This article was first published in the July 2009 print issue of Universitas. We are republishing this in celebration of the 32nd foundation anniversary of the College of Arts and Sciences on March 19, 2021.
We are perhaps the only university in the Philippines that takes liberal education seriously and probably one of the very few in the world to do so. We must be convinced of its worth. It cannot be simply a marketing ploy, a “niche” to distinguish us from other schools. Given the increasingly low estimation of liberal education in the Philippines and in the world, we must know why we continue to uphold it. Besides, on our concept of liberal education depends the core curriculum in our undergraduate programs, both the subjects that make up that curriculum and the number of units allotted to each subject.
Note that I have said “our” concept of liberal education: liberal education in a university that offers such an education is something that must be valued by the entire academic community and not just by a portion of it. We call liberal education the gateway to our master’s programs. What this means is that our graduate programs assume, or should assume, the liberal education our undergraduates receive. This is the reason why the quality of the liberal education we offer is not merely a CAS (College of Arts and Sciences) concern; it is a university concern.
It is sometimes said that there is no one concept of liberal education. This is true—today. We live among the ruins of Western civilization, ancient, medieval, and modern civilization, and among these broken stones, potsherds, twisted metal, and bits of glass are the ruins of liberal education. There are monstrous structures cemented, glued, and nailed together that purport to be programs of liberal education, one such, so some think, being the curriculum which all Philippine universities are obliged to follow: a veritable Frankenstein.
And we? What should we do? Accept the harsh realities of history and legislation and embrace Frankenstein? I do not think so. Shall we claim that any concept of liberal education is as good as any other so long as it sounds reasonable? This would be amateurism. The right thing to do is to engage in what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger called wiederholung or repetition, to go to the roots of liberal education and see what the original insight at the heart of the concept was.
The concept of liberal education
“The concept”: I have said. One may regard liberal education as a sociological fact or as a theory of education, as a concept. As a sociological fact, “liberal education” is simply the education of the free, those who were not slaves; as a theory of education, its father is Aristotle. It is to Aristotle’s Politics that we owe the phrase “the education of the freeman.” This is an important distinction: education as a sociological fact is more the result of circumstance rather than theory, and when we have a curriculum which is in part the result of circumstance, such as the obligatory Philippine college curriculum with its courses on Taxation and Land Reform and Family Planning, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a single explanation for every course in the curriculum.
If we wish to explore the meaning of liberal education as a theory of education, with the accent on the word liberal, then it is to Aristotle that we must turn. He does not refer to the homo liber, the “freeman,” in a sociological sense, that is, as someone who is not a slave, but invests the term with a philosophical meaning. The freeman for Aristotle is the person whose intellectual gifts are such that his sociological status, whether freeman or slave, becomes something purely accidental: Aristotle’s freeman is free “by nature.” Even more, some men are freer than others by nature, and others less free: Degrees of freedom by nature in Aristotle reflect degrees of rationality, not political status.
What does the education of the freeman mean for Aristotle? For Aristotle, the freeman is the citizen of the polis. Liberal education for Aristotle means the education of the citizen, which he characterizes in three ways: it is an education not only for war but also for peace, not only for work but also for leisure, and not only in the useful but also in the liberal and the noble. These are broad strokes, but sufficient for any curriculum planner worth his salt to set about working.
Liberal education vs. professional education
Compare Aristotle’s theory of liberal education with the dictionary definitions given by Random House of two related terms: “liberal education” and “liberal arts.” Liberal education is defined as “an education based primarily on the liberal arts, emphasizing the development of intellectual abilities as opposed to the acquisition of professional skills.” Liberal arts is defined as “the academic course of instruction at a college intended to provide general knowledge and comprising the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, as opposed to professional or technical subjects.”
These are definitions one may hear today even on our campus. You will remark that they do not bear any immediate resemblance to Aristotle’s. What should especially catch our attention, however, is the reference both definitions make to professional education, as though neither concept may be understood by itself, but only in opposition to professional education. This is, of course, not the case with professional education. This one-sided definitional dependence betrays an uncertainty in the contemporary mind about the very concept of liberal education.
Aristotle’s discussion of education is instructive. Aristotle does not oppose liberal education to professional education, which, on the other hand, did not exist in his time as we understand it now. To the development of intellectual abilities Aristotle opposes mechanical training, or banausic education as we referred to it in my course on Theories of Liberal Education, training that stultifies the intellect, instead of developing it. I do not think anyone would claim that professional education stultifies the intellect.
It is closer to the truth to regard professional education as education in work, and so its contrary is education in leisure. There is no opposition between liberal education and professional education, as there is no opposition between the whole and one of its parts. This will become clearer the day we offer graduate programs in literature, history, and philosophy; the difference between professional education in these fields and the liberal education which comprises them is a difference of aims. A clear grasp of this difference is sufficient to dispel any danger of confusing one with the other.
Development of intellectual abilities vs. mechanical training
The same thing may be said of liberal education as “emphasizing the development of intellectual abilities as opposed to the acquisition of professional skills.” Why should the development of intellectual abilities be opposed to the acquisition of professional skills? We sometimes hear this: that liberal education prepares students for future jobs which are yet unknown. On the other hand, I know many engineers who have made good managers, entrepreneurs, and bankers: can we claim therefore that engineering prepares a person for multiple professions? And what shall I say about my experience directing plays to which I attribute my skills in teaching and school administration?
Related to this is the claim that liberal education teaches the student to synthesize and integrate, whereas professional education specializes. In fact synthesis and integration occurs in any program with more than one course. What rather distinguishes the synthesis and integration that occur in liberal education from that in professional education is the very subjects synthesized and integrated.
