Your Biggest Liberal Arts Questions, Answered

You’ve probably had at least one relative ask you what having a liberal arts degree even means—or maybe you’ve even asked them . And that’s fair! The term “liberal arts” leaves a lot to be desired, especially since you don’t actually need to vote blue or be an artist to pursue a degree in it.

Liberal arts has been a cultural flashpoint of criticism in recent years; it’s easy to believe that an art history degree, for example, is nothing but a passion pursuit. But the liberal arts are fundamentally misunderstood, both in terms of the areas of study and the crucial societal importance that this degree confers.  

So, what exactly does a liberal arts education encompass? Let’s break it down. 

Q: What exactly does liberal arts mean? A: A liberal arts degree is grounded in the ideas of humanities and the arts and encompasses literature, philosophy, social and physical sciences and math. The “arts” in “liberal arts” aren’t limited to fine or performing arts, but denote a method of broad-based learning in many disciplines. The word “liberal” also gets lost in translation here—it doesn’t mean you’re ready to register as a Democrat. Rather, it’s rooted in the Latin word liberalis , or “free”. Mini lesson: Back in the Middle Ages , free citizens studied things like logic, rhetoric, geometry and arithmetic that would help them function successfully in society. 

Q: What kind of majors would fall under a liberal arts degree? A: So. Many. Majors. Siena’s School of Liberal Arts is the largest of our three schools and encompasses more than 40 major, minor and certificate programs, including:

  • American Studies
  • Creative Arts
  • Modern Languages and Classics
  • Political Science
  • Religious Studies
  • Social Work

Q: What are you going to do with that degree? A: Did we just channel your parents? Here’s the deal (and here’s what you can tell them): A liberal arts degree effectively prepares you for thousands of potential careers. Most importantly, your future employers will know that you’re able to apply critical and creative thinking to your scope of work. A liberal arts education will help you to be adaptable in a rapidly evolving workforce, it will help you to synthesize a ton of different perspectives, and it will help you to communicate effectively with others. Trust us when we say this particular skill set is what sets candidates apart in the job market. (Further reading, if you’re interested: Yes, Employers Do Value Liberal Arts Degrees .)

Q: How else does a liberal arts degree set me up for future success? A: A major appeal of a liberal arts degree is that it allows students to both dive deep on subjects they’re drawn to while also broadening the scope of their experiences. At Siena especially, our liberal arts students are encouraged to challenge themselves by pursuing other possibilities outside of their main areas of interest—an inclination that will serve them well in the working world, where employees are often asked to take on responsibilities outside of their understanding or specialty. 

Q. What if I don’t want to major in a liberal arts program, but still want to graduate with those skills? A. This is our favorite question, because the truth is: Business majors need a liberal arts education too . And science majors. And any major! No matter what you study, your college should have opportunities to help you hone all those liberal arts skills in other ways. So how does Siena tackle that? Through our core curriculum and first-year seminar offerings—which are not only informative and enlightening, and so relatable too. Check out our latest roster.  

Got more q’s about the liberal arts? We got answers. 

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What a Liberal Arts College Is and What Students Should Know

Liberal arts colleges traditionally emphasize broad academics and personal growth over specific professional training.

Liberal Arts Colleges Explained

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Students have freedom to explore at a liberal arts college, where there's an emphasis on broad academic inquiry.

Through smaller class sizes, wide-ranging curricula and tight-knit communities, liberal arts colleges are designed to develop intellectually curious students into free thinkers who are versatile in the professional workforce, experts say.

"The goal is to become broadly educated, well-rounded members of society that can understand lots of different domains of knowledge, learn how to learn and have a specialization of sorts," says Mark Montgomery, founder and CEO of Great College Advice, a college admissions consultancy with offices across the U.S.

Some common notions about liberal arts colleges are misconceptions, experts say. For example, the phrase "liberal arts" does not reflect a political alliance.

"Kids get mixed up," Montgomery says. "'Liberal' means freedom – freedom of the mind."

Marcheta Evans, president of Bloomfield College , a predominantly Black liberal arts institution in New Jersey, warns prospective students against making generalizations about student bodies at liberal arts colleges. Since the tuition for these schools is often higher than other universities, some assume only affluent students attend, which isn't true.

"Some liberal arts institutions have very privileged kids," she says. "But you also have institutions like mine, where a lot of kids are first-generation college students."

What Is a Liberal Arts College?

Liberal arts colleges are four-year undergraduate institutions that emphasize degrees in the liberal arts fields of study, including humanities, sciences and social sciences.

Maud S. Mandel, president of Williams College in Massachusetts, describes a liberal arts education as "an introduction to general knowledge." The Association of American Colleges and Universities notes its emphasis on integrating "academic and experiential learning" and developing skills "that are essential to work, citizenship, and life."

Most liberal arts colleges do not offer separate professional education programs, such as business and engineering schools, which are designed to give students specialized training for specific professional practice.

Students at liberal arts schools are typically required to take a number of general education courses, regardless of their major. At Pomona College in California, for example, students must fulfill a Social Institutions and Human Behavior requirement, and can do so by taking courses in areas such as anthropology, public policy analysis or sociology.

What Is the Difference Between Liberal Arts Colleges and Universities?

Though every liberal arts college is unique, most tend to differ from large universities in three ways:

  • Educational approach.

Liberal arts colleges tend to be smaller than large universities.

Every top 50 National Liberal Arts College in U.S. News rankings had an undergraduate enrollment of fewer than 5,000 students in fall 2020. The same was true at only eight of the top 50 National Universities ranked the same year by U.S. News.

Most liberal arts colleges do not offer graduate school programs, unlike other universities. They also tend to have small campuses and class sizes; in fact, many classes have fewer than 20 students.

Evans says some students find comfort in the sense of community that these more intimate settings can create. "Some students thrive in larger settings," she says. "Others need that smaller, family-like environment."

Compared to typical universities, students at liberal arts colleges can interact with their professors more easily and regularly because of lower student-teacher ratios, experts say.

"You have a relationship with your professors," Montgomery says. "It's a luxurious kind of education."

Peggy Baker, an independent educational consultant based in Asheville, North Carolina, says there's "real mentoring involved" in liberal arts college classrooms.

"I have students all the time who go to a liberal arts school and establish a relationship with a professor, and it makes all the difference," Baker says.

Students at liberal arts colleges typically have easier access to extracurricular activities than their counterparts at large universities, Montgomery says.

"The opportunities for leadership and participation, broadly, are greater," he says. "If you are trying to be the president of a club , you have much better odds of being it at a smaller college."

And most liberal arts colleges focus exclusively on undergraduate students. "You have that accessibility to research, or that lab assistant job, which would otherwise go to a graduate student," Baker explains.

Educational Approach

Most large universities offer Bachelor of Arts degrees, which use a liberal arts curriculum. This kind of degree emphasizes a broad education and so-called soft skills like communication and writing proficiency, analytical thinking and leadership ability.

At liberal arts colleges, Montgomery explains, all students follow this liberal arts curriculum design, regardless of major.

And he notes that students who have specific professional interests shouldn't exclude liberal arts colleges from their school search – these schools can also prepare students for careers in fields like engineering and business.

"You can still do engineering," he says. "There are places where you can do engineering and liberal arts together."

Many liberal arts colleges have Phi Beta Kappa Society chapters. Often referred to as PBK, this prestigious national academic honor society recognizes students who excelled academically in the arts and sciences at their college or university.

Many liberal arts colleges are private institutions, meaning they are not directly government-funded. As a result, liberal arts colleges are typically more reliant than public schools on tuition.

Prospective college students and their families sometimes turn away from liberal arts schools because of intimidating sticker prices – the total yearly cost of an education before any financial aid is applied. However, these numbers can be deceptive, experts point out.

Montgomery finds that liberal arts colleges are often generous in providing merit scholarships to students who demonstrate interest in their school.

"They want the students who want them," he says. "At some liberal arts colleges, 100% of the student body gets merit-based aid. In other words, no one pays the sticker price."

Evans encourages all students to consider the impact that financial aid could have on their education costs before ruling out small colleges. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly known as the FAFSA , helps determine a student's qualification for federal need-based aid such as the Pell Grant , loans and work-study . Most colleges require students to submit the form annually to be considered for institutional aid.

"Completing the FAFSA is one of the first steps you need to take before you even think about different institutions," Evans says.

When students factor merit and other aid considerations into their college pricing calculations, they may be pleasantly surprised by the final cost of attending a liberal arts college.

"There are dozens – if not hundreds – of high-quality liberal arts colleges in America that, in the end, will not be much more expensive, or maybe even the same price, as going to the flagship university in your home state," Montgomery says.

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The Value of a Liberal Arts Education is More Than Most Know

Columns appearing on the service and this webpage represent the views of the authors, not of The University of Texas at Austin.

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“What are you going to do with that?” Many new graduates will hear this question in the coming weeks.

For a business or computer science graduate, the answers seem obvious. What about someone studying a liberal arts field, like English or history or philosophy? A common misconception sees these as useless subjects or a waste of valuable resources. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Given the skills employers want, the traits we need in the next generation of leaders, and the qualities we value in our neighbors and friends, we might well ask the liberal arts grad, “What can’t you do with that?”

The main concern people have about liberal arts is marketability. Where are the jobs for people studying ancient Greek or African history? Everywhere. Because what those students are learning, alongside verb forms and dates, are the skills that appear time and again on top of employers’ wish lists. Skills such as persuasion, collaboration and creativity.

Does this mean that a liberal arts degree is as financially lucrative as computer science or petroleum engineering? No. But liberal arts majors do just fine in the workplace. Liberal arts students go on to earn good livings in a wide variety of fields, including technology.

In fact, the median annual income of a liberal arts major is just 8% lower than the median for all majors and more than one-third higher than the median income of people without a college degree.

Liberal arts offer not just financial value, but also personal, social and cultural values. The liberal arts take their name from the Latin word “liber,” which means “free.” Originally this referred to the education of free persons as distinct from slaves, but freedom is still at the root of the liberal arts. Liberal arts are a privilege of a free society, and the study of the liberal arts helps to keep us free.

Why is this? Contrary to what some would have us believe, our financial and social well-being depends on how we respond to the kinds of open-ended questions that liberal arts fields are asking. A computer scientist wants to invent a cool new app or technology. Whether he does a good job is measured by how much money his product earns.

As we see all too often, little thought is given to the social effects of these new technologies. They cause serious harm that people trained in writing computer code and making money may be unable or unwilling to address. Earnings can’t measure the things that most of us really care about when we think about new technologies.

This is where the liberal arts come in. The bedrock of a liberal arts education is the ability to understand a complex situation from many different viewpoints. To understand that the same information may look different to different people, or even to the same person at different times. We need the liberal arts to address questions that have no one right answer. And most of the important questions facing society are questions like this.

For instance, with all the technologies revolutionizing our society, how should we balance the need for accurate news and information with individual free speech? Where is the line between a legitimate business use of personal data and exploitation? Who gets to decide? So far, technology companies have done a lousy job of grappling with these questions. Some history majors, with their rich understanding of how complex forces shape society over time, would be a great idea.

Such skills have value in lots of places besides the workplace. The philosophy major on the church executive board is thinking about how the bedrock values of his community should inform decisions about replacing the roof or hiring a new Sunday school teacher. The English major participating in an environmental advocacy group can use her rhetorical and analytical skills to narrow the gap between the near-unanimous scientific consensus on climate change and political inaction on the issue.

The mistaken view that liberal arts are not financially valuable creates the more damaging idea that some fields of study have financial value, while others have social values. With liberal arts, we get both. Our society depends on it.

Deborah Beck is an associate professor of classics at The University of Texas at Austin.

A version of this op-ed appeared in The Hill .

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Liberal Arts & Sciences

Plan Your Academic Journey

The undergraduate degree is designed with flexibility in mind: you set your own academic goals, and we'll help you plan coursework to meet them—while also ensuring you receive a broad liberal arts and sciences education.

Liberal Arts & Sciences Education

Academic exploration across disciplines.

As former President Lawrence Bacow stated in his 2018 installation address, “Given the necessity today of thinking critically… a broad liberal arts education has never been more important.”

What is a "liberal arts & sciences" education?

Commitment to liberal arts & sciences is at the core of Harvard College’s mission: before students can help change the world, they need to understand it. The liberal arts & sciences offer a broad intellectual foundation for the tools to think critically, reason analytically and write clearly. These proficiencies will prepare students to navigate the world’s most complex issues, and address future innovations with unforeseen challenges. Shaped by ideas encountered and created, these new modes of thinking will prepare students for leading meaningful lives, with conscientious global citizenship, to enhance the greater good.

Harvard offers General Education courses that show the liberal arts and sciences in action. They pose enduring questions, they frame urgent problems, and they help students see that no one discipline can answer those questions or grapple with those problems on its own. Students are challenged to ask difficult questions, explore unfamiliar concepts, and indulge in their passion for inquiry and discovery across disciplines.

Concentrations

You have many options when pursuing your Harvard degree. We offer more than 3,700 courses in 50 undergraduate fields of study, which we call concentrations. A number of our concentrations are interdisciplinary.

Double Concentrations

For students interested in deeply pursuing two areas of study, the option to declare a double concentration was added in the 2022-2023 academic year. Double concentrations allow students to pursue two distinct, in-depth paths of study that do not substantially overlap. Students who pursue a double concentration do not need to write a senior thesis unless one of the fields of study is an honors-only field.

Joint Concentrations

A  joint concentration  allows students to combine two fields that are each an undergraduate concentration and integrate them into a coherent field of study. Joint concentrations culminate with an interdisciplinary senior thesis written in one of the concentrations only. In essence, joint concentrations allow an undergraduate to blend two concentrations into one cohesive unit of classes.

Special Concentrations

Special concentrations  allow you to craft a degree plan that meets a uniquely challenging academic goal. This could be an unprecedented area of research or a combination of disciplines not covered by our current offerings.

To create your own special concentration, you must submit a petition to the Standing Committee on Special Concentrations, which reviews each plan of study on an individual basis.

Harvard College Curriculum

Approximately a third of courses towards your degree fulfill Harvard   College requirements. This includes classes in the areas of General Education, Distribution, Quantitative Reasoning with Data, Expository Writing, and Language.

“We want Gen Ed to be the kind of courses faculty have always dreamed of teaching — and the kind students never forget.”*

For detailed explanations of academic requirements, consult the Harvard College Curriculum . 

Components of your degree

General education.

Harvard's Program in General Education connects students to the world beyond the classroom by focusing on urgent problems and enduring questions. Students take one course in each of four categories: Aesthetics & Culture; Ethics & Civics; Histories, Societies, Individuals; as well as Science & Technology in Society.

Distribution

The distribution requirement exposes students to the range of scholarly disciplines offered at Harvard. Students take one course in each of the three main divisions of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: Arts and Humanities; Social Sciences; as well as Science, Engineering, and Applied Sciences.

Quantitative Reasoning with Data

Quantitative Reasoning with Data courses teach students how to think critically about data. Students learn the computational, mathematical, and statistical techniques needed to understand data. They’ll also learn how to use those techniques in the real world, where data sets are imperfect and incomplete, sometimes compromised, always contingent. Finally, they’ll reflect on all the questions raised by our current uses of data — questions that are social and ethical and epistemological.

Expository Writing

The writing requirement is a one-semester course offered by the Harvard College Writing Program that focuses on analytic composition and revision. Expos courses are taken as first-year students and are taught in small seminars focusing on writing proficiency in scholarly writing. Students meet one-on-one with instructors (called preceptors) regularly to refine writing skills. Depending on the result of the summer writing placement exam, some students take a full year of Expos.

Students may take a year-long (eight credit) or two semester-long (four credits each) courses in a single language at Harvard. Courses taken abroad may also be considered with prior approval. Students who study language at Harvard will have their record updated upon successful completion of the coursework. A list of the foreign languages offered at Harvard can be found on the Arts and Humanities website .

*Quote by: Amanda Claybaugh, Dean of Undergraduate Education

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Harvard College offers several opportunities for you to pursue your academic goals.

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In addition to your concentration, you can pursue a secondary field (sometimes called a minor at other institutions). There are currently 50 secondary fields. A secondary field is an excellent way to expand your education into multiple intellectual interests. Work with your adviser to develop a plan of study that matches your goals.

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Undertaking advanced study in an ancient or modern language gives you a unique perspective the literature, history, and viewpoints of another culture. Each language citation program consists of four courses of language instruction beyond the first-year level, including at least two courses at the third-year level or beyond.

Independent Study

Independent Study allows for academic inquiry not available through regular coursework—such as an interdisciplinary investigation, an arts practice or performance study, or a field research project. Speak with your adviser to find out if this option is a good fit for you.

Fourth Year Master's Degree

Students can apply to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for a master's degree in select fields of study during their fourth year at Harvard through the Concurrent Master's Program.

Enroll at Affiliated Institutions

Harvard undergraduates can take classes at one of Harvard's ten  graduate schools  or  cross-enroll at other Boston-area institutions.

About half of all Harvard students choose an honors track within their concentration, and most of these write senior theses or complete research projects under the supervision of professors and departmental tutors.

Dual Degree Music Programs

If you are a talented musician and dedicated scholar choosing between in-depth music training and a liberal arts education, you can apply to Harvard College’s dual degree programs with the New England Conservatory (NEC) and Berklee College of Music.

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discussion questions about liberal arts education

What Does Liberal Arts Mean?

A liberal arts education offers an expansive intellectual grounding in all kinds of humanistic inquiry.

