I have long disliked the term “liberal arts.” And by “long,” I mean since I first began seriously studying that term and the idea it stands for a dozen or so years ago. My unease is not with what it means, but how it means it.
I was clear about this point in the book that I dared to title Inside the Liberal Arts, and again in the early posts of this eponymous blog. (I might have titled the blog “Inside the Liberal Arts – for lack of a Better Term,” except for the fact that a better term is not lacking. “Critical inquiry” is a better term, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
For anyone who cares about the universe of learning, my arguments for and against the phrase “liberal arts” bear repeating.
In America, the liberal arts have been attacked, and defended, basically forever; an essay titled “Is the Liberal-Arts College Doomed,” by James L. McConaughy, appeared in 1938. But the controversy between skills-learning and ideas-learning, in various forms, goes back to John Dewey vs. Walter Lippmann, to W.B. Du Bois vs. Booker T. Washington, even to Thomas Jefferson’s vision of learning in American vs. Benjamin Franklin’s. And before that, it dates to the practical-minded Sophists vs. the Socratic thinkers who valued dialogue and rationality for citizenship.
Attacks on liberal learning have intensified in recent decades as the nativist and xenophobic strains in American culture have again reared their hideous heads. Yes, I’m talking about the MAGA movement and Trump, but also about the cultural, economic, and technological conditions that made this resurgent brew of ignorance and idiocy possible. Legislators and other public figures who work to defund liberal education, to make it less accessible to the broad population, who in fact would just as soon see everyone go to a trade school (and I have nothing against trade schools) – those people may or may not know that they are not just deeply anti-intellectual but, more importantly, deeply anti-democratic. They are both a symptom of a democracy at war with itself and the disease itself. And most of them have enjoyed liberal educations of on kind or another.
The fact that the liberal arts are under attack is a good reason not to try to rebrand it as something else. Nevertheless, I have suggested (and still believe) that “critical inquiry” is a much better term for the same thing. “Liberal arts” has always been an awkward term for several reasons. First, its origins, although distinguished, are obscure to most people who use it now. Second, related to that, the words “liberal” and “arts” both mean different things than they did when the term first emerged in late Roman antiquity as a way to express the skills (“artes”) of a citizen.
Third, the plural form leads to awkwardness and confusion. And fourth, related to that, it’s a vague term that (unlike critical inquiry) doesn’t foreground the process of learning, but rather more readily identifies a broad range of areas of learning: pretty much everything other than purely skill-based education or the hard sciences (which latter are nevertheless taught in all liberal arts institutions). And I’m not yet convinced that the sciences, even in the highly technical and mathematical reaches that are beyond my understanding, are not deeply rooted in essentially the same ideas of rationality and critical thinking that are the animating core of liberal learning. (See my essay … ).
Like I said, I prefer the term “critical inquiry” for its focus on the process of thinking and learning, and for its avoidance of the semantic and other traps that ensnare the phrase “liberal arts.” In our dreams, we might imagine a resurgent, post-MAGA America, a resurgent democracy that would necessarily entail and be propelled by a resurgent trust in liberal education. We might rebrand it “critical inquiry” and feel better for it. That’s not likely to happen, at least not all of it.
What I’m sure of is that the phrase “liberal arts” is authentic to the original idea of “artes liberalis,” of training people to be democratic citizens; that mission hasn’t changed in the two thousand years since the Romans devised it, adapting the learning and the rationalist philosophy of Ancient Greece; and that such training is the ultimately the best possible reason for getting an education. I say this because, as important as they are, we could survive without physicists, engineers, or even doctors; but a world without citizens would be truly nightmarish. In fact, we’re starting to see it.