I have gone through this exercise of wiederholung to point out the false dichotomies that plague contemporary understanding of liberal education and that, I fear, affect us. Ultimately, they pervert our understanding of liberal education, easily affecting curriculum, pedagogical approach, faculty training, and organizational structure. These false dichotomies are traceable to the controversy between the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
To Oxford’s liberal education, which comprised the liberal arts and the humanities, Edinburgh opposed its programs of mathematics and the sciences, accusing Oxford of teaching useless knowledge. Oxford’s reply was to oppose universal knowledge to specialized knowledge. With time, “universal knowledge” degenerated into “general knowledge.” To Edinburgh’s accusation of useless education, Oxford replied by singing the praises of a mind schooled in various disciplines. I would like to lay the blame for the false dichotomies at Oxford’s doorstep, and at Newman’s feet, if I may add.
And yet there is more… We would be right to sense a change in the concept of liberal education by the nineteenth century. Between Aristotle and Newman came the collapse of the Greek democratic poleis and the rise of Imperial Rome, feudal societies, and the monarchies of France and England; between them came the Italian humanists and Baldassare Castiglione. By the time the English coined the phrase “liberal education” (referring to Aristotle’s original idea) in the seventeenth century, it meant the education of the gentleman, and this education was above all in the humanities. (The liberal arts had dropped into grammar school.)
There is, of course, a difference between the education of the gentleman and the education of the citizen. The education of the citizen has the polis in mind as backdrop; the education of the gentleman,… tea parties? Or post-prandial conversations over brandy? Liberal education has not quite shaken off this reputation of being the education for men of leisure, despite Mortimer Adler’s efforts.
General vs. specialized education
In the Philippines, before “liberal education” was replaced by the dreadful phrase “general education,” liberal education for a long time meant, albeit vaguely, what can only be called education in wisdom— knowledge that went far beyond the world of practical matters and concerned Life, Man, and Society, the stuff of philosophy. This exceeded the narrow confines of the Greco-Roman liberal arts and was rather the legacy of the Italian humanists, in addition to and not in place of Medieval “divinity.”
This gives us an insight into the Oxford-Edinburgh rivalry: it was not so much disagreement on which mattered more—the general or the specialized; rather, it was disagreement on what mattered to understand reality: (a) the study of God and man or (b) the study of nature using mathematics and experiments (Newton’s shadow here!). The former was discredited as airy-fairy: another stain on the reputation of liberal education that remains to this day. The contemporary contrast between general and specialized education is the degenerate version of the Oxford-Edinburgh conflict. Is there anything to be said about liberal education as education in wisdom? This was not part of Aristotle’s original concept, but we do find it in the fourth century after Christ in Augustine’s description of the liberal arts: philosophy is the climax of the trivium and quadrivium. The High Medieval version of this focused on ethics—something Aristotle would have disapproved of as he considered 40 to be the ideal age at which to study ethics. It is to the humanists we owe a more accessible version of education in sophia: wisdom mediated by literature.
This education focused on the human being (hence the designation of its champions as “humanists”) with ethics as the lens through which the human being was studied. Aristotle would not have complained. His Politics regards the idea of happiness to be essential to citizenship; part of his concept of liberal education was education in leisure, and leisure for Aristotle meant contemplation, not amusement; moreover, he regarded literature as a legitimate vehicle for wisdom. The best citizen was for him the wise citizen. Education in wisdom is a most respectable part of the education of the citizen.
It is important to distinguish between the concept of liberal education and the curriculum that makes up liberal education. The Politics identifies four disciplines in the education of children: (1) reading and writing, (2) gymnastics, (3) music, and (4) drawing. Seven hundred years later, Augustine would identify the seven liberal arts and philosophy as the stuff of liberal education. Almost a millennia and a half after Augustine, the humanities, mathematics, and the natural sciences would constitute liberal education.
The point I wish to make now is how the curriculum of liberal education has changed since Aristotle: we should not be prisoners of the seven liberal arts or of the humanities as these arose historically. What is important is the concept of liberal education, which is the education of the citizen in a specific type of polity—one in which all citizens are considered equal with equal rights to rule over the community. Of this education, education in wisdom (the humanities) is an important component, even more than education in the basic knowledge and skills expected of a citizen (the liberal arts). To these, however, I would add a third component—education in the civil society to which one belongs, which we might abbreviate as civic knowledge. These three components are what currently make up the CAS curriculum.
A must: expertise in liberal education
A word on expertise in liberal education. One cannot exaggerate the need for expertise in the concept of liberal education in our university, as error in this area can be the source of much mischief. What would such expertise consist in? At the least, a knowledge of the history of education coupled with a knowledge of the history of ideas. This would probably be attained through personal reading rather than formal courses, as standard courses in the history of education do not normally spend much time on the evolution of liberal education.
Obviously, experience in teaching in a liberal arts program or administering such a program, no matter how many years this may comprise, much less a degree in philosophy or in education, cannot substitute this basic knowledge. We know as teachers how easy it is to persist in error year after year; time does not necessarily bring wisdom. If we are to claim to be experts in liberal education, and soon perhaps to be among the very few experts in the world, we have no choice but to do our homework. It is not easy, as I have seen for myself preparing for classes in Theories of Liberal Education, not only because books on the subject are difficult to come by, but also because books on classical and medieval education tend to describe their subject matter in terms of modern education, blurring differences with the present time and consequently misrepresenting their subject matter. One must read with discernment.#
An early version of this article was given as a talk during the Foundation Day of the School of Education and Human Development on September 15, 1999.
Banner photo by Sebastian Voortman from Pexels.
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