ConclusionIt is not easy to summarize what has been suggested in this essay. But in greatly simplified terms, something like this may serve.

The understanding which comes through education increases the power of man over himself and his world; it increases his awareness, his capacity to influence, to accept and to enjoy. Everybody knows these things, but an explanation of how this power arises has been attempted. To do this, understanding, was said to be a process, a dynamic act, and four perspectives on this act, each showing one of the ways in which power is created have been presented.

First, it was suggested that thought is the process of discriminating the field of feeling. This implies a much closer connection between thought and feeling than is ordinarily held. The particular power here is expressed in terms of the idea that the form of thought both expresses and limits at the same time. Due to this you get clear elements not only expressed in their own right, but deriving part of their clarity and individuality because of their explicit exclusion from other elements of the same field. Second, the power of knowing was explained as due to the tension between levels of significance It was suggested that concepts are fields of meaning composed of mutually constituting levels or particularity and generality.

Third, it was suggested that the power of knowing comes through the extension of the range of significant feeling through the use of imagination.

Finally, the double aspect of consciousness, which allows man both to do something consciously and to guide such doing self-consciously, was indicated as of major importance to the power and practice of a liberal education because it constitutes the power which frees man from himself.

No one can liberate another person by organizing his experience for him. That he must do for himself; it is his life. But educators are in the business of disciplining the student in the truly human fashion which includes the organization of our experience in terms of dynamically interacting levels of generality and significance, the objectifying and clarifying of the field of feeling through thought, the broadening and deepening of that range of feeling through the imaginative projection of possibilities for feeling, as well as the steady consciousness of self that frees man from himself.

These four aspects constitute the power which man's nature gives to him alone. It is because of this power that man has been called a rational animal. And along side of this power any others which he may be said to possess are as nothing. Indeed, it is open to question whether there are any other separate powers. Someone may want to mention the power of human love, but a moment of reflection should show that all we consider of most value in human love is an expression of the powers of which we have spoken. A liberal education is of value precisely because it is aimed at the development of those qualities of truly human activity which characterize man at his best. We may have to accept something less than this due to human frailty, but we need not be content to aim at anything less.

Picking a college is a daunting task if you aren't sure what career path you want to follow after graduation. A liberal arts college provides opportunities in several fields, making students creative thinkers and problem solvers. This type of education promotes a well-rounded, diverse background and opens a student up to a world of careers without limiting them to one particular field. A university education, however, offers more high-tech equipment, high-profile professors and the ability for you to focus on your chosen field of study.DefinitionA liberal arts education provides all of the fundamentals necessary to survive in a changing workplace. You take core classes in fields like sociology, anthropology, mathematics and science to build a foundation that prepares you for life in the real world. This type of education is meant to build a well-rounded student who not only is an expert in her chosen field, but also an excellent critical thinker and competent writer.Class Size/Faculty AccessThe liberal arts education provides a smaller, more personalized approach for your college experience. Class sizes are relatively small, allowing students access to professors and giving them the ability to interact with each other more, both in and out of the classroom. In a larger research university, classes may have up to 500 students in a lecture hall, and you typically don't have a relationship with the professor. University professors are under pressure to keep up with research trends and gain grants and national accreditation for the university, which leaves less time for the personal mentoring of undergraduate students.Broad Versus FocusedStudents receiving a liberal arts education have to take a broad range of classes, requiring them to learn not only about the subjects in their majors, but also about writing, critical thinking and mathematics. A liberal arts student who is a biology major also is takes classes in public speaking, composition and philosophy, giving those students the ability to write more comprehensive lab reports and communicate their research to an audience in an organized manner. A university student focuses more on the major area of study, taking more science classes that relate to the profession or intended graduate program.FundingA major disadvantage of a liberal arts education is the lack of funding available for cutting edge equipment and research materials. For example, science students at liberal arts colleges don't have access to the same expensive microscopes or computers as students at a university.. The library at a liberal arts college may not have the vast selection of old and new materials available for research. Universities draw in nationally recognized field experts who can teach students from their real life experiences and who have research funding to continue their studies. Liberal arts colleges have professors who have a great passion for their chosen field, but they may not have the same credentials or outside connections.

In a world increasingly shaped, for better and for worse, by technological advancement,

how can we form people who are thoughtful enough and free enough to distinguish

between what we can do and what it would be wise for us to do? Many hope that an

education in the liberal arts might help us become people who are neither captive to

technology nor dismissive of it. But, alas, it is becoming ever more difficult to find

places where the liberal arts flourish.

It is hardly news that higher education in this country is beset with many problems.

Students graduate — if they graduate — with more indebtedness than many of them

can manage. Tuition continues to rise, aided and abetted, no doubt, by the availability

of government-financed student loans. Graduate programs continue to produce freshly

minted Ph.D.s, many of whom may not find teaching positions, and others of whom may

find positions with which they are far from happy. The increasing use of adjuncts,

understandable as a money-saving move, breeds considerable discontent among a

growing faculty underclass. The proliferation of mid-level administrators, who

increasingly make many of the decisions that shape college life, never seems to end.

