The value of a liberal education

What is the value of a liberal education? And how do you help students to realize the value of a liberal education?

These are, perhaps, big questions that will require a number of different approaches and attempts. Here’s a first try.

Values are best examined with a historical perspective, I think, especially in this post modern era. The values of liberal education that we hold today can best be explained in the context of the history of thought about education. And as the needs and desires of society have changed over time, so too have the values attached to education generally and to liberal education in particular. So to understand the values of liberal education, we need to consider briefly the history of liberal education.

The ancient Greeks, and those who lived and wrote in Athens in the 5th century B.C. especially, were the first we know about who were concerned about educating the youth of their cities as a way to ensure future success. But already at this time there were differences of opinion about what this education should look like. Some thinkers took the view that political skills were key and that education should produce men (and, yes, it was only the men in 5th century Athens who were active in the democracy of the time) who could create, deliver, and analyze speeches such as they might give in a democratic assembly. The value of persuasive discourse was primary in the minds of these thinkers.

Others, however, (most notably Plato) took the view that truth, the highest form of knowledge, should be the focus of an education, since, following the Socratic tradition, such ultimate knowledge would lead to virtue, and virtue was what would produce good government and a successful community.

There was already in 5th century B.C. Athens, then, a tension between the view that education should focus on the practical and political or whether it should emphasize the philosophical and higher aspects of knowledge.

This tension remains with us today, I think. The practical aspect tends to be given voice by many first year students who, when asked why they are taking university classes, reply that they want a good job. They see their education as a direct contributor to the concrete and practical outcomes of success as they define it and their comments emphasize the values of wealth and security that they see as being served by higher education. Few ever mention higher knowledge as an end in itself as a reason for their post-secondary education efforts, much to the disappointment of many faculty who see the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge as the primary reason and value for higher education.

It is clear nonetheless from statistics collected by Stats Canada, for example, that post-secondary education does result in higher employment rates and, overall, higher incomes than for those who have no post secondary education. What is it, though, about higher education that produces the kind of economic success that students value? And what does liberal education offer to those practical values? Or is a liberal education a hindrance to the practical outcomes? Are the values of liberal education more in line with the higher ideal of knowledge for knowledge sake?

More to come.

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Reference: Bruce A. Kimball, Orators & Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986).

Northrup Frye on liberal education

This is a great quotation from one of the great literary critics:

“I do not myself believe in any education programme that adjust the student either to an ideal or to an actual environment, and I distrust both invulnerable wisdom and backslaphappy sociability as human goals. Offhand, I should say that the purpose of liberal education today is to achieve a neurotic maladjustment in the student, to twist him [sic.] into a critical and carping intellectual, very dissatisfied with the world, very finicky about accepting what it offers him, and yet unable to leave it alone. The man [sic.] who can appreciate Bach and Dante will be bored to death by most movies, nauseated by most radio programmes, stupefied by most sermons, and sickened by most politicians. The man [sic.] who can understand Goethe and Montaigne will not be better equipped to deal with his own society; he will merely be more inclined to retch and spew at the very sight of a large proportion of its members, including anti-Semites, spokesmen of big business, and people who want to fight Russia. The man [sic.] who reads Tolstoy and Marx will not be able to find refute in an ‘ivory tower’; he will only be able to see with horrid clarity that most businessmen are living in one. In short, the man [sic.] with a liberal education will not have an integrated personality or be educated for living; he will be a chronically irritated man, probably one of that miserable band who read the Canadian Forum, which is always finding fault and viewing with alarm. One real dose of real culture, and never again will he be able to enter, with millions of his compatriots, into the Paradisal peace of the Star Weekly and the Canadian Sunday afternoon, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest (Job 3:17).”

Northrup Frye. (2000). “A liberal education” (Originally published in Canadian Forum 25 (Sept. 1945): 134-5 and 25 (Oct. 1945): 162-4. In J. O’Grady & G. French (eds.) Northrup Frye’s writings on education (Collected works of Northrup Frye, Vol. 7, pp. 40-49). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Although Frye’s rant is rooted in what I would call a modernist view of liberal education, he beautifully expresses the unsettling result of liberal education, that is, an unrelenting dissatisfaction with the status quo.

liberal education in postmodern times

What has liberal education got to offer? I didn’t have a clue when I first entered university as a music major more than 30 years ago. I doubt I was much different then than many of the first year students I have in my classes today. I, like many of them, struggled with the notion of liberal education and even with the whole university experience. I switched majors a couple of times and left university for a while to pursue a different kind of learning, traveling around Ontario in a white Chevy van playing country music with some good friends. But eventually I came back, finished by undergraduate in one discipline, Anthropology, and then went on to Harvard Divinity School for a Master of Theological Studies which I managed to obtain without taking a lick of theology. A PhD at University of Toronto in Religious Studies followed, together with work on archaeological field projects in Israel and Jordan, family, and years of contracted sessional teaching in a wide range of disciplines, from Anthropology and Archaeology to Philosophy, History, and Geography. I guess that made me a liberated thinker (I always liked the liminality of cross-disciplinary interfaces) but not much of a disciplinary specialist.

So now I’m Coordinator of Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge and I have been thinking quite a lot about liberal education and what it has to offer in these postmodern times.

This blog will recount some of my explorations and musings. Maybe others will find it stimulating or interesting.