Why a Liberal Arts Education? Why for Teenagers?

The ultimate goal of education is to kindle a love of knowing and to nurture the ability to inquire.  The vision of a Liberal Arts Education, as I understand it, is to support the student’s development of independent judgment, clarity of thought and the habit of inquiry. 

My own love of the liberal arts began when I was in high school. Prior to that time, I found reading slow, difficult and unrewarding.  I couldn’t imagine why anyone would spend time doing it for fun.  In my sophomore year of high school, however, a dear family friend began to encourage me to learn how to read.  He gave me a book on economic theory and political philosophy written by six college students called The Incredible Bread Machine.  The book (despite what one might expect) was short, clever, and fun. More importantly, it introduced me to a world of ideas, ideas that were interesting to me because they helped me understand the world around me.  This book, and the literature I was introduced to through it, satisfied a deep craving for meaning and knowing, which I wasn’t aware I had. I became alive to ideas.  My deep interest in economics spread into other fields such as history, philosophy of science, ethics, mathematics, logic. I started to be aware of things I had never noticed before and became eager to understand more and more.  My desire to find things out, in turn, made me invested in thinking well and in developing the necessary intellectual skills I would need to engage with the world of ideas. 

“Everyone, by nature, desires to know.”  Teenagers in particular crave the exploration of meaning.  A student’s desire to understand and find out is a powerful force for his or her development, if it can be unleashed.  Unfortunately “traditional” models of education devalue the exploration of meaning and dissuade students from asking genuine questions.  Instead, these models force students to incorporate other peoples’ conclusions into their own thinking by means of mere belief and memorization. Without genuinely engaging students in inquiry about the problems, questions, methods and reasoning that lead to these conclusions, students have no ownership of the particular information or of the greater “conversation” about these ideas. 

This predominant mode of teaching and schooling is the outgrowth of a false epistemology: that knowledge is handed down by experts, who learn it from other experts, whose knowledge ultimately arises from an unknown source to which the student cannot hope to have direct access.  This theory of learning hangs over the edge of a chasm separating belief and understanding, thought and judgment.

This epistemology makes students believe they are impotent, that they are incapable of coming to know through their own efforts and reason. In this context, students implicitly conclude that they must do the exact opposite of what is actually needed. Instead of being active questioners, they believe that they must suppress their questions in order to faithfully incorporate the ideas of those who will “teach” them. Not only does this way of teaching discourage criticism of authority, but it does not supply the students any basis from which to exercise reasonable criticism.  This disenfranchises them from the process of inquiry and from the responsibility of having to find and make the meaning of their lives. 

The alternative to this false epistemology is that students are valuable participants in a collaborative search for truth and that they have the primary responsibility to make and discover the meaning of their lives.  When students engage the great ideas in the context of a community of genuine learners, they realize that learning is valuable and that they have the capacity to make meaningful contributions to human knowledge and progress. Once students are thus enthused, they are more likely to demand clear thinking of themselves and each other and are more receptive to the acquisition of the needed intellectual habits and skills. 

Robert Maynard Hutchins, the founder of the great books program at the University of Chicago, expressed the idea that every human being is a liberal artist by inescapable necessity.  We cannot avoid using theories of knowledge to judge and incorporate ideas into our own understanding.  The only issue remains, therefore, whether we will be good liberal artists or poor ones, whether our ability to inquire, reason and judge has been exercised and developed, or whether we are at the mercy of other people’s understanding.