Online courses multiply even as fewer and fewer students seem interested in a

traditional liberal arts education that emphasizes the humanities.

None of these trends, problematic though they are, really threatens the continued

existence or well-being of the very best (and most highly endowed) colleges and

universities. But these trends are widening the gap that separates the fortunate

institutions from the rest of the academy. Schools are naturally disinclined to fold their

tents and go out of business, so, whatever their pretensions, they become places that

are in many ways (pretensions aside) indistinguishable from community colleges.

In the face of these pressures, educational traditionalists and defenders of the liberal

arts all too easily turn to commending the need for core curricula and to bemoaning the

rise of specialization among faculty. But gradually, over almost four decades of

teaching, I have become persuaded that these are not useful remedies. Indeed, what

we need is not core curricula but fewer general education requirements. And we should

want our students — some of whom are our own children, after all — to be taught by

people with genuine expertise in the materials they teach. What, then, should the

student who wants a liberal arts education be looking for? The answer is a school that,

whatever its size, has few required courses, thereby leaving students free to find their

own way into the conversation about the meaning of our humanity that is at the heart

of the liberal arts.

Most colleges and universities offer verbal respect to the liberal arts and emphasize

their commitment to liberal learning. Often, however, their liberal arts departments

function largely as service organizations, offering courses that meet general education

requirements for students, many of whom do not really want to be in those classes and

whose energies are focused mostly on other aspects of the curriculum. Moreover, for

that smaller number of students who are truly interested in the liberal arts, these

general education requirements tend to stifle rather than liberate the eros that draws

them in search of wisdom.

It would be foolhardy to suppose that the liberal arts flourish at an academic institution

simply because it talks about providing a liberal education. Selling a product by that

name most often means providing an education aimed primarily at preparing one to

make a living, and then adding courses in arts and sciences to serve as a little frosting

on the cake. These courses may broaden a bit the horizons of people being trained to

be future workers, may help those future workers learn to write coherent sentences,

and may provide for at least a few students a little relief from the tedium of preparing to

be workers. Sometimes vendors of liberal education will add a further claim to advertise

their product: namely, that they are preparing students to be not only good workers but

also good citizens.

None of this, however, is an education in the liberal — that is, the “free” — arts. The

roots of the concept of liberal arts lie in a Greek word (scholē) that meant “leisure.” The

liberal arts are free in the sense that they serve no goal external to themselves. Their

purpose is not to make us (someday) capable workers who can earn a living. But neither

is their purpose to make us dependable citizens, an alternative often attractive to

traditionalists who reject careerism in higher education. Quite the contrary, in fact. The

liberal arts should teach us to ponder the very old question of whether the good person

is necessarily the good citizen.

Why Study the Liberal Arts?Many students come to college to train for a career in business, nursing, engineering,

communications, education, social work, or, quite often these days, sports

management. These are all honorable ways to make a living, and there is nothing wrong

with going to school to be trained for such vocational paths. But even if these students

also tack on some “liberal education” by meeting general education requirements in the

arts and sciences, theirs is not an education in the liberal arts.

In part this is a matter of the content taught in these courses, but in larger part it is a

matter of the students’ goals. Their academic study is not free; it is not undertaken for

its own sake. Rather, it is in service to other, external goals, whether related to work or

citizenship. We train nurses, engineers, or marketing experts because we need them to

do some task or other. These may be important and necessary tasks, well worth doing.

But in these instances we can always say what we need these peoplefor, what purpose

external to their study their education is to serve.

But why do we need students of philosophy, literature, history, or religion? What is their

study for? The point of this sort of education is simply that we want to understand

ourselves and to know the truth about human life, whether about individual lives as we

might examine them in literature or philosophy, or life in society as we might examine it

in political theory or sociology. To be sure, an education in the liberal arts will

sometimes be more about the seeking than the finding of this truth. There are no

guarantees. At its best, however, it draws us into a centuries-old conversation among

specialists — scholars from various disciplines, each providing us a different angle from

which to examine what it means to be human.

Students of the liberal arts learn from anthropological studies of human behavior. They

read great literature and enter imaginatively into the ways of life it opens for them.

They probe philosophical analyses of human consciousness and human values. They

study biology and genetics, examining the “mechanics” of life. They ponder the human

desire for God and the human capacity to transcend at least in part our finite location,

as that desire and capacity are illumined and examined in religious texts, belief, and

practice.

Of course, no student can or should try to enter into all of these disciplinary approaches.

Each must find the language and forms of thought that he or she really cares about. We

should not seek to produce well-rounded students. Rather, our aim should be to form

people who care and know about our humanity from within a particular discipline.

