argument essay about liberal arts

Here are some more reasons why liberal arts matter

Associate Professor of History, Assistant Dean of Faculty for Pre-Major Advising, Dartmouth College

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Lately, in the heated call for greater STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education at every level, the traditional liberal arts have been needlessly, indeed recklessly, portrayed as the villain. And STEM fields have been (falsely) portrayed as the very opposite of the liberal arts.

The detractors of the liberal arts (who usually mean, by liberal arts, “humanities”) tend to argue that STEM-based education trains for careers while non-STEM training does not; they are often suspicious of the liberal political agenda of some disciplines. And they deem the content of a liberal arts education to be no longer relevant. The author of a recent article simply titled, “ The Liberal Arts are Dead; Long Live STEM conveyed this sentiment when he said, "Science is better for society than the arts.”

I see this misunderstanding even at my own institution, as a humanist who oversees pre-major advising and thus engages with students and faculty (and parents) from all over the university. The idea that STEM is something separate and different than the liberal arts is damaging to both the sciences and their sister disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Pro-STEM attitudes assume that the liberal arts are quaint, impractical, often elitist, and always self-indulgent, while STEM fields are practical, technical, and represent at once “the future” and “proper earning potential.”

STEM is part of liberal arts

First, let’s be clear: This is a false and misleading dichotomy. STEM disciplines are a part of the liberal arts. Math and science are liberal arts.

In the ancient and medieval world, when the liberal arts as we know them began to take shape, they comprised grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy (the last three we would count as STEM disciplines today; and music, dealing mostly with numerical relationships through sound, was really more akin to what we would today call physics).

Advocates of STEM are missing the point. The value of a liberal arts education is not in the content that is taught, but rather in the mode of teaching and in the intellectual skills that are gained by learning how to think systematically and rigorously.

These intellectual skills include how to assess assumptions; develop strategies from problem solving; test ideas against evidence; use reason to grapple with information to come to new conclusions; and develop courses of action to pursue those conclusions.

Yes, some disciplines might prepare for certain types of problem solving (how do I get a computer to integrate information from two different consumer data platforms in the most elegant fashion?) more strongly than others (what do I recommend to investors based upon my French-language research of markets in Madagascar?).

And some areas of knowledge might be more useful than others in certain industries.

But in all cases, the point of the liberal arts approach is to learn how to think, not simply what to know – especially since information itself is now so easily acquired through Google and the smartphone. If anything, content is too abundant for any single individual to master. What is much more important is knowing what on Earth to do with the glut of information available in most situations.

And here is where the liberal arts training comes in.

A liberal arts education (STEM-based or otherwise) is not just about learning content, but about knowing how to sort through ambiguity; work with inexact or incomplete information, evaluate contexts and advance a conclusion or course of action.

In other words, it is not about learning the prescription to achieve a textbook result. It is about having the intellectual capacity to attack those issues for which there is yet no metaphorical text or answer.

Is liberal arts the choice of the elite?

Now, let us take up the elephant in the room. Many people would argue an engineering degree balanced with some English courses might be a nice idea.

But for a student to major in English or studio art is sheer craziness. What does one do with a studio art degree except become a starving artist? What does one do with an English degree except wait tables?

Those who make such arguments usually conflate “liberal arts” with “humanities,” those disciplines that do not have an obvious “end career goal” or a “remuneration outcome” at the other side of the college degree.

When detractors hear educators like me say that “the liberal arts” are valuable, they understand us to mean that they fulfill something in the core of our souls. That is, that the humanities are personally and intellectually valuable, but not remuneratively so.

They hear us acknowledge that the humanities are decidedly not practical, and are thus are the purview of the elite and privileged who can afford to indulge in them. But, of course, the idea that the only remunerative professions out there are in science and technology is silly.

Whole industries do in fact exist that are not based on STEM premises: media, consulting, fashion, finance, publishing, education, government and other forms of public service are just a few.

And even those reputedly “tech” industries that STEM advocates see as our future (IT, health, energy) require all sorts of nontechnical employees to get their companies to work.

