INSIDE THE LIBERAL ARTS: Critical Thinking and Citizenship
PREFACE
A few years ago, I traveled with my son to the West Coast to look at a small liberal arts college not unlike the one I had attended in the East thirty years earlier. A late-spring snowfall had just coated the nearby mountains when we arrived at the campus. My son liked what he saw, and he ended up studying there. Coincidentally, his college had been my own second choice; and while my undergraduate experience was memorable, his fir-clad Oregon campus might have served me just as well as my Quaker arboretum in Pennsylvania.
What struck me most of all, in looking through the catalogue of his college-to-be, was how much its curriculum resembled that of my alma mater – not at the time, but a third of a century earlier. Whereas my school had vastly diversified its course offerings – and its student body – since that time, the curriculum of my son’s college was like mine in a time capsule: it had hewn to a narrower and more traditional approach to the “liberal arts.”
I put “liberal arts” in quotation marks here not in disparagement, but to emphasize just how ambiguous and problematic the term is, despite its wide usage, and also to highlight the fact that it embraces the different paths that two otherwise similar institutions have taken over the past generation. There remain crucial overlaps of course. My college hasn’t abandoned philosophy, literature, or the classics. It has merely added, among other offerings, Arabic, Asian Studies, Chinese, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Environmental Studies, Film and Media Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Interpretation Theory, Islamic Studies, and Japanese.
Both schools are avatars of academic excellence, and both can claim the mantel of a liberal arts college. More than anything else, it was seeing the contrast between two viable models – triggered by a sense of déjà vu in a course catalogue – that prompted me to consider a series of interlacing questions about the meaning of liberal education and how it relates to critical thinking and citizenship. This book is the result.
So much for the genesis of the work. What about its form and destination? In brief: it began on what seemed like twin tracks, in response to the two original questions – What are the liberal arts, and what is critical thinking. But those tracks quickly merged as it became clear that they are really one and the same question. The universe of human knowledge is the universe of reason. It is useful to treat them as distinct entities, and I do so throughout the book. But as I hope to show, they are in fact two sides of the same coin. Some of what we call rationality or critical thinking applies beyond liberal learning. But it is also the very essence of liberal learning.
As I further discovered, there are many good books defending the liberal arts against their critics. And as I already knew, there are many good books about thinking, for the general reader, the philosopher, and for other students and scholars. But there have been none that show how deeply the liberal arts and the study of thinking are connected.
Until now.
Inside the Liberal Arts is not a work of scholarship per se, nor is it a study of colleges, public or educational policy, or pedagogy. Its twin purposes are intertwined if not inseparable: to elucidate the concepts of the “liberal arts” and “critical thinking,” including how they lay the groundwork for full citizenship; and to guide readers toward becoming critical thinkers in the highest sense.
In the process, it will identify and explain some of the core concepts that connect the various liberal arts disciplines to form a unified system of thinking and learning, with a common ancestry in philosophy. The aim is to provide a high baseline of intellectual literacy centered on critical thinking, as well as a clear map of the structure and purpose of liberal learning. In other words, to provide keys to the “ivory tower” – a trope I don’t fear to embrace, though I might choose another building material – and also the blueprint of that tower of learning.
I will address in passing the ongoing conversation about the future of the liberal arts. That conversation is old and vital. It is ongoing of necessity, because any democratic culture is a dynamic, ever-evolving organism in a state of perpetual crisis – a state of continual and contested change – and higher learning is an essential part of that process.
Broader discussions of the liberal arts are especially important at this moment, and they hover around the central questions of what we mean by the terms “liberal arts,” “critical thinking,” and “citizenship.” All are essential to democracy. But it isn’t my goal to add to the impressive stack of recent works on why liberal learning is important. Rather, this book is intended for anyone interested in those underlying questions: for all learners and seekers, including students, educators, and aspiring scholars who, like me, are still in the process of occupying their minds.
Reed College in Oregon and Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania were in the 1970’s, and remain today, institutions given over to scholarly rigor, open inquiry, and the serious joy of learning. In this they are not unlike many other American colleges and universities. Although Swarthmore has changed in ways that Reed has not, those core values remain intact at both institutions. Each pathway has its strengths and drawbacks, yet both are models of the liberal arts ideal at its best: an ideal that combines intellectual breadth, academic excellence, and moral and civic responsibility.
These institutions of higher learning and others like them across the country, large and small, public and private, collectively represent the signal achievement of American civilization: a beacon of intellectual empowerment to the nation and the world. Within their halls, in their classrooms, and along their walkways, students are challenged to discover how the liberal arts and critical thinking combine to promote citizenship in its fullest form: creativity, enterprise, intellectual and social mobility, and thoughtful engagement with the societies those students are preparing to change, preserve, and make their own.
Inside the Liberal Arts: Critical Thinking and Citizenship is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound.