The Future of Liberal Education

Timothy Burns, Peter Lawler

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415733816
• eBook ISBN: 9781317689799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Liberal Education, once the whole of American Higher Education, has been displaced by technical training and career-oriented majors. But it has also suffered from the decline in genuine liberal learning found in humanities disciplines, owing to specialization, politicization, and the adoption of new literary and psychological theories. The social sciences, too, have arguably abandoned the kind of relentless and sometimes disturbing questioning that used to constitute the core of education. In this compelling volume, thirteen college educators describe in sparkling prose what liberal education is, its place in a liberal democracy, the very serious challenges it faces in the 21st century—even from some of its alleged friends—and why it is important to sustain and expand liberal education's place in American colleges and universities. Proponents and critics of liberal education alike will benefit from these insightful essays.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Perspectives on Political Science.

Introduction

TIMOTHY W. BURNS AND PETER AUGUSTINE LAWLER

Liberal education is becoming rare in America. At the time of the American founding a liberal education was de rigeur for anyone who aspired to public life. In 1900, it remained the norm in America’s colleges. And as the core curricula of colleges and universities in 1950 attest, it remained the central, defining feature of undergraduate education as late as the mid twentieth century. Today it is uncommon. While liberal education is not synonymous with education in the humanities, the two are closely tied, and so visible trends in the latter can help us see the fate of the former. Data recently released by the U.S. Department of Education show that only 7.6% of bachelor’s degrees in 2010 were awarded to majors in the humanities, down from 14% nationally in 1966,¹ a trend especially prominent among women. Recent news reports indicate that the trend away from the humanities is visible not only in state schools but private universities like Stanford and Harvard, and indeed is worldwide.² The vast majority of students graduating from state universities and colleges follow curricula that prepare them, or so they hope, for lucrative jobs. As for private universities and liberal arts colleges, whether secular or religiously affiliated, it often seems that only administrators charged with raising funds still claim that there is or should be a coherent and common liberal education of their students. Their watchword is “diversity,” and their courses are more and more specialized in areas of peculiar interest to their faculty.

More importantly, courses outside of mathematics and the natural sciences tend to be taught in the service of a specific political agenda rather than of the freedom of the mind that openness to truth can alone provide. Most faculty members and administrators have learned to smile at the notion of truth even as they adhere fiercely to political opinions that they manifestly consider to be true and that they wish to impart to their students. In the service of political agendas, too, are indoctrination activities, often under the division of “student affairs,” that have become common on college campuses and whose administrative costs have caused the price of attending college to soar.

Finally, arriving at the truth—or even mastering one’s native language or a foreign language—is not an easy matter; it demands among other things habits of attention, concentration, and reflection that need to be fostered in students, in part through the fair and accurate grading of their work. But faculty’s inflation of student grades has made the acquisition of a degree and even of Latin honors much less difficult than it was a short time ago, removing the stigma that attended poor performance by removing the measure of poor performance. Soviet workers used to joke about their Marxist overlords, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” At many American colleges and universities students would not be exaggerating much to say of faculty, “They pretend to grade us, and we pretend to work.”

The contributors to this volume write in awareness that the causes of liberal education’s expulsion from its home in American colleges and universities are deep and that a full explanation of those causes would be long. But they recognize that one major cause is the loss of understanding of what a liberal education is and must be, and that any hope for the revival of liberal education rests on a persuasive or convincing articulation of what it is and of why it is so desirable to human life. Such an articulation has been lacking from recent literature on liberal education. Even the report of the august American Academy of Arts and Science, The Heart of the Matter, fell short in this matter. In the acerbic but sadly accurate words of Peter Wood, the Academy “offered a sugar rush of sweetness in lieu of any trenchant reasons for studying the great works of literature and art, let alone history and philosophy.”³ So too Harvard’s recent report, The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future, contained a few helpful modest proposals but as Samuel Goldman notes, it lacked any description of what the humanities are for.⁴

The contributors to this volume aim to provide an articulation of what liberal education is and why it is so vital to human flourishing. They are successful teachers, and know that the desire for liberating truth has by no means been expunged from the souls of today’s students. They write in awareness of the need to address and somehow resolve the question of the relation between liberal education and civic and/or moral education, confronting squarely questions like the following: if liberal education is to remain free of politicization, by the left or the right, can one of its ends be a civic or ethical education? Can it and should it try to build on and broaden the civic education that should take place at home and in primary and secondary schools, or should it treat civic education as an altogether distinct (if vitally important) activity? How can the needs of our political regime, whose pillars are freedom and equality, be served by liberal education while that education at the same time fosters a liberation from the here and now, a critical distance from the principles of the political order into which we happen to have been born? Can or should liberal education foster a deepening of moral, civic, ethical, or religious virtue, and if so, how? And with respect to religious virtue in particular: has biblical revelation changed what ought to be the end of liberal education from what it was understood to be in pre-biblical times and places? While the contributors have various answers to these questions, all address them with thoughtful and thought-provoking arguments, from which both friends of liberal education and those who are curious about this kind of education are likely to benefit.

