Philosophy, Politics, and the End of Liberal Arts Education (original) (raw)

An Essay on the Christian Liberal Arts

The growth of higher education in the United States involves a fascinating history of relationships, movements, and achievements. The liberal arts form of higher education traces its history back to the days of Ancient Greece. Christian liberal arts enjoys a hallowed thread within this history. In this essay, I give a brief overview of the history of Christian liberal arts and then discuss five key goals to which those within this educational world should strive. My essay concludes with three challenges facing Christian liberal arts higher educational institutions. The Appendix gives a more detailed summary of early history.

"Biblical Wisdom as a Model for Christian Liberal Arts Education"

Christian Higher Education, 2019

Christian educators recognize the value of biblical wisdom. Indeed, one of the foremost objectives of a Christian liberal arts education is that all members of the learning community would pursue and attain wisdom. While wisdom is important as an end goal of Christian liberal arts education, this article proposes that wisdom can also serve as its model, allowing the subject to structure the method. Specifically, six key traits that characterize biblical wisdom should also characterize Christian liberal education. Like wisdom, Christian liberal education should be foundationally theological, integrated, accessible, practical, transformative, and foster lifelong learning. Building on scholarship from both biblical studies and educational theory, this article discerns a link that needs to be recognized and proposes a model of viewing Christian liberal arts education that flows organically from its primary subject.

Reforming the Liberal Arts (Ch. 6)

As the title of this chapter suggests, "Learning as a Spiritual Experience," I argue that learning, especially the higher we go, is inherently spiritual, transcendent, and religious. My intent is to offer yet another challenge to the dichotomy between faith and learning.

Morality and the Liberal Arts: Six Axes of Connection

Journal of Educational Thought, 2022

The universe of liberal education is a moral one because it involves communities, and therefore the potential for competition and conflict. However, the ways in which morality and the liberal arts intersect are complex, problematic, and contested. This essay explores six axes along which liberal education is animated by moral concerns: the axis of policy; that of language and communication; within the curriculum (particularly, but not exclusively, in the humanities); in pedagogy; in terms of moral agency and character; and finally, in terms of the mission of liberal education. Mapping these six dimensions doesn't resolve fundamental moral problems, but offers a framework for understanding them more clearly and for managing those "essentially contestable" debates that cannot be resolved.

Bl. John Henry Newman and St. Thomas Aquinas on Wisdom and Prudence in Liberal Education

In The Idea of a University, Bl. John Henry Newman claims that “Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another . . . . Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence.” One may easily infer from these claims that Newman sees the university’s task as purely intellectual rather than moral; that liberal education can aim at intellectual excellence but must leave moral excellence alone. The Idea presents an abstract notion; the Rise and Progress of Universities presents images of the living, concrete reality. And in the latter, one finds that the integrity of the university requires its relation to the Church, in which a liberal education finds its place within the formation of a whole person, including the moral dimension, under the guidance of the Church. Nevertheless, the connection between the moral and the intellectual could be expressed more clearly than Newman’s formulation allows by taking advantages of some resources in Thomas’s account of the intellectual virtues. Put in Thomas’s terms, the Idea seems to claim that the cultivation of science and wisdom, taken in itself, excludes the formation of prudence and the moral virtues it expresses. And his fuller statement in the Rise and Progress might suggest that an education aimed at the development of the whole person, including not only science and wisdom but also prudence, comes about only by the combination of two unlike things. The intellectual life and the moral life, one might think, can be combined but not because of an internal connection between them. But Thomas’s account of the virtue of wisdom as a potential whole comprising all the speculative and—I argue—practical intellectual virtues both preserves Newman’s distinction between these kinds of virtues and shows that the cultivation of wisdom in any form is internally linked to the formation of whole persons in a contemplative, rather than merely gentlemanly, character. The argument moves in four steps. Since Newman’s ideal of a “philosophical habit of mind” and Thomas’s understanding of wisdom both revolve around a perception of the connections between things, I begin with the relation between reason and order in Thomas’s thought. Section two describes the distinctions among the intellectual virtues as diverse habits of ordering, and section three presents them in their unity as members of a potential whole centered on wisdom proper. Finally, in the fourth section, I consider several different “characters” often proposed as legitimate goals for liberal education in our own time in the light of the notion of the intellectual virtues as habits of ordering united in a potential whole.

Augustine and the Liberal Arts

In an early dialogue, On Order, Augustine sets out a program for thinking about thinking. Through such reflections, students attain self-knowledge and prepare for philosophical inquiry. The liberal arts are useful for this project, insofar as they provide opportunities for thinking, yet they are not ultimately necessary. I suggest that On Order's program, correctly understood, provides a rationale for Augustine's beginning but never completing a set of works on the seven liberal arts, and that his approach has contemporary relevance. Current discussions of the liberal arts move between concerns for particular content, which after a canon war may seem political or arbitrary, and useful skills, which reduce the liberal arts to quasi-vocational programs. Augustine's focus on rational activity escapes the content/skills dilemma and gives us a fresh perspective on the liberal arts' value.

Orators or Philosophers? On the roots of liberal education and its significance in a complex world.

Since the end of the 20th century a combination of breadth and depth seems to be one of the hallmarks of every program that is based on the liberal education concept. Depth is achieved by some degree of specialization, usually in the form of a disciplinary or multidisciplinary major; breadth usually includes a selection of general education courses and some evidence of civic engagement. However, curriculum designers are increasingly concluding that some sort of integrative learning is necessary in order to achieve coherence. When students are left on their own to see connections, general education curricula often become a series of unrelated courses. It is an illusion to think that coherence grows in the minds of students without an incentive to integrate knowledge and skills. Related to this model there are some questions I want to discuss in this presentation.