrate the utility of liberal learning without compromising its integrity.  There is no inherent contradiction between the values of liberal arts education and preparation for vocation or profession. Theory can be combined with practicality, thinking well with doing well.  That is the reason all those corporate executives are saying that they value liberal learning—and I’ll return to that.

First, let me make a distinction I learned from my friend Bob Knott when he was a colleague of mine several decades ago, a distinction between two levels of instruction, arbitrarily labeled “training” and “education.”

• Training, on the one hand, is instruction which seeks to develop a student’s knowledge and skills ­­­withina given value framework.  Programs with a training orientation assume the ends or goals of a given system, job, or profession and seek to develop the student’s abilities to operate efficiently and effectively within in the confines of those ends—vocational training narrowly conceived. 
• “Education,” on the other hand, refers to a level of instruction which includes training objectives, but transcends them to develop the student’s wider abilities—including the ability to question the value system(s) which inform a given job, career, or professional orientation.

An individual who is “educated” is equipped to adapt to change; an individual who is “trained” may find his or her knowledge becoming obsolete with change—what someone has called “trained incapacity.”  Ralph Tyler put it this way:

“We should be less interested in whether students have acquired a bunch of little answers to little questions and more concerned with whether they conceive of human learning as a means by which they are able to work out answers to their own problems because they have acquired the intellectual skills (to do so).”

It would be enormously shortsighted these days to claim to prepare students for life-long careers when, according to the most recent projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, today’s youngest workers are likely to hold twelve to fifteen jobs in their lifetime, and the typical college graduate will change professions (not just jobs) from five to seven times in his or her career—to say nothing about the changes that will occur within careers and professions.

That is a mind-blowing projection and it means that all students will have to become permanent learners in order to keep up with the knowledge explosion and the technological revolution.  Some of the careers that these students will enter are not even on our radar screen yet!

This quote from Thomas Friedmans’s recent op-ed piece, “The Next America,” in the New York Times (December 4, 2018) is instructive:

“The old model of work was three life blocks: Get an education. Use that education for 40 years. And then retire. We then made the faulty assumption that the next new model would be: Get an education. Use it for 20 years. Then get retrained. Then use that for 20 more years and then retire.

But in fact, in the Next America . . . the right model will be “continuous lifelong learning”— because when the pace of change is accelerating, ‘the fastest-growing companies and most resilient workers will be those who learn faster than their competition’.”

If we cannot equip our current students with learning and coping skills for such a world, help them acquire the ability to be permanent learners, to adapt to rapid change, any career training we provide them will not have been a bargain at any price.

If education is “liberal” (and, please, let’s try to rise above that word as a political label, a badge of honor or dishonor, depending on one’s point of view), then it must be “liberating,” “freeing.” 

It should free us from the restrictions of time and place which derive from the culture; it should liberate us from the prisons of intolerance and discrimination, of close-mindedness, of parochial perspectives.

But it should also free us to the pursuit of truth, without fear of where that quest may lead us, to the pursuit of virtue, of excellence—academic, personal, professional excellence.

In other words, liberal education—in its classic, traditional forms and, in my judgment, in its best contemporary incarnations—has never advocated a kind of vacuous tolerance that issues in a rootless lack of commitment.  On the contrary, genuine tolerance is an attitude of intellectual humility that hovers over the most passionate quests for truth, an informed modesty that acknowledges truths as yet unknown, wisdom as yet unclaimed, points of view from which one may yet learn something. 

Tolerance is not the opposite of commitment.  Tolerance is the opposite of dogmatism.  As someone put it, “the object of an open mind, like an open mouth, is occasionally to close it on something.” 

In the next post I will offer what I believe that “something” entails in a liberal arts education.