Bringing such people together in a common space and shared life requires, then, that

they learn to talk with others who likewise care and know, but who do so from other

disciplinary perspectives. Thus, to study the liberal arts is to enter into an ongoing

conversation among scholars who examine the meaning of our humanity from differing

disciplinary perspectives.

To understand the liberal arts in this way is also to see why the notion of

“interdisciplinary” study, currently so popular in liberal education, is misguided. It

imposes a kind of top-down combination of disciplinary perspectives, attempting to

produce in cookie-cutter fashion something that can only happen gradually, if at all, in

the minds of students who are learning to think about our humanity within a range —

sometimes complementary, sometimes clashing — of approaches. The would-be

student in the liberal arts is well advised to look for schools where the specialized

academic disciplines are valued and cultivated — and equally well advised to steer clear

of schools touting new interdisciplinary initiatives. This also means that much of the

criticism of academic “specialization” one hears all too often from purported advocates

of the liberal arts is missing the mark. No one’s knowledge is narrower than that of the

non-specialist, who knows a very little about a very lot.

Consider an example that is not, I fear, as rare as we might hope. I know an institution

at which the first-year experience, as it is often known, involves a two-semester course

that constitutes roughly a third of a student’s credit hours in that year. This course has

no disciplinary perspective. Its readings, grouped under broad themes, are shaped

largely by the ideological leanings of the faculty committee that selects them. It will

probably surprise no seasoned professor to be told that many of its sections are taught

by adjuncts, some of whom themselves lack a Ph.D., for the faculty that structured this

first-year experience does not really want to teach it. Even when a section is taught by

a regular member of the faculty, the odds are very good that he or she will have little or

no expertise for many of the texts read. Thus, a student spends roughly a third of the

first year being taught by someone who is likely to have no specialized knowledge of

what is being taught. And for this course, imagined by administrators to be an asset

that should enhance the attractiveness of their school, the student pays thousands of

dollars.

As students of the liberal arts, we need and want teachers who are specialists, who are

skilled in a particular way of thinking about the meaning and significance of human life.

Even when these professors do not specifically engage in an exchange of viewpoints,

students will have to negotiate in their own minds the relation of their different

perspectives. This cannot be done in the top-down, ready-made fashion that

interdisciplinary curricula seek to provide; rather, this work of intellectual integration is

the fundamental task of students of the liberal arts, and the attempt to do it for them

betrays a misunderstanding of its liberating function. Sometimes students succeed in

this task; sometimes they do not. That is a risk we must take. But there is nothing more

rewarding for college students than those moments when they themselves begin to see

and to create connections among their work in several disciplines, when the

conversation actually takes place within their own thinking.

But that is not the same thing as amassing a total number of credits in different

subjects. Indeed, prospective students should be leery of academic programs that will

necessarily require taking too many courses at one time, dispersing one’s intellectual

energies too widely. A genuine education in the liberal arts, one that aims to invite

students into the kind of conversation among disciplinary perspectives that I have

described, probably cannot happen if a student takes more than, say, four courses at a

time. If they are really thought-provoking courses in the liberal arts, they will draw the

student into serious thinking about our humanity; but no useful work of integration can

take place if one is simply running from subject to subject, meeting requirements but

not really thinking.

Of course, one cannot spend one’s entire life immersed in this conversation. Even

college professors themselves cannot, for they do what they do in part because they too

have to make a living; none of us is freed from that necessity. The “eternal

undergraduate” is, as Michael Oakeshott once put it, “a lost soul.” But for a few short

years students are offered what Oakeshott nicely called the gift of an “interval” — a

short time in which they are free to try to understand themselves and the world, free

from the need to become competent workers or good citizens. The point, we might say

— upending Marx upending Feuerbach — is to understand the world, not to change it.

The Sciences’ ContributionThis vision of a liberal arts education raises many questions, of which at least two need

some attention: First, is there really any place for the natural sciences in the liberal arts

as I have depicted them? And second, have I not envisioned an education in which few

will have interest, and for which few may be suited?

When liberal arts majors are required to take courses in the natural sciences, members

of the faculty who teach physics, chemistry, biology, and so forth often have to exercise

a good bit of ingenuity devising courses that students will want to take and be able to

take. So, for example, students might take a course on the physics of sports, addressing

questions like whether a curveball really curves. Or students might take a course on

chemistry and crime, thinking like a young Sherlock Holmes with his exhaustive

knowledge of poisons or (updating things a bit) like Abby on NCIS. Nevertheless,

scientists themselves are unlikely to think that such courses provide an adequate

entryway into the real nature of their work.