By exploring issues, ideas and methods across the humanities and the arts, and the natural and social sciences, you will learn to read critically, write cogently and think broadly. These skills will elevate your conversations in the classroom and strengthen your social and cultural analysis; they will cultivate the tools necessary to allow you to navigate the world’s most complex issues.

A liberal arts education challenges you to consider not only how to solve problems but also trains you to ask which problems to solve and why, preparing you for positions of leadership and a life of service to the nation and all of humanity. We provide a liberal arts education to all of our undergraduates, including those who major in engineering.

As President Christopher Eisgruber, Class of 1983, stated in his 2013 installation address: “[A] liberal arts education is a vital foundation for both individual flourishing and the well-being of our society.”

A commitment to the liberal arts is at the core of Princeton University's mission.

This means:

Princeton is a major research university with a profound and distinctive commitment to undergraduate education.

Our curriculum encourages exploration across disciplines, while providing a central academic experience for all undergraduates.

You will have extraordinary opportunities at Princeton to study what you are passionate about and to discover new fields of interest.

Students who elect to major in the natural sciences or engineering, for example, also take classes in history, languages, philosophy, the arts and a variety of other subjects.

You could major in computer science and earn a certificate in theater. Or major in African American studies and earn a certificate in entrepreneurship. Many other options are possible through the range of Princeton's concentrations and interdisciplinary certificate programs.

You will be exposed to novel ideas inside and outside the classroom that may change your perspective and broaden your horizons.

We value learning and research as a source of personal discovery and fulfillment — as a pleasurable and enlightening experience in its own right. But it is also a means to an end, in preparing you to live a meaningful life in service to the common good.    

Your Princeton education will facilitate your progress along whatever path you choose to pursue, and you will continually rely on what you learned here in your career and in your life.

Our graduates are prepared to address future innovations and challenges that we may not be able to even imagine today. 

We hope you will take time to explore how a commitment to the liberal arts is part of what makes Princeton special. Consider our 30+ m ajors and 50+ minors ; discover the research conducted by our distinguished faculty; engage with the range of superlative visiting scholars and artists we invite to campus each year; and imagine the quality of conversations you’ll be able to have with your professors and your peers.

Humanities Sequence

In Princeton's yearlong humanities sequence—team-taught by professors from a variety of academic disciplines—undergraduates are immerse in texts that span 2,500 years of civilization.

Seminar Class

Integrated Science Curriculum

Integrated Science is a revolutionary introductory science curriculum intended for students considering a career in science. This year-long course prepares first-year students for a major in any of the core sciences while bridging meaningfully across other disciplines.

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Engineering Studies

The School of Engineering and Applied Science challenges students to both solve problems and understand which problems are important by emphasizing fundamental principles of engineering with their connections to society.

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I came to Princeton because I wanted a liberal arts education that would enable me to pursue multiple interests rigorously and deeply. I concentrated in physics, but the courses that most shaped my intellectual life were in constitutional law, political theory and comparative literature.

- Christopher L. Eisgruber ’83, Princeton University president

Gerald W. Schlabach

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On the "core questions" for a liberal arts education

 Copyright © 1997, 1999, Gerald W. Schlabach

Questions on Liberal Arts Education

I am interested in learning about what it is like to recieve a liberal arts education and about whether a graduate can use the degree sucessfully in the real world.

Here are some questions that I have;

-How does a liberal arts education (curriculum, learning method, etc) differ from a non-liberal arts education?

-Is a liberal arts degree sufficient job training? Should it be considered as “education” only?

-How much do prospective employers respect a liberal arts degree?

-Are a graduate’s prospects limited?

-Does the average liberal arts graduate need additional education or training in order to find a good job?

-I have heard it said that a liberal arts education enables a person to pursue almost any career beause it teaches one to think critically. Is this an overstatement?

-Which of these degrees is more valuable or useful; a liberal arts degree, or a specialized degree in a non-Math or Science field (ex. History or English) earned at a non-liberal arts college?

-Would the varied curriculum offered at a liberal arts college and use of critical thinking help a student to discover talents which they may not have disovered if they did not pursue a liberal arts education?

-Do those who graduate with a liberal arts degree have a realistic view of their abilities and are sure of what occupation they want to pursue?

:slight_smile:

If you consider the curriculum at, and outcomes from, an emblematic liberal arts university such as Yale, then many of your questions will be answered.

A degree in History or English is a liberal arts degree, regardless of whether it’s earned at a liberal arts college. Likewise for math and science.

Professional and vocational degrees are not liberal arts degrees. Engineering, accounting, and nursing, for instance.

Liberal arts degrees aren’t intended to be job training. But even degrees that are intended to train you for a specific career don’t produce graduates who can work independently from Day One; they produce graduates who have enough of a foundation to be trainable. The liberal arts give you that foundation for jobs where a broad range of generalist skills are useful but no particular specialist skills are required.

The liberal arts consist of: [ul][ ]Arts (dance, music, visual arts, etc.) [ ]Humanities (art history, Classics, English, philosophy, religion, etc.) [ ]Math [ ]Sciences (biology, chemistry, geology/earth science, physics, etc.) [li]Social sciences (anthropology, geography, history, political science, sociology, etc.)[/ul][/li]Most liberal arts colleges and universities require students to select a major from among these fields. Some colleges require students to complete a core curriculum or distribution requirements (e.g. at least 2 classes each in the sciences, humanities, arts, and social sciences), whereas other colleges have no specific graduation requirements outside of completing a major. Amherst and Brown are examples of colleges that have open curriculums.

Colleges also offer “pre-professional” degrees, which prepare students for a specific career. This includes many popular majors like these: [ul][ ]Architecture [ ]Business [ ]Engineering [ ]Journalism [ ]Nursing [ ]Public Health[/ul] Students majoring in these fields may be required to take liberal arts classes on top of completing their major requirements.

Though seemingly somewhat informal in its methodology, this Forbes article on expensive colleges worth their costs emphasizes those with primarily liberal arts curricula:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliesportelli/2017/04/26/10-expensive-colleges-worth-every-penny-2017/

Thank you to everyone who have responded so far.

I should have been more specific about what I meant by “liberal arts”.

I meant to ask about a general “Bachelor of Arts” degree, an unspecialized degree, vs a specialized degree.

You’re going to have to be more specific than that. You mean something like a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies, like this: https://pacs.ou.edu/undergraduate-degrees/bachelor-liberal-studies/ or this: https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/bachelor-liberal-arts-degree ?

Those tend to be degree completion programs, for working adults who have some prior college coursework and need a degree to advance, but the credits they have don’t fulfill the requirements for any particular major. The goal is to get a college degree as quickly and efficiently as possible while working.

IMHO they’re a poor choice for people with the luxury of being full-time students.

In response to #5 , I’ll say that B.A. liberal arts programs can develop strong specialized skill sets. In a meaningful sense, a student can be considered to be a chemist or a geologist after graduating with a B.A. degree. Actually, when liberal arts colleges express their missions, developing student proficiency within a chosen area of study typically appears as a core institutional priority.

Perhaps more representative for most potential college students would be the curriculum and outcomes as a liberal arts (science, social science, humanities, arts) major at a moderately selective state university or public liberal arts college.

You mean like a Bachelor of Arts from The Evergreen State College, which has no major or general education requirements beyond completion of 180 quarter credits (equivalent to 120 semester credits)? https://www.evergreen.edu/registration/degrees

Presumably, it will qualify you for a credential-creep job or promotion where a bachelor’s degree but no specific major or course work is required. Given how many jobs are now in this category, that is a non-trivial number of jobs, although the career growth potential and pay level certainly varies.

But note that some students choose specific liberal arts majors for pre-professional reasons. For example, some math, statistics, and economics majors choose those majors intending to go into finance or actuarial jobs. Some economics majors choose it as a substitute for a business major. Some students choose majors like English, math, history, or a science intending to go into high school teaching of the subject after earning the teaching credential.

Poli sci majors often end up with jobs related to government or politics. Math or Econ majors can land positions with consulting firms like Deloitte or Accenture. One of my kids got a job as a researcher with a consulting company with her liberal arts degree, and has worked her way into several interesting positions and promotions with the firm since college.

A lot has been written on this topic because Americans still believe a broad based, widely accessed familiarity with “how the world works” is essential for democracy to function well. Some have gone even farther to suggest that America owes its trademark ability to innovate to its willingness to allow its young a prolonged period to experiment with different ways of learning.

The questions seem to revolve around the length and depth required before someone is required to go on to more practical vocational, professional, or technical training. The age of 21 has traditionally been the arbitrary transition period. In Great Britain and many parts of Europe, one can pursue law and prepare for careers in college teaching at 18 and 19 years of age. But, some would argue that is because their secondary schools are stronger and cover much of the same territory earlier.

I understand “liberal education” to mean “education for freedom” (and not just “education in many different subjects”, as the term in English might suggest). It teaches people to make disciplined use of free time, both their own leisure time and also the largely self-regulated hours employers make available to them for leadership activity and innovation. Successful, innovative companies employ liberally educated “thought leaders”, pay them well, and give them some measure of freedom/autonomy to solve challenging problems. They also tend to encourage these employees to live rich personal lives.

A liberally educated person can be trusted without coercion - but not without accountability - to make good use of one’s own time and the time of others. They are expected not only to solve problems, but also to be able to account for their solutions (or failures) by describing repeatable approaches and evidence sources. Good scholarship would appear to involve widely transferrable skills.

Such a person can be expected to understand (or try to understand) problems from the perspective of times, places, or conditions that may be unfamiliar (but also to recognize the limits of one’s own knowledge). A good liberal education probably does require exposure to a variety of subjects (typically including literature and history) but not necessarily to the exclusion of practical training.

Or so it seems to me.

Intparent: My daughter has been accepted to many colleges and she is interested in pursuing International Relations under Political Science major. All her friends are going to major in computer science or business. We always encouraged her to pursue what she is interested in. We are wondering what kind of job opportunities are available in this field.

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The value of a liberal-arts education

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Many people today are skeptical about higher education in general and the liberal arts in particular. They worry about the cost of college and the relevance of the liberal arts in the workplace. Some have a similar reaction as the gentleman seated next to me on a flight last year. When he turned to me and asked what I do, I replied that I’m president of a small liberal-arts college. “Wow,” he said. “Good luck with that.”

purpose of a liberal arts education

I’m an optimist when it comes to higher education, however, and I believe that a liberal-arts education has never been more relevant in terms of preparing young people for work and life. Every day on our campus, we’re opening minds and hearts so students can see opportunities in the world, focus their energies and collaborate with others to find new solutions to complex problems. We’re preparing them to be leaders in whatever fields they enter—individuals who are resilient in the face of change, which is the one thing they’ll surely face for the rest of their lives.

A rapidly changing world means that young people will need to know the value of seeing things from different perspectives and be experts in collaboration and communication. The only way they can prepare for the future—for jobs that don’t yet exist—is to develop nimble minds, comfort with different cultures and ideas, and skill at writing and speaking—which are all qualities developed by the liberal arts.

Unfortunately, many people make the all-too-common mistake of confusing education with training. The idea that colleges should simply be factories for producing graduates focused exclusively in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields is shortsighted. While getting a job that leads to a fulfilling career is a great reason for going to college, it certainly isn’t the only one. A liberal education—including, for example, philosophy, art and sociology as well as math and physics—educates the whole person, and prepares students to excel in a range of careers and, most importantly, live lives rich with meaning and purpose. A liberal-arts education teaches students to learn how to learn, and inspires them to go on learning throughout their lives.

Related story

  • Study backs liberal arts, but questions graduates’ competence
  • A liberal, and liberating, education
  • Why we need the liberal arts

We no longer live in a world where people hold the same jobs throughout their entire lives. Many of our students will have jobs in 10 years that don’t exist now. For that reason, our colleges must continue to prepare young people to think with rigor and creativity rather than simply train them for a particular line of work.

Here at Colorado College, we see the same traits of successful people who accomplish their goals as being nurtured by the liberal arts:

  • Resilience, or the ability to recover from setbacks and cope with stress;
  • Grit, or perseverance and passion for challenging goals;
  • Conscientiousness, or the tendency to be responsible and willing to delay gratification;
  • Creativity, or the willingness to break with convention, challenge the status quo and come up with new ideas;
  • Focus, or the ability to zero in on one thing at a time and tune out distractions; and
  • Self-regulation, or an awareness of what matters and the discipline to see something through.

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In fact, these traits, along with compassion and humility, are frequently used to describe Colorado College graduates. Our students go on to successful careers in a variety of areas. We recently queried students from the Class of 2012 and found that many of them are already pursuing meaningful new adventures across the globe.

We’re also taking care to uphold our tradition of learning for its own sake. As Colorado College professor Tim Fuller stresses in the foreword to Michael Oakeshott’s The Voice of Liberal Learning , “At some point in the educational venture, students need an interval in which they are neither simply learning school lessons nor looking to their future careers. In this interval is to be found the full flowering of liberal learning, the blossoming of human life.”

Jill Tiefenthaler is president of Colorado College.

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This is well put, though I would go even further in distinguishing “skills” from “qualities” as our focus. More here: http://bilcummings.wordpress.com/

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discussion questions about liberal arts education

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Doing Liberal Arts Education pp 1–4 Cite as

Liberal Arts Education: Changes, Challenges, and Choices

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  • Toshiaki Sasao 3  
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Despite the rising demand for vocational and practical education, the values of liberal arts education are still highly regarded, and many higher education institutions have been integrating liberal arts education as an approach to the development of a well-rounded education, flexible and creative thinking, civic engagement, and internationalization. For instance, several of the oldest, private liberal arts colleges in the USA continue to thrive and attract first-class students (Chopp R, Frost S, Weiss D (2013) Remaking college: innovation and the liberal larts. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore). East Asian universities, particularly those in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China, show an increasing interest in liberal arts education, and small, independent dedicated liberal arts colleges and general education programs have been developed in these countries (Jiang YG (2014) Liberal arts education in a changing society: A new perspective on Chinese higher education. BRILL, Leiden; Jung IS, Nishimura M, Sasao T (2016) Liberal arts education and colleges in East Asia: Possibilities and challenges in the global age. Springer, Singapore).

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Nishimura, M., Sasao, T. (2019). Liberal Arts Education: Changes, Challenges, and Choices. In: Nishimura, M., Sasao, T. (eds) Doing Liberal Arts Education. Education Innovation Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2877-0_1

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Why Is Liberal Arts Important?

Written by Scott Wilson, B.A. English

Artist working in studio

Why is liberal arts important? The liberal arts help provide a fuller, more global perspective on just about everything, including socio-political ideas that are part of modern discourse. A background in liberal arts also improves critical-thinking, reasoning, enquiry and communication skills. The liberal arts offer context for understanding modern society, which helps us both appreciate and improve the world we live in.

We don’t use broad strokes to paint the picture of why liberal arts is important because it makes it easier to cover everything. It’s actually the best way to discuss an area of study that is broad by its very nature. We talk about big ideas like ethics, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication because that’s what the liberal arts are all about.

Narrow perspectives and rigid thinking, in the broad span of human history, have almost always led to bad things. Adaptation, on the other hand, the flexibility to adjust and to succeed through creativity and innovation, is the hallmark of humankind.

You Appreciate the Importance of Liberal Arts When You Imagine the World Without It

It’s sometimes useful to look at why liberal arts is important by looking at situations where a lack of liberal arts training has led to massive failure.

Understanding Cultural Nuance is About More than Just Being Cultured

Munich, Germany skyline with mountains in the background

The company failed to account for any cultural differences between German and American markets. The ubiquitous Walmart greeter, stationed at the door to welcome every customer, made Germans uncomfortable right at the outset. Unlike Americans, who browse stores, many German customers preferred to get in and get out, and were not susceptible to the stocking strategy that spread preferred products out in hopes of striking impulse buys.

The company also blew cultural connections with their own workforce, requiring public expressions of corporate morale that were seen as rude and inappropriate. Worse, the company imported a mandatory policy requiring employees to report coworkers who violate company rules. With the specter of Gestapo informants and neighborhood spies still hanging over the country from the Second World War, local employees had little stomach for it.

In less than ten years, the company abandoned their German experiment, leaving behind a whole lot of money and fodder for business school case studies that will last for decades. The whole German effort collapsed both inside and out.

A professional education focused on economics, business organization, and markets by itself didn’t prevent Walmart executives from making such an expensive blunder. But a liberal arts education would have told them they needed to expect some cultural conflict.

What Does it Mean to Have a Liberal Arts Education?

How could those Walmart executives have gotten that cultural perspective they so badly needed? Maybe less time in MBA programs and more time studying history and culture, for starters.

A liberal arts education hands you the knowledge to compare situations to analogous events from a wide range of fields and trains you in the analytical skills you need to assess and decide on a response. Rather than cramming facts and figures into your head, liberal studies teach you the tools for finding the facts on your own through research, logic, and observation.

There’s a strong element of experiential learning in liberal studies programs that also gives you real-world experience and enough confidence in your own skills to make those decisions.

Maybe above all, liberal arts teach you that there are always options. You have a toolbox with more equipment in it than people who have only had a specialized education. Your ability to look at the world through more than one lens will let you see things that other people won’t.

Why Liberal Arts Is Important For Individuals and For Society

Successful woman with arms in the air

Liberal arts is important for creativity. Creativity is a mysterious subject but it’s thought to involve making obscure connections between different fields of knowledge. It goes without saying that you have to have access to those different fields of knowledge before those connections can be made. Liberal arts, by spreading itself across disciplines ranging from physics to politics, is an excellent way to equip yourself for creativity and discovery.

Liberal arts is important for context. Like Walmart, many failures in modern society result from a lack of context. An education in liberal arts is a constant reminder that our individual experiences are grains of sand in the bigger picture. Learning to place our own perspectives in the broader context is invaluable for understanding others.