NOTES

1.   Cited in The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College:  Mapping the Future, Harvard University, June 6, 2013, 8–9.

2.   Tamar Lewin, “As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry,” The New York Times, October 30, 2013; Ella Delaney, “Humanities Studies Under Strain Around the Globe,” The New York Times, Dec. 1, 2013.

3.   Peter Wood, “The Highs and Lows of 2013: NAS Picks Higher Ed’s Top Ten Stories,” The National Association of Scholars, Dec. 24, 2013. See also Peter Wood, “A Wretched Defense of the Humanities,” Minding The Campus, June 23, 2013.

4.   Samuel Goldman, “Harvard and the Humanities,” First Things, January 2014, 20–1.

Liberal Education: Its Conditions and Ends

DAVID D. COREY

Abstract: This article describes liberal education as it comes to light not historically but philosophically, taking the word liber (free) as its chief distinguishing feature. It considers what liberal education presupposes of those who pursue it, and it enumerates several outcomes or “ends” that are likely to ensue. Through liberal education, I argue, the mind is liberated from the here and now, freed by exposure to diverse kinds of character, released from the tyranny of the practical mode of thought, and, at the same time, freed by certain careful habits of reflection that take years to acquire.

What is liberal education? Obviously, the question has been asked and answered many times before. More often than not the answer takes a historical form. The origins of liberal education in Greek and Roman antiquity are described. The trivium and quadrivium are recounted. And eventually John Henry Newman is extolled for unifying the various disciplines of the university under the umbrella of theology. If I appear to make light of the historical way of defining liberal education, I do so only because it has become so familiar, not because it lacks explanatory power. On the contrary, to know where something comes from—its origin and genesis—is to know something important. But I proceed in this article on a somewhat different footing and consider what liberal education might mean when viewed not historically but philosophically, taking the word liber (free) as its chief distinguishing feature. As I see it, liberal education is related to freedom in two fascinating ways: its conditions and its ends. Thus, the reflections that follow fall under these two headings, beginning with ends, because it is only in the light of the ends of liberal education that its necessary conditions come into view.

THE ENDS OF LIBERAL EDUCATION

The purpose of liberal education is, of course, to set us free; but the freedom in question is of a specific sort. The goal is not physical, economic, or political freedom—as if liberal education were about escaping from jail, managing a retirement fund, or overthrowing a regime. Its goal is rather intellectual freedom or, in a certain quaint sense of the word, “spiritual” freedom. Liberal education teaches us how to think and be, free from various constraints. How does it do this? Without pretending to be exhaustive about it, I mention four ways. None of these is particularly original, yet it is remarkable how frequently these four basic paths to freedom go unexplored by college and university students today.

The first way in which liberal education sets us free is by removing us from the confines of a particular place and time—twenty-first-century America, inner-city Detroit, the rural South—and exposing us to other settled forms of life. Our mind journeys in liberal education from Athens to Rome; from Thagaste to Cluny; from the first settlements on the Tigris to the great libraries of Baghdad; or from Renaissance Florence to Victorian England. The point here is not that we necessarily want to recreate or escape permanently to any of these foreign times and places, though in some particulars we might wish to. It is rather that in leaving home we are able, upon returning, to view old surroundings in a new way.¹ The constraining belief that all around us simply “is as it must be” begins to loosen its grip. We come to recognize that individuals and societies have been and can be ordered in myriad ways; and we awake to the possibility of living undetermined by the arbitrariness of the here and now. Or perhaps we return home only to appreciate that what we left behind is precisely what we wanted after all, as Odysseus returns to Penelope and his beloved father. But still, an informed appreciation of what we have, or what we are, is more meaningful than an appreciation that knows nothing of the world. To have self-knowledge, one must have knowledge of the “not-self,” and when the self in question is an entire culture, knowledge of the not-self comes only through intellectual travel.