We have to recognize that the “arts” and the “sciences” are quite different things, no

matter how often we speak of them together. No one can study the humanities without

attending to historical change and development — without, for example, reflecting upon

how Plato’s sense of eros for the divine is transformed in Augustine’s theology and

reclaimed in Iris Murdoch’s philosophy. But a physics undergraduate need know very

little about the history of physics. Indeed, to study that history is to engage not in

natural science but in humanistic endeavor — the history or philosophy of science. It is

therefore no surprise that students drawn to the humanities may resist science

requirements, while students drawn to the sciences may have difficulty writing the sort

of papers required for classes in philosophy, religion, or political theory. Moreover, in

our time the sciences have so many astonishing technological applications that it is

hard not to think of them as being studied for those reasons rather than for their own

sake, for the sheer wonder of what they explore.

Still, we should not suppose that natural scientists cannot offer their own kind of

perspective on what it means to be human. I noted earlier that biologists and

geneticists examine the “mechanics” of human life, forcing us to think from that

perspective and consider whether by itself it can be adequate. Physicists, who from my

unscientific and somewhat anecdotal observation are the natural scientists most

susceptible to religious awe, invite us to think about our place in the universe and the

nature of contingent being — that is, why there should be anything at all. Indeed, the

science majors I teach, most often in a course on bioethics, are frequently quite

perceptive in bringing their studies to bear on humanistic questions. (They also tend to

be more organized than non-science majors and more likely to turn in papers on time.)

Moreover, in the cultural circumstances in which we find ourselves today, the natural

sciences can make a peculiar contribution that is not likely to be made by many of the

other academic disciplines. If students ought to study the liberal arts for no extrinsic

purpose, but simply because we desire to know the truth about human life, then the

sciences remind them that there are in fact right and wrong answers to some questions.

They teach us that the world is not “our” world to shape and form as we please. They do

not invite us to offer our opinions about one or another “prompt” on an exam. After all,

Plato’s recommended approach to education called for the study of mathematics well

before one was ready to enter into philosophical dialectic. Not the world as we would

like it to be but the world as it is in truth is what the student of the liberal arts seeks,

and the natural sciences will not let us forget that.

Another Path to FreedomFinally, have I envisioned an education suited only for a few, with the rest of us simply

immersed in the world technology provides and imposes? If college at its best offers the

kind of free reflection in the liberal arts that I have described, would not many

prospective students have little reason to attend? And how then would they find a kind

of freedom essential to being human?

In part, we can respond to this legitimate concern by restating what I noted earlier.

There is nothing wrong with seeking training to become a social worker, an engineer, a

nurse, or an elementary school teacher. If some colleges and universities are the best

places to do that, there is a reason for them to exist and for students to attend them.

Whether there is good reason for such schools to add to their vocational training various

general education requirements in the arts and sciences, however, is doubtful (apart

from the benefit of providing work for Ph.D.’s unlikely to find gainful employment

elsewhere). It adds to the time and cost required to learn what a student with such

vocational goals needs to learn, but it does not really enrich these students with a

liberal arts education. Of course, it may do some other useful things — help students

find a friend or a spouse, give them a chance to continue to play competitive sports for

a few more years — but these are hardly integral to the liberal arts. We might be well

advised, as some have suggested, to question whether the college “experience” as it

has developed in this country, with its accompanying financial indebtedness for many

students, is really desirable.

Moreover, it may simply be true that education in the liberal arts is not intended for or

needed by many students. There is, in fact, at least one other way to get the most

important benefit, the free self-transcendence, it offers. The liberal arts should help us

to understand the truth about our lives — which means, in part, the truth of our

contingency and neediness, and, ultimately, our dependence on the divine. An

openness to what transcends us is what the “leisure” that is study of the liberal arts

should, at its best, cultivate. It seeks not power but wisdom, not to change the world but

to know it in truth. And to know the world truly is to know it as creation, as a gift that

invites our gratitude more than our mastery. This gratitude can be cultivated not only in

the liberal arts but also and most especially in the words and actions of worship. People

who are honest, disciplined workers and reliable citizens immersed in a world shaped by

technology may regularly be drawn out of themselves into a world of leisure separate

from what Abraham Joshua Heschel called “technical civilization.” In resting from our

attempts to remake the world, our goal is, as Heschel put it, “not to have but to be, not

to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.”

In an essay titled “The Lost Mariner” (from the 1985 collection The Man Who Mistook His

Wife For a Hat), neurologist Oliver Sacks described the life of one of his patients, Jimmie

G., a former sailor who now suffered a severe form of amnesia. Jimmie could recall

everything up to the end of the war in 1945, but nothing of the thirty years thereafter.

Unable to form any new memories that would last more than a few seconds, still

thinking of himself as nineteen years old, every moment was for him a new present

moment. Yet when Sacks asked the Sisters, who provided nursing care in the home

where Jimmie lived, if they thought he had a soul, their answer was simple: “Watch

Jimmie in chapel.” “I did,” Sacks writes,

and I was moved, profoundly moved and impressed, because I saw here an intensity

and steadiness of attention and concentration that I had never seen before in him or

conceived him capable of. I watched him kneel and take the Sacrament on his tongue,

and could not doubt the fullness and totality of Communion, the perfect alignment of his

spirit with the spirit of the Mass.... He was ... absorbed in an act, an act of his whole

being, which carried feeling and meaning in an organic continuity and unity.