Liberal arts is important for self-confidence. Liberal studies also force you to think through your own ideas and reasoning. You’re constantly confronted with other examples, with challenges to facile thinking, with new information that can change your mind. Far from discouraging most students, this constant loop of taking in new information and dealing with the implications helps build confidence in your ability to apply logic and cope with any new situation the world throws at them.

Liberal arts is important for learning. Learning, the act and ability to take in and apply new information, is innate in human beings. But at the same time, it is a skill that can be practiced, improved, and honed. Liberal studies do all those things, pushing your brain to absorb and reflect on new inputs all the time. That makes it easier for the next batch of new data to come in and incorporate itself into your knowledge base.

Liberal arts is important for humanity. Understanding and empathy are key pieces in determining how people treat other people. A course of study in liberal arts forces you to put yourself in the shoes of others, to consider their lives and actions in light of your own perspectives and culture, to reflect on both differences and similarities. Exposure to art, writing, and history offers an appreciation of others in a way that a professional or vocational education never even attempt.

Liberal arts is important for communication. An ability to express yourself accurately and concisely is an act of empowerment. Communications skills are not something we are born with, however. By exposing you to great literature, rhetorical devices, and methods of elocution, liberal studies help you share your own humanity, your own ideas, in ways that strengthen your place in the human community.

Those are all valuable traits not just for individuals, but for civilization as we know it. The humanities brought the Enlightment, an end to slavery, and an awakening to environmental catastrophe. When you need big picture thinking, you need liberal arts. And there’s always a need for big picture thinking.

The Importance of Staying Flexible and Nimble in the Marketplace

Streaming apps on tv

Each Blockbuster could store only a limited number of videos. They had to pressure customers to return them. Even then, popular films were often unavailable.

With a centralized, online model, combined with a new, cheaply-mailed video technology (the DVD), Hastings and Randolph realized they could stock and ship enough films that customers could be allowed to basically return them on their own schedule. It was a killer application of two unrelated trends.

During a rough patch in the early 2000s, Netflix offered to sell to Blockbuster. The CEO, with a technical background in business administration, saw only the numbers and not the human elements of the model. He declined to buy.

Today, Netflix is a $200 billion business and Blockbuster no longer exists.

It’s ultimately up to every student to ask themselves – what is the purpose of liberal arts in my own education? It’s an enormous field, and an evolving one too, so the answer to that question can change over time.

It’s easy to see why liberal arts is important in the context of human history, and not too difficult to understand how it can serve society well into the future.

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What Are the Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education?

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Cece Gilmore is a Content Writer at Scholarships360. Cece earned her undergraduate degree in Journalism and Mass Communications from Arizona State University. While at ASU, she was the education editor as well as a published staff reporter at Downtown Devil. Cece was also the co-host of her own radio show on Blaze Radio ASU.

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Bill Jack has over a decade of experience in college admissions and financial aid. Since 2008, he has worked at Colby College, Wesleyan University, University of Maine at Farmington, and Bates College.

discussion questions about liberal arts education

Maria Geiger is Director of Content at Scholarships360. She is a former online educational technology instructor and adjunct writing instructor. In addition to education reform, Maria’s interests include viewpoint diversity, blended/flipped learning, digital communication, and integrating media/web tools into the curriculum to better facilitate student engagement. Maria earned both a B.A. and an M.A. in English Literature from Monmouth University, an M. Ed. in Education from Monmouth University, and a Virtual Online Teaching Certificate (VOLT) from the University of Pennsylvania.

What Are the Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education?

If you are exploring higher education options, you may be wondering what the benefits of a liberal arts education are. The quick answer is that a liberal arts education curriculum allows students to explore various subjects rather than preparing for a specific career. If this type of degree sounds interesting, keep reading to learn more about the benefits of a liberal arts education! 

What is a liberal arts education vs. a liberal arts college? 

A liberal arts education focuses mainly on arts, sciences, humanities, and social sciences. A liberal arts education is usually found at smaller liberal arts colleges, but some large universities have smaller programs that offer a liberal arts curriculum. Larger universities are better known for preparing students for a particular career in a specific subject. Meanwhile, a liberal arts college encourages students to find an appreciation of (and connection between) all subjects. A liberal arts curriculum is designed to be very flexible and encourages students to try out different subjects before declaring their major. 

Related:  What are the NESCAC schools?

Many liberal arts colleges are defined by the following characteristics: 

  • Small student population
  • High number of residential students
  • Intimate feel of small classes
  • Heavy focus on academics

Read more : What is a liberal arts degree? 

The benefits of a liberal arts education

Interdisciplinary approach to learning.

A liberal arts education focuses on exposing students to a wide array of subjects. For example, math majors will take art classes and pre-med majors will take sociology classes. This type of broad education helps prepare students to succeed in whatever career path they choose. 

Opportunities to pursue a variety of career options

The exploratory nature of a liberal arts education allows students to discover what subjects they do and do not like. As students grow and evolve during their four years of college, they may learn that their original future plans are not something they wish to pursue long term. Luckily, a liberal arts education is the perfect way to explore subjects and find true passion. In addition, a liberal arts education allows students to keep their career options open because they will learn transferable skills rather than one specific skill set. 

Also see:  Top liberal arts colleges

Many liberal arts colleges are small institutions, especially when compared to public universities. Having a small size allows students to create a more intimate and close-knit environment to thrive in. In addition, small class sizes can help create a more hands-on, personalized learning environment for students. 

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Director of Undergraduate Admissions

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Learn critical skills

A liberal arts education strives to teach students important problem-solving and critical thinking skills. The goal is  to teach students “how” to think, not what to think. Meaning, rather than memorizing facts, students learn to examine, think, and connect ideas. The skills learned in a liberal arts education can help students outside of the classroom as they navigate the real world. 

Strong alumni presence

Due to the smaller size of most liberal arts colleges, they tend to have very involved alumni. This allows current students to connect and have mentoring opportunities with alumni. In turn, students learn through example about what can be accomplished with a  liberal arts education. 

Interactive classes

The smaller class sizes at liberal arts colleges and programs lead to a more interactive and engaging learning environment. A low student to faculty ratio often fosters deeper classroom connections and learning to occur. 

Post-graduation jobs

Liberal arts degree graduates learn broad skills that are valued by employers . For example, critical thinking, communication, and an open mind are just a few of the attributes that liberal arts education students are known for. 

Related: How to land a job after college

What can you do with a liberal arts degree? 

You can ultimately pursue whatever field you want after you receive a liberal arts degree. However, some common careers include:

  • Advertising manager
  • Social worker
  • Business analyst
  • Public relations specialist

Related: How to choose a college

Is a liberal arts education worth it? 

Ultimately, it is completely dependent upon you. Students have to figure out if the exploratory curriculum of a liberal arts college will best suit their needs. If you are going to college strictly as a way to land a specialized and/or higher-paying job, a liberal arts education may not be what you’re looking for. But if you hope to broaden your educational horizons and combine academic disciplines to reach a greater understanding of the world, it is probably a great fit.

No matter what educational path you take, paying for tuition will likely be a factor. Luckily, you can use our handy dandy free scholarship search tool to help you fund your education. 

Also see: Is college worth it?

Key Takeaways

  • A liberal arts education curriculum allows students to explore various subjects rather than preparing for a specific career
  • A liberal arts education is often found at liberal arts colleges, but larger schools have liberal arts programs as well
  • A liberal arts curriculum offers an interdisciplinary approach to learning
  • Liberal arts majors have opportunities to explore different subjects without committing to a career
  • Small liberal arts colleges or programs have close knit learning environments and ample opportunities to connect with professors and alumni
  • Employers value job applicants who come from a liberal arts background

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Pericles Lewis

Yale university, liberal education and innovation, speech by pericles lewis, president, yale-nus college symposium on university as a source of innovation and economic development stanford center, peking university 4 october 2014.

Enge Wang, President, Peking University,

John Etchemendy, Provost, Stanford University,

Richard Saller, Dean, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University,

Colleagues,

Liberal education is among the most honored but also the most contested creations of the modern university system, a mode of learning broadly and deeply which has inspired new programs and schools throughout Asia and beyond, even as it has become a site of debate in the United States.  21 st -century liberal education should draw on the traditional strengths of the liberal arts tradition, which I will describe today as a series of conversations. At the same time, I will recognize certain important criticisms of existing liberal education programs, which focus on the shaping of students’ characters through education.  Finally, I will describe the founding of a new liberal education institution, Yale-NUS College, which is envisioned as a community of learning.  I hope, then, to define what is living in the tradition of liberal arts education, what are its current failings, and what innovations can be introduced in order to re-envision this form of education for a complex, interconnected world.

I will speak broadly of liberal education, but I have in mind especially the form of education in the liberal arts and sciences practiced in the best colleges and universities in the United States, as contrasted with university systems that emphasize relatively early specialization, such as have been common in Asia at least since the Second World War.

While I myself attended a university with such a program, McGill University, where I took a three-year honors degree in English literature, my experience in graduate school at Stanford and as a faculty member at Yale University in the United States and more recently in Singapore at Yale-NUS College, has convinced me that a broader, four-year program spanning the breadth of the humanities and sciences promises a better foundation for future global citizens.  In a broad sense, of course, my training at McGill was also a form of liberal education, and perhaps more important than the distinction between curricula with greater specialization or greater depth is the broad spirit of liberal learning which is present in many great colleges and universities and is certainly not the exclusive preserve of the American form of liberal education.  So I am speaking today both about the specifics of a particular kind of curriculum and about the broader principles underlying liberal education in general.  I should emphasize too that a liberal education includes science so I am not advocating for a liberal education at the expense of STEM education; rather, I think the two should be integrated.

There are at least five good reasons to pursue a liberal education, and to provide one for our students:

The most commonly cited reason, and a very important one, is to make students into better-informed citizens.  By developing their critical reasoning skills, and by practicing the art of discussion and consensus in a classroom, they become better able to debate matters of public importance and to arrive at reasoned agreement, or reasoned disagreement, with their peers in the political sphere.

Another reason, equally valid and perhaps even more important to some parents and governments, is to create more innovative workers.  Technical education is extremely important for the development of industrial society, but in the post-industrial world, employers value skills such as creativity, the ability to “think outside the box,” openness to multiple perspectives; and liberal education fosters these traits.

Certain forms of liberal education also prepare students well for life in a multi-cultural or cosmopolitan society by making them aware of a variety of cultures and the need to communicate effectively across cultures.

More fundamental than any of these, perhaps, is the ethical case for liberal education.  Socrates said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”  Liberal education fosters habits of self-awareness and self-criticism and makes us aware of the importance of examining our own prejudices and assumptions.

Finally, and most intangibly, liberal education allows the individual a greater enjoyment of life; whether it is in appreciating a work of art, understanding an argument in philosophy or an equation in mathematics, or exploring the diversity of the natural world. To be broadly educated provides pleasure and depth to the experience of life, something that has been recognized both in China and the West for centuries. It is recorded in the Analects that Confucius said, “’The gentleman is not a [one-purpose] vessel.’” 君子不器 (Analects [Lunyu] 2.11). As the Song-dynasty Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi [Shee] explains in his commentary to the passage: “Vessels are things that each fulfill a particular function yet cannot be used interchangeably. A man of accomplished virtue embodies [a broad learning] that incorporates everything, and thus he is completely well-rounded in his applications, and not merely someone who displays a single talent or skill.”

Part I: Conversation

Liberal education depends on conversation.  Conversation between a teacher and a student; conversation among students inside and outside the classroom; conversations with the traditions of learning; conversations with the past.

The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer spoke of the encounter with a text from the past in terms of a “fusion of horizons,” an expression that has always reminded me of the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, whose “Stormy Sea Breaking on a Shore” from the Yale Center for British Art is shown here. As Gadamer explains in an important passage from Truth and Method , “The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point.”  Metaphorically, we can speak of people with narrow or broad horizons, that is people who have very limited ideas and people who see many other points of view.  What is important about the metaphor of the horizon is that it both suggests that we can see a certain distance and calls attention to the limited range of our sight.  There is always something beyond our horizon that we do not yet know or have not yet seen.  The nature of a conversation, including conversations with texts, is that we try to make our horizon match the horizon of the person we’re talking to. Gadamer gives as an example of an unproductive conversation the oral examination, in which the examiner seeks to find out what the examinee knows, but not really to learn from him or her, and not to arrive at a real understanding.    By contrast with this, the true “fusion of horizons” for Gadamer consists in really engaging with the other and thus in opening up our horizon for possible changes.  Our horizon is always ready to change as we grow and learn and develop, and the real fusion of horizons with the past involves the potential for such change.  Our encounter with the past, Gadamer argues, is part of what allows this development.  The problem of interpretation, as he also says, is the problem of all understanding, namely how to engage in this dialogue with others, with texts, with the world, by which we at once challenge our own horizons and seek to learn something from and speak back to the rest of the world.

Now Gadamer was concerned with the philosophy of interpretation, but it is no accident that the most characteristic form of liberal arts education in the United States is the seminar in which a professor and a group of students grapple with the interpretation of an important text, or work of art, or piece of evidence.  Liberal education allows students to test their own ideas against those of their classmates, their professors, the great works of the past, and the most important current research in their fields of study.  It also demands that they learn some of the tools of interpretation in a variety of disciplines, so that they can approach problems from multiple perspectives.  Ideally, liberal education also leads students from different backgrounds to encounter diverse and disparate cultures. Not only do students bring these distant cultures together through their studies, but they themselves encounter different backgrounds and patterns of thought through the diverse student body with which they share this educational journey. Indeed, liberal education leads students not just to encounter distant cultures, but to redefine what they understand as “distant,” forming their own pictures of the world and its global conversations.

In the context of liberal education, students are encouraged to enter into such conversations first-hand, through small classes, discussion groups, and laboratories. Here, they become active participants in their own learning process, deriving new, diverse methods for encountering problems ranging from social inequality to the age of the universe. Working alongside their fellow students, they are encouraged to broaden their perspectives and to solve problems within a group, making decisions on the basis of others’ advice, but also learning to be accountable for their own ideas and contributions [see Laloux, 100-4].  This feature of liberal education is one of the reasons that it can propel students toward innovative approaches, which can be valuable in their later working life. Through this group work, students come to recognize that innovation is not just the product of a single brilliant mind working in a vacuum, but of the continued, concerted efforts of teams that discuss, encourage, criticize, test, and refine new ideas.

Such conversations between individual students and the group or groups in which they participate become part of daily life through the system of residential colleges.  The collegiate model goes all the way back to medieval Oxford and Cambridge, but similar communities of learning existed in China even earlier. By living alongside peers with a variety of different backgrounds, experiences, and interests, students learn to coexist with others, even in situations where their opinions or expectations may differ widely from one another. [see Harry Lewis, 79] Residential colleges continue the work of liberal education beyond the classroom, promoting compromise over unilateral decision-making, and a recognition of others’ humanity and worth over the primacy of a single student’s individual needs. Students become leaders among their peers, but also learn to listen to what their peers have to say, forging and evaluating solutions together. Further, residential colleges lead students to see their education not as a “job” that is localized to a single classroom or laboratory, but as a vocation, a collection of many “roles” that they play in relation to others [Laloux, 90, 119]. By learning to move fluidly among these roles and to integrate education into their everyday lives, students create an innovative space in which they might reevaluate and adapt the lessons of the classroom into real-world conversations.  In such communities, students participate in the sports, clubs, societies, musical groups, and student publications that create a lively civil society in parallel with the official curriculum taught by the faculty. Supported by a residential staff that pays attention to their emotional and social needs, students find this period of their lives a great opportunity for personal growth and for developing their abilities as citizens and leaders.

Despite liberal education’s broad success in fostering an environment that promotes conversation and innovation, there remain aspects of a traditional liberal education that call for reform and innovation. This is a task which has been taken up both in the older liberal arts institutions of the West and in the new or recreated institutions of Asia. To say that liberal education requires some rethinking in the twenty-first century is simply to recognize that colleges and universities, like other great institutions, must change in response to history, technology, and the needs of our students [Laloux, 15]. I want to outline here a few of liberal education’s pitfalls, so that we can then discuss how this form of learning might be improved and enlivened to serve the needs of our twenty-first-century students.  It seems to me that the most telling critiques of liberal education can be summarized in terms of the problem of character.

On the one hand, colleges and universities have often promised to shape the character of their students, while on the other, critics such as the former Harvard College Dean Harry Lewis (no relation) and my friend and former Yale colleague William Deresiewicz have pointed to weaknesses especially in elite American educational institutions.  While I do not share all of their analyses of the situation, I do think they raise important issues.  As competition for entry into the top institutions continues to increase, there are risks that those who attend, for example, Ivy League colleges, will come from a narrower stratum of society, will see themselves as entitled, will avoid risks and stick to safe subjects and pursuits, and will be treated by their institutions as the customers who are proverbially always right rather than challenged to grow and sometimes to fail.