Further, basic communication, speaking and writing skills are absolute must-haves of anyone who is going to climb the ladder in any high-tech industry .

What defines success

That said, the so-called “practical” major (and I reject the designation) might have a more obvious, path to the entry level job of a solid career. This is only because the major has an apparently known professional pathway.

But that does not guarantee success in that field.

In fact, those other disciplines that detractors of the liberal arts (read: humanities) assume are dead ends could well be fantastic springboards to amazing professional lives.

They are not a guarantee of one – and neither is a STEM degree . But they give those students who have committed seriously to the study of excelling within their college discipline (be it classics, anthropology, or theoretical physics) the capacity and the ability to achieve one.

Some people talk about this as critical thinking; some as the ability to think outside of the box; some as “transferability” – the ability to carry critical intellectual skills from one challenge or industry to another.

In my view, done right, liberal education makes one smarter and more able to be successful and innovative on the path one embarks on. And although we can all point to exceptions (would that Bill Gates had graduated from college!), for the most part, it is those who know how to think nimbly, creatively and responsibly that end up building extraordinary careers.

Why we need a liberal arts education

Let us return to my earlier point about STEM disciplines.

We should not only accept that they are part of a liberal arts education, but we must understand that teaching them within a liberal arts framework makes the financial investment of learning them of greater value.

Peter Robbie , an engineering professor at Dartmouth College who teaches human centered design, explains why liberal education is so critical to engineering training. He said in an email to me that:

creative design process of engineering provides the means for complex, multidisciplinary problem-solving. We need to educate leaders who can solve the ‘wicked problems’ facing society (like obesity, climate change, and inequality). These are multifactorial problems that can’t be solved within a single domain but will need liberally-educated, expansive thinkers who are comfortable in many fields.

As we know, an engineer who has basic cultural competency skills (honed, for instance, through cultural studies) will be an attractive asset for an American engineering firm trying to branch out in China.

Likewise, a doctor who knows how to listen to patients will be a better primary care doctor than one who only knows the memorizable facts from medical school. This is one reason that medical schools have recently changed the requirements of application to encourage coursework in sociology and psychology.

It is the ability to use these skills honed by different types of thinking in various contexts that allows people to build beyond their particular ken.

And that is what a liberal arts education – science, technology, humanities and social sciences – trains. It prepares students for rich, creative, meaningful and, yes, remunerative, careers.

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The Life-Shaping Power of Higher Education

By  Marvin Krislov

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As I begin my first full semester as president of Pace University after serving for 10 years as president of Oberlin College, I find myself looking to the past and the things I’ve learned. I can’t help but reflect on the extraordinary changes I’ve witnessed in American higher education along the way.

This past decade has been one of transformation for our nation and our colleges and universities. Barack Obama was twice elected president of the United States. We experienced the Great Recession -- the worst economic downturn since the Depression. Income inequality has grown from a significant problem to a polarizing divide, with ripples felt in every corner of our society. The internet has become the newswire of the world and the center of our economic might, as well as a battlefield where terror is waged and democracy is tested.

Same-sex marriage has moved from limited recognition in a few states to the boldly embraced law of the land. Rather than evolving into a postracial society, we’ve realized we have a long, long way to go. And after a bare-knuckle election that splintered families and friendships, Donald Trump was elected president of our not so United States. In the words of the Grateful Dead, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

American higher education has also been on a journey. There have been many changes and challenges during my time as a college president. But one important thing hasn’t changed: the value of a college education and its ability to transform students’ lives.

That life-shaping power sometimes gets overlooked in the shifting landscape of higher education. Colleges and universities are facing an array of economic, demographic and sociopolitical challenges. Among the most significant is the public’s changing perception of the purpose and value of a college education. The short version: many Americans think a college degree should be a ticket to a specific job -- the cheaper the ticket, the better.

Campus climate issues have also changed dramatically since 2007. While many small residential colleges exist in a kind of bubble, many of those climate issues mirror what is happening in our society. Race is one example. The realization of a postracial society has not been achieved, and the nation has seen race become a much more contentious issue. The killings of unarmed black men by police officers spawned the Black Lives Matter movement and fueled student activism on campuses across the country. The hatred and bigotry displayed in Charlottesville, Va., undoubtedly will spark difficult conversations and more this fall.

