Liberal education—not just about being smarter

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.

More about this in the next post.