The “liberal” in “liberal arts” derives from the latin root for “free,” but not the way that most people think. The medieval Liberal Arts were not free in the sense that they promoted freedom or free thinking, but rather in the sense that it was the education that “free” people (i.e., the rich) chose to pursue. The term connotes conspicuous consumption rather than freedom.
Because Liberal Arts – and in particular the humanities – were always the preserve of the elite, they have retained an aura of providing people with “higher skills”: creativity, critical thinking, cultural awareness, problem solving, communication skills, and so forth. But in the modern university, this puts teachers in the Liberal Arts in a bit of an anomalous position. Think about this for a bit: we get engineers to teach engineering, doctors to teach medicine. But we leave creativity, critical thinking and problem solving to… classicists? English teachers? It is not belittling these disciplines in the slightest to ask why it is that we think that people trained in these areas have some gifts for imparting creativity, etc., that professors trained in other disciplines do not.
Obviously, humanities disciplines do inculcate these skills to some extent. The work of Richard Arum and Josipa Roska, bleak as it generally is, makes it pretty clear that students in these disciplines seem to have better educational outcomes in terms of cognitive development. Whether that’s due to something innate in the disciplines or something innate about the kinds of young people who enrol in these courses is a bit of an open question. At best, you can say that creativity, critical thinking, etc., are poorly-understood epiphenomena of the humanities.
I’m fairly sure we can do better than this. Let’s say there is something innate in humanities disciplines that promote critical thinking, etc. If what we care about is the outcomes, rather than mastery of the disciplines themselves, shouldn’t we design curricula specifically around these outcomes? Shouldn’t professors in these disciplines receive instruction at some point in how to develop these skills?
Of course, the problem is that at Canadian institutions most of our Arts faculties offer students smorgasboards of courses rather than curricula per se. And many professors would be offended at the notion that they are primarily in the business of teaching transferable skills rather than teaching mastery of a discipline. Yet, justifying the Arts in terms of precisely these transferable skills has become routine.
It raises an inevitable question: if that’s the justification for the liberal arts and humanities, is the professoriate in these fields actually fit for purpose?
Geneviève Bergeron
Hélène Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Maryse Laganière
Maryse Leclair
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Michèle Richard
Annie St-Arneault
Annie Turcotte
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz
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Alex,
To my mind, you’ve got some of this right but missed some key bits. First, the liberal arts were pitched to “free” people, but only incidentally to the “rich”. The idea was that, to go to “school”, a word stemming from the greek word for “leisure”, you had to have presciesly that, time not to be working in the fields, time not to be scratching a living. School, leisure, requires, therefore, as a necessary but not sufficient, condition, some material resources. So a general and liberal (in the sense of “freeing” or “liberating” education for “free” people) was not pitched to the rich in so far as they were rich but in so far as they had time. Second, while sure, the liberal arts have been about skills (the trivium and quadrivium back in the day, “critical thinking”, etc now), I’ve always thought the liberal arts were primarily about “sense making”. Offering up the various narratives and arguments which have shaped, i.e. made sense of, our worlds and ourselves (for better or worse), and giving students the tools to assess them, the liberal arts have, at their best, invited students to make sense of the world and themselves for themselves . . . something that doesn’t end with a BA but which, one hopes, becomes a life-time engagement in the search for a purposeful life. Can this be measured? Perhaps. Should it be? I, for one, would be most careful in devising such measures.
Thanks for the “thoughts” in the morning. They’re a good start to my day.