Ensuring free speech is another campus issue that has grown more challenging over the past decade. In the classrooms and on campuses, getting students to discuss difficult issues freely and respectfully remains a challenge.

Of course, no reference to free speech is complete without also acknowledging the mechanism by which it is exercised. Social media and technology have been a decidedly mixed blessing in promoting civil discourse. Read the comments section on just about any news story having to do with one of America’s top liberal arts schools, and you’ll find no shortage of trolls and vitriolic anti-intellectualism.

Yet one thing hasn’t changed: the value of a liberal arts education. I received an outstanding liberal arts education as an undergraduate, and it continues to shape my career and my life. I firmly believe liberal education is the best preparation a young person can have for the job market and a rewarding, meaningful life as a citizen of our democracy.

Continuing the Great Conversation

Today, however, liberal education finds itself under fire more often than in the past. The primary reason for this -- to borrow a phrase from the movie Cool Hand Luke -- is a failure to communicate. Many colleges and universities that embrace liberal education suffer from a certain degree of self-satisfaction. We know our graduates do well in their lives and careers. We celebrate that within our own communities. But as a group we don’t do an effective job of communicating that success to the broader public. We need to better explain what liberal education is. We need to better articulate what we do -- and why it is so important for our country and the world.

That said, the value of liberal arts education can be hard to convey because it can’t be boiled down to a simple sound bite or an eye-popping starting salary. The mission of most liberal arts colleges is to educate the whole person rather than training graduates to succeed at specific jobs. Robert Maynard Hutchins, the great American educator who studied at Oberlin College and Yale University and served for decades as president of the University of Chicago, wrote in a famous essay on education titled “The Great Conversation” that the aim of liberal education is human excellence both private and public -- meaning excellence as a person and as a member of society.

Liberal education does that by teaching students to become lifelong learners who are their own best teachers. It enables them to take intellectual risks and to think laterally -- to understand how the humanities, the arts and the sciences inform, enrich and affect one another. By connecting diverse ideas and themes across the academic disciplines, liberal arts students learn to better reason and analyze, and express their creativity and their ideas.

College should do more than get you one job. It should prepare you to succeed in multiple careers. Studies show that current college graduates will likely change careers a dozen times in their lives -- and do so before turning 40. If all they learned in college was how to do one thing well, navigating those changes is going to be tough.

Successful careers and financial gain are just part of the value of a liberal arts education. Its true worth is measured not in dollars but in meaningful lives well lived. Through the years, the breadth, depth, flexibility and rigor of American liberal arts education has enriched countless lives in myriad ways. It has also produced many leaders in virtually every field of human endeavor. Other countries are now embracing the liberal arts in a bid to create employees who are not rigid technocrats but more flexible and innovative thinkers.

Given the global leadership of American higher education, and the global economy’s demands for flexible, adaptable employees, undergraduate liberal education is more than relevant. It remains one of our country’s great assets.

Is it for everyone? Of course not. But for those who pursue liberal arts education, it can be life transforming.

I see this life-transforming potential across all types of colleges and universities. Some people might consider Pace University an unusual next step for someone who spent a decade as president of a small, semi-rural school in a Midwestern state. Yet while Oberlin and Pace are vastly different institutions, they hold equally impressive records and embrace certain common values and concentrations of study -- and both provide an important liberal arts education.

Despite its modest size, Oberlin College has never had difficulty distinguishing itself from much larger, more recognizable metropolitan peers. It was established nearly 200 years ago with an abolitionist philosophy that challenged the conventional thinking of the time. It would become the oldest coed liberal arts college in the nation and the first to admit students of all races. It would see its first African-American graduate become the first black lawyer admitted to the bar in the state of New York and play an integral role in the early years of Howard University.

Oberlin continues to embrace a progressive legacy. Its campus community is known for its diversity and inclusion, its advocacy of LGBTQ issues, and its social and political activism. In addition, the college has distinguished itself for a commitment to arts and culture through the extremely selective Oberlin Conservatory of Music. It was also an early proponent of study in sustainability and effective environmental stewardship.