Sacks could only conclude that the Sisters were right. Jimmie did “find his soul here”

with a “depth of absorption and attention” that study of the liberal arts might be hard

pressed to emulate.

If the ultimate aim of education in the liberal arts is to draw us out of ourselves, to teach

us the language of praise and gratitude, then Jimmie attained it in worship. Education in

the liberal arts — if we can still find it in our world — is one important path to finding

one’s soul. But it is neither the only nor even the most suitable path for many people.

Were we really to absorb this truth, we could stop pretending that the liberal arts are

important frosting on the cake of an education that is in fact designed for other

purposes. In so doing, we might free the liberal arts to set us free.

Liberal Education

THE GREAT CONVERSATION

By Robert M. Hutchins

The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this dialogue. The goal toward which Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue. The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the path to the realization of the potentialities of the race.

At a time when the West is most often represented by its friends as the source of that technology for which the whole world yearns and by its enemies as the fountainhead of selfishness and greed, it is worth remarking that, though both elements can be found in the great conversation, the Western ideal is not one or the other strand in the conversation, but the conversation itself. It would be and exaggeration to say that Western civilization means these books. The exaggeration would lie in the omission of the plastic arts and music, which have quite as important a part in Western civilization as the great productions included in this set. But to the extent to which books can present the idea of a civilization, the idea of Western civilization is here presented.

These books are the means of understanding our society and ourselves. They contain the great ideas that dominate us without our knowing it. There is no comparable repository of our tradition. To put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized

the West it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a few generations. On the other hand, the revival of interest in these books from time to time throughout history has provided the West with new drive and creativeness. Great Books have salvaged, preserved, and transmitted the tradition on many occasions similar to our own.

The books contain not merely the tradition, but also the great exponents of the tradition. Their writings are models of the fine and liberal arts. They hold before us what Whitehead called “‘the habitual vision of greatness.” These books have endured because men in every era have been lifted beyond themselves by the inspiration of their example, Sir Richard Livingstone said: “We are tied down, all our days and for the greater part of our days, to the commonplace. That is where contact with great thinkers, great literature helps. In their company we are still in the ordinary world, but it is the ordinary world transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius. And some of their vision becomes our own.”

Until very recently these books have been central in education in the West. They were the principal instrument of liberal education, the education that men acquired as an end in itself, for no other purpose than that it would help them to be men, to lead human lives, and better lives than they would otherwise be able to lead.

The aim of liberal education is human excellence, both private and public (for man is a political animal). Its object is the excellence of man as man and man as citizen. It regards man as an end, not as a means; and it regards the ends of life, and not the means to it. For this reason it is the education of free men. Other types of education or training treat men as means to some other end, or are at best concerned with the means of life, with earning a living, and not with its ends.

The substance of liberal education appears to consist in the recognition of basic problems, in knowledge of distinctions and interrelations in subject matter, and in the comprehension of ideas.

Liberal education seeks to clarify the basic problems and to understand the way in which one problem bears upon another. It strives for a grasp of the methods by which solutions can be reached and the formulation of standards for testing solutions proposed. The liberally educated man understands, for example, the relation between the problem of the immortality of the soul and the problem of the best form of government; he understands that the one problem cannot be solved by the same method as the other, and that the test that he will have to bring to bear upon solutions proposed differs from one problem to the other.

The liberally educated man understands, by understanding the distinctions and interrelations of the basic fields of subject matter, the differences and connections between poetry and history, science and philosophy, theoretical and practical science; he understands that the same methods cannot be applied in all these fields; he knows the methods appropriate to each.

The liberally educated man comprehends the ideas that are relevant to the basic problems and that operate in the basic fields of subject matter. He knows what is meant by soul. State, God, beauty, and by the other terms that are basic to the insights that these ideas, singly or in combination, provide concerning human experience.

The liberally educated man has a mind that can operate well in all fields. He may be a specialist in one field. But he can understand anything important that is said in any field and can see and use the light that it shed upon his own. The liberally educated man is at home in the world of ideas and in the world or practical affairs, too, because he understands the relation of the two. He may not be at home in the world of practical affairs in the sense of liking the life he finds about him; but he will be at home in that world in the sense that he understands it. He may even derive from his liberal education some conception of the difference between a bad world and a good one and some notion of the ways in which one might be turned onto the other.

