Liberal Arts and Freedom – Liberal Learning Blog

Liberal education—not just about being smarter

By WilliamP | May 23, 2017

Some readers were surprised at the focus on autonomy in my previous post. Why, they asked, did I choose to write about personal freedom instead of the usual topics that crop up when one talks about liberal education—classic texts, arts and sciences, critical thinking, and the like?

Well, of course, liberal education is at least partly about those things. You cannot really get a liberal education—an education pertaining to freedom—without engaging those things.

But liberal learning is much more about developing two key proficiencies that human beings need to meet the demands of life—discernment and judgment. The reason we all need to improve these proficiencies is that we all want to live the best life we possibly can. Discernment and judgment are indispensable in attaining that aim.

Now the classics, the great books in all fields of human activity, are material for developing discernment and judgment. They have stood the test of time. They show how fictional characters or real people have navigated life’s deepest challenges. They provide a fund of examples for us to ponder, to select among, to pattern our lives on, if we so choose.

And critical thinking—which, as far as I can tell, just means thinking better—is of course a crucial part of education. Since we are thinking beings that can hardly get through a few moments of the day without thinking, we should do it well rather than poorly.

But we liberal artists do not immerse ourselves in the great books just to become familiar with canonical examples of human activity. Nor do we try to master critical thinking just to be smarter.

We do these things for a higher purpose. We do them to improve our discernment—that is, adroitness is distinguishing differences or identifying similarities—and to improve our judgment—that is, our confidence in choosing better and worse among alternatives. Life presents us with innumerable objects and situations. We deal with them through discernment and judgment.

The point of improving our discernment and judgment is to live a good a life as we can—a task that is made easier by being able to take account of the objects and situations around us and make confident choices about which are better and more choiceworthy.

If you can’t discern very will the properties of things in the world around you, or if you can’t judge well about what is better and worse, how can you expect anything but random outcomes from your choices in life?

So, liberal education is not primarily about great books or critical thinking. It’s primarily about developing the discernment and judgment to lead the best possible life. And that life, as I said in the previous post, will be an autonomous one in which we use discernment and judgment to determine the laws we will set for ourselves.

Now, contemporary approaches to higher education tend to center on so-called “core competencies,” intellectual skills such as written and oral communication, quantitative reasoning, scientific reasoning, information literacy, and critical thinking.

But these skills are not themselves capable of improving discernment and judgment. How may effective writers and compelling speakers, how many brilliant mathematicians and scientists, how many erudite scholars and precise logicians have neither the discernment or judgment to make wise choices outside of their area of expertise? And yet, most of life lies outside our areas of expertise.

The truth is that all these intellectual skills are not goals in themselves. They are means by which we attain to the higher aim of improving discernment and judgment. By practicing them, we hope to exercise our faculties of discernment and judgment so that we can develop them to the point of making good choices in life generally.

But, it turns out, there is another element that must come into play if we are to attain the discernment and judgment we need. In some ways, this element is even more important that the intellectual skills.

It’s imagination.

Why we all need liberal education

By WilliamP | May 19, 2017

Every human being deserves to be autonomous.

Americans, in particular, should agree with this sentiment, because it follows from one of the three unalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence—the right to liberty. It would make no sense to have liberty if we could not direct our own actions. And that is the essence of autonomy—prescribing laws to ourselves to govern our own actions.

Yet human beings are not born free or autonomous. We come into the world full of desires and, at first, our desires control us. It is only much later that freedom becomes possible. When we begin to resist our desires, we acquire options for the first time. And freedom—the ability to choose among options without constraint—arises at the same moment. This first freedom is the seed of autonomy.

But freedom does not spontaneously grow into autonomy. A steady supply of learning must be added. Which choices work out well, which badly? Are there signs or patterns that identify good and bad choices? Is it possible than a bad choice in one area of life may be a good one in another area?

Only by confronting these and hundreds of similar questions do we develop enough control over our freedom and enough consistency of character to begin establishing laws for ourselves. Those who never experience this sort of learning use their freedom capriciously, haphazardly. They are free but not autonomous because they have no laws to direct their choices.

If we had to learn everything on our own, we probably wouldn’t live long enough to become autonomous. So, since long before the first historical records, human beings have speeded up the process through education, which shares out the labor of learning among a community of learners.

Now, education can be used to attain all sorts of aims other than autonomy. By joining educational communities you can learn how to master a skill, how to survive in a hostile environment, how to become wealthy. But learning to be autonomous is the highest possible aim, one which both supersedes and encompasses all other aims. It puts us in control of our lives and gives us the authority to decide which other aims are worth pursuing.

Education for autonomy is called “liberal education.” The “liberal” means “pertaining to freedom.” Autonomy is the highest degree of freedom that human beings can attain. And the “liberal arts” are not, as many seem to believe, useless and impractical subjects. They are the skills that pertain to the best use of freedom, the studies that move us forward on the path toward autonomy. That makes them more practical by far than other arts that aim at lower degrees of utility.

It is sometimes said that liberal education is not for everyone, that some people are better off with job training that will enable them to make a living. It is also said increasingly that liberal education is not for anyone, that education only makes sense as an investment in establishing a remunerative career.

Both of these beliefs are wrong. Liberal education, which helps us make the best use of our freedom, is for everyone in a way that job training can never be.

Getting a job, no matter how lucrative, does not make you autonomous. On the contrary, it makes you subservient to your employer in ways you may not have bargained for. But becoming autonomous makes any job you take part of your life-plan. You decide how much of your existence you are willing to give over to making a living. You decide when or whether to get a new job if your old one stops suiting you. You decide how making a living fits in with your conception of making a life worth living. We all need the sort of liberal education that can help us achieve this level of control over our own lives.

Because every human being deserves to be autonomous.