Liberal Education

There are two interesting features of a liberal education, as it has evolved over the decades, especially in the United States. One, which is well-discussed, is the breadth of disciplines to which undergraduate students are exposed. Most liberal education colleges mandate that students get exposure to the content and ways of thinking of the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. This philosophy of education is in sharp contrast to the narrower career focus in universities in other countries (e.g., beginning medical school after secondary school). The breadth of learning is obtained by taking introductory courses in several disciplines. In disciplines that have well-specified structures, integrated theories, or key threshold concepts, undergraduate students often take a “survey” course of the field. Such a course presents the key building blocks of knowledge of the field, but can rarely go very deep (e.g., introductory physics courses compared to the cutting edge of the discipline). In disciplines that have fewer unifying theoretical structures, the introductory courses can be a deeper examination of a subset of the knowledge (e.g., the novels of James Joyce as a focus of an introductory English course).

The content of these core curriculum courses can be, of course, of great value to the student. But another strength of the breadth of exposure is that students learn different ways of thinking. This might be thought of as different epistemologies, different approaches to observing, critiquing, and synthesizing. For example, the natural sciences build their knowledge production around a set of protocols constituent of the “scientific method.” This is a highly structured set of actions that must be followed for findings, discoveries, and conclusions to be accepted. The arts value the creation of new ways of expression, ideally evocative of many alternative interpretations. Many of the humanities develop the skills of reasoned questioning, examining assumptions explicitly and seeking evidence for alternative meaning. The social sciences contain a mix of research approaches and evidence building, seeking insight into individual and group actions, both cognitive and behavioral. Building these capacities has value much wider than the content of the courses because they can be applied throughout one’s life.

But there is another strength in liberal education as practiced in many US colleges and universities. It is the major. The major is the chance for students to go deep. Ideally, it consists of progressively more sophisticated and variegated understanding of a discipline’s domain of knowledge. When the experience of a major really works, the student begins to see the edges of the understanding of that domain. They learn what the discipline doesn’t yet fully understand. The unanswered questions are revealed. They get a sense of the excitement of the innovation at the frontiers of the field.
When they are truly educated in the major field, they experience for themselves the process of scholarship of the field. They expose themselves to the edges of understanding of the discipline or field. They seek answers that are not found in the existing texts. They invent. They experience failure in original efforts and recover to extract meaning out of their failures. They alter their assumptions or preconceptions or hypotheses. They try another idea.

In essence, they acquire the capacity of searching for truth using the scholarly methods of their major. While they will never forget the activities they practiced, perhaps the real value is common to any such activity in any discipline. They discover the value of careful observations, self-critical ideation, and intellectual resilience. These are life-enriching lessons applicable to a myriad of future prospects for the student.

Both breadth and depth are the key ingredients of the value of the liberal education philosophy. Breadth, for exposure to a wide variety of ways of thinking; depth, for the exercise of original critical inquiry.