Liberal arts

“ For its preliminary training, it seemed to them to need what has since come to be called the liberal arts, that is, a knowledge of certain languages and of logic, as well as a thorough consideration of the great problems of the relation of man to his Creator, to his fellow-men, and to the universe around him. ”

“ We have had leaders of great stature in the past—prophets, editors, inventors, social reformers, captains of industry, poets, statesmen—but the greatest of them, in so far as they have been prepared for their life-work by formal education, have depended, not on brief vocational schooling, but on the broadly cultural and ultimately practical education of the college of liberal arts. ”

“ A good economic, social, and political life will maintain these instruments of liberty, but one of its chief concerns will be to pass on to youth the germinal insights and habits the cultivation of which will make them free. These insights and habits are available in the traditional liberal arts, and they can be transmitted and communicated if teachers have them and are allowed to exercise students in their practice on the best materials. ”

“ Education in the ingenious arts, and in the liberal professions, is still more tedious and expensive. The pecuniary recompence, therefore, of painters and sculptors, of lawyers and physicians, ought to be much more liberal; and it is so accordingly. ”

“ Now a kind of liberal education must underlie every wholesome political and social process, the kind of liberal education which connects a man’s feeling and his comprehension with the general run of mankind, which disconnects him from the special interests and marries his thought to the common interests of great communities and of great cities and of great states and of great nations, and, if possible, with that brotherhood of man that transcends the boundaries of nations themselves. ”

“ Provision must be made for thorough training that will direct the labor which produces the fruits of the earth. Thus to broaden the scope of liberal education it must be divested of all aristocratic limitations and rendered sufficiently democratic to meet the wants of the sons of toil. ”

“ Such pessimistic comment falls away from a college or university animated by such social spirit as I have sought here to indicate and advocate. Such a spirit will entail not a narrow, but a broad curriculum to answer the needs of an increasingly complex civilization, and a more liberal discipline with more guidance, and less repression, more freedom and an increased sense of responsibility, in order to fit for citizenship in an enlightened and self-disciplined democracy. ”

“ It is not just a play on words to say that the aim of liberal education is to make men free, and for this reason democracy must sustain and extend liberal education or perish, since democracy is the society of free men. ”

“ What is a professional education but a liberal education taking a special direction?
Can it now be said, with any truth, that our nominally-educated young men go out into the world equipped with that general knowledge of the sciences of law and government, and political economy, with that knowledge of ethics and philosophy, with that acquaintance with modern history and of the condition of the world they live in, and with that real taste for modern literature, which should form the equipments of every man calling himself educated? ”

“ It is a matter of rejoicing that the way is open to give to all classes a basis of common thought and common knowledge, including a common store of literary and historic allusions, a possession which has a curious power of cementing bodies of men, and, in the next place, it is an enormous gain that we are within sight of giving to the working-classes, notwithstanding their limited opportunities, that stability of mind and magnanimity of character which are the proper outcome and the unfailing test of A Liberal Education. ”

“ The first led us to suppose that the liberal education which our ancestors advocated was essentially aristocratic in theory as well as in practice, and so prompted the false conclusion that there must be some other theory of liberal education more appropriate to a democratic society. ”

“ When I say that American education has failed to achieve liberal ends by liberal means—and is still moving in the wrong direction—I appeal for support to the obvious facts with which we are all acquainted. ”

“ To supply such alleviations—to afford to our citizens who are engaged in the employment of active life an opportunity of keeping up, or of renewing their acquaintance with those great branches of knowledge which form the staple of a liberal education—is the object which this Institution has especially at heart. Its aim is to lift you, at times, above the distractions of your worldly cares, and the pursuit of your professional interests, by spreading before you man's fairer heritage of wisdom and of truth ”

“ But none is the direct result of liberal education, though we may hope that liberal education does not oppose the acquisition and possession of some, if not all, of them. The direct product of liberal education is a good mind, well disciplined in its processes of inquiring and judging, knowing and understanding, and well furnished with knowledge, well cultivated by ideas. ”

“ Progress in the science of philology, enabling us to assign their right position to the classical languages as elements in liberal culture, and giving us, in modern philological science, an improved and more powerful teaching instrument. 3. The first real attempt to combine republican ideas with the theory of liberal education—in other words, to make the education of the whole people liberal, instead of merely the education of certain privileged classes and protected professions. And when I say the whole people, I mean men and women. ”

“ There may be some doubt in the minds of the small business man and the craftsman about the utility of a liberal education for earning a living. One who shares these doubts should read the early American State Papers and follow the current discussions of the fundamental conditions and principles of American society to get free of the prejudices which we inherit from societies that base themselves on invidious class distinctions. ”

“ It is undoubtedly easier to think soundly about liberal education if you are preparing to give it only to the few who are favored in natural endowments or economic position. But democracy is right and we must solve the problem of giving to everyone the sort of college education that is most readily given to the favored few. ”

“ Of such strands are formed the cord which binds society; and one of the main purposes of a [78] ‘liberal education for all’ is to form links between high and low, rich and poor, the classes and the masses, in the strong sympathy of common knowledge. The Public Schools have arrived at this through the medium of the classics; an occasional ‘tag’ from Horace moves and unites the House of Commons, not only through the urbane thought of the poet but because it is a key to a hundred associations. ”

“ Since I have admitted that our ancestors did not succeed in practice despite their sound conceptions, does it matter, then, that our institutions are dominated by misconceptions and confused theories of what liberal education should be? ”

“ Disregarding, therefore, accidental, partial and temporary phases of liberal education, we note, in the first place, that in styling an education liberal we thereby associate it with liberalism in politics, in philosophy and theology, and in men's personal relations to each other. ”

“ It is true that many men do, by force of natural ability or by other natural and acquired advantages, obtain distinguished positions in society or political life without such education, but they are the exceptions, and, as a rule, the only one point which all prominent men, in society and politics, of all classes and opinions, have in common, is their liberal education. ”

“ The rudiments of all those studies must be reckoned as the most valuable of all the elements of general elementary training, which, in their higher departments, and after liberal culture, diverging in various directions, form the substance of professional knowledge, both that of those professions now reckoned, and of all those hereafter to be reckoned liberal. For, what should liberal education be but the preparatory general stage for that work of life which all honest callings and professions carry on in diverse directions afterward? ”

“ We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. ”

“ But the essential conditions of freedom cannot be established through education; only the love of it, the understanding of it, and the power and will to use it for service can be gained from the most liberalizing of curricula. The possibility and the extension of freedom are the work of direct social and political reform. It is futile, meanwhile, to insist that liberal studies shall be all that schools shall offer. It is simple error to insist that a traditional range of studies—the classics, science, mathematics, even history, or English—provide the only possible culture for freedom. ”

“ This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called Liberal Education ”

“ To the list of studies which the sixteenth century called liberal, I would therefore add as studies of equal rank, English, French, German, history, political economy, and natural science, not one of which can be said to have existed in mature form when the definition of liberal education, which is still in force, was laid down. ”

“ One of the interesting things about liberal education is that it leaves out of the view altogether the question how anyone can directly make money out of it. We boast in our own time that mind is monarch, that we analyze things before we do them; and yet we give ourselves away in every discussion of this particular thing, and show that we have not analyzed it at all. When we discuss what the elements of a practical training are, and what the elements of a liberal training are, the advocates of a practical training all, you will find, include mathematics in their list of studies. ”

“ Since every normal being is born with an intelligence that can be disciplined and cultivated—with some degree of capacity for developing a good mind—everyone can be and should be given a liberal education to an extent that equals his capacity. ”

“ And again, "The liberal, the public-spirited, those who see in our public school system the great upholding principle of all our institutions, and the means of advancing the civilization of the race—who see in it both the conservative and the progressive principle of society—will advocate a generous appropriation." ”

“ But the real point of significance is that, though born and bred in an atmosphere of active Liberalism (our livelihood drawn from the conduct of a “liberal” newspaper) , I had no idea, as a boy, that politics had anything to do with industry or standards of living. ”

“ But we may hope for better things. We may, some of us, live even to see liberal education divest herself of exclusive restrictions and eighteenth century idealism and walk hand in hand with twentieth century progress ”

“ Liberal education also must look forward, must put its traditions to work, must germinate, and become alive in the mind of the American, and then teach him by old principles to attack new problems.
We must either live by our education or live without it. ”

“ Liberals must be somewhat disappointed that a Liberal Government has done so little for education. The reforms for which they stand—their hopes for the nation—depend on the increase of knowledge and intelligence among the people. The establishment of Free Trade, wise economy and wise expenditure, and the support of the statesmanship which makes for peace, all presuppose an instructed electorate. ”

“ But though ignominiously and unjustly excluded from the seats of learning, and driven to the expedient of providing at a great expense for scientific education among ourselves, we have had this advantage, that our institutions, being formed in a more enlightened age, are more liberal and therefore better calculated to answer the purpose of a truly liberal education. ”

“ Now, the only conception of a liberal education that will satisfy these new conditions, the only conception of an education capable of becoming national and universal, at the same time that it is liberal, is that of a training of the national mind through the mother-tongue as the chief, and other tongues as the subordinate instruments, in the elements of all those branches of knowledge which, used in their rudiments as elements of general training, will develop, in their higher stages, into the objects of professional pursuits. ”

“ The problem of education and the state is a political problem. Here the major principle is the most general of all political truths, namely, the distinction between good and bad states, just and unjust governments. The ancients formulated this principle by saying that the criterion of justice resides in the end which the government serves. ”

“ This is what liberal education does for the physician, the lawyer, the minister, and the scientist. This is what it can do also for the man of business; to give a mental power is one of the main ends of the higher education. Is not active business a field in which mental power finds full play? Again, education imparts knowledge, and who has greater need to know economics, history, and natural science than the man of large business?
Further, liberal education develops a sense of right, duty, and honor ”