Theorizing Liberal Arts Education and Place

The History of Liberal Arts Education and Place

American educationalists have long contested the meaning, purpose and goal of liberal arts education.  Broadly speaking, the argument comes down to the meaning of the term “liberal” (from the Latin word liber, meaning “free”).  One understanding, derived from the eighteenth century Enlightenment project, takes it that a liberal arts education is to free students from their antecedent opinions, from the idols of their tribe, from the provincialism of their perspectives on life.  Passing through the refining fire of rational criticism, students are to gain entry to the cosmopolitan world of pure Reason, to a realm of knowledge achievable by all who forsake belief on the basis of hearsay, superstition and authority for the rational methods of testing and assessment recommended by the sciences.  They are to reject time-bound and place-bound traditions for the sake of universal principles embedded in the common faculty of Reason. 

This—the “Enlightenment understanding” of the purpose of liberal arts education--stands in contrast to what we might call the “Classical understanding,” which carries with it a very different view of what the word “liberal” brings to education (3).  This view is most readily discerned at the origins of liberal arts education in the age of the Athenian democracy and the heyday of the Roman republic.  There freedom was not the goal of education, but the condition.  Liberal arts education was for those who were already free from the necessity of work by virtue of their aristocratic social standing.  Liberal arts education was education for those who were excused from the necessity of work and thus had time for civic engagement.  Such education was not designed to divest students of the beliefs and values of the ambient culture, but to enable them to serve the local polity in accordance with those beliefs and values.  The study of grammar, for instance--part of the trivium in the classical roster of the liberal arts--was not just a matter of learning the parts of speech, or rules for well-formed sentences; rather, it was designed to expose students to the ideals and values encoded in the canonical literature of the day.  By reading Homer, Simonides and other revered poets, Athenian students of the liberal arts were to learn about the lives of heroes worthy of emulation, about what the gods like and dislike, about the virtuous life and how to live it.  It was an exercise in the formation of a person; a formation very much bound to the place and time of the community in which that education took place.  Liberal arts education was for the preparation of civic leaders in the place-based political community; and that education was itself informed by the time-bound traditions that held sway in that location.

In sum: the Enlightenment understanding of liberal arts education carries with it a drive or tendency towards placelessness, as it uproots its students and escorts them to the free-floating “view from nowhere.”  On the other hand, the Classical understanding tends to consolidate the hold that place and antecedent tradition has on its students.  Its project is one of inculcation—it wants to form students according to the ideal and values of the age, to fold them into locality.

Examples of both the Classical and the Enlightenment views are evident in American educational history.  During the early national period, as the experiment in democracy gained stability, two types of higher education institution were established (4).  The most common in antebellum America were small, locally supported, residential liberal arts colleges modeled in the English “Classical” tradition.  Increasingly common as the century wore on were larger, more comprehensive universities in either the “Agricultural and Mechanical” (A & M) tradition, or the state flagship tradition (5).  The 1862 Congressional legislation drawn up by Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont-- the Morrill Land Grant Act--traded federal land in each state for the establishment of state “land grant” universities.  While each of these types of institution generally maintained a set of liberal arts requirements, they diverged in their degree of emphasis on this form of education.  Private colleges continued to emphasize the liberal arts in the Classical tradition, while state universities increasingly developed in the Enlightenment tradition.  Following the German model, the new universities emphasized research, provided education for an increasing number of students (including women, minorities, and students from lower income strata), and favored disinterested learning; all in place of the Classical model of learning done by the elite for the betterment of society.  Confounding this distinction was an increasingly ambiguous role played by the founding religious traditions in the Classical colleges – in some cases these traditions were overtly discarded, in most cases they were subtly replaced by broadly humanist commitments, and in a few cases they were actively maintained within a liberal arts framework.

Another way of describing the dichotomy in the liberal arts tradition was offered by historian James McLachlan (6).  McLachlan suggested that a two-pronged model of collegiate education replace the dichotomy between college and university.  He recommended the categories of cosmopolitan and local colleges and universities.  Cosmopolitan collegiate education would include universities and colleges with broad university goals serving a smaller, more select student body, while local collegiate education served the majority of students, much like the current form of community college education today with its emphasis on vocational training (7).  Other scholars have drawn a similar distinction between antebellum colleges and modern community colleges as well.

During the twentieth century research universities gained clear predominance on the landscape of American higher education in terms of the number of students as well as the size of their overall operations.   Yet a small set of highly respected liberal arts colleges--some within these larger universities--remain.  Lately, each has tried to incorporate the virtues of the other. Recent trends show large universities attempting to recover some of their lost sense of place and intimacy through residential colleges, while small colleges attempt to complement strong teaching reputations with increasing efforts in the world of research. 

As the influence of higher education in America continues to spread, and access to higher education enables a greater number of its citizens to reach middle class standing, an additional challenge to traditional commitments to place emerges.  Middle class professionals are increasingly mobile, and they are typically committed first to profession, and second to geography.  The realities of urban flight and suburban sprawl also create living possibilities for larger numbers of mobile professionals, making neighborhood social commitments less likely (8).  This middle class mobility can be linked to the rise of the undergraduate and graduate education that equips students with disciplinary knowledge for professional careers as an avenue to private success rather than public service.  The concomitant perception of higher education in American has been that of “passport to privilege” rather than a noblesse oblige regard to using privilege for societal betterment.

We are inheritors of both traditions, the Classical and Enlightenment.  And we would do well to honor them both.  Clearly an education that seeks only to inculcate given beliefs and values, without examination, is deficient; but so is an education that seeks only to uproot and negate, that leads only to the skeptical suspension of belief and a permanently bemused sense of irony.  Products of a liberal arts education should not be uncritical recipients of a tradition; nor simply critical rejecters of tradition; but rather critical participants within a tradition.  This goal, a dialectical product of the Classical and Enlightenment views, squares with the fact that we are finite, embodied, time-bound, placed-based creatures who nonetheless have the capacity to think things over, who can compare traditions, who can discern generally valid norms for sorting out what needs to be preserved and what needs to be changed in their own culture.  Similarly, liberal arts education would be deficient if it aimed to graduates whose horizon was limited to needs of the local community; but neither should seek to produce rootless professionals, social atoms bouncing around in the free space of a market economy.

Liberal arts education, then, should both intensify its students’ relation to their place and enhance their ability to critically evaluate it.  It should take them deeper into their own traditions and locales, and also provide them with vantage points by which to assess them.  It should strengthen their commitment to place, and their commitment to making their place a better place—be that place local, regional, national, or global.

The larger issue with which contemporary American colleges and universities must contend is the dual nature of their inheritance as it relates to the question of relating the liberal arts to a sense of place and a sense of responsibility to local place-based communities. These dual paths will continue to cross, and our best hope is that they will inform each other.  Institutions of higher education are not placeless.  Despite charges of ivory tower irrelevance, they exist in actual cities, towns, and communities.  This placement itself is a factor for institutions to consider in their efforts to develop a commitment to place in their students.  For example, urban, suburban, and rural campuses exist in very different geographical contexts, contexts that present very different opportunities for civic engagement on the part of the educational community.  On-line universities, such as the behemoth University of Phoenix, have developed as hybrid institutions, on the one hand bringing higher education closer to where people live--even into their own living rooms – but at the same time bringing it into the placelessness that is cyberspace.  The historical developments within liberal arts education outlined above raise challenges for those who seek to foster a concern for the particularity of place within students, faculty, even the institution itself.

 

Next: Cultivating Care for and Attention to Place