The method of liberal education is the liberal arts, and the result of liberal education is discipline in those arts. The liberal artist learns to read, write, speak, listen, understand, and think. He learns to reckon, measure, and manipulate matter, quantity, and motion in order to predict, produce, and exchange. As we live in the tradition, whether we know it or not, so we are all liberal artists, whether we know it or not. We all practice the liberal arts, well or badly, all the time every day. As we should understand the tradition as well as we can in order to understand ourselves, so we should be as good liberal artists as we can in order to become as fully human as we can.

The liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are unavoidable, Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one.

The tradition of the West in education is the tradition of the liberal arts. Until very recently nobody took seriously the suggestion that there could be any other ideal. The educational ideas of John Locke, for example, which were directed to the preparation of the pupil to fit conveniently into the social and economic environment in which he found himself, made no impression on Locke’s contemporaries. And so it will be

found that other voices raised in criticism of liberal education fell upon deaf ears until about a half-century ago.

This Western devotion to the liberal arts and liberal education must have been largely responsible for the emergence of democracy as an ideal. The democratic ideal is equal opportunity for full human development, and, since the liberal arts are the basic means of such development, devotion to democracy naturally results from devotion to them. On the other hand, if acquisition of the liberal arts is an intrinsic part of human dignity, then the democratic ideal demands that we should strive to see to it that all have the opportunity to attain to the fullest measure of the liberal arts that is possible to each.

The present crisis in the world has been precipitated by the vision of the range of practical and productive art offered by the West. All over the world men are on the move, expressing their determination to share in the technology in which the West has excelled. This movement is one of the most spectacular in history, and everybody is agreed upon one thing about it: we do not know how to deal with it. It would be tragic if in our preoccupation with the crisis we failed to hold up as a thing of value for all the world, even as that which might show us a way in which to deal with the crisis, our vision of the best that the West has to offer. That vision is the range of the liberal arts and liberal education. Our determination about the distribution of the fullest measure of these arts and this education will measure our loyalty to the best in our own past and our total service to the future of the world.

The great books were written by the greatest liberal artists. They exhibit the range of the liberal arts. The authors were also the greatest teachers. They taught one another. They taught all previous generations, up to a few years ago. The question is whether they can teach us.

It should be pointed out that a liberal education is not the same as a liberal arts education. A liberal arts education encompasses certain subjects of study, while a liberal education may be pursued through any subject [3]. In presenting its initial understanding of liberal education, the American Association for the Advancement of Science neglects to prescribe a specific curriculum (such as liberal arts), but rather promotes a certain way of learning: “Ideally, a liberal education produces persons who are open-minded and free from provincialism, dogma, preconception, and ideology; conscious of their opinions and judgments; reflective of their actions; and aware of their place in the social and natural worlds” [4]. A liberal education ideally also strives for learning that spans a broad range of subjects. A study conducted at Miami University in Ohio analyzed the effects of an interdisciplinary core curriculum as opposed to a discipline-based general education program. Even though both groups did not have statistically significant differences in generic liberal arts skills, such as argumentation or thematic analysis, students who participated in the interdisciplinary program were found to be superior in cognitive development [5]. - See more at: http://triplehelixblog.com/2011/03/the-struggle-between-science-and-liberal-education/#sthash.7eqFlIPR.dpuf

An education in the arts and sciences plays a powerful part in the shaping of human capabilities and the unfolding of human possibilities. Recent effort to evaluate student learning in higher education has focused attention on what are typically called student "learning outcomes." Attending to learning outcomes allows us to measure the consequences of the engaged study of important ideas, texts, artifacts, problems, and methods that provide the content of knowledge in arts and sciences fields. The key to seeing the enduring power of liberal learning is to trace how knowledge and its processes take up residence in students as they move toward becoming independent thinkers and agents of their own lives. A liberal education provides students with a broad set of capabilities such as critical thinking, effective communication, quantitative reasoning, creative thinking, problem-solving, integrative thinking, and personal and social responsibility. While not monetarily quantifiable at graduation, there is no question of the value of these capabilities for all individuals in the workforce of the future, as citizens and as human beings.

Each of these capabilities serves as an entry point into the more specific ways that the arts and sciences open cognitive and personal doors into the social and natural worlds in which we live. To explore but one example, in learning to communicate effectively, we discover the endless depths and power of language and the ways we can find great pleasure in it; but, we can also learn to use language to touch and influence others, especially as we grasp the narratives that we and others inescapably both live and tell.

All these capabilities have an eminently practical side that translates into skills for success in the marketplace and into dealing effectively with the intricate responsibilities of personal and civic life. The very best views on the value of the liberal arts today are those of the current beneficiaries of this education: undergraduates who are studying the liberal arts and alumni who have experienced how valuable the liberal arts have been to them in their lives and careers. These fresh voices are the ones that need to be heard, and that is the reason behind a TEDx conference at Brown University October 20th. Only when we see and hear people who are now in medicine, finance, film making, technology, and public service, who continue to find lasting significance in their liberal arts education, will we come to understand where true value lies.

What Is Liberal Education?

