In my many years of thinking about higher education, the metaphor I most like to use for what higher education should be is the cathedral. A good education and a cathedral both take time to build; rightly conceived, they are the project of a lifetime. Both marry beauty and function. And both are built to facilitate something higher, beautiful, and purposeful. A cathedral is built to facilitate worship; an education is built to facilitate human flourishing.
The marriage of beauty and function can be viewed through Aristotle’s golden mean. An education should neither be all practical nor so esoteric and myopic that it is detached from reality, place, and history. In Aristotle’s terms, it should include theoretical wisdom and technical wisdom. It should also include knowledge of, as Matthew Arnold puts it, “the best that has been thought and said.”
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explains that acting “at the right times, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end, and in the right way, is the intermediate and best condition, and this is proper to virtue.” The balanced path is the best one.
The liberal arts are not an afterthought. They are an integral part of human flourishing.
That’s not to say that we should suddenly embrace the “digital humanities” or other such fads that attempt to make the liberal arts “relevant.” The liberal arts are already relevant because they enable their adherents to think and live freely and purposefully.
In practical terms, this means enshrining a liberal-arts general-education curriculum for all students, with selections from history, philosophy, civics, and literature. After building this foundation and the accompanying buttresses, students can go on to major in something that helps them fulfill their career goals. In this way, engineers can learn to enjoy the classics. Nurses can appreciate philosophy. And both can understand what it means to pursue the good life.
Some students may choose to make liberal arts their major. But as soon as they do so, their studies become a means rather than an end. Majors, by their very nature, are career-oriented. They are where skills education naturally belongs. This instrumental education is the bricks and mortar of a good life, but it is no substitute for meaning.
Unfortunately, most universities have it backwards. They create a general-education curriculum based on skills and capacities rather than knowledge and ideas. This approach strips liberal-arts courses of their meaning. And without meaning, what’s the point? First-year students should be free to read Shakespeare for love, not in order to hone their “aesthetic and interpretive analysis.” Many of the essays in this issue rightly criticize the liberal-arts-as-skills model that universities have adopted.
Putting the liberal arts first, in a general-education program devoted to truth, goodness, and beauty, allows them to be truly liberal and liberating—studies that serve free people in their leisure, not their careers. Learning that is not stuffed into a box of “skills” and career-readiness.
Students will inevitably pick up some useful skills in such a program. But they should be incidental to the main point. Proponents of the liberal arts who showcase these skills as the main reason for such studies have already lost the argument.
All of this is to say that most universities need major reform in order to get the liberal arts right. Employing half measures or sticking with business as usual virtually ensures that many humanities courses and disciplines will be eliminated. The best such courses can be saved by moving them out of their disciplines and into their own, dedicated school of general education. There, they will be valued, cultivated, and taught in a way that helps students build strong foundations.
Along with colleagues from the National Association of Scholars and the Ethics and Public Policy Center, I outlined how this can be done in the model General Education Act. But the main point is this: The liberal arts are not an afterthought. They are an integral part of human flourishing. Without the liberal arts, education has little meaning.
It’s a cliché to say so, but a sturdy foundation built in college will prepare students for lifelong appreciation of the liberal arts. Learning shouldn’t stop at graduation. Students who have been taught to appreciate art, literature, and history will go on to attend the theatre, read for pleasure, and learn more about the history of civilization and their place in it. They can finish building the cathedral.
Jenna A. Robinson is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and publisher of From the Academy.