To develop this a bit further, liberal education can be viewed for us today as liberation from the fads and fancies of American culture. And this is liberation indeed! What is the outlook of our age and what are its characteristic mistakes? Our democratic spirit in all things, our strange admixture of spiritual fanaticism and radical secularism, our desperate attempts to find happiness in the latest handheld device, our love of “social networking” over true friendship and conversation, our pathetic hope that one more piercing or tattoo might make us unique, our willingness to sell our souls to the workplace for little to nothing in return: These and other features of our culture begin to appear as they really are—grotesque—in light of what we learn from the chronological and geographical journey of the mind to distant cultures. Critical perspective results unavoidably from liberal education. We become free insofar as we learn to recognize the ephemeral in much that pretends to permanence.

A second way in which liberal education sets us free is by introducing us to paradigmatic lives and therewith to the many subtle ways that lives can be described and evaluated. We come to know Antigone and Ophelia, Pericles and Pershing, Inspector Holmes and Captain Ahab. At the same time, we learn what it’s like to be puckish, droll, wry, and urbane. The world of human interaction is not only a world of characters and deeds but also one shot through with moral reflection. To know only the most basic ways of referring to human types is, in effect, to run through life partially blind. We may hit upon something pleasurable here or painful there, but we cannot say quite what it is, nor can we fully appreciate the characters of those around us. I have noticed over the years that people who exhibit especially unattractive characteristics often do not know the meaning of the words they embody. I knew a university administrator who was objectionably eager to offer unsolicited “administration.” In a conversation with him one afternoon I discovered he didn’t know the word “officious.”

The two forms of liberation just mentioned have something in common, at least the way I’ve presented them here: liberation from our immediate culture and liberation through wide exposure to different characters. Both concern the problem of shaping ourselves and our communities into something we are not. Thus, they are ways of expanding our moral imagination. But this moral way of experiencing and interacting with the world around us is not the only mode of life. And a third way in which liberal education sets us free is, precisely, by introducing us to other modes.

The dominant, and therefore most familiar, mode is, of course, the moral or “practical,” according to which the world is viewed through the lens of desires and aversions. In this mode we speak of pleasure and pain, right and wrong, advantage and disadvantage, approval and disapproval. Our goal is to maximize the good and to avoid the bad. So dominant is the practical mode in everyday life that it seems plausibly complete as an account of human existence per se. But it is not. To wonder about the origin of some practice—say, farming or federalism—is not to view the world through the lens of desires and aversions but to view it through the lens of history. And the historical mode is distinct from the practical, because it brings its own form of illumination to the things it engages. It presents, in other words, a permanent way of answering the question, “what is this?” And this is the case with every mode—not only the practical and historical, but also the scientific, aesthetic, and philosophical.²

In explaining “modality” to students I like to have my classroom concentrate attention on a familiar object (e.g., a student’s plastic water bottle). I then wonder with my students out loud: What is this? The first answer, of course, is obvious. It is a vessel for conveying liquid to the mouth, a tool for quenching thirst. This is to view the bottle in the practical mode. But if someone were to say, “No, that is not what I mean. Try again: What is this?” Then, suddenly other possibilities emerge. It is a semisynthetic substance containing polymers of high molecular mass derived from petroleum and natural gas. This is to view the bottle scientifically. Or it is a modern version of the Thracian “drinking horn” or Bedouin “goat bladder,” which is to view it historically. Or it is an object whose light green color and smooth, curved lines are designed to please the senses, which is to view it aesthetically. To understand the bottle in these basic ways is, of course, not difficult. But to become truly adept at seeing and experiencing the world through a plurality of modes is another matter. And here liberal education helps us profoundly, not only because we can read classic works in each of the various modes but also because we come into contact with people (teachers and fellow students) who are themselves oriented toward specific modes. Only at a great liberal arts college do we find people engaged in history, science, physics, music, and art as ends in themselves, not as a prelude to a job or a stepping st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Liberal Education: Its Conditions and Ends
• 3. Why Do We Wear These Robes and These Hoods?
• 4. The Place of Liberal Education in America
• 5. Liberal Education and Liberal Democracy
• 6. Reclaiming the Core: Liberal Education in the Twenty-First Century
• 7. The Liberal Arts and the Arts of Liberty
• 8. The Fading Promise of a More Meritocratic Society
• 9. Education for Freedom
• 10. The Future of the Liberal Arts
• 11. Liberal Education In, For, and Against Liberal Democracy
• 12. Can liberal education survive liberal democracy?
• Index