The Decline of the Liberal Arts?

One of the potential repercussions of the authors’ predicted revolution in education is the decline of the liberal arts (p.107). This may come about as a result of students’ specializing only in things that interest them and/or as a result of economic pressures to take occupation-oriented courses. The authors wonder whether students will choose to expand their own horizons, in the way that a liberal arts education is meant to.

Though it is to their credit that the authors signal this issue, I think it merits more attention that the authors give it, because it opens up into two larger questions about the nature of education. The first question is: to what extent should education be a function of student choice? The second is: what are the appropriate outcomes of education? I do not pretend to have answers to these questions, but I would at least like to raise some further questions about them.

The authors are right to indicate that forcing students to learn leads to apathy, boredom and discontent amongst students. But is it wise to let students choose their own paths? Perhaps they will by and large forego the liberal arts. On what grounds will they do so? Are their own, young, inexperienced inclinations necessarily going to lead them in the right direction on this issue? At that age, do they even know enough about themselves to make informed decisions? The liberal arts have represented a traditional core of human learning, which include disciplines that are, from a certain perspective, useless. They are nevertheless valued and valuable. I want to focus on one that is both especially useless and dear to my heart: Classical Studies, in which I have an MA. Being able to read Ancient Greek merits no appreciable economic benefit and the skill has little transferable qualities. It does, however, allow one to read Homer and Sophocles in the original, not to mention Plato, Aristotle and Aristophanes. Classical Studies are in decline; without interested students, they may wither and die. By letting students choose so early and by not exposing them to ancient Greek at all, we risk losing the next great Classical scholar to plumbing, which she happened to choose because her favorite TV show featured a cool, wise-cracking plumber!

I always cringe when economic measures are used to value education at any level. However, I don’t doubt that both students and parents have economic and occupational hopes which their education is meant to enable. Fair enough. The liberal arts have always represented a broader view on education, one that sees humans as inheritors of the intellectual achievements of the past. Reading Greek is thought to be valuable for its own sake, and not as a means to something else. If education is cast in terms of measurable outcomes and useful occupational skills, then what happens to something like Greek? Can one measure educational outcomes of all sorts? Administrators schooled in the language of “assessment” like to think so, but is it really so? If so, to what extent? For all disciplines? Can one measure the interpretation of an Aeschylean choral ode? This sort of thing seems not to be amenable to the kind of computer-generated feedback loop that authors discuss.