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Liberal Arts, Liberating Arts: What does "freeing" mean in this context?
| Claremont Statement |
If you only read ONE of these statements on the liberal arts, read the Claremont Statement to the end: The Liberal Arts are literally arts of freedom from slavery: Here are definition, change over time, and the modern challenge to the Liberal Arts.
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| Roanoke Statement | "A liberal arts education frees us from a reliance upon received opinion into an achieved personal authority by training the skills of critical thought, sound research, and informed and reasoned debate."
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| Acton Institute | A third aaproach to the word 'liberal' has to do with knowing, that is, knowing things for their own sakes so that we are able to "rule ourselves".
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The most insidious challenge to the Liberal Arts: Selling the Liberal Education as a means of enslavement. aka: 'The Liberal Arts prepare you very well for any type of job or profession.'
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If the Liberal Arts do free a person from slavery, then, to use the Liberal Arts to point a person TOWARD slavery results, mainly, in three possibilities: 1.) The student is truly free and the Liberal Arts do open one's mind and eyes to the slavery that this position intends culminate in, resulting in avoiding those chains; 2.) The student accepts the goal of job-slavery, and the Liberal Arts are destroyed, have no liberating effect but does result in locking the chains on the student, perhaps forever; 3.) Confusion, for all the obvious reasons, in students, teachers and administration. The same idea is encapsulated here at Westminster College. For example, consider the Westminster statement below (especially in the context of the Claremont Statement at the top of this list): Westminster claims... "The college prepares its students for success through a strong foundation of liberal education combined with cutting-edge professional programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels." The above statement appears in prominent places of Westminster College's self-description and is meant to attract students: What kind of students will this attract? Not many that have a Liberal Education desire! Jobs, money, career and 'success' will be at the center of these incoming students. |
| Barbara Reynolds on Dorothy Sayers | Dorothy Sayers and her fellow graduates were privileged, not because they were wealthy, for most of them were not, but because of the implicit assumption in their time that subjects intrinsically of value set their minds and talents free to enter into permanent possession of a tradition and heritage. "Vocational education," she wrote, "is the education of slaves." Educationists of today continue to be confused about this, being increasingly influenced by political interests and the market-led approach, in which children and parents are seen as consumers, schools as competitive business, teachers as technicians and higher educational institutions as factories. |
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The term 'liberal arts' in the Encycloaedia Britannica "college or university curriculum aimed at imparting general knowledge and developing intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum." John Henry Newman, in The Idea of a University, identified the main principle and purpose of the Liberal Arts: "this process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture." |
| Can Liberal Arts Colleges be Saved? | FINALLY & FUNDAMENTALLY: The periodical, Inside Higher Ed, addresses the question to the left with some solutions, but misses the fundamentals: So do middle and high schools miss the fundamentals: As one high school teacher said to me, "What? Grammar? Spelling? Logic? No, we focus on 'creativity' and social skills." Worse, high school teachers offer college courses without the (usually requisite) prep or degrees, and colleges accept this "coursework" in the hope of high enrollments -- AP courses. So new college students not only miss the fundamental prep they should have gotten in high school, but come with a free pass to avoid the fundamental prep that a college might offer as well. |
