Liberal Education
The phrase ‘liberal education’ has passed from common usage in our American culture in the last several decades. There are still Liberal Arts Colleges in America but they seem to be less in demand by today’s students. Parents and students want universities and colleges to focus on matters of importance, how to get a good job.
It seems that few recognize that education has an extrinsic and an intrinsic value. The extrinsic value is contained within the fact that a practical education is the key to making a better living.
What is the intrinsic value of learning? Why study history or literature? Of what value is philosophy? Why study logic or how to think when I only care about learning how to build a bridge? Of what value is it for me to become a critically self-conscious thinker?
Everybody comprehends how the intellect can be used to build bridges, or repair a broken bone, or be an accountant but our culture has slowly removed from our comprehension the purpose of an ordered intellect in matters of providing meaning and purpose to life.
It appears that the mind has its own ‘grammar’ (system of rules). Many forms of thinking, i.e. math and music or logic, help us construct a solid structure for exercising this grammar. Other types of knowledge, i.e. history, help us because we understand the present through analogies with the past.
Creativity is greatly enhanced by the cross-fertilization of multiple sources and kinds of knowledge. The broad scope afforded by a liberal education prepares us to see things in ‘the whole’; we see things holistically (in combination, in completeness, not dissected or fragmented).
[b]Some consider that wisdom is “seeing life whole”, every realm of knowledge is necessary for discovering ‘full truth’.[b/]
John Henry Newman wrote that the pursuit of knowledge will "draw the mind off from things which will harm it," and added that it will renovate man's nature by rescuing him "from that fearful subjection to sense which is his ordinary state."