Opinion | What Is Liberal in the Liberal Arts?

What is the “liberal” in the liberal arts? The purpose of the liberal arts education is really to form leaders, to form freedom-loving and moral leaders and giving them the tools, rhetoric and history, and some science, for sure. But it’s supposed to train citizens, really, through engagement with the classics. In the early times, there was a lot of emphasis on being able to speak in public, to speak in a convincing way, in public. And this is all really to convince people to become citizens and to do the right thing. Education is such an important part of this book. Other histories of liberalism I’ve read actually reveal the same thing, that when you go back into the liberal tradition, the purpose of education is hotly debated and held at the center of the project. Today, you don’t have that discourse in the same way. We talk about whether or not education is working, not so much what it is for. It’s almost taken as evident that the purpose of education is to prepare you to get a job. That’s right. And that was not the purpose of the liberal arts. No, it was not. Today it’s a lot about vocational training, a lot about preparing students to get jobs. These were considered menial, menial tasks for — liberal arts, was for the leaders in the time. So it was for — and the citizens were the leaders of society in Rome. In the medieval period as well, it was always about something other than preparing you for a job. Isn’t it funny that today, when people try to defend the humanities, which are under siege in many universities, frankly, and they try to advocate for liberal arts education, that they say: Oh, well, actually, there’s proof that having a liberal arts education will get you that job. So that whole discussion about what a citizen of a democracy means, what it means to be a citizen, what are the values, what is our common language, what does it mean to be a citizen of a democracy. All of these questions that are so important have kind of dropped out of our discussion.