What Is the Goal of a Liberal Arts Education?
The Purpose of a Liberal Education
When my son was seven years erstwhile, he could reel off all the stats anyone would ever demand to know nearly Detroit Tigers baseball. Batting averages, RBIs, home runs, or stolen bases—he knew them all. Of class, his prodigious prowess for Tigers stats wasn't in fulfillment of a homework consignment or from a promise that such knowledge was practically "useful." I never had to tell him, "Now, go study well-nigh the Tigers!" He had an authentic devotion, desire, and enthusiasm for the subject. My son was, in essence, a student of Major League Baseball game. He loved following the Tigers for its ain sake. This very spirit is at the eye of liberal education, and it'due south the fundamental to answering the pivotal questions of life.
To understand what makes liberal instruction dissimilar from other sorts of education, we first demand to capeesh that the (pocket-sized "l") liberal arts are chosen liberal because they are free from serving ends outside themselves. They are worth doing for their own sake. At that place are other arts, besides, called "servile arts," those arts not pursued for their ain sake. Now, to exist clear, to phone call an art "servile" should not be taken as an insult. Servile arts are necessary. Nosotros'd starve, suffer, and perish without them. One way to distinguish the servile from the liberal arts, and so, is by noting their different aims.
C.S. Lewis distinguished them this manner:
The purpose of liberal instruction is to produce the expert human and the proficient citizen. The good man hither means the man of good taste and expert feeling, an interesting and interested homo. Vocational training, [the servile arts], on the other hand, prepares the student not for leisure, but for work. It aims not at making a good man, but a good broker, a adept electrician, a good scavenger, a proficient surgeon.
In the strictest sense, a liberal fine art is any organized torso of cognition worth knowing for its ain sake, without business for the awarding—or utility—of such cognition. Liberal learning is thus liberated from the burden of answering this oft-heard question: "What is the practical use, application, or benefit of studying the subject?"
This tin exist confusing for students infected with what I call the virus of "relevantism." Also many American higher students get in on campus enervating to know the relevance of each particular course, grade, or assignment and what they tin can "do" with information technology while on the chore. To exist certain, these questions seem reasonable for those seeking only vocational training. But such a vocational focus reveals the unfortunate fact that "higher" education has descended from its once lofty study of ends to a mundane obsession with means.
Human life is also rich, however, to prepare for information technology in such a limited way. The most robust higher education, still much it may include vocational training, is non limited to such grooming. Vocational training may produce clever workers able to earn lots of dollars, merely the liberal education goes further, ordering the heart and mind thereby equipping the workers to spend those dollars wisely. A liberal arts student, therefore, asks, "What sort of person volition I get by pursuing this instruction? How will this course shape my soul? How will my collegiate experience teach me to live well and wisely whether on or off the job? What will I learn nearly the ends that wise men should pursue in life?"
In "Metaphysics," Aristotle writes: "All men by nature want to know. An indication of this is the delight nosotros accept in our senses. For even apart from their usefulness, they are loved for themselves." For instance, we can all agree being able to see is improve than existence blind. Eyesight is useful. Merely we too like just to sit down and stare at the surf on the ocean beachfront, or at beautiful mountains, or at a sunset. These are all lovely activities that aren't especially useful. The indicate is that there is indisputably a delight to learning that has no consideration for the utility of the learning. This is non to advise that students should never tend to the professional utility of their studies. This is probably incommunicable, and not wise regardless. Just students who ignore those things that are liberal, that are worth pursuing for their own sakes, will miss out on so much that equips them to live honorable lives of wisdom and virtue.
Truthful liberal learning demands that students larn to set aside, even if only for a time, business organisation for a discipline's immediate practical relevance. Indeed, the Latin root from which we derive the word "student" refers to a disposition of eager devotion, want, and enthusiasm for a subject. When one truly loves something for what it is, ane doesn't begin by asking what "usefulness" it provides.
The business organization of teaching is learning what to love and how to love it in the right style.
As information technology turns out, withal, learning pursued for its own sake, without regard to practical utility, turns out to exist mighty useful. Only if it's pursued with one's optics solely on the consequences and "usefulness" of the endeavor, the liberal arts will be rendered servile and the good consequences may not come up. This is the paradox of liberal education: Pursue the learning without regard to the practical utility, and there will exist many useful consequences, but pursued with the principal business organisation being the utility, the liberal education will be deficient.
Liberal learning creates cultivated, well-formed men and women; thoughtful people who possess a wealth of cognition and who, in the calorie-free of this knowledge, can impartially estimate matters of significance. Liberal teaching produces people capable of continuing to educate themselves—people endowed with the necessary intellectual frameworks, curiosity, and methods to pursue a life of learning and vocational success.
It may seem counterintuitive in our "pedal-to-the-metal" piece of work culture, but when it comes to learning, the best attitude to cultivate is one of leisure. We get the word "schoolhouse" from the Greek give-and-take scholé, which conveys notions of "free fourth dimension," "leisure" and "rest." The classical Greek world, where the liberal arts were first conceived, understood leisure to be about the gratuitous time to spend leisurely on lectures and discussions of neat ideas—scholé was about chasing truth and enjoying oneself in the pursuit.
My 30-2 years of pedagogy experience have taught me that near students of the liberal arts become less interested in acquiring the ways to get what they want than in figuring out what in life is really worth wanting, what ends are ultimately worth pursuing. The business of teaching is learning what to dearest and how to love information technology in the right way. If done properly, this involves improving one's heart and graphic symbol—which involves an ordering of the soul. One must come to recognize that which is genuinely good, true, or beautiful, and one's soul must larn how those things ought to be loved.
Students young and old must free themselves to savour learning for its own sake, not only for the sake of the earning ability it bestows. Simply when learning is pursued for its own sake will that learning do its nearly for the student. It will order the soul, discipline the heed, and equip 1, not just for the workplace, but for the chore of living, that is, for flourishing in all the capacities that await in life. A good liberal pedagogy provides the kind of preparation needed to live well—non just for success at the function, but more importantly, beyond information technology.
This text is based on an edited extract of the lecture entitled "Learning" given to Hillsdale College students—office of a four-function "Freshman Foundations" series on the purposes of a liberal arts educational activity that all Hillsdale students must attend during their freshman year.
Source: https://lawliberty.org/the-purpose-of-a-liberal-education/
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