Welcome to the Inside the Liberal Arts blog.
This is the first in a series of blogposts – I envision at least several dozen more – many of which will relate, in one way or another, to my just-published book, Inside the Liberal Arts: Critical Thinking and Citizenship (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023). My aim here will be to expand on what’s in the book, not just repeat it – and to do so in bite-size chunks. Once in a while, I may wander off into the mental wilderness, and I hope you’ll follow along.
The first few posts will focus on the foundations I lay in the early chapters for understanding liberal learning and critical thinking, and why they really matter. Spoiler alert: they matter for democracy. But after that, it’s Katie-bar-the-door.
Where possible, I’ll address topical issues along the way, and one or two personal or ancillary ones, just to add some the pepper and salt. In this post, I simply want to give you an overview of what to expect, and why. I welcome your feedback and thoughts on this or future posts.
Again: this will be a blog about the liberal arts, critical thinking, and citizenship, and it will aim to show how they form a system that is foundational to what we call democracy. Surprisingly or not, this has never been attempted before (or if it has, it hasn’t succeeded). There are many good books, especially recent ones, that defend liberal learning. There is no need for another one. And there are many books on critical thinking and its close cognate, rationality. (I will argue that there is no compelling reason to distinguish these.) But I know of no work that systematically connects these two ideas, critical thinking and the liberal arts, with each other and with democratic citizenship. That is why I wrote the book, and why I’m writing this blog.
It’s a big job, and I won’t get everything right. But as Melville wrote of Moby-Dick, “As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors.” I invite you to share your ideas and to be a critic.
Beyond that, many points will be contestable; and contestability itself will figure prominently in how we understand liberal learning. But over the course of the blog, I’ll offer a number of discrete glimpses into the nature of this grand intersection of liberal learning, critical thinking, and citizenship. Hopefully each post will be more or less self-explanatory; but as a system, they should add up to more than the sum of their parts.
Thus, the book Inside the Liberal Arts and this blog aren’t just about liberal learning per se, or about critical thinking. Rather, I’m suggesting that the two rubrics are opposite sides of the same coin: that critical thinking is in fact the essential core, the common denominator, the spine and the soul, if you will, of all non-professional, non-vocational, non-technical (i.e., skill-based) learning.
Science is a crucial part of the mix, for at least three reasons that I can think of. First, because no broad-based liberal arts curriculum can leave nature out of the equation: nature and the two other mega-domains of learning (human nature and society) interconnect in many ways; second, because the scientific method is a paradigm of rationality (but not the only one); and third, because we need both science-literate citizens and scientists who can communicate with those other citizens – the rest of us – to navigate the challenges of democracy in the 21st century. Scientific knowledge, in other words, is a democratic value. It’s not just about how we as a civilization use toasters or nuclear warheads, but how we understand and control them. And don’t forget climate change or pandemics.
What this blog is not is another “defense” of liberal learning, or a standard text-book approach to critical thinking. It isn’t about pedagogy or what should be taught, or how, in a liberal arts curriculum. In fact, I’ll argue that it doesn’t matter what we study, only that we learn to think (while adding some facts and frameworks); and we can learn to think regardless of whether the subject matter is zoology or Zoroastrianism.
I anticipate being criticized for a too-Western approach that excludes other learning traditions. And there’s superficial truth in that claim, which masks a different reality. It’s true that I am not schooled in Asian, African, or Arabic cultures. But my curiosity isn’t limited by that, and neither should yours be. (One of the best books I’ve read in recent years is “Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia” by Christina Thompson, a study of how the Pacific Islands were first settled by rafters from the Asian mainland. Another is the novel “Nervous Conditions” by Tsitsi Dangarembga , about growing up in Zimbabwe. But those are isolated exceptions to the rule.)
My touchstones are mainly those of Western philosophy. But the core focus on rationality that was the gift of the Greeks remains at the heart of liberal education today, even when it focuses on, or is enriched by, other cultures. I urge an approach to education that is more universal, while recognizing the importance of the Greek legacy. And I’m not big on canons – but great books are great.
I admire the contributions of those other traditions, and I welcome challenges from all directions. But I reject the idea that we can learn anything at all without the various forms of rationality-cum-critical thinking. As I’ll suggest, the practice of reasoning made explicit for the first time by Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient thinkers is embedded in language itself. We’re all rational thinkers, as users of language. In fact, we are all philosophers. The supreme aim of higher learning is to make all better thinkers – and better philosophers.
In my next post, I’ll further outline the course of the blog and explain how it came about in the first place. But who are you, my readers? Not just my mother, surely. My hope is that you will be anyone with a curious mind: students, scholars, educators, or ordinary people like myself (I am none of the above) who simply want to know more about how things are, how things work, and what things mean.
Thank you. You can learn more about the book (including the Table of Contents, subsections of each chapter, and a bibliography,) at https://jeffreyscheuer.com/insidetheliberalarts. Please keep reading, chime in with your thoughts, and share the blog with anyone you think might enjoy it.