With a total enrollment of 13,000 students across three campuses, Pace is significantly larger than Oberlin. Its students hail from all 50 states and 109 countries around the world. Two-thirds study at the university’s flagship location, a textbook metropolitan center in lower Manhattan, while the rest opt for its Pleasantville and White Plains campuses in Westchester County to the north.

Long regarded as a commuter accounting school, the university now offers over 100 majors and degree programs and encompasses six schools, including a law school consistently ranked third in the nation for its environmental law program, plus ultracompetitive undergraduate and graduate performing arts programs.

Despite their differences, diversity and gender equality are hallmarks of student populations at both Oberlin and Pace. Pace, like Oberlin, was ahead of its time and admitted women and minorities from the beginning, in 1906. Today, nearly two-thirds of students are women and more than half self-identify as a minority. Unlike at Oberlin, many Pace students are the first in their families to go to college. And while income is just one outcome by which to measure the value of a college education, a study by the Equality of Opportunity Project ranks Pace first in New York -- and second in the nation -- for economic mobility based on students who enter college at the bottom fifth of income distribution and end up in the top fifth.

That’s just another example of the life-transforming potential of the liberal arts. I am inspired and energized by the changes I have witnessed in American higher education over the past 10 years. As I look to the future as president of Pace University, I am excited by the promise and possibility of things to come and the impact the university will have on the lives of current and future generations of students.

The past decade is proof that higher education is more relevant and essential to our modern world than ever before -- and the value of a college degree has never been greater than it is today. Providing access to such an education for any student who wishes to pursue it strikes me as a goal that any great nation should and must embrace.

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The Value of a Liberal Arts Education is More Than Most Know

Columns appearing on the service and this webpage represent the views of the authors, not of The University of Texas at Austin.

“What are you going to do with that?” Many new graduates will hear this question in the coming weeks.

For a business or computer science graduate, the answers seem obvious. What about someone studying a liberal arts field, like English or history or philosophy? A common misconception sees these as useless subjects or a waste of valuable resources. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Given the skills employers want, the traits we need in the next generation of leaders, and the qualities we value in our neighbors and friends, we might well ask the liberal arts grad, “What can’t you do with that?”

The main concern people have about liberal arts is marketability. Where are the jobs for people studying ancient Greek or African history? Everywhere. Because what those students are learning, alongside verb forms and dates, are the skills that appear time and again on top of employers’ wish lists. Skills such as persuasion, collaboration and creativity.

Does this mean that a liberal arts degree is as financially lucrative as computer science or petroleum engineering? No. But liberal arts majors do just fine in the workplace. Liberal arts students go on to earn good livings in a wide variety of fields, including technology.

In fact, the median annual income of a liberal arts major is just 8% lower than the median for all majors and more than one-third higher than the median income of people without a college degree.

Liberal arts offer not just financial value, but also personal, social and cultural values. The liberal arts take their name from the Latin word “liber,” which means “free.” Originally this referred to the education of free persons as distinct from slaves, but freedom is still at the root of the liberal arts. Liberal arts are a privilege of a free society, and the study of the liberal arts helps to keep us free.

Why is this? Contrary to what some would have us believe, our financial and social well-being depends on how we respond to the kinds of open-ended questions that liberal arts fields are asking. A computer scientist wants to invent a cool new app or technology. Whether he does a good job is measured by how much money his product earns.

As we see all too often, little thought is given to the social effects of these new technologies. They cause serious harm that people trained in writing computer code and making money may be unable or unwilling to address. Earnings can’t measure the things that most of us really care about when we think about new technologies.

This is where the liberal arts come in. The bedrock of a liberal arts education is the ability to understand a complex situation from many different viewpoints. To understand that the same information may look different to different people, or even to the same person at different times. We need the liberal arts to address questions that have no one right answer. And most of the important questions facing society are questions like this.