An essay by Jeff FreymanProfessor of Political Science

Writing a piece on the meaning of liberal education for readers of TransylvaniaUniversity magazine is like preaching to the choir. Transylvania prides itself on its long tradition of liberal education, and its alumni have been shaped by their experience with it. Yet, recent research has found that even people associated with liberal arts colleges like Transy are often confused about what liberal education means. This includes not only current and past students, but professors and administrators as well. Over half a century ago, a leading educational foundation speculated, “Liberal arts college faculty seldom state clearly what they mean by liberal or general education. Perhaps they do not know.” Maybe the public is confused about liberal education because we in academe are too. It may be time for all of us to pay more attention to what we say we are doing.

In typical academic fashion, let me begin by being difficult. I want to sneak up on what liberal education is by distinguishing it from what it is not. Let’s start with an easy one. The “liberal” in liberal education certainly does not refer to left-wing politics. Liberal education has a very ancient pedigree going back to classical Athens. Preserving the ideals of this 2,500-year-old tradition has, in fact, often been seen as conservative or even reactionary. The word “liberal” (from the Latin liberare, meaning “to free”) refers to that education which is appropriate for free human beings. (Back then, freedom meant not being a slave and not having to work, presumably because one owned slaves who did it instead. It means something different today.) Needless to say, these are ideas to which people of various political persuasions could easily subscribe. Even the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. extolled the virtues of such an education in his book God and Man at Yale.

A more common misconception is to confuse liberal education with some particular academic setting in which it takes place. I often hear comments to the effect that colleges like Transy offer a liberal education because of their small size, which encourages personal interactions and individual attention. Small classes are said to allow students to get to know their professors and fellow students as human beings. Transy is all of these good things, but they are not what makes it a liberal education institution. After all, there are some much larger and more impersonal schools—say, Harvard—that do a pretty good job of liberal education. What’s more, many think that liberal education is best achieved when students engage in off-campus experiences like internships, service-learning activities, or study-abroad programs. So liberal education is not necessarily the same thing as learning in a close-knit community.

Nor should liberal education be identified with a specific curriculum.Largely because liberal education got started in the classical world, it was equated with Greek and Latin literature for a very long time. Not until the nineteenth century did educators find this course of studies too narrow. Consequently, a number of modern proponents, wishing nevertheless to maintain the tradition as a fixed canon of almost sacred texts, have identified it with a limited set of Great Books which represent “the best that has been thought and said” throughout the course of Western Civilization from Plato to NATO. But however extensive such a list might be, it still must exclude many important works in the Western tradition, not to mention the numerous other voices that are also part of humanity’s great conversation.

Sensitive to these issues, many educators have come to identify liberal education not with any set of specific works but with a set of specific academic fields of study called the “liberal arts.” These disciplines in the humanities, the arts, the social sciences, and the natural sciences are characterized by what they are not—namely, they are not primarily vocational. Rigorous study in one of these fields, it is thought, constitutes a liberal education. It is, however, sometimes difficult to differentiate vocational courses from nonvocational ones. While acknowledging these ambiguities, the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the foremost national organization dedicated to honoring and promoting the liberal arts, nevertheless concluded, “It is not difficult to distinguish between broad cultivation and technical competence.” I agree, but their claim begs another question. If liberal education is defined by “broad cultivation,” then how does concentrating in any one specific discipline—whether it is part of the liberal arts or not—constitute liberal education? Rather, it is suggested, what is needed is a general education broadly cast across all subject matters. While he was president of Harvard over a century ago, Charles William Eliot took the idea of breadth to its logical (or illogical) conclusion by arguing that if liberal education is about freedom, then we should let students take whatever they want. By the second half of the twentieth century, these various positions reached an uneasy compromise in what is academe’s now widely accepted Trinitarian formula: students spend about one-third of their time fulfilling requirements in their major field, in general education, and in electives. (It is hard to imagine Socrates and Protagoras arguing over the precise number of credit units to be dedicated to each of these three areas with the same passion as do faculty members today.) Many of these conflicting perspectives about the curriculum for liberal education make a good deal of sense. My point here is that, precisely because they do, liberal education should not be defined by any one of them.

So where does all of this leave us in our quest for the holy grail of liberal education? It is not to be found in any specific political orientation or academic setting or subject matter. These things represent mere idols, rather than the true spirit, of liberal education. What makes education liberal is its distinctive purpose. Liberal education aims at the fullest development of the person as a human being. You would think that people don’t need much instruction in being human; it ought to come fairly automatically to them just by being born. But the truth is that being human is rather different from being almost anything else. Who we humans are is not precisely fixed either by our genes or by our environments. As human beings, our lives are, to some important extent anyway, whatever we make of them.

