Via Instapundit and New Criterion:
What is a liberal education and what it is for? From Cicero’s artes liberales, to the attempts at common curricula in more recent times, to the chaotic cafeteria that passes for a curriculum in most American universities today, the concept has suffered from vagueness, confusion, and contradiction. From the beginning, the champions of a liberal education have thought of it as seeking at least four kinds of goals.
One was as an end in itself, or at least as a way of achieving that contemplative life that Aristotle thought was the greatest happiness. Knowledge and the acts of acquiring and considering it were the ends of this education and good in themselves.
A second was as a means of shaping the character, the style, the taste of a person—to make him good and better able to fit in well with and take his place in the society of others like him.
A third was to prepare him for a useful career in the world, one appropriate to his status as a free man. For Cicero and Quintilian, this meant a career as an orator that would allow a man to protect the private interests of himself and his friends in the law courts and to advance the public interest in the assemblies, senate, and magistracies.
The fourth was to contribute to the individual citizen’s freedom in ancient society. Servants were ignorant and parochial, so free men must be learned and cosmopolitan; servants were ruled by others, so free men must take part in their own government; servants specialized to become competent at some specific and limited task, so free men must know something of everything and understand general principles without yielding to the narrowness of expertise.
Main points:
- “…the medieval universities, whatever their commitment to learning for its own sake, were institutions that trained their students for professional careers.”
- “…the humanists of the Renaissance…made a conscious effort to return to the ideas and values of the classical age.”
- “The civic humanists looked to the liberal education of the humanists to train good men for public service, for leadership in cultural and political life.”
- “For the Italian humanists, freedom meant putting aside concern for gain and instead devoting oneself to the training of mind, body, and spirit for the sake of higher things.”
- “A liberal education [in Georgian England] was one suitable to a free man, who, it was assumed, was well-born and rich enough to afford it. It was to be a training aimed at gaining command of arts that were ‘liberal,’ ‘such as fit for Gentlemen and Scholars,’ as a contemporary dictionary put it, and not those that were servile—’Mechanick Trades and Handicrafts’ suited for ‘meaner People.’”
- “For most students [in the nineteenth century], a liberal education came to mean the careful study of a limited list of Latin and Greek classics, with emphasis on mastery of the ancient languages, but it was now justified on a new basis. This kind of learning, it was said, cultivated and strengthened the intellectual faculties.”
- “By the nineteenth century, however, the power of natural science and the scientific method to discover new knowledge had become so obvious that it could no longer be prevented from influencing universities. At its core was the German idea of academic freedom, a freedom to investigate new questions and old in new ways, with a bold willingness to challenge accepted opinion unhampered by traditions from the past. Originality and discovery became the prime values. The idea of the university as a museum, a repository of learning, gave way to the notion that it should be dynamic, a place where knowledge was discovered and generated.”
- “…the greatest shortcoming of most attempts at liberal education today, with their individualized, unfocused, and scattered curricula, is their failure to enhance the students’ understanding of their role as free citizens of a free society and the responsibilities it entails.”
A perspective on what a liberal education is about.