For instance, with all the technologies revolutionizing our society, how should we balance the need for accurate news and information with individual free speech? Where is the line between a legitimate business use of personal data and exploitation? Who gets to decide? So far, technology companies have done a lousy job of grappling with these questions. Some history majors, with their rich understanding of how complex forces shape society over time, would be a great idea.

Such skills have value in lots of places besides the workplace. The philosophy major on the church executive board is thinking about how the bedrock values of his community should inform decisions about replacing the roof or hiring a new Sunday school teacher. The English major participating in an environmental advocacy group can use her rhetorical and analytical skills to narrow the gap between the near-unanimous scientific consensus on climate change and political inaction on the issue.

The mistaken view that liberal arts are not financially valuable creates the more damaging idea that some fields of study have financial value, while others have social values. With liberal arts, we get both. Our society depends on it.

Deborah Beck is an associate professor of classics at The University of Texas at Austin.

A version of this op-ed appeared in The Hill .

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The Value of the Liberal Arts

By Hina Azam September 20, 2022 facebook twitter email

Those of us who teach in liberal arts colleges are passionate about the value of a liberal arts education. But for those outside of academia – even for those who might have received a degree in UT’s College of Liberal Arts – the precise meaning of “liberal arts” can be murky.  What, exactly, is meant by the “liberal arts”? What is the history of the idea, and how does it translate into the educational concept we know as a “liberal-arts curriculum,” or, more broadly, a “liberal education”? What is the value of a liberal arts education to both individual and collective life? This essay presents a brief overview of the idea, history, purposes, and values of liberal arts education, so that you, our readers, may understand the passion that inspires our faculty’s teaching and scholarship, and be similarly inspired.

What are the Liberal Arts?

The idea of the liberal arts originates in ancient Greece and was further developed in medieval Europe. Classically understood, it combined the four studies of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music – known as the quadrivium – with the three additional studies of grammar, rhetoric, and logic – known as the trivium . These artes liberales were meant to teach both general knowledge and intellectual skills, and thus train the mind. This training of the mind as well as this foundational body of content knowledge and intellectual skills was regarded by scholars and educators as necessary for all human beings – and especially a society’s leaders – in order to live well, both individually and collectively.

These liberal arts were distinguished from vocational or clinical arts, such as law, medicine, engineering, and business. These latter were conceived as servile arts – i.e. arts that served concrete production or construction. These productive/constructive arts were also known as artes mechanicae , “mechanical arts,” which included crafts such as weaving, agriculture, masonry, warfare, trade, cooking, and metallurgy. In contrast to the vocational or mechanical arts, the liberal arts put greater weight on intellectual skills – the ability to think and communicate clearly, and to analyze and solve problems. But more distinctively, the liberal arts emphasized learning and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, independent of immediate application. The liberal arts taught not only bodies of knowledge, but – more dynamically – how to go about finding and creating knowledge – that is, how to learn. Finally, the liberal arts taught not only how to think and do, but also how to be – with others and with oneself, in the natural world and the social world. They were thus centrally concerned with ethics.

Notably, the term “liberal arts” has nothing to do with liberalism in the contemporary political or partisan sense; the opposite of “liberal” here is not “conservative.” Rather, the term goes back to the Latin root signifying “freedom,” as opposed to imprisonment or subjugation. Think here of the English word “liberty.” The liberal arts were historically connected to freedom in that they encompassed the types of knowledge and skills appropriate to free people, living in a free society. The term “art” in this phrase also must be understood correctly, for it does not refer to “art” as we use it today in its creative sense, to denote the fine and performing arts. Rather, from the Latin root ars , “art” is here used to refer to skill or craft. The “liberal arts,” then, may be thought of as liberating knowledges, or alternatively, the skills of being free.

What is a Liberal Arts Education ?

A liberal (arts) education is a curriculum designed around imparting core knowledge and skills through engagement with a wide range of subjects and disciplines. This core knowledge is taught through general education courses typically drawn from the humanities, (creative) arts, natural sciences, and social sciences. The humanities include disciplines such as language, literature, poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, religion, history, law, geography, archaeology, anthropology, politics, and classics. Natural sciences include subjects such as geology, chemistry, physics, and life sciences such as biology. Social sciences comprise disciplines such as sociology, economics, linguistics, psychology, and education. Through a core curriculum or general education courses, students gain a basic knowledge of the physical and natural world as well as of human ideas, histories, and practices.

