Education in general, and the liberal arts in particular, are all about citizenship – and I mean all. This blog post will explain why.
Let’s begin with a definition of citizenship. It has to be a broad definition, because citizenship is a broad concept. (“ ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty-Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’” Take that, Alice.)
Citizenship encompasses a range of things. But all of those things have this common underpinning: they involve transactions where there is both give and take between an individual and a larger community. Everything we learn prepares us for such interactions. And those transactions occur mainly (if not exclusively) in three general dimensions of society: the political or civic dimension, the cultural dimension, and the economic dimension. Most or all other relationships that meet the definition of citizenship can be related to, or subsumed within, one of those three domains. Citizenship, in short, is triangular.
Triangular Citizenship
If this triangular model seems a bit too neat, it is mainly because the three domains affect and interact with one another. That’s why, in Chapter 2 of Inside the Liberal Arts, I offer a more complex model showing some of those interactions. But the bottom line remains this: virtually all education is for one or more forms of citizenship.
There are further complexities: for example, the various subtypes of civic engagement that can be identified within or between the three main domains, and the various ways in which we succeed, fail, or opt out as citizens. And political citizenship has a limited kind of priority over the other two domains, due to the fact that it determines their scope and limitations– for example, in terms of freedom of speech, or legal constraints on economic behavior. But for our purposes, the paramount consideration is that all education is instrumental to citizenship of some kind, and not to something else. It enables us to participate in the economic, cultural, and political life of the community.
If that triangle is the first premise of a syllogism, the second premise is that education for particular skills – whether STEM, vocational, technical, or otherwise – is primarily or exclusively conducive to economic citizenship, and not to the other two domains. And skills are important. We need doctors, pilots, hairdressers, dental technicians, and computer scientists. Some of those skills, of course, are transferrable to the other domains; and any type of skill requires critical thinking of some kind. But skill-based learning, whether STEM or vocational or otherwise, is limited relative to the larger citizenship model. It doesn’t teach us history or psychology or philosophy, or how art or literature broadens and deepens our awareness of society and our place in it.
That being the case, we need something else to be full citizens – citizens who understand their place not just in the economic world, but in the political and cultural spheres. The form of education that affords that range of engagement in the world is the liberal arts. Only the liberal arts, in sum, prepare us for the trifecta of economic, civic and cultural citizenship. Without liberal learning (as I’ll argue further in a later post) we aren’t just limited to training for economic functions, important as they are. Without the liberal arts, there can be no democracy. Not a scintilla of it.