Probably the most important issue here is one of access.  Given increasingly tough competition for spots in the top universities of the world, those born into privileged families can take advantage of better primary and secondary education, tutors, admissions coaches, and other advantages that help them to gain admission to elite institutions.  These institutions have recognized the problem and devoted considerable resources to seeking out students from poor backgrounds or from under-represented minorities, but it is still the case that most students at Ivy League colleges come from families that are upper middle-class or wealthy, and that relatively few talented students from the poorer segments of society receive the kind of college preparation that allows them to attend the Ivy League.  Even among those who might benefit from an Ivy League education, ignorance of the opportunities or fear of the cost may prevent them from applying.  This is not a problem with an easy solution; colleges and universities rightly seek to promote diversity, but ultimately some of these problems are a product of a stratified social structure and the poor opportunities at earlier levels of education for the underprivileged in the United States.  Having lived in Canada, the United States, and now Singapore, I suppose the best I could hope would be that the United States might adopt a public education system more like Canada’s or Singapore’s so that more of its young people would be ready for the opportunities presented by its outstanding university system.  In the meantime, colleges and universities should continue to seek out a diverse array of students with high potential and should place greater emphasis on developing an ethos of service among their students so that those who are privileged to attend the great universities recognize their responsibility for giving back to the broader community.  Even among the children of the elite who do ultimately get in to the top universities, there may be negative effects in the pressure of competing for these spots. One risk is that high school students (and even younger children) who are influenced by well-meaning but driven parents might learn to view their studies and extracurricular activities only through the prism of what will get them into the College of their dreams, and that the joy of learning for its own sake, or playing a sport or a musical instrument, or participating in a life-enhancing activity, will be reduced to a line on an admissions form or “brag sheet.”

One of the main criticisms of the liberal education provided once students arrive at leading institutions has been that it caters more to student desires or fads than to challenging students or building their characters [Lewis, 93 ff .]. In many curricula, for instance, relatively weak general education requirements have allowed the opening of a rift between disciplines, with the humanities and natural sciences on opposite sides of this divide and the social sciences hovering somewhat uncertainly toward the middle. In this situation – a modern variant of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” – students and faculty seem increasingly unable to traverse the space between the disciplines. Humanities majors think that science is too “difficult” or “objective”; science majors think that the humanities are too “soft” or “subjective.” If given the opportunity, many students avoid taking courses outside of their own discipline, or, in the case of “distribution requirements,” they often take the easiest, most watered-down courses they can find. This situation does not, as some might think, help students to specialize in a single field, but rather, makes certain that they will remain distrustful of concepts and forms of learning beyond their own blinkered purview. In fact, this isolation of the disciplines prevents innovation, since it stands in the way of students bringing together multiple disciplines in order to make all of their studies richer, adapting vocabularies and ideas from one discipline to another in order to create an interdisciplinary conversation. Rather than building students’ characters through intellectual and interdisciplinary challenges, such forms of liberal education allow them to remain within their academic comfort zones.

Furthermore, in many liberal education programs and particularly in the United States, curricula artificially limit the scope of their students’ education even before they arrive on campus. Even in institutions that boast cohesive, challenging liberal education curricula, the focus is often exclusively on Western thought, with relatively weak gestures toward comparison with sources outside of Western Europe and America. In addition, many schools place a disproportionate focus on liberal education in the humanities, with students required to take only superficial, watered-down courses in quantitative or natural sciences. This exacerbates the “two cultures” problem, and, ironically, does a disservice to both sides of the disciplinary divide, since it paints the humanities as easy enough for any student to learn, marks the sciences as too difficult, and provides students with a rather lopsided, insufficiently challenging education.

One further challenge of current liberal education programs bears mentioning: the problem of forging a deeper link between living and learning, between undergraduate student life and the educational mission of the college or university. Student extracurricular life can be a source of education as lasting and important as that of the formal curriculum, but there are also many institutions where extracurricular life is dominated by partying or where well-meaning student life staff are not really seen as partners in the educational enterprise.  Such institutions lose the opportunity for many of the important synergies that make college a time not only for intellectual but also for personal and civic growth.

Finally, a common complaint about academia today concerns the perceived over-emphasis on research at the expense of teaching.  While I do think that there are a number of problems with the incentive structure in academia that sometimes grant tenure and promotion to indifferent or even bad teachers, and that discourage some faculty from truly engaging with their students, I think that it would be a mistake to assume that the relationship between research and teaching is a zero-sum game. Some faculty may ignore their teaching duties while pushing to get tenure; others may churn out publications of minimal importance. For the most part, however, the opportunity to conduct specialized research allows faculty to develop their knowledge of their fields and to hone their own intellects, allowing them to share this learning, in turn, with their students.  The caricature of the researcher who sees students as a mere distraction is, in my experience, unrepresentative.  Most faculty seek a balance between teaching and research, and many of the best researchers are in fact also excellent teachers, because the factors that go into good research and good teaching are closely intertwined: intelligence, devotion to learning, and hard work.  There is, however, some risk that by over-emphasizing research in our rewards system (tenure, promotion, salary), we might encourage faculty to become too absorbed in their research and that this has a negative impact on their teaching, too, as they may undergraduates like proto-graduate students, grading undergraduate work as if it were a credential for graduate school rather than tailoring courses to fit undergraduate needs, and expecting students to become premature specialists rather than allowing them to explore subjects broadly.

The challenge here lies in balance. Faculty should have the freedom to pursue their own research, so that they can advance knowledge and infuse their teaching with new, future-facing ideas. They should also teach a curriculum that is inspiring and demanding, yet tailored to a class of undergraduates who likely will not become specialists in a given academic field. Instead, professors should teach students with the expectation that they will be adapting their liberal education to a world beyond the academy, from the arts to law, medicine to business, government to non-governmental organizations. They need not pander to students’ career goals, but should allow this breadth of application to infuse their approach to their specialized subjects, allowing both students and faculty to see beyond the subject at hand to its larger importance. Finally, faculty should serve not just as teachers, but also as mentors to their students, bridging the gap between the time in the classroom and students’ lives beyond. In some liberal education institutions, this bridge is facilitated by designated faculty who live on campus as residential fellows but it need not be so formal. Faculty should embody for their students the connection – yet another ongoing conversation – between learning and life.

As twenty-first-century educators, how might we address these challenges of liberal education while also retaining the traditional strengths of this mode of education? How might we create an innovative form of liberal education which itself promotes innovation? These are questions that my colleagues and I have asked ourselves repeatedly as we’ve forged ahead in the process of creating a new institution for liberal education at Yale-NUS College. It’s a rare and exciting opportunity to draw on the history of the liberal arts and sciences and on current best practices, and then to then apply one’s findings to a practical outcome [cf. UVA: Roth, 27], yet at Yale-NUS, this is precisely the chance we’ve experienced over the past several years. As all of us here are well aware, some of the most innovative applications of liberal education these days are to be found not just in the ivy-covered institutions of the United States but in the ancient courtyards and quickly rising campuses of Asia. The opportunity to think about new or renovated Asian versions of liberal education gives us the opportunity to see what is most relevant in these methods and what can be adapted for greater success in the future.

One of the first innovations that we introduced at Yale-NUS was a rigorous common curriculum. This addressed several of the pitfalls I’ve just discussed by including texts both Western and non-Western, pairing Confucius with Aristotle, the Odyssey with the Ramayana, and also bringing modern texts from throughout Asia and the West in conversation with each other. Such a comparative approach is not just limited to the humanities, as courses on “Comparative Social Institutions” and “Historical Immersion” carry this global scope into the social sciences, as well. In addition, our common curriculum gives a broad and rigorous introduction to the methods of the humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences. Out of ten required courses, three are focused in the natural sciences, and one in quantitative reasoning. Rather than treating non-majors to watered-down courses, each course in our common curriculum is designed to challenge students to understand a variety of disciplinary approaches and ways of thinking. This teaches students to become proficient in and understand the applications of multiple subjects, as well as to bring these together in their work in and beyond the university.

We created the common curriculum with one central question in mind: “What must a young person learn in order to lead a responsible life in this century?” In other words, what education must we provide for our students such that they continue to learn and create new ideas once they leave our campus? How do we ensure that they live what Socrates called “the examined life,” thinking critically about their own values, and at the same time have the opportunity for an active life, one that allows them to make a difference beyond the campus walls.

One solution was already open to us: by placing our school in Asia, we were able to bring together students from a variety of backgrounds, including adventurous students from all over the world. To give you a sense of the resulting diversity, our entering class in 2013, comprising about 150 students, was about 40% international, including students from six continents—only Antarctica has escaped our intrepid admissions officers! This sort of diversity allows students to explore new practices and viewpoints simply by working with their peers. It also allows them to embrace risk and the possibility of failure [Tellis, Black], since our students know that they will encounter others with habits, traditions, and languages that are entirely new to them, and that they will have to test and retest methods for finding a middle ground. Because our students have come from far and near, and from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, they are primed to become self-reliant and to probe traditional knowledge with an open but critical mind [Roth, 60-3]. We strive to capitalize upon these instincts through an education that leads them even further beyond their comfort zones. As an international community of learning, we teach our students to to discover and create new opportunities in their world.

As I’ve already mentioned, we have also refocused our liberal education curriculum to include in-depth scientific training for all students, as well as required classes in social science and quantitative methods. This, too, challenges students to move beyond their areas of comfort and to gain the knowledge that will help them to study and evaluate their quickly changing world. In the course of the past decade, much has been said about the failure of traditional liberal education programs to furnish students with the tools to make wise financial decisions or to vote on hot-topic political issues. By introducing all of our students not just to “science” or “math,” but to the structure of scientific inquiry – we are providing them with the vocabulary and confidence to think critically within their own disciplines and future careers, as well as to become responsible citizens and leaders. At times, innovation means simply possessing the awareness of what needs innovating, and we expect that a training in all three branches – science, social science, and humanities – will equip our students with precisely this skill.

In addition to this in-class curriculum, we’ve designed a program that requires students to bring their campus-bound learning into the world, to make education into innovation. All students at Yale-NUS take part in a program called “Learning Across Boundaries,” in which students spend a week in off-campus projects, becoming immersed in such topics as biodiversity in Spain, Burmese literature, or Buddhist philosophy in Kyoto, Japan. Much like the “20% time” set aside by major corporations for their employees to pursue self-driven, innovative projects [Tellis], these off-campus trips provide students with a canvas on which to experiment with the skills they’ve learned in class. Students are driven to understand the world not just intellectually, but practically, to apply their education as a basis for engagement and empathy [Roth, 18]. By going out into the world as a part of their common curriculum at Yale-NUS, students practice bridging the gap between world and campus, precisely the same bridge that they will cross as they graduate from our institution. We hope that this practice in bringing liberal education to real-world applications will allow our students to replicate and expand upon their experiences at Yale-NUS by creating their own innovations in the world. This is our tradition of innovation.

In building innovation into the foundational structure of liberal education at Yale-NUS, we’ve also sought to recruit our faculty as champions of innovation and change. By placing faculty in “divisions” that are inherently interdisciplinary, we strive to break down the silos inherited from the traditional nineteenth-century organization of research universities, resulting in an integration of disciplines that is emulated in our students’ common curriculum. Faculty participate in workshops and teach in teams that help them to generate new ideas regarding both research and pedagogy.

Through a broad but well-defined and intensive common curriculum, the integration of different disciplines, the drawing together of world and campus, and finally the recruitment of an energetic faculty with a strong commitment to undergraduate education, we at Yale-NUS have striven to create an international community of learning. Our community is founded in the conversations facilitated by the liberal education tradition and it addresses head-on the challenges that liberal education has confronted as it adapts to the twenty-first century and spreads throughout the world. Most of all, our community is founded on the idea that we wish to teach students to anticipate change, to ask future-facing questions, to take on risks, and to carry their learning beyond the walls of our campus. Through interdisciplinary, international knowledge, through self-reliance and teamwork, we wish to create a campus of innovators.  We have summarized our mission as follows:

A Community of Learning Founded by two great universities In Asia, for the world.

I am honored to share this vision with colleagues here in China, and I hope that the traditions of liberal education will continue to enliven Asian educational systems in the generations to come, shaping a generation of Asian leaders who are also citizens of the world.

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As researchers and scholars, our faculty is second to none. We are proudest, though, of our students who are learning to probe the big questions and develop the analytical and interpretive skills to address them.

What is a Liberal Arts Education?

A liberal arts education provides an opportunity to go beyond disciplines and specializations to examine the meaning of being human..

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A liberal arts education develops your capacities to analyze, to synthesize, to interpret, to visualize, to craft an argument, to ask important questions, and to grapple with evidence, whether visual, textual or virtual. These capacities are vital for a wide range of future careers, including the scientific, engineering and medical professions. More importantly, subjects like philosophy, religion, literary and visual cultures, history of society and history of art, prepare students to make an impact on the world, as citizens and as thought leaders.

At STEM-strong universities like Rice, the liberal arts provide a course of study focused on critical interpretation, analysis, gathering of evidence and analytic writing. Liberal arts courses provide the “big picture” that connects all of your areas of learning into a vital foundation for your future.

It should not take a pandemic, or a prolonged crisis of democracy, to show us just how important the liberal arts are in preparing students to engage critically with challenges to social and scientific knowledge, and to lead the social, cultural and economic processes of the future toward a more just and equitable civil society for all.

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Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?

By Emma Green

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The first thing you notice when walking into the middle-school classrooms at Brilla, a charter-school network in the South Bronx, is the sense of calm. No phones are out. The students are quiet—not in the beaten-down way of those under authoritarian rule but in the way of those who seem genuinely interested in their work. Sixth graders participate in a multiday art project after studying great painters such as Matisse. Seventh graders prepare to debate whether parents should be punished for the crimes of their minor children. Another group of sixth graders, each holding a violin or a cello, read out notes from sheet music. A teacher cues them to play the lines pizzicato, and they pluck their strings in unison.

Brilla is part of the classical-education movement, a fast-growing effort to fundamentally reorient schooling in America. Classical schools offer a traditional liberal-arts education, often focussing on the Western canon and the study of citizenship. The classical approach, which prioritizes some ways of teaching that have been around for more than two thousand years, is radically different from that of public schools, where what kids learn—and how they learn it—varies wildly by district, school, and even classroom.

In many public schools, kids learn to read by guessing words using context clues, rather than by decoding the sounds of letters. In most classical schools, phonics reign, and students learn grammar by diagramming sentences. Some public schools have moved away from techniques like memorization, which education scholars knock as “rote learning” or “drill and kill”—the thing that’s killed being a child’s desire to learn. In contrast, classical schools prize memory work, asking students to internalize math formulas and recite poems. And then there’s literature: one New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity featuring characters named Aristotle and Dante. In classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.

Classical education has historically been promoted by religious institutions and expensive prep schools. (Many classical schools have adopted the Harkness method, pioneered by Phillips Exeter Academy, in which students and teachers collectively work through material via open discussion.) More recently, powerful investors have seen its potential for cultivating academic excellence in underserved populations: the Charter School Growth Fund, a nonprofit whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies, has put millions of dollars into classical schools and networks.

Republican politicians have also smelled opportunity in the movement, billing its traditionalism as an antidote to public-school wokeism. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, has railed against “a concerted effort to inject this gender ideology” into public-school classrooms, and has celebrated the influx of classical schools in his state. Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, proposed launching up to a hundred classical charter schools statewide, touting their mission to preserve American liberty. As more conservatives have flocked to classical education, progressive academics have issued warnings about the movement, characterizing it as a fundamentally Christian project that doesn’t include or reflect the many kids in America who aren’t white, or who have roots outside this country. The education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch recently wrote that classical charters “have become weapons of the Right as they seek to destroy democratically governed public schools while turning back the clock of education and social progress by a century.”

Stephanie Saroki de Garcia, who co-founded Brilla, acknowledged that “classical education is often seen as a white child’s education.” This is partly because of the curriculum: “You’re talking about teaching the canon and mainly white, male authors,” she said. It’s also because these schools have been embraced by white Republicans who have the resources to keep their children out of the local school system. And yet Brilla is not rich, or white, or discernibly right-wing. Many students are English-language learners and immigrants, from Central America and West Africa. According to Brilla’s leaders, nearly ninety per cent of their students meet the federal requirements for free or reduced-price lunches. Saroki de Garcia purposefully opened the first Brilla school in the poorest neighborhood of the Bronx, which has a large population of Latino Catholics. (Brilla is secular, but it offers a free Catholic after-school program.) The students I met were nerdy and earnest, and far from young reactionaries. Angelina and Fatumata, two eighth graders, told me that they started a book club to read about racism in America; one recent pick was “Passing,” the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, set in the Harlem Renaissance. Brilla’s leaders intentionally take a wide view of the canon, and of which texts are valuable to study. “We try to make that connection for our students, who are mostly Black and Hispanic, with faces they can see themselves in,” Will Scott, the principal of one of Brilla’s middle schools, said.

Brilla’s administrators were careful to note that the network isn’t “classical” but, rather, “classically inspired.” This distinction is partly practical. Although teachers invoke Latin root words when they’re teaching kids English, for example, students don’t take Latin as a subject. But it also seemed like the school’s leaders wanted to put some distance between themselves and the broader classical-education movement. “If we say ‘classical school,’ that has a connotation,” Scott said. Still, it’s telling that the schools have found traction by marketing themselves as “classically inspired” in the South Bronx, where voters overwhelmingly prefer Democrats and the college-graduation rate is among the lowest in New York City. During the lead-up to Brilla’s launch, in 2013, volunteers posted up outside a local McDonald’s to pitch families on enrolling. “We billed it as, This is what the élite get,” Saroki de Garcia told me.

Everyone I met at Brilla seemed aware that their school is an implicit rejection of traditional public schools, but not in the way one might expect. Although America’s public-school wars are often depicted as fights over race and gender ideology, there are also a lot of parents who think their local schools just aren’t very good. Brilla’s two middle schools are in New York City’s School District 7, where, last year, less than a third of sixth graders were proficient in math or in reading and writing. Angelina, a recent immigrant from St. Croix, said that most of her friends “go to a public school, and they talk really poorly about their school.” Fatumata added that “they don’t have what we have,” such as Algebra I classes for middle schoolers. “The schools around us are, frankly, failing,” Scott, the principal, told me.