A liberal arts education comprises more than learning only content, but also honing skills and cultivating values. Intellectual and practical skills at the heart of the liberal arts are reading comprehension, inquiry and analysis, critical and creative thinking, written and oral communication, information and quantitative literacy, teamwork and problem-solving. Values that are central to liberal education are personal and social responsibility, civic knowledge and engagement, intercultural knowledge and competence, ethical reasoning and action, and lifelong learning.

Why a Liberal Education? Purposes and Values

Four overarching purposes anchor the idea of an education in the liberal arts. One of those is liberty . As mentioned above, the traditional idea of the liberal arts was an education that befitted a free person, one who was fit to participate freely in the life of society. The modern casting of this idea is that a broad education does not limit one to a particular profession or occupation, but rather, is meant for any life path – it prepares the mind for a variety of possible futures and for constructive participation in a civil democratic society. The interconnection between liberal education and human freedom cannot be over-emphasized, and it was at the forefront of the minds of the great political theorists and educators of the western tradition. Those with insufficient knowledge and skills would easily fall prey to demagogues and agents of chaos, and pervasive ignorance and lack of intellectual skill would eat away at a polity’s foundations. Only an informed citizenry – who had familiarity with and foundational understanding in the major areas of knowledge, and who had the requisite skills to both process existing information and seek out reliable new information – would be able to uphold and maintain a democratic society and stave off a decline into tyranny and despotism. As Thomas Jefferson, a major architect of the American public university, held, “Wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government.” [1]

Another central purpose of a liberal arts education is the inculcation of the principle of human worth. This purpose is built on values collectively known as humanism : the idea that human life, individual and collective, has intrinsic value; the idea that human beings are endowed with rights to life, liberty, property, and a number of other rights that we know as “human rights”; that human beings are fundamentally equal, even if they are not the same, and that that equality should translate into both political and legal equality. This ideal of humanism is not in opposition to religious beliefs and practices; however, it regards the public sphere as one in which all should be able to participate regardless of religious beliefs and practices. Humanism mirrors the principle of a common or shared humanity, even while recognizing differences of experience, perspective, and resources. This vision is at the heart of that facet of liberal arts known as the humanities . Writes Robert Thornett, “Humanities is, in fact, education in how to be a human being.” [2] A liberal arts education exposes learners to diverse types of knowledge – which allow for understanding and empathy with others – within a humanistic framework that aims for deeper unity and synthesis. This approach to knowledge serves as a bulwark against social, political and ideological forces that seek to drive wedges between human beings, and that all too often culminate in violence and oppression.

A third purpose of liberal education is to provide a space for contemplation of truth and virtue , based on the conviction that such contemplation is necessary for the free mind, and that  informed explorations of these notions lead to the formation of better human beings. The liberal arts are where students have opportunity to consider the “big questions”: What is true? What is good? What is just? What is beautiful? This contemplation is what fires the imaginations of our students, and what makes the liberal arts curriculum unlike any other curriculum. Vartan Gregorian explains the unique character of liberal arts education, writing that “the deep-seated yearning for knowledge and understanding endemic to human beings is an ideal that a liberal arts education is singularly suited to fulfill.” [3]  

A fourth value of liberal arts education is its emphasis on the skills of learning , and of constructing knowledge out of information. We live in an increasingly complex information environment, where the sheer quantity of information – and its intentional manipulation into disinformation – overwhelms people’s abilities to make sense of it all. Without sufficient training, people are less equipped to find reliable information, to understand what they encounter, and to process that information, mentally and emotionally, into rational knowledge that can form the basis of ethical evaluation and action . This is a matter of grave importance for all human beings – in their capacity as students, citizens, consumers, workers, and people in relationships. Gregorian long ago identified the problem of information overload, and the function of education, in an interview with Bill Moyers: “Unfortunately, the information explosion … does not equal knowledge. … So, we’re facing a major problem: how to structure information into knowledge. Because … there are great possibilities of manipulating our society by inundating us with undigested information… paralyzing our choices by giving so much that we cannot possibly digest it.” [4]

Given this paralyzing deluge of information, he continues, “The teaching profession, the universities, have to provide connections … connections between subjects, connections between disciplines … to provide some kind of intellectual coherence.” In the final analysis, suggests Gregorian, “Education’s sole function is now, possibly, [to] provide an introduction to learning.”

The purposes and values outlined above cannot easily be fulfilled outside of an intentional liberal arts curriculum.  One does meet people who are driven to read widely and to pursue lifelong learning; to develop skills of information critique and lucid oral and written communication; to hold steadily to the vision of a shared humanity and humane ethical conduct; to undertake the ethical burden of preserving political liberties and civil rights; to engage in sustained contemplation of truth and practice of virtue; to perceive the interconnectedness of different spheres of knowledge and therefore of our world; and to develop the facility to synthesize chaotic data and irrational information into rational and cogent knowledge. But these goals are far more difficult to achieve outside of the structured, collective, and compulsory activities of the college classroom and away from teachers whose minds are perpetually set to these concerns. For too many, such integrated learning is out of reach or undervalued. Meanwhile, the insufficient attainment and integration of broad knowledge, intellectual skills, and ethical reflection is wreaking havoc on our society and national culture; on our quality of life morally, intellectually, psychologically, and physically; and finally, on our planet, which is increasingly unable to withstand humanity’s relentless onslaught and is fast losing the capacity to sustain its assailant.

Liberal-arts education is not found in any one course, classroom, or teacher.  It is a composite formation, attained over time through series of courses and learning opportunities that together coalesce in the minds of students. Each instructor, and each course, contributes elements that are oriented toward the purposes identified above. It is through the process of seeing the interconnections between different areas of knowledge, using diverse intellectual skills, that the human mind gains the capacity for liberation.

[1] https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/genesis-university-virginia

[2] Robert Thornett, “What Are College Students Paying For?” at The Quillette , June 2, 2022 [ https://quillette.com/2022/06/02/what-are-college-students-paying-for-the-stephen-curry-effect-and-getting-back-to-basics/

[3] Historian and former Brown University President Vartan Gregorian, in his essay “American Higher Education: An Obligation to the Future” at https://higheredreporter.carnegie.org/introduction/ .

[4] “Vartan Gregorian: Living in the Information Age,” interview with Bill Moyers, at https://billmoyers.com/content/vartan-gregorian/ .

The Unexpected Value of the Liberal Arts

First-generation students are finding personal and professional fulfillment in the humanities and social sciences.

Growing up in Southern California, Mai-Ling Garcia’s grades were ragged; her long-term plans nonexistent. At age 20, she was living with her in-laws halfway between Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert, while her husband was stationed abroad. Tired of working subsistence jobs, she decided in 2001 to try a few classes at Mount San Jacinto community college.

Nobody pegged her for greatness at first. A psychology professor, Maria Lopez-Moreno recalls Garcia sitting in the midst of a lecture hall, fiddling constantly with a cream-colored scarf. Then something started to catch. After a spirited discussion about the basis for criminal behavior, Lopez-Moreno took this newcomer aside after class and asked: “Why are you here?”

Garcia blurted out a tangled story of marrying a Marine right after high school, seeing him head off to Iraq, and not knowing what to do next. Lopez-Moreno couldn’t walk away. “I said to myself: ‘Uh-oh. I’ve got to suggest something to her.’” At her professor’s urging, Garcia applied for a place in Mt. San Jacinto’s honors program—and began to thrive.

Nourished by smaller classes and motivated peers, Garcia earned straight-A grades for the first time. She emerged as a leader in diversity initiatives, too, drawing on her own multicultural heritage (Filipino and Irish). Shortly before graduation, she won admission to the University of California, Berkeley, campus, where she could pursue a bachelor’s degree.

Today, Garcia is a leading digital strategist for the city of Oakland, California. Rather than rely