ONE
The Liberal Arts: What Is a Liberal Arts Education and Why Is It Important Today?
Every session we have with parents and students on college planning inevitably leads to this question: “Why should my child go to a liberal arts college? How will it prepare him/her for a job or career? Why not jump right into a specialized major?” In this chapter, we answer that question. We have found that there is a great deal of misunderstanding and a general lack of information about the nature of a liberal arts education, its value in society, and its role in preparing students for graduate programs and careers. Many students are unaware of the differences between a “college” and a “university,” between a graduate and an undergraduate education and degree, and between degree programs specializing in technical, business, arts, or other fields and those offering or demanding study across the arts and sciences disciplines.
We defend the value of a liberal arts education, building on the work of many prominent scholars who have argued that an education spanning multiple academic disciplines and requiring that students learn core concepts, methods, and content builds unparalleled strengths in reasoning, understanding, and communication, preparing students for any academic or professional challenge they may choose. At the same time, we avoid for the most part the disagreements among “liberal” and “conservative” thinkers on necessary reforms in liberal arts education and on whether changes over the past several decades have been “good” or “bad.” However, we must add that in our minds, liberal arts colleges have changed for the better and significant choice exists among these institutions to give students a great deal of leeway in determining which curriculum and environment best suits their needs and interests.
Goals of a Liberal Arts Education
As Nathan Glazer has stated, “Liberal education has meant many things, but at its core is the idea of the kind of education that a free citizen of a society needs to participate in it effectively.”* In a complex, shifting world, it is essential to develop a high degree of intellectual literacy and critical-thinking skills; a sense of moral and ethical responsibility to one’s community; and the ability to reason clearly, to think rationally, and to analyze information intelligently. Students must be able to respond to people in a compassionate and fair way, to continue learning new information and concepts over a lifetime, to appreciate and gain pleasure from the beauty of the arts and literature and to use these as an inspiration and a solace when needed. They should know how to revert to our historical past for lessons that will help shape the future intelligently and avoid unnecessary mistakes, and to create a sense of self-esteem that comes from personal accomplishments and challenges met with success.
A liberal arts education aims to help graduates:
• Think and problem-solve in a creative, risk-taking manner.
• Express ideas and feelings in organized, logical, coherent, descriptive, rich language, both orally and in writing.
• Analyze, organize, and use data for meaningful solutions.
• Develop the capability of setting goals with appropriate information and research and then achieve these goals with proper means.
• Help define a personal-value and ethical system that serves throughout life in making the challenging decisions one will face.
• Have the capacity and instinct to work in a cooperative, collaborative manner with others in one’s professional and community life.
These are ambitious goals! How different colleges and universities achieve them reveals variations in educational philosophy, institutional personality and history, and particular social and academic strengths and missions. All the liberal arts colleges share a commitment to disciplinary and student diversity, intellectual and otherwise. To varying degrees, these colleges require students to pursue courses in key academic subject areas, some with more specificity, others with a great deal of freedom, in order to expose students to multiple areas of knowledge, diverging perspectives on the world, and different paths to scientific, ethical, social, and humanistic understanding.
Content is important, but so are process and style. Liberal arts colleges may expect students to master a core body of knowledge, including Western and, increasingly, non-Western masterworks in fields ranging from physics to music to government, comparative literature, history, and language. Students will build on their secondary school education by majoring in one or more specific areas of knowledge (academic “disciplines” or “fields”), but will pursue areas of interest within key general academic areas: the physical sciences; mathematics; the humanities (history, English and other languages, visual and performing arts, and so forth); and the social sciences (political science, sociology, etc.). So-called cross-disciplinary courses of study are offered in such areas as women’s studies, African American studies, environmental studies, and social psychology. Students will be exposed to a wide range of subjects that they may not have encountered previously: anthropology, genetics, philosophy, criminology, economics, engineering sciences, religion, education. But all of this will be in the context of a broad-based approach to learning. One cannot graduate from a liberal arts college without having experienced course work in a multitude of subject areas. The goal: an intelligent and “well educated” student who can converse knowledgeably about a wide range of topics and who has learned how to learn about anything under the sun.
Thus, process and style undergird a liberal arts education. Students learn how to think, approach problems, write, present information intelligibly, and make coherent arguments in their field of choice and others they may encounter. A liberal arts education challenges students’ conceptions and pushes them to ask difficult questions, question established answers, and develop their own arguments through logical reasoning and the discovery of new understandings. A liberal arts education helps a student specialize in at least one particular area, but also to see and make connections among multiple fields of inquiry. As Ernest Boyer, a former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has argued, traditional research designed to promote the advancement of knowledge should be complemented by the “scholarship of integration,” which makes connections across disciplines; the “scholarship of application,” which concentrates on the interrelationship between theory and practice; and the “scholarship of teaching,” which both educates students and attracts them to the academic world. Such a view of scholarship clearly relates to the goals of a liberal arts education.
Learning How to Learn: The Luxury of Time
Alan Ryan writes, “At its best, liberal education opens a conversation between ourselves and the immortal dead, gives us voices at our shoulders asking us to think again and try harder.”* How many of us, academics or not, would not relish the notion of taking four years of our lives to keep open that conversation, enjoying what we call the luxury of time, to think, to make connections, to question, and to learn? Howard Bowen, a highly respected teacher/researcher of higher education, writes in an early important study:
As compared with others, college-educated people on the average are more open-minded toward new ideas, more curious, more adventurous in confronting new questions and problems, and more open to experience. They are likely to be more rational in their approach to issues. They are more aware of diversity of opinions and outlooks, of the legitimacy of disagreement.… They are less authoritarian, less prejudiced, and less dogmatic. At the same time, they are more independent and autonomous in their views, more self-confident and more ready to disagree. They are more cosmopolitan.*
Bowen’s point is that attempts to measure the value-added benefit of a college education often consider the wrong issue. The major benefit of a liberal arts education is that it will produce the kinds of educated leaders that will benefit our economic, political, social, and family lives.
John Wooden, the great basketball coach at UCLA, once quipped, “It’s what you know after you learn everything that counts.” A liberal arts education, particularly one obtained in a residential college setting, seeks to provide that learning experience and that sense of knowing a lot, but also knowing what you do not know. “We go to college,” the poet and teacher Robert Frost said, “to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven’t learned in high school. Once we have learned to read, the rest can be trusted to add itself to us.” As with the majority of his observations and commentary, Frost is full of irony in his view of the purpose of the liberal arts experience. His message, as true today as it was many years ago (when Frost was at Dartmouth and Amherst), is that reading intelligently and analytically, with a critical mental eye, will enable one to carry on his/her education for the remainder of a lifetime. In a sense, once one has “learned to read” in its broadest meaning, he/she is prepared to go out into the world. It is the definition of reading that counts.
Ernest Martin Hopkins, a former president of Dartmouth, characterized in his 1929 convocation address to the entering class the view of the essential qualities of the liberal arts college: “The liberal arts college is interested in the wholeness of life and in all human activity.… It is characterized as liberal because it recognizes no master to its limit to seek knowledge and no boundaries beyond which it has not the right to search. Its primary concern is not with what men and women shall do but with what they shall be.” The liberal arts education is the means by which outstanding young men and women will develop those skills and qualities of mind and spirit that will enable them to lead productive and valuable lives. This means not only for their own well-being, but also for the good of their families, communities, and the larger society. The colleges we have selected are among the leaders in higher education in preparing young adults to take their places as responsible and enlightened leaders in the world. To think critically and with a conscience, to be resilient in an accelerating world of technological, intellectual, cultural, and social change, are critical skills for the...