There are many charter schools that aim to address the problem of low achievement, often through an obsessive focus on test scores and discipline. Brilla cares about both of these things, but what sets it apart is its mission. Classical education is premised on the idea that there is objective truth, and that the purpose of school is to set kids on a path toward understanding it. This principle is often framed in philosophical shorthand—classical educators love talking about “truth, beauty, and goodness,” which can sound like a woo-woo catchphrase to the uninitiated—and it’s paired with an emphasis on morality and ethics. Brilla students attend a character-education class every morning, where they talk about how to live out the different virtues reflected in the texts they read. As Alexandra Apfel, an assistant superintendent for Brilla’s middle schools, said, “We’re building students that are not just going to be academic robots but moms and dads someday.”

In 1947, Dorothy Sayers, a motorcycle-riding Anglican crime writer, delivered a paper at Oxford titled “The Lost Tools of Learning,” in which she bemoaned the state of education. “Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected) but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves?” Young people do not know how to think, she argued, because they’ve never been taught. They may have been introduced to subjects, but not to what it means to learn.

In the face of this contemporary problem, Sayers proposed an ancient solution: the revival of a medieval teaching format called the trivium, which divided learning into three stages—grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. The first stage is about mastering basic skills and facts; the second teaches students to argue and to think critically about those facts. By the third stage, they’re ready to express themselves in essays and oration. This model of education, cultivated by Renaissance thinkers and the Catholic Church alike, was common among European élites for centuries.

Tombstone that reads “50 Looking at Phone 50 Looking for Phone.”

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Sayers’s essay built on a long-standing debate about whether this kind of education made sense in a rapidly changing, industrialized world. Classical-education advocates often point to John Dewey, the early-twentieth-century progressive reformer, as the bête noire who marginalized their preferred form of schooling: “There was a war going on between the progressive and the classical educators, and the progressives won in a rout,” Andrew Kern, the founder of the Center for Independent Research on Classical Education, told me. Although this story is perhaps overly simplistic, Johann Neem, a historian at Western Washington University, said, it’s true that Dewey and other progressives thought that the old ways of education were inadequate for modern students. These progressive reformers planted the seeds of two trends. The first was shifting the focus of school toward appealing to the interests of the child, rather than transmitting ancient knowledge and wisdom, which these reformers considered élitist. (“Academic and scholastic, instead of being titles of honor, are becoming terms of reproach,” Dewey wrote.) The second was a utilitarian impulse—some scholars thought that the purpose of education was to train workers. They did not believe that every student needed to read Plato.

In the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, classical education reëmerged as a pushback against these trends. A handful of schools built around Sayers’s ideas launched in Idaho, Massachusetts, Kansas, and Indiana, independently of one another. They were all Christian, but of different flavors—two had Catholic roots, one was ecumenical, and one was evangelical. Doug Wilson, the pastor who founded the evangelical school, in Idaho, later started a conference for Christian parents and educators who were interested in creating their own schools. This was the beginning of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, or A.C.C.S., which has since grown into a network of more than five hundred and forty schools, most of which are Protestant and use aspects of the trivium model. Even in Christian circles, Wilson is a polarizing figure—he promotes a theology that prizes strictly traditional gender roles and has made inflammatory comments about race relations. But the classical movement has expanded into something much broader: there are more than two hundred Catholic classical schools, which call their approach “Catholic liberal education,” along with a growing number of classical charter schools with no religious identity. The movement is diverse, in part because classical education has boomed among homeschoolers, who run the gamut from serious athletes to kids with learning differences to conservative Christians. These homeschooling families “like the idea of a traditional, rigorous education that really demands a lot out of a child, and that is also responsive to them,” Susan Wise Bauer, the co-author of “The Well-Trained Mind,” a popular guide to classical homeschooling, told me.

The notion of a standardized curriculum, let alone a shared value system, no longer exists in most American public schools. Proponents of classical education argue that any student can find value in the same timeless texts—Augustine and Austen, Chaucer and Chesterton—regardless of that student’s race, religion, or class. James Baldwin once said that reading Dickens “taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had been alive.” Classical-education advocates want kids to read Dickens and feel that same connection.

Though classical schooling might have once been the education of élites, the modern version has egalitarian potential. In Texas, enrollment in classical charter schools is growing most quickly among Asian and Hispanic students. In Arizona, a charter-school network called Espiritu, which mostly serves immigrants, recently overhauled its curricula to be more classical. And yet, perhaps inevitably, the movement has also felt the gravitational pull of the culture wars. With many classical schools focussed on moral formation and civics—and, incidentally, white male authors—this educational mode is primed to be co-opted into something that’s not just traditional but reactionary. The architects of contemporary classical education believed that, by reaching into the past, they could build a better future for American education. Today, many of the people embracing classical education are more interested in running away from the aspects of progressive schooling they fear.

Pete Hegseth, the perfectly coiffed Fox News host, sits on a stage in Franklin, Tennessee, a small city south of Nashville. To his left is a giant American flag. He is here taping a segment of his Fox Nation special “The MisEducation of America” before a live audience of parents who are disturbed by what they’ve encountered in local public schools. “We are fighting the battle of fires,” Cameron Sexton, the speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, tells Hegseth: “You’re talking about C.R.T.”—critical race theory—“you’re talking about books in the library,” which might incorporate ideas about gender or sexuality. Sexton goes on to explain that the only solution is for people to enroll their children in classical schools, like he did with his own daughter, where students won’t be spoon-fed ideology. “There’s nothing more powerful than for an individual to have the ability to think and decide things for themselves,” Sexton says. “That’s how you stop the government from intruding on your life.”

When we spoke, Hegseth acknowledged that his interest in the movement “started as a reaction against” what he saw as progressive indoctrination in typical public schools. He has since reoriented his life around classical Christian education; in 2022, he and his wife moved outside Nashville to send their kids to such a school. He also understands the appeal of the model to a politically conservative audience. “What our viewers are looking for is a back-to-basics approach,” he said, one in which Christianity is “front and center.”

Hegseth is close with David Goodwin, who became the president of A.C.C.S. in 2015. Under Goodwin, the number of A.C.C.S. schools has more than doubled. Goodwin and Hegseth recently co-wrote a book called “Battle for the American Mind,” in which they argue that Marxists “have taken full control of America’s education system.” Wokeism, they explain, is driven by a vision of education that prizes “control of your identity, being accepted for who you are, finding adventure, and creating your own path in life.” Arguably, these are contemporary buzzwords with roots in century-old progressive ideas—that knowledge and virtue are not objective and external but, rather, subjective and internal, to be discovered as one develops one’s sense of self. Hegseth and Goodwin believe that, by focussing students’ education on the civilizations that flowed out of “the convergence of Greece, Rome, and Hebrew cultures,” America can recapture the norms it was built on. “We are the new radicals, the new revolutionaries,” they write.

As part of this revolution, Goodwin and the A.C.C.S. have been promoting classical education overseas. They see Africa, in particular, as fertile ground: over the last twenty-five years, Christian missionaries and pastors have planted classical schools in a dozen countries. This past fall, I went with Goodwin to Nairobi for a conference hosted by the Rafiki network, which runs schools in ten English-speaking African countries and publishes a curriculum used by dozens of other schools. Goodwin lives in Boise—it was his first time in Africa, or south of the equator, for that matter. Wearing a slightly baggy blazer and a yellow tie, he stood in front of roughly two hundred people in a dim auditorium near an Anglican cathedral.

The obvious question of the day was why Goodwin’s version of classical education would be compelling to people living outside the West. “It took me about twenty hours from where I live in the States to get here,” Goodwin said. “Fifteen hours in, I started crossing over the territories that most developed the West. I crossed Macedonia. The plane flew down through Greece and near Alexandria, in Egypt, and then down the Red Sea, with Mt. Sinai on the left.” In Nairobi, he argued, they were far closer to the history of the West than he was back at home. “This is where Christendom grew up,” he said. He noted that the word “Western” is often associated with colonization. Goodwin framed his role not as one of domination and takeover but, instead, as an emissary from a possible future. “We’re in a pitched battle in the United States,” he said, “between the powers of light and the powers of darkness.” His prayer was that the audience wouldn’t let progressive education take root in their country.

After the lecture, Goodwin confessed to me that his earlier argument—that Kenya is closer to the origins of the West than America is—was a bit of a stretch. Despite nearly three-quarters of a century of colonialism in Kenya, he said, “I don’t think it’s dominantly a Western culture, because Greco-Roman philosophy is not deeply ingrained.” In his view, no place on the African continent is currently part of the West. Even Alexandria, which was one of the seedbeds of Western thought and philosophy in the centuries before and after Christ, is now dominated by Islam, which Goodwin does not see as part of the West. Although Christianity might have roots in Africa, it moved westward, toward Europe and the United States, and that’s the intellectual tradition Goodwin is focussed on. It is “existentially evident that Western culture is the most influential in the history of man,” he had told me a few weeks earlier. Goodwin thinks that Kenyans should learn songs and stories from their country and continent, along with the history of Greece and Rome. But, he said, “we don’t buy into the cultural philosophy that all cultures are equally valuable and good.”

The next day, I got in a car with Theodore and Crystal Wilson, the heads of Rafiki Classical Christian, a school on the outskirts of Nairobi that educates kids aged three to eighteen. The Wilsons, a Black, missionary couple, taught at classical schools in America before moving to Kenya, in 2022. We wove through chaotic traffic on our way out of central Nairobi—speeding minibuses taking men to work, throngs of people crossing the street seemingly at random. Churches were everywhere: Israel New Creation House, Abundant Glory International Ministries. Soon, we arrived at the Rafiki compound, originally the summer home of Kenya’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta. Behind a tall rock wall, the campus was a lovely oasis: ibises flew around acacia trees that were scattered among a series of small, squat buildings with red tile roofs, each housing a couple of grades.

Theo Wilson was a Navy chaplain, and his military background showed. When he and his wife arrived in Kenya, they cultivated a morning-assembly tradition—a highly orchestrated performance of students marching along an outdoor basketball blacktop. Wilson, wearing a canvas safari hat, a bow tie, and a sweater vest, stood before the children, who lined up in neat rows with their hands behind their backs. “Why are we in school today?” he asked. “To glorify and enjoy God,” they answered, following a script provided by the A.C.C.S.

In the classrooms, the trivium was everywhere. Preschoolers were memorizing a verse from I Samuel. Third graders took turns reciting lines from “The Fisherman and His Wife,” a fairy tale published by the Brothers Grimm. Some aspects of Kenyan culture were present: on the wall of a second-grade classroom, the Kiswahili alphabet was written out next to the English one. “We go to great lengths to feature their art, their music, but also historical figures of the African diaspora,” Theo Wilson said. Still, there was a jarring emphasis on Western civilization. In one classroom, the history of music was laid out according to European eras—Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic—and the walls were decorated with portraits of white European composers. Later, we visited the library inside Rafiki’s teacher-training college. One wall was covered by a twenty-three-foot-long time line of world history first published in 1871, starting from Adam and Eve. It featured a sketched map of the world that portrayed Europe and the Middle East in colorful detail, whereas the whole of the African continent south of Carthage was a giant black mass. Each civilization had its own line, tracing its evolution through the centuries. By the time of the birth of Jesus, any reference to African history had disappeared.

At the conference, I met a Kenyan woman named Melissa Wakhu, who wore large, geometric earrings and styled her hair in shoulder-length locs. She had worked as a consultant for Deloitte before choosing to homeschool her four children full time using Classical Conversations, a classical-homeschooling curriculum that’s popular in America. Her kids have received the full classical experience, from learning literature and Latin to memorizing the names of Greek and Roman gods. “I’ve watched what it’s done to my children, in terms of opening up their minds, their vocabulary, their thinking, their empathy,” she said. She even works for Classical Conversations part time, as its representative for East Africa.

And yet, as time went on, she started feeling unsettled. Her children would listen to classical music, “but then my kids started asking, ‘Are there no African musicians and composers?’ ” she said. One lesson suggested that children go outside and collect maple leaves, which are nowhere to be found in Nairobi. Her tenth grader was working through a unit on the American government and economy. “They have to memorize a well-written speech and present it, and what they were memorizing was the preamble to the Constitution,” she said. “So I have these African, Kenyan children standing and reading out to me, ‘We the People of the United States . . . ’ For me, that was a conflict.” Wakhu has now written and published more than a dozen kids’ books featuring Kenyan scenes and African heroes, to fill what she saw as a gaping hole in the classical resources available to her family.

Throughout the conference, American speakers kept bringing up Augustine, who lived and wrote in what is now Algeria. “He’s northern Africa, which has a completely different experience than the rest of us,” Wakhu told me. The implication, in suggesting that Augustine is the closest thing to an African thinker that the classical tradition has to offer, is that “there was no philosophical thinking” in places like Kenya, Wakhu said. “It’s a challenge for this group of foreigners to try and come and convince us of something that is beautiful, but is also Western.”

Plenty of Americans are also skeptical of the classical-education movement’s narrow emphasis on the West. In 2021, Angel Adams Parham, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia, became the board chair of the Classic Learning Test, or CLT—an SAT alternative often taken by classical-school students and homeschoolers. Parham came to classical education by the same path as many others: when her oldest daughter was getting ready for school, Parham looked at the available options and wasn’t satisfied, so she started homeschooling. Just like Wakhu, Parham found Classical Conversations, which set her on her own intellectual journey. “As I’m reading the Republic for the first time—I must have been in my forties—I’m thinking, Why have I never read this?” She had an undergraduate degree from Yale and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and yet, she told me, she had never been exposed to these foundational texts.

Parham, who is Black and studies the history of race, came to believe that the Western canon is deeply intertwined with the Black intellectual tradition—after all, Malcolm X read the classics in prison. Black figures have also fundamentally shaped the Western tradition. Parham recently led a reassessment of which authors appear on the CLT; one figure who got added was Olaudah Equiano, a freed slave who was part of the movement to end the slave trade in Britain and wrote an influential autobiography. For the most part, though, Parham has found that “the mainstream of the movement” is hesitant about efforts to widen the aperture of classical education: “Their sense is, There’s a list of texts, and these people are not on the list.” The result tends to be a Eurocentric notion of the West. “You have to take a very sharp scalpel to the world to carve out Africa, the Middle East, and Asia in order to get the version that they want to call ‘Western’ and ‘classical,’ ” Parham argued. Homer talks about Ethiopians. Herodotus tells tales from Asia and Africa. Aquinas engaged with Islamic scholarship. But “we’re not educated in that tradition,” Parham said.

I first encountered Parham in September, when the CLT’s board of advisers held a summit in Annapolis, Maryland, at St. John’s College. Men and women in brightly colored preppy dress milled around before the first activity of the day: croquet lessons. The scene, complete with a nearby lemonade table, felt like the most extreme possible caricature of what people who venerate the classics would do for fun. (Then again, the next day’s activity was sailing.) The impresario of the croquet field was Jeremy Tate, the C.E.O. of the CLT. He schmoozed his way through the small pack of players in a blue summer suit, his blond bangs carefully tousled with gel. He was riding a high: last fall, Florida’s board of governors agreed to let students use the CLT to apply to state universities and scholarship programs, significantly increasing its number of test-takers. (That number is still minuscule compared to those who take the SAT.)

As one might expect, the CLT is heavy on classic texts—one practice exam uses excerpts from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Federalist Papers to test reading comprehension. But, despite the exam being promoted by conservatives like DeSantis, the sharpest critique that the CLT’s founders make is not about politics but about high-stakes testing—a critique typically associated with progressives. Tate told me that the College Board, which makes the SAT, is cynical and career-focussed. “The point of education was always the preservation of civilization,” Tate said. “It was the cultivation of virtue.” To Tate, this includes the kind of learning that can never be fully measured by a test, such as an appreciation for poetry or theatre. According to Tate, policymakers in other red states are interested in following Florida’s lead by offering the CLT. But when Republicans ask if he wants them to promote the exam, he told me, “we’re trying to say, ‘Not really,’ because your being a champion of this would further politically hijack it.”

Tate represents a common figure in the classical-education world: a dispositionally conservative guy who is also adamant that classical education is not right-wing. He acknowledged that the movement has a natural constituency on the right, among parents who are panicked about wokeism. But “it’s not enough to get some of the ideas out that you consider toxic,” Tate said. “You need a bigger vision for education.” Besides, the G.O.P. has its own utilitarian tendencies when it comes to schooling, which are out of step with classical education. “It wasn’t long ago that you had Marco Rubio on national television making fun of philosophy majors,” he said. “It’s a weird moment, where this kind of education would be championed on the right.”

The right’s suspicion of identity politics has also made conversations about diversity difficult. One of the questions that Parham and the other CLT board members considered during their reassessment of the authors on the test was whether more nonwhite or non-male thinkers should be included, prompting one board member to complain that “the CLT was going woke.” Parham expressed frustration with this kind of attitude. “There are people who really love classical education, but they are really hungry for ‘How do we weave together a more diverse tapestry?’ Does it all have to be Greece and Rome and European authors?” she said. “That is very different than saying, ‘We just want diversity for diversity’s sake.’ ” Parham thinks that kids, and especially kids who are not white, would benefit from learning about the crossroads of the Mediterranean back before modern notions of racial hierarchy existed. But it’s challenging to find an audience for this argument in America’s polarized culture. “Left academia is not helping us,” she said. “People are pushing back against some of the extremes of that. They are fleeing to classical education, unfortunately, thinking it’s going to be a safe space. But it’s all very wrongheaded.”

The tricky thing about truth, beauty, and goodness is that, for all their supposed timelessness and objectivity, not everyone agrees on what is actually true, beautiful, and good. As the classical-education movement grows, it must contend with the fundamental question of pluralism: Does the movement’s notion of truth keep out not only certain texts but certain children?