And while we’re at it, we might as well make the most of our lives. This has meant different things to different people throughout history. What has remained fairly constant, however, is the idea that whatever the “good life” is, it does not just happen—it requires a bit of effort and guidance. The seventeenth century French philosophe Fontenelle got it right when he wrote, “We are, to the extent that we know how to be wise, the artisans of our own life.” People make themselves, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. We can’t do much about the limitations imposed on us by physical reality—although God knows we keep trying. The freedom to fashion our lives as we imagine is also limited by our dearth of imagination. It’s the lack of vision thing. Here’s where education comes in.

It helps to know what life has to offer. Vincent Price, the famous 1950s horror movie actor and less famous art connoisseur, once quipped, “People tell me they don’t know much about art but they know what they like. What they should say is that they like what they know.” By expanding what students know, liberal education widens their appreciation of life’s alternative possibilities. “Appreciate what?” you might ask. What is it that really matters? Posing that question is the first step in a liberal education. Liberal education is the life-long examination of the big questions in our lives: Who am I? What does it mean to be human? What can humans accomplish? What is freedom? Thus, not the Great Books, but the Great Questions. The questions define a liberal education, not the answers. Answers will often

differ from person to person and from one period of time to another, but the questions are those that all humans face. Asking them of ourselves is the mark of our humanity.

“The proper study of mankind is man,” wrote Alexander Pope.Whatever the subject matter, the real objects of study in liberal education are the students themselves. Socrates noted that the unexamined life is not worth living. Self-examination is not just navel-gazing. It is not done for its own sake, but in order to lead a richer life. Of course, we should never confuseenriching one’s life with getting rich. The art of living is not the same as making a living. Kentucky poet Wendell Berry recently told graduating students at a nearby college that “You must refuse to accept the common delusion that a career is an adequate substitute for a life.” Certainly having a good job can contribute to human flourishing. And there is no reason why the competencies developed in liberal education might not be useful in one’s subsequent career. But the real vocation for which liberal education prepares students is the full-time job of being human.

The sad thing is how much of life’s richness is unappreciated. Let me give you an illustration. My wife and I visited Rome a few years ago, during which we toured the Vatican, including a stop inside the Sistine Chapel. Decorating its walls and ceiling is a series of frescos painted by Michelangelo that are among the world’s greatest artistic masterpieces. The center vault of the ceiling depicts the iconic “Creation of Adam.” In it, God extends a pointed hand toward Adam, who mirrors his creator by extending his hand back to receive the divine spark. This panel expresses both the divinity of God and the godlike nature of humans, who are created in God’s image. Just as God created human beings, so do humans create masterpieces like the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. From overhead, Michelangelo calls upon us to appreciate our humanity in all its glory. It is discouraging how many of my fellow tourists were so busy with mundane activities that they failed to notice that inspiring message. Instead they chattered among themselves, flipped through their guidebooks, skimmed their newspapers, plotted their afternoon shopping excursions, followed dutifully behind their tour guides from one end of the chapel to the other—and many never even looked up at the ceiling. Taking the time to look up and out at what life has to offer can make the difference between a tour guide journey through life and a life purposely chosen and richly lived. Long ago, Marcus Aurelius observed that the worth of one’s life is measured by the seriousness of its undertakings. Life is too precious to waste in playing a perpetual game of Trivial Pursuit.

The sad fact is that many people sell their lives short by living only a part of it. Many years ago at a party with my then fellow graduate students and their families, I was introduced to the wife of a colleague. In answer to my question, “So, what do you do?” she replied, “I’m just a housewife.” Over the years, I came to know this woman rather well, and what I discovered was a remarkable human being who could not be defined by any social role. She was so many wonderful things, not just any one thing. Or consider the case of Anna Sam, who worked as a cashier to pay her way though college in her native France. Anna was thoroughly alienated by her menial job until one day, largely to occupy her mind at work, she decided to mentally collect anecdotes for a future book about her experiences as a cashier. Even before ever writing a word, Anna began to see herself and her world with new eyes. She realized that she was not just a cashier; she was a human being who had something profound and witty to say. A run-away best-seller, her subsequent bookTribulations of a Cashier transformed many lives, not just Anna’s. Other cashiers who read the book told her how much it had changed their perceptions of themselves as well. And members of the public related how they had begun to perceive and subsequently treat cashiers differently, like real human beings.

Liberal education is like Anna’s book. It seeks to reveal and unleash our inner human being. Its central lesson is: Ecce Homo (“Behold the Person”). We are all potentially

so much more than our conventional selves. And whatever this quality is, we share with our fellow human beings. This insight is not new. Sages and saints have been telling us its truth for a long time. Repeating it here may be unnecessary. In many ways, however, it is a message all the more critical today. We live in a world where technological imperatives, the “creative destruction” of market forces, and the totalizing logic of instrumental rationality reduce human beings to the status of things. In the face of modernity’s dehumanizing prospect, perhaps liberal education is needed more now than ever. It can help to release us from the prisons of our own construction. It leads us back to ourselves again.