Two people look at dog on stilts.

Doug Wilson, the A.C.C.S. founder, who is often credited with repopularizing classical education, is a difficult figurehead for a movement that wishes to be inclusive. He maintains a “Controversy Library” on his blog, which includes an account of the outrage over his now retracted pamphlet “Southern Slavery as It Was,” in which he described slavery as “producing in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since.” (Wilson says the pamphlet was retracted because of citation problems.) He believes that it is not possible to have a truly classical education without Christianity. This is a common view, even among leaders of the Society for Classical Learning, a more moderate alternative to the A.C.C.S. that deëmphasizes “culture war” in favor of “culture care”—inviting people into the movement, rather than policing its borders.

For people like Susan Wise Bauer, the co-author of “The Well-Trained Mind,” the idea that there’s something fundamentally conservative or Christian about classical education is ahistorical and myopic. A specific type of person tends to dominate the classical speaker circuit, she told me: the “theo bro,” which she defined as a “conservative Protestant-theology fan who likes to smoke cigars, drink whiskey, talk theology, and has a beard.” She sees herself as speaking for a much broader, more diverse constituency, including Jews, Muslims, atheists, and “liberal, pinko, Marxists” who love classical education. If she and Doug Wilson were discussing the classical approach, she added, “we’d probably both agree on the importance of teaching grammar, but I don’t know that we’d have much in common, other than that.” Kevin Hall, the C.E.O. of the Charter School Growth Fund, told me that he sees a particular hunger for classical education among parents who are not religious, and who may find comfort in a public charter school that can partner with them in developing their kids’ character.

By law, classical charter schools are secular, because they are publicly funded. The largest network is Great Hearts, which has twenty-eight thousand students across its schools in Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana, with fifteen thousand more students on its waiting lists. Daniel Scoggin, one of the Great Hearts co-founders, told me that it wasn’t hard to arrive at a version of classical education that was appropriate for a public charter school. “You take out the theology,” he said. “You keep a focus on the Greeks, keep a focus on the classics, the great American tradition as the capstone to the classical story.” Doug Ducey, the former governor of Arizona, who helped push through a significant expansion of charter-school funding, told me that he sent his sons to Catholic school, “but if Jack, Joe, and Sam Ducey were in kindergarten today I would be trying to enroll them in Great Hearts.”

Although networks like Great Hearts and Brilla have attracted many families, some parents find the ideas associated with the movement alienating. The Archdiocese of Portland is one of many Catholic dioceses that is slowly incorporating elements of classical education into its schools. But this transition has become mixed up with sensitive issues of identity, including the place of gay and trans kids and families in the Church. The archbishop, Alexander Sample, recently released guidelines on “dealing with gender issues,” instructing Catholic institutions, including schools, not to support gender transitions in any way. At least one group of parents protested, but they say their concerns were ignored.

“When I look at those who are promoting the classical-education model, there have been a lot of red flags,” Charlene Hannibal, one of the parents, explained. “The main thing that concerns me is the lack of acceptance for trans youth and L.G.B.T.Q. families and children.” Elias Moo, the Archdiocese’s new superintendent, told me, “It does no one any favors if we try to sugarcoat or water down what the Church teaches.” This includes the faith’s understanding that humans are created as male or female. “We will honor the primacy of parents to such an extent that we’re willing to recognize when a parent says, ‘This isn’t the best environment for our child,’ ” he said. In classical schools, inclusion isn’t necessarily the highest virtue.

There can be a sense of urgency in the classical-education world—a feeling that whole generations have been lost, and that the next must be saved. In January, I visited a new classical school on the Upper East Side where that feeling was acute. The school is called Emet Classical Academy; emet means “truth” in Hebrew. Plans for Emet had been in the works for over a year, but after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th Emet’s leaders decided to open the school on an accelerated timeline. Two mothers—both well-dressed, professional-class women—took me on a tour of the Conservative synagogue where, beginning this fall, students will learn about their place in the Western tradition. It will be a contained world of study; classroom windows look out onto a brick wall.

“For me, this is really about antisemitism,” one of the moms, who asked not to be named, told me. “After October 7th, it became abundantly clear that unless my child is in a safe space, like a Jewish school, there is opportunity for antisemitic rhetoric.” The other mom said that she worries about sending her kids to college unprepared for an onslaught of criticism of Jews, and of Israel: “Whatever the antisemitism du jour is in five years, I realized over the last few months that it’s my responsibility as a Jewish parent to make sure they’re prepared to respond to it.” So much of New York City schooling is about helping students understand their identity, she added, “and that’s all excellent. But most schools don’t include Judaism or Zionism in those aspects that they seek to develop in the kids.”

This is the pitch that Emet is making: through a classical education, students can become confident in themselves as Jews, and as Americans. As much as the project is intended to be countercultural—a fix for what’s wrong with modern schooling—it also mirrors modern schooling’s obsession with developing kids’ sense of identity. Both moms were eager to point out that the school will be Jewish but not religious, which they see as a plus. Abraham Unger, the head of the school, told me that every morning the students will say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, but there will be no mandatory prayers, and kids will not be expected to learn how to participate in synagogue services. Most of the families who have expressed interest in Emet are not from traditionally observant backgrounds, and their kids are not coming out of religious Jewish day schools. They’re parents like the two moms I met. This moment in history has shaken something in them. They’re looking for roots.

Emet is a project of the Tikvah Fund, a prominent Jewish foundation chaired by Elliott Abrams, a neoconservative fixture who served in the Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump Administrations. Eric Cohen, Tikvah’s C.E.O., told me that he hopes Emet will eventually be a model for dozens of schools around the country, including existing Jewish day schools. He also wants to start a Jewish classical-education version of Teach for America.

“The Jews were summoned in history to have a kind of purpose,” Cohen said. “Jews brought certain ideas and ways of understanding reality into the world: that humans are both created and commanded. That we’re covenantal beings that have a responsibility in shaping history. That there’s a moral vision of life that’s articulated in the Jewish tradition that has wisdom and relevance for all human beings.” To him, the story of Jewish civilization is fundamentally Western, and the story of Western civilization is fundamentally Jewish. “The West is Greco-Roman culture recast through a Jewish lens,” he said. The goal of Emet is to cultivate students “who can enter the world with that civilizational vision—those habits of mind and heart and leadership and character that classical learning at its best can shape—for deeply Jewish purposes.”

So far, Cohen said, the school has been welcomed into the Christian-dominated classical-education movement. The movement’s leaders don’t necessarily agree with Cohen’s interpretation of history or his high view of Jewish texts, though. I asked David Goodwin why students in A.C.C.S. schools don’t learn Hebrew—the language of the Old Testament, and the lingua franca of the rabbis who, according to Cohen, helped shape the West. “The Hebrew tradition is one of authority and law, which we study,” Goodwin said. “But the emphasis is on the Greek and Roman tradition, which is one of persuasion and logic. There’s more there to study—in the Greek, it’s a deeper pool.” Plus, he added, Hebrew is too hard for most high schoolers to learn.

Nothing is more classical than Plato’s allegory of the cave, which is really a story about education: how human beings emerge from ignorance and discover truth. In the story, humans are prisoners chained up in a dark chamber, facing a wall. They believe that the shadows on the wall represent the world. Then one day a prisoner makes his way out into the light. He is blinded by the sun, but eventually his eyes adjust. He goes back into the cave to persuade the others to come out. But his eyes no longer work in the darkness; all the prisoners see is a blind man, and they assume that leaving the cave is pointless.

There’s a sly tension in the allegory. Plato clearly believes that it’s better to live in the light and know the truth. But he also acknowledges that a person can be blinded in two ways, both as they’re emerging from the cave and again as they’re returning to it. It can be difficult to know which direction leads to the truth. Even Plato’s fanboys might get lost on their way. ♦

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Liberal Arts and Liberal Education

Christopher Flannery

June 1, 1998

Our Greatest Need

Students entering college are frequently more concerned with how to make a living than with how to live a good life. The two things are related, and a complete education should prepare them for both, but liberal education is concerned primarily with the latter of the two. It is concerned not primarily with the acquisition of technical skill—job training—but with learning how to live well. What is the distinction between technical training and liberal education, and why is it essential for students entering institutions of higher learning to understand this distinction?

A passage in Martin Gilbert’s monumental biography of Winston Churchill suggests an answer to these questions. There we are reminded of a grim episode in modern history that we forget at our peril. In the autumn of 1942, in the midst of world war, information was smuggled out of Nazi Germany through neutral Switzerland revealing to the outside world “the extent of the German slaughter of Jews on the eastern front, the murder by gas of Polish Jews in three special ’death’ camps at Chelmno, Belzec, and Treblinka, and of the deportation of Jews from France, Belgium, and Holland to an ’unknown destination’ in the East.” 1

It was only two years later that this ’unknown destination’ was identified as Auschwitz, where Jews were being gassed at the rate of about 12,000 men, women, and children a day. As Churchill wrote at the time, this was “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilized men.” 2 The German people were the most technically advanced—one might say highly educated—people in the world at that time. Doctors, nurses, psychologists, educators, scientists, engineers, accountants, lawyers, and the whole array of other highly skilled and “nominally civilized” men and women, were devoting their considerable skills, acquired at great effort and expense, to the extermination of a people.

The twentieth century, the most technologically advanced century in history (until the twenty-first), with more technically skilled people per square mile than could once have been imagined, stands out as a century in which genocide was a term with which every grade school child must become familiar. As communism continues to take its uncertain and much awaited departure from the world, let us not forget the horrors of the Gulag Archipelago, the Bolshevik extermination of the Kulaks, the millions sacrificed to China’s political experiments, and of course the “killing fields” in Cambodia—all in the name of scientific socialism and progress, but in fact amounting to a new phenomenon in the world: scientific savagery. More generally, if less dramatically: human beings throughout history have proven as apt to use their acquired skills to inflict suffering on one another as to confer benefits: Consider the innocent skill of flying small airplanes in the light of September 11, 2001; or the equally innocent skill of manipulating chemical or biological agents, in the light of the war on terrorism that has come to define our era.

What does this tell us about education and about the relation between liberal education on the one hand and the acquisition of technical skill—job training—on the other? It points to the heart of the matter.

Every art, or craft, or technical skill (what the ancient Greeks called “ techne “) may be used in the service of justice or injustice, good or evil. It may be used to dignify our humanity or to degrade it. As Socrates points out in Plato’s Republic , the medical art, for example, is equally able to guard against disease and to produce it. 3 For this reason, the urgent practical question arises: How do we learn to do what is good and avoid what is evil? And this question compels us to contemplate the theoretical question: What is good?

These, of course, were the kinds of questions posed by Socrates to the ancient Athenians, and for doing them this service, they gave him the hemlock. Nonetheless, in his death Socrates proved victorious over his judges, as he predicted he would. His life became the source of the idea of liberal education in the West. His questions became the central questions of the liberal arts curriculum as it developed through the Middle Ages and into the modern era. They were the human questions, and they animated the study of what came to be called the “humanities.”

These questions reflect the ultimate human need—the need to know the source and reason of all goodness. Because of this elemental need, as Plato’s Socrates would put it, every education is radically—decisively—deficient or incomplete to the extent that it is not informed or illuminated by “the greatest study,” the study of that “for the sake of which” we do all that we do. 4 The “human questions” arise from human nature itself. “Man by nature desires to know,” as Aristotle wrote. 5 And what man by nature ultimately most needs to know is the final end, or highest good, or that for the sake of which all things exist. 6 The Christian heirs to the classical tradition gave their own distinctive expression to the ultimate human need toward which all profitable human inquiry is directed: It is the need to know God. 7

The consequence of forgetting this need and the world of questions arising from it—of replacing these questions with the acquisition of technical competence or job training—is brutally clear. It is to risk producing computer programmers, scientists, business managers, doctors, and lawyers, who are at best technocratic barbarians. It is to place in the hands of succeeding generations ever greater power over their world and their fellow human beings, and to fail to teach them the ends to which this awesome power is to be used.

However much America—and the world—needs technically skilled workers and professionals, there can be no doubt of the critically greater need for liberally educated citizens and human beings, who can distinguish good from evil, justice from injustice, what is noble and beautiful from what is base and degrading.

The Living Tradition

Liberal education is commonly associated with education in the liberal arts. What are the liberal arts, and what is the relation of the liberal arts disciplines to one another, to education as a whole, and to higher education in particular?

These basic if not simple questions are, in effect, already answered by every institution of higher learning that includes among its avowed purposes education in the liberal arts, or liberal education. That these questions have been answered, however–in mission statements, institutional structures, and curricula—does not necessarily mean that they are being asked. Colleges and universities like other institutions perpetuate themselves in part by taking certain things for granted. Among the things necessarily taken for granted are sometimes the most important things, including the central purposes of the institution itself. At the most established institutions, these purposes are most deeply imbedded in tradition.

A tradition is something that is in a sense taken for granted; it goes without question. It would seem to be, in this respect, at institutions where they have been answered by the strongest traditions that our questions most need to be asked. They need to be asked by those specific men and women who are responsible for understanding and carrying forward the traditions, the avowed educational purposes, of the institutions. It is the active understanding in the minds of presidents and provosts, deans and faculty, that breathes life into these formal purposes; and it is in the learning that takes place between teachers and students that these purposes are fulfilled, these traditions become living traditions, and the questions posed here receive their most important answers.

Our contemporary understandings have arisen in self-conscious response to a particular twenty-five hundred year tradition or history of the liberal arts. It is, therefore, from the standpoint of the thinking of the preceding two and a half millennia that reflection on the meaning of the liberal arts may naturally begin. But, the liberal arts, though they have a history, are not reducible to that history. While it is possible to speak of a tradition of the liberal arts, it is necessary to observe that this is a tradition rooted in the questioning of the most familiar and authoritative traditions. One might say that in the world of the liberal arts all roads lead to a Socratic question—not just to the historical record of the question but to the living question in a living mind.

Pillars of Wisdom

What, then, speaking historically, is the tradition of the liberal arts?

As we have said, the tradition has its origin in the classical thought of ancient Greece. It originates in response to the most needful questions, arising from human nature, and posed by incipient philosophy—What is being? What is wisdom? What is virtue ? What is good?

An unprecedented search for truth accessible to reason about the whole world led necessarily to the search for truth about the place of humanity within this world. 8 This revolutionary endeavor of the human mind—rightly associated above all with the names of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—gave rise to a structured and systematic body of reflection. After Greek philosophy had reached full flower in the fourth century B.C., scholars and teachers sought to establish a curriculum to prepare students for the higher and more difficult studies. Out of these efforts came what was called the enkuklios paideia , the learning circle, from which we get our word encyclopedia. 9

A first century B.C. scholar and statesman named Marcus Terentius Varro codified this slowly developing curriculum into nine disciplines and introduced it to Rome. His work provided a model for Latin scholars (“encyclopedists”) of the later Roman period; such famous names as St. Augustine, Boethius, and Cassiodorus refined and developed the tradition; and by the fifth to sixth century A.D. a canon of seven liberal arts (dropping Varro’s architecture and medicine) had been established and incorporated into Christian education.

These seven arts were divided into the two familiar categories: the trivium, consisting of the verbal arts of logic, grammar, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium, consisting of the numerical arts of mathematics, geometry, music, and astronomy. These disciplines came to constitute the liberal arts, which “provided the basic content and form of intellectual life [in Europe] for several centuries.” The liberal arts were, in effect, regarded as “the seven pillars of wisdom.” 10

The Hierarchy of Disciplines

How, in this tradition, are the liberal arts related to one another and to education as a whole? The trivium and quadrivium mean literally “the three ways” and “the four ways.” These disciplines are, as Thomas Aquinas said, “paths preparing the mind for the other philosophic disciplines.” 11 The liberal arts are basic; they are foundations of a full liberal education, which rises from them and reaches beyond them.

There is a distinctive mode of reasoning appropriate to the different disciplines. As Aristotle noted, an educated person does “not require precision in all pursuits alike, but in each field precision varies with the matter under discussion.” 12 The carpenter and the geometer investigate the right angle in different ways. One should not demand mathematical precision of a statesman defending the cause of justice; nor should one accept enthymemes from a mathematician demonstrating the Pythagorean theorem. Yet both mathematical and moral or political discourse reveal elements of the truth about the world in which we live.

There is an inherent hierarchy within the liberal arts themselves and in the whole educational edifice of which they are the foundation. According to the tradition, a student should first acquire a facility with language ( logos , which means both speech and reason) because this discipline is necessary for all other studies (for the liberal arts, as elsewhere, “in the beginning is the word”). Youth is also traditionally held to be capable of acquiring the art of mathematics, because it is abstract, whereas certain other disciplines require experience to be understood. The practical disciplines of ethics and politics, for example, depend upon the accumulation of experience and, most important , the development of the capacity to subject one’s passions and appetites to reason.

Last comes the most difficult and the highest study, the study of first causes. For the pagan Greeks and Romans, this study culminated in metaphysics. With the assimilation of the pagan tradition to Christianity, the highest study became, of course, theology, the divine science. And the liberal arts were throughout Christendom, from the time of Augustine to the time of Aquinas and well after, understood as the necessary preparation for the lofty and rigorous discipline of understanding in its fullness “…the truth [that] shall make you free” (John 8:32).

The Unifying Principle

Within the historical development of the liberal arts themselves, the question is continuously raised of the meaning, purpose, and unifying principle of the liberal arts. For some two thousand years, the nature of this question and this principle remains in a decisive respect the same. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a radical reorientation or disorientation occurs, a revolution in thought marking a departure from the previous two millennia and inaugurating the modern era. It is impossible to understand the significance of this modern revolution, however, without understanding fully the still living—if battle-scarred— tradition it was intended to replace.

In this tradition, the liberal arts, the artes liberales , are literally arts of freedom. Traditionally this meant, among other things, the arts of free men as opposed to slaves. A slave is one who is subjected to the will of another, who is a mere tool or instrument of alien purposes and cannot choose purposes for himself. People are subjected to slavery by conquest. To prevent such conquest, to preserve that freedom which is a condition for the exercise of the liberal arts, requires other arts, arts of necessity, most notably the art of war. Other necessities also encroach upon our freedom and our very survival—the needs for food, shelter, and clothing, for example. Arts are developed to secure the necessary material conditions for existence. Economics (from the Greek oikonomike , household management) is the name given to the general art of acquiring such necessary material goods. The successful cultivation of the arts of necessity seems to be a necessary condition for the flourishing of the arts of freedom.

Unlike the compulsory arts of war and economics the liberal arts are not forced upon us by the needs of mere life but are chosen for the sake of a good life. They are arts not for the acquisition or accomplishment of necessary things but for the use of choiceworthy things. They were distinguished traditionally, for this reason, from the manual or mechanical arts as well. That is, they are not merely instrumental arts but arts that are in some respect an end in themselves. They are arts to be exercised, as it were, after the battles are fought and won, and the fields are plowed, and the buying and selling are done. They are, as Aristotle would say, the “leisure” arts. 13 Our students are (perhaps painfully) amused around exam time when we recall to them that our words “school,” and “scholar,” and “scholarship” are derived from the Greek word “ schole ,” which means leisure—and that “schools” are places where “scholars” learn to make the best use of their “ schole .”

Our young scholars know only too well that school involves toil, not to say drudgery. Where is the schole for our scholars? Where is the libertas for our liberal artists? The idea of the liberal arts involves a tension—inherent in human nature itself—between freedom and ruling purpose. An art is a skill ( techne ). What is done with art is distinguished from what occurs by chance or by nature. Arts do not grow like the grass in the fields. Human purpose, design, and conscious method infuse the arts. Rigor and precision are involved in acquiring and in exercising every art. It is not by chance that the various liberal arts are traditionally called “disciplines.” This suggests to us that leisure properly speaking is not mere idleness and that freedom is not random meandering or arbitrary willfulness. The liberal arts are, paradoxically, the leisure disciplines, the disciplines of freedom. They prepare us to deserve, by using well, “the blessings of liberty.”

The liberal arts have to do with that element of our being in which our freedom most essentially resides—namely, our mind or soul—as opposed to what is subject to physical compulsion, our bodies. This is why medicine, for example, came to be excluded from the canon. One might say that the first principle or axiom of the liberal arts is—in the words of Thomas Jefferson—that “Almighty God hath created the mind free.” 14 And the first task of the liberal arts is to secure the liberation of the mind from those many fetters that can bind it: notably ignorance, prejudice, and the influence of the passions. In and through this essential freedom, the freedom of the mind, our “humanity” is revealed. The integrative principle of the liberal arts is this idea, humanitas , which gives us our word for the humanities.

The way in which this unifying idea was expressed for some two thousand years was in the form of a vital question, the central animating question of the liberal arts tradition—asked alike by Greek and Roman classical rationalists, Roman Catholics, Renaissance humanists, and protestant Christians. In the words of the Westminster Larger Catechism, words that would be as familiar and understandable to Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century A.D. as they were to protestant communicants in the seventeenth century: “What is the chief and highest end of man?” 15

The Revolution of Modernity

Even as late as the seventeenth century, the ancient tradition of the liberal arts was still intact—though certainly under siege. Thomas Hobbes could still write in 1640 that it was Aristotle, “whose opinions are at this day, and in these parts of greater authority than any other human writings.” 16 And the idea of Aristotle against which Hobbes and other founders of the modern world would rebel was an idea essentially in harmony with the “divine writings” held in authority by both Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity, an idea which, in a sense, was the animating idea of Western civilization itself–the idea of the final end or highest good toward which all human endeavor should be directed. As Hobbes wrote,

There is no such finis ultimus, utmost aim, nor summum bonum, greatest good, as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers… Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter… So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. 17

The rejection of the idea of a final end or highest good as the central concern of life and education marks a decisive break in the two thousand year tradition of the liberal arts. With this break, the arts of freedom begin to be replaced by the arts of (mere) necessity. Education oriented to the highest good is replaced by education in the service of the lowest common denominator—avoidance of death or preservation of life and physical comfort. Mastery of nature for the relief of man’s estate begins to become the governing objective of education. The highest aim of education becomes the aim of a distinctively modern science in which “knowledge and human power are synonymous.” The aim is no longer to teach men how to live well; it is to “enlarge the power and empire of mankind in general over the universe.” 18

Modern thought is characterized by a wholesale rejection of the most fundamental premises of both classical learning and revealed religion, and therefore of the liberal arts tradition that to a large degree brought Athens and Jerusalem together in Rome. From the time at least of Thomas Hobbes, our most influential thinkers have in a variety of forms rejected both revelation and reason; they have denied both God and the freedom of the mind with which God had been held to have endowed human beings.

When Friedrich Nietzsche, summing up the state of the modern mind at the end of the nineteenth century, infamously proclaimed and lamented that “God is dead,” he understood perfectly well that this alleged death encompassed the idea of humanity which was coeval with civilization itself; and with humanity, of course, must go the humanities or the liberal arts. 19 This nihilism remains, nonetheless, consciously and unconsciously the dominant mode of thought in the teaching of what are still called the liberal arts in American universities. This fact is the source of the most challenging questions for teachers and students of the liberal arts today.

The tradition of the liberal arts is, in a decisive respect, the Western Tradition, and the fate of the liberal arts will be inseparable from the fate of the West. The liberal arts came into formal and self-conscious being in the last glow of the political greatness of Athens and Greece. They were systematized as Rome reached and passed the apogee of its ancient pagan greatness. They were transformed by the centuries-long cultural and political spread of Christianity and again transformed by the rise to ascendancy of modern natural science. In the late twentieth century they patiently endured deconstruction in the service of the dogmas of a postmodernism that is now passé. There has always been—as there continues to be—lively disagreement about how the various disciplines are related to one another and, indeed, which are essential and why. This disagreement ascends to the greatest height of controversy: to disagreement about the most urgent question—the question of the highest good, the question of the end or purpose of human existence. It is because of the seriousness of this question that the meaning of the liberal arts and liberal education has been and will continue to be so fervently disputed. We need not feel an undue sense of crisis if we find ourselves, on this small “bank and shoal of time,” compelled again to ask basic if not simple questions. Is it not precisely our crisis that we have learned to ignore them?

This essay is adapted from a chapter in The Liberal Arts in Higher Education, edited by Diana Glyer and David Weeks (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998). Updated September 2004.

1. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: The Road to Victory , 1941-1945, Vol. VII (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986), p. 245. Return to text.

2. Ibid., 847. Return to text.

3. Plato, The Republic of Plato , trans. Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1991), 332d-333e. Return to text.

4. Ibid., 505a2, 505d7-8. Return to text.

5. Aristotle, Metaphysics , first line. Return to text.

6. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 1094a1-26; 1177a12-1178a8. Return to text.

7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica , Question 94, Second Article , Objection 3 ( http://www.knight.org/advent/summa/209402.htm ). Return to text.

8. Socrates describes the historic turn in his own relentless search for the truth in Phaedo , 96a-100. Return to text.

9. The Academy founded by Plato—a leading center, to say the least, of liberal education—endured for some nine hundred years. It had some difficulty preserving and perpetuating in their full breadth and depth the teachings of its founder, as have American universities and colleges with far less to live up to. What brought the Academy to an end after nine hundred years was an edict of the emperor Justinian in 529 A.D. as part of an effort to impose religious conformity throughout the Roman Empire. Return to text.

10. David L. Wagner, ed., The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1983), 1, 256; see especially 1-57, 248-272 for general treatments of the development of the liberal arts tradition. Return to text.

11. Wagner, ibid., 251. Return to text.

12. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , trans. Martin Ostwald (Prentice Hall, 1962), 1098a26-28. Return to text.

13. Aristotle, Politics , 1337b27-1337b42; 1333b37-1334a34. It is worth reflecting on what Aristotle means when he says that leisure is “the first principle” (the arche , the beginning and end) of all activity. Return to text.

14. Thomas Jefferson, “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” Writings (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 346. Return to text.

15. http://www.reformed.org/documents/larger1.html Return to text.

16. Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (1640, I, ch. 17, sec. 1), http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/hobbes/elelaw . Return to text.

17. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), 63-64. Return to text.

18. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum , I. 3; I. 129, in Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum (New York: Willey Book Co. 1900), 315, 366. We need not deprive ourselves of the many useful discoveries of modern science merely because we remind ourselves of the ancient insight that what is “useful” can only be understood in light of what is “good.” Return to text.

19. “’Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not heard anything of this, that God is dead ?’” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra , in The Portable Nietzsche , trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 124. Return to text.

Christopher Flannery is Chairman of the Humanities Program at Azusa Pacific University and an Adjunct Fellow at the Ashbrook Center. [Updated June, 2019: Chris Flannery is the executive director of the Ashbrook Center, a contributing editor for the Claremont Review of Books, and author of The American Story podcast.]

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Why Study the Liberal Arts?

"The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks." - Albert Einstein

What is a Liberal Arts Education?

Working towards a baccalaureate degree in the Liberal Arts or Sciences involves taking courses in what are traditionally referred to as the "Liberal" Arts. This means that your courses will be in general areas of study--philosophy, mathematics, literature, history, economics, languages, and so on--rather than in applied or specialized fields.

A Liberal Arts education is not intended to train you for a specific job, though it does prepare you for the world of work by providing you with an invaluable set of employability skills, including the ability to think for yourself, the skills to communicate effectively, and the capacity for lifelong learning.

What Will I Study as Part of a Liberal Arts Education?

You will study a variety of subjects, looking at the world and its people from various points of view. You will learn about ideas and beliefs that have guided human beings and shaped civilizations for thousands of years. You'll ask yourself questions like:

  • What does it mean to be human?
  • What have humans done, thought about, and felt?
  • What is truth and beauty, and what are their value to life?
  • How have we been shaped by, and how have we shaped, our physical and natural environment?
  • What skills, methods or techniques can be used to examine the world and its people?

A Liberal Arts education is by nature broad and diverse, rather than narrow and specialized. Choosing courses from many disciplines gives you a wide and useful education.

In the first year, a Liberal Arts student normally takes a variety of introductory courses. This not only gives you a wide knowledge of subjects but helps you to choose certain areas for further study. In most cases, you will be encouraged to take courses in at least some of the major categories within the Liberal Arts:

  • Humanities (English Literature, Foreign Languages, History, Philosophy)
  • Social Sciences (Black Studies, Economics, Geography, Political Science, Sociology)
  • Creative Liberal Arts (Fine Art, Theatre, Speech, Creative Writing)
  • Sciences (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Math)

Liberal Arts studies at UNO also requires students to choose a major - a specific group of thematically-linked courses. By concentrating on a given subject, whatever it may be, you will go beyond the mere surface of things and gain a solid grasp of the core material in a given area.

Why Should I Pursue a Liberal Arts Education?

This is the big question: Why Liberal Arts? Why not Engineering? Or Nursing? Or Computer Science? There are numerous ways to answer this question, and ultimately the utility of any answer will depend upon your own circumstances.

For you, studies in the Liberal Arts may provide the necessary practical skills that you will apply on the job; or they may prepare you to move on to a graduate or professional school. For others, the key value of a Liberal Arts education may be the personal satisfaction and fulfillment that studying philosophy or art makes possible. Still others will be able to excel in today’s global business world because the foreign language skills developed in their Liberal Arts education gave them an important edge.

Indeed, the reasons for pursuing a Liberal Arts education are as many as the number of potential students. What you need to ask is what you want to get out of postsecondary education. If you want to get a solid, broadly-based, general education that will improve your analytical, communication and learning abilities, then the Liberal Arts may be for you.

What About Skills Training?

You have probably heard a lot of talk lately about how important it is to get the proper "skills set" so that you can be immediately attractive to an employer. Some think that the goal of a postsecondary education should be to provide you with as much specific training as possible before you arrive on the job, thus relieving potential employers of the costs and risks associated with hiring untrained workers.

In light of this perception, many students balk at taking general Liberal Arts courses and choose instead to focus narrowly on a vocational or professional area of study. This can be an excellent choice. There are many rewarding and fulfilling careers that one can pursue with the help of a first-class vocational or career training program.

But make sure that you are making your educational choices for the right reasons—those that are best for you. If you are shying away from Liberal Arts courses because you think that you need training in specific skills to get a job, you may be mistaken.

First, a Liberal Arts education does provide you with tangible, practical skills that employers value highly. What's more, you will obtain skills and knowledge that are never obsolete. The world is changing rapidly and there may be a danger in preparing yourself too narrowly to fit a certain slot that may not even exist by the time you get into the job market. Meanwhile, the underlying skills, abilities and attributes fostered in the Liberal Arts are always relevant.

What Skills Will I Learn by Taking Liberal Arts Courses?

The list of skills, abilities, capacities and attributes normally associated with a Liberal Arts education includes, but is not limited to, the following:

  • Analytical and knowledge-building skills
  • Evaluative and critical thinking skills
  • Creative thinking skills
  • Effective oral and written communication skills
  • Critical and reflective reading skills
  • Problem-solving and pattern intelligence skills
  • Numerical skills
  • Synthesis skills and the ability to express the results of analysis and evaluation
  • Ability to pose meaningful questions that advance understanding and knowledge
  • Ability to conduct research and organize material effectively
  • Information literacy and other skills associated with learning how to learn
  • Independent judgment and ethical decision-making
  • Ability to meet goals, manage time, and complete a project successfully
  • Self-confidence and self-understanding
  • Ability to cooperate with others and work in teams
  • Sensitivity to individuals and tolerance of cultural differences
  • Ability to use sensitive and technical equipment
  • Informed openness to new information technologies

Where Can a Liberal Arts Education Take Me?

A Liberal Arts degree prepares you for hundreds of careers. Your opportunities are limited only by your imagination, your interests and your willingness to devote time and energy to your work. Of course, a Liberal Arts degree can also take you to the top graduate and professional schools.

Liberal Arts courses are often required for anyone who pursues a professional degree, and a high percentage of Liberal Arts graduates go on to take further education. This is not surprising, since the Liberal Arts serve as a foundation for most vocational or professional studies at the university.

For example, programs in accounting, business, education, journalism, and law are built upon the knowledge and skills that come from fields that make up the Liberal Arts. Accounting and business depend upon mathematics and economics; education derives from psychology and sociology; journalism requires a knowledge of English and history; and law builds upon political science and philosophy.

Will a Liberal Arts Education Make Me a Better Person?

A Liberal Arts education will enhance your knowledge and improve your understanding of the world and its people. Many say that knowledge leads to wise action, perhaps even to goodness. Thus, a Liberal Arts education may help you to perceive and to understand your shortcomings, allowing you to become a better citizen, friend, spouse, parent, human being.

Liberal Arts courses often enable students to reach beyond their own experiences and imagine worlds far distant in time and space. By opening your eyes, ears and mind, a good Liberal Arts education can strengthen in you the virtues of tolerance, sympathy, and respect for others.

A Liberal Arts education will equip you to participate effectively in your community. It can also help you to engage in the controversies of our time--whether about the environment, cultural diversity, social justice, ethnic strife, gender relations or foreign policy.

Can a Liberal Arts Education Make Me Happy?

It would be ridiculous to make any promises of a carefree future, but a Liberal Arts education can contribute to your happiness. Studies in the humanities offer an obvious preparation for leisure and life beyond the world of work. A good Liberal Arts education increases your capacity to understand and enjoy humanity’s cultural and scientific achievements.

It also contributes to the pleasure you can get from the world around you. Studies in your Liberal Arts program can increase your awareness and appreciation of literature, music, personality, nature, art, symbolism, wit, historical allusion or figurative language.

But more than that, a good general education allows you to see things whole, to provide a context for seemingly meaningless or isolated events. This may sound like an abstract benefit, but it is just this orientation for knowledge that might reduce the confusion and frustration that comes from being unable to put into context an event, decision or phenomenon that you encounter in your daily life.

Perhaps this helps explain, to a certain extent, why studies consistently show that educated people have, statistically, happier relationships, lower rates of depression, less loneliness, and a higher degree of satisfaction with life.

But is a Liberal Arts Degree Worth It in Today’s High-Tech World?

A Liberal Arts degree is valuable in itself, but also teaches many of the skills and abilities that are needed in the contemporary workplace. That is why managers in business, industry and government appreciate the value of a Liberal Arts degree in potential employees.

They recognize the importance of what are often called "employability skills." Reading, writing, listening, speaking effectively, knowledge of language, critical thinking, problem-solving, basic numeracy, information literacy and the capacity to continue to learn for life--and know that UNO Liberal Arts programs have always concentrated on just these skills.

Students, too, understand that Liberal Arts Faculties tend to do the best job in developing these general employability skills. That is one of the reasons that students continue to vote with their feet by enrolling in Liberal Arts programs in high numbers.

Still, there is a perception out there that technical trainees get high wage jobs in their fields while Liberal Arts graduates face high unemployment or can find only low wage jobs that do not use their university training. A common stereotype portrays the poor Liberal Arts grad stuck in a dead-end McJob. In fact, this is a gross misrepresentation of labor market reality. More than ever, an undergraduate college education is a sound investment. Recent studies in both the U.S. and Canada have demonstrated that a high level of education translates into higher income over a person’s lifetime. These studies show that most university graduates, including those with Liberal Arts degrees, have lower unemployment rates and higher lifetime earnings than people with only high school diplomas or technical/vocational credentials.

But there is more to it than a simple link between education and income. A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) points to what it calls "literacy skills" as the key factor that pays off in any job.

Literacy, in this sense, involves the types of skills that are fostered in Liberal Arts programs: the ability to understand and use prose, to analyze documents, and to work with numbers. The report, entitled Literacy Skills for the Knowledge Society, contains data comparing the literacy skills of people in 12 countries. It finds that the ability to comprehend and use words and figures plays a strong role in determining wages, especially in countries like Canada and the United States.

It is worth noting, however, that low literacy rates can be found even in people with higher education. The report points out that your educational credentials may get you a job in the first place, but having strong literacy skills will make you the kind of productive and useful employee who rises through the ranks.

Moreover, workers with high literacy skills can adapt more easily to changing circumstances, making them less vulnerable to unemployment and more likely to be high income earners. In a rapidly changing, information-based economy, the benefits of literacy cannot be overestimated.

What Should I Do?

Only you can know what is best for you at this time in your life. Still, you should explore all of your opportunities, including a Liberal Arts education. Talk to your advisor. Speak with friends, relatives or co-workers about their educational experiences.

Read up on the trends and developments that might influence your decision. Admissions officers can help you get into the areas of your choice. And financial aid or awards officers can advise you on how to access scholarships or student loans.

Whatever you do, don’t let opportunities pass you by because you have failed to get the material you need to make an informed choice. But remember, a postsecondary education can be expensive. It is a lot of work. And it represents a major investment of time and energy.

So don’t waste your money or your time doing something that you really don’t want to do. You will be happier and more likely to succeed if you follow your heart, do whatever you do for your own reasons, and look at a postsecondary education for what it is: an opportunity for you to grow and develop as a human being.

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What is a Liberal Arts Education?

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A liberal arts education refers to college studies that provide general knowledge and develop intellectual ability. This type of education can prepare you for many fields in today's workplace.

Liberal Arts Education Benefits

  • Prepares students to work in a variety of jobs. This is different from other types of education where students develop professional or vocational skills for a specific job.
  • Degree is appealing to employers. Employers like liberal arts graduates because they have the skills necessary to adapt in a changing workplace. Employers desire transferable skills (skills employees take with them to any job) typical of a liberal arts education. These include written and verbal communication skills and the ability to solve complex problems and work well with others.
  • Provides an excellent foundation for graduate study in health care, law, business, or other fields. Graduate schools look for candidates who will succeed in graduate-level study. Students with a liberal arts background are appealing, because they demonstrate an ability to learn across a diverse field of studies.
  • Creates graduates who are equipped with the skills to become valuable community members. The value of a liberal arts education goes far beyond its economic value. Graduates understand problems, generate solutions, and communicate those solutions to others. In many ways, a liberal arts education is education for life. It prepares graduates who can adapt and thrive in an ever-changing world.

Liberal Arts Resources

10 Ways to Market Your Liberal Arts Degree This article will give you some ideas of how to market yourself to employers as a liberal-arts graduate.

Liberal Arts Education Prepares Students for Work and Life Learn why a liberal arts education is valuable and marketable in today's society, according to the Minnesota Private College Council (MPCC).

Liberal Arts Skills That Are Most Useful in Careers A short list of the most useful skills gained by liberal arts graduates.

What is Liberal Education? Defines liberal education's approach to learning. Describes often-confused terms. Provides a comparison of essential learning outcomes for 20th and 21st century learners.

Liberal Arts Majors

  • Education and training
  • Health science
  • Human services
  • Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
  • Review more liberal arts majors .

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Summer 2018

What is Liberal Education?

Washington, DC

Political Studies | Summer Course 2018

American higher education, or rather a part of it, is today the envy of the world, producing and maintaining research scientists of the highest caliber. But liberal education is another matter.  The dominant opinion proclaims that no shared set of ideas, no common body of knowledge, and no baseline set of values or virtues marking an educated human being exist.  Universities increasingly fail to give students more than a dim intimation that a liberal education has a distinctive shape and a coherent and cumulative content.

Yet, properly conceived, a liberal education provides invaluable benefits for students and the nation. For most students, it offers the last chance to read widely and deeply, to acquire knowledge of the opinions and events that formed them and the nation in which they live, and to study other peoples and cultures. And the nation benefits as well, because a liberal democracy presupposes an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing the public interest from private interest, evaluating consequences, and discerning the claims of justice and the opportunities for — and limits to — realizing it in politics.

In this opening week, led by Hertog Political Studies Program Dean Peter Berkowitz, students explore what liberal education is and why it is necessary for a free society. Among the questions students will discuss include: Why is a liberal education necessary? What are the benefits of liberal education? What is the relationship between the cultivation of moral virtue and liberal education? Why should the study of classical authors be emphasized in an age of scientific progress? Is increasing specialization helpful or harmful to the progress of civilization? What are the tensions inherent in liberal education, and how might they be resolved?

Images: Henry Holiday, Aspasia on the Pynx , 1888 | Pesellino, Seven Liberal Arts , ca. 1440

Peter Berkowitz on Liberal Education

This one-week course will take place in Washington, DC. It is a full-time commitment for Monday–Friday, with required sessions in the morning, afternoon, and some evenings.

discussion questions about liberal arts education

Peter Berkowitz

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He studies and writes about, among other things, constitutional government, conservatism and progressivism in America, liberal education, national security and law, and Middle East politics.

He is the author of  Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation  (Hoover Institution Press, 2013);  Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War  (Hoover Institution Press, 2012);  Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism  (Princeton University Press, 1999); and  Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist  (Harvard University Press, 1995).

He is the editor of seven collections of essays on political ideas and institutions published by the Hoover Institution:  Renewing the American Constitutional Tradition  (2014);  Future Challenges in National Security and Law  (2010);  The Future of American Intelligence  (2005);  Terrorism , the Laws of War, and the Constitution: Debating the Enemy Combatant Cases  (2005);  Varieties of Conservatism in America  (2004);  Varieties of Progressivism in America  (2004); and  Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic  (2003).

He taught constitutional law and jurisprudence at George Mason University School of Law from 1999 to 2006, and political philosophy in the department of government at Harvard University from 1990 to 1999. He holds a J.D. and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, an M.A. in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a B.A. in English literature from Swarthmore College.

Download the Full Syllabus

Preview the syllabus by week/session, the crisis of liberal education.

  • William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale , Author’s Preface
  • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind , Author’s Preface & Introduction
  • Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate, The Shadow University , Chs. 1 & 5

Discussion Questions:

  • What, according to Buckley, is the purpose of college education?
  • What, according to Bloom, is the aim of liberal education?
  • What, for Bloom, is the connection between “openness,” moral relativism, and freedom?
  • How, according to Bloom, do they conspire to undermine liberal education?
  • What, according to Kors and Silverglate, is political correctness, and how does it subvert liberal education?

The Foundations of Liberal Education I

  • Plato, The Apology, in Four Texts on Socrates , trans. West and West
  • What are “the first false charges” against Socrates? What are “the later charges”? How successful are Socrates’ refutations?
  • Socrates mentions the virtues of citizens and human beings (20b).  In what ways are those virtues similar?  How might they differ?
  • How is Socrates’ determination to investigate the oracle’s pronouncement that “no one was wiser” an act of piety? How is it an act of impiety?
  • Is Athens’ failure to protect Socrates’ freedom to philosophize a failure of democracy?  An authentic expression of democracy?  Both? Neither?
  • In what ways is Socratic wisdom humble?  In what ways is it boastful?  In what ways can it nourish the laws and politics?  In what ways does it threaten the city?

The Foundations of Liberal Education II

  • J. S. Mill,  On Liberty , Chapter 2, “Liberty of Thought and Discussion”
  • What are the costs of silencing wrong opinions?
  • What lessons does Mill draw from the lives of Socrates, Jesus, and Marcus Aurelius?
  • How, according to Mill, can progress in knowledge impair understanding? How can Plato’s dialogues be helpful?
  • What contributions do “a party of order or stability, and “a party of progress or reform” make to a healthy politics and to liberty of thought and discussion?
  • What is “the real morality of public discussion” (last sentence of Chap. 2) and how might it be cultivated consistent with the principles of freedom?

Freedom of Speech and the Curriculum

Discussion Questions:

See previous day’s questions.

Liberal Education and the University

  • J. S. Mill, “Rectorial Address,” St. Andrews University
  • How does liberal education differ from professional education?
  • What distinctive contributions, according to Mill, does study of the classics make to a liberal education?
  • Why is study of political economy, jurisprudence, and international law essential?
  • Where does study of morals, politics, and religion fit in?  How is the goal attained?
  • How does the study of literature and art— that is, “the education of the feelings and the cultivation of the beautiful”—complete liberal education?

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discussion questions about liberal arts education

Graduate-Professional Student Appreciation Week 2024

310 Pillsbury Dr SE Minneapolis , MN 55455

Join us for a roundtable discussion, facilitated by Dr. Len Cassuto, author of “The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education.” 

A round-table discussion with Leonard Cassuto , Professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University. It aims to showcase successful department transformations that support graduate student career diversity, provide examples, and highlight the role of different stakeholders (students, alumni, staff, and faculty) and their potential impact. An e-version of Cassuto’s book  is available at the UMN Library.

IMAGES

  1. What is Liberal Arts Education?

    discussion questions about liberal arts education

  2. What Is a Liberal Arts College and What Students Need to Know

    discussion questions about liberal arts education

  3. Demystifying the Liberal Arts

    discussion questions about liberal arts education

  4. What Is a Liberal Arts Major? Guide to a Liberal Arts Degree

    discussion questions about liberal arts education

  5. What is a Liberal Arts Education?

    discussion questions about liberal arts education

  6. 11 Reasons Why Liberal Arts Education is Worth it!

    discussion questions about liberal arts education

COMMENTS

  1. Your Biggest Liberal Arts Questions, Answered

    A: A liberal arts degree is grounded in the ideas of humanities and the arts and encompasses literature, philosophy, social and physical sciences and math. The "arts" in "liberal arts" aren't limited to fine or performing arts, but denote a method of broad-based learning in many disciplines. The word "liberal" also gets lost in ...

  2. What a Liberal Arts College Is and What Students Should Know

    This kind of degree emphasizes a broad education and so-called soft skills like communication and writing proficiency, analytical thinking and leadership ability. At liberal arts colleges ...

  3. The Value of a Liberal Arts Education is More Than Most Know

    The liberal arts take their name from the Latin word "liber," which means "free.". Originally this referred to the education of free persons as distinct from slaves, but freedom is still at the root of the liberal arts. Liberal arts are a privilege of a free society, and the study of the liberal arts helps to keep us free.

  4. A Historical and Global Perspective on Liberal Arts Education: What Was

    This discussion presents liberal education's non-Western, ... Questions are being raised about whether vocational-oriented curricula are producing human capital with the right kind of skills for the quickly evolving knowledge economy. ... "What a Liberal Arts Education is . . . and is Not," Bard Institute for International Liberal ...

  5. PDF liberal arts education lecture for Thales

    liberal arts education to explain to the freshmen. When I taught the First Year Symposium again recently, I began to wonder how well I really understand the Liberal Arts. This essay takes up one of the most fundamental questions, how to explain the liberal arts to students. According to today's prevailing view, the liberal arts

  6. Liberal Arts & Sciences

    What is a "liberal arts & sciences" education? Commitment to liberal arts & sciences is at the core of Harvard College's mission: before students can help change the world, they need to understand it. The liberal arts & sciences offer a broad intellectual foundation for the tools to think critically, reason analytically and write clearly.

  7. A return to understanding: Making liberal education valuable again

    A follow-up study in 2012, almost 20 years later, using Breneman's criteria of liberal arts education, found that 'true' liberal arts colleges continue to be in decline (Baker, Baldwin, & Makker, Citation 2012). The decline is for the most part driven by the perceived necessity for liberal arts colleges to offer vocational education.

  8. What Does Liberal Arts Mean?

    A liberal arts education offers an expansive intellectual grounding in all kinds of humanistic inquiry. By exploring issues, ideas and methods across the humanities and the arts, and the natural and social sciences, you will learn to read critically, write cogently and think broadly. These skills will elevate your conversations in the classroom ...

  9. On the "core questions" for a liberal arts education

    How shall debates be structured between rival clusters of answers to all of these questions? I.e., how shall the public forum, university, and college of liberal arts be organized so as to encourage humane disagreement and fruitful debate overall that constitutes and contributes to a humane, just, and thriving human community?

  10. What is Liberal Arts Education?

    The aim of a liberal arts education was to produce a person who was virtuous and ethical, knowledgeable in many fields and highly articulate. Modern liberal arts curriculums, however, allow students to study a much larger range of subjects, but they still retain the core aims of the traditional liberal arts curricula: to develop well-rounded ...

  11. Liberal Arts FAQ

    A liberal arts education is all about asking questions. In fact, many of the critical-thinking skills and problem-solving methods that these degrees teach involve learning precisely how to ask the right questions in the first place. A liberal arts education gives you the skills you need to answer the big questions in life… and the small ones.

  12. The enduring relevance and benefits of a liberal arts education

    The relevance, cost and value of a college education have been hot topics lately on various media platforms. The discussion often seems to be just an exchange of point-counterpoint broadsides among proponents and opponents of a liberal-arts education. As president of a liberal-arts college, I won't pretend to be neutral. I have benefited from ...

  13. Questions on Liberal Arts Education

    merc81 May 31, 2019, 1:55am 2. If you consider the curriculum at, and outcomes from, an emblematic liberal arts university such as Yale, then many of your questions will be answered. allyphoe May 31, 2019, 2:02am 3. A degree in History or English is a liberal arts degree, regardless of whether it's earned at a liberal arts college.

  14. The value of a liberal-arts education

    A liberal education—including, for example, philosophy, art and sociology as well as math and physics—educates the whole person, and prepares students to excel in a range of careers and, most importantly, live lives rich with meaning and purpose. A liberal-arts education teaches students to learn how to learn, and inspires them to go on ...

  15. PDF Liberal Arts Education: Changes, Challenges, and Choices

    Extant publications on liberal arts education including Jung, Nishimura, and . Sasao (2016) have offered intensive discussion on the core values of liberal arts education in the historical context, introduced best practices of selected liberal arts colleges, and analyzed policy and pedagogical guidelines of those institutions. M. Nishimura

  16. Why Is Liberal Arts Important? Liberal Arts Education

    Liberal arts is important for learning. Learning, the act and ability to take in and apply new information, is innate in human beings. But at the same time, it is a skill that can be practiced, improved, and honed. Liberal studies do all those things, pushing your brain to absorb and reflect on new inputs all the time.

  17. What Are the Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education?

    A liberal arts education strives to teach students important problem-solving and critical thinking skills. The goal is to teach students "how" to think, not what to think. Meaning, rather than memorizing facts, students learn to examine, think, and connect ideas. The skills learned in a liberal arts education can help students outside of ...

  18. Liberal Education and Innovation

    21 st-century liberal education should draw on the traditional strengths of the liberal arts tradition, which I will describe today as a series of conversations. At the same time, I will recognize certain important criticisms of existing liberal education programs, which focus on the shaping of students' characters through education.

  19. What is a Liberal Arts Education?

    A liberal arts education develops your capacities to analyze, to synthesize, to interpret, to visualize, to craft an argument, to ask important questions, and to grapple with evidence, whether visual, textual or virtual. These capacities are vital for a wide range of future careers, including the scientific, engineering and medical professions ...

  20. Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?

    Classical schools offer a traditional liberal-arts education, often focussing on the Western canon and the study of citizenship. ... One of the questions that Parham and the other CLT board ...

  21. Liberal Arts and Liberal Education

    His life became the source of the idea of liberal education in the West. His questions became the central questions of the liberal arts curriculum as it developed through the Middle Ages and into the modern era. They were the human questions, and they animated the study of what came to be called the "humanities."

  22. Why Be a Liberal Arts Major?

    A Liberal Arts degree is valuable in itself, but also teaches many of the skills and abilities that are needed in the contemporary workplace. That is why managers in business, industry and government appreciate the value of a Liberal Arts degree in potential employees. They recognize the importance of what are often called "employability skills."

  23. What is a Liberal Arts Education?

    Employers desire transferable skills (skills employees take with them to any job) typical of a liberal arts education. These include written and verbal communication skills and the ability to solve complex problems and work well with others. Provides an excellent foundation for graduate study in health care, law, business, or other fields.

  24. What Is Liberal Education?

    American higher education, or rather a part of it, is today the envy of the world, producing and maintaining research scientists of the highest caliber. But liberal education is another matter. The dominant opinion proclaims that no shared set of ideas, no common body of knowledge, and no baseline set of values or virtues marking an educated ...

  25. Applying Mnemonics in Liberal Arts Music Education

    Objectives The purposes of this study is to explore how mnemonic methods can be applied to liberal arts music classes by exploring the various mnemonic methods and their applicability. Methods To this end, based on past studies on mnemonics, possible ways to apply such methods to composition activities in introductory music classes were explored by identifying different categories and methods ...

  26. Graduate-Professional Student Appreciation Week 2024

    Join us for a roundtable discussion, facilitated by Dr. Len Cassuto, author of "The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education." A round-table discussion with Leonard Cassuto, Professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University.It aims to showcase successful department transformations that support graduate student career diversity, provide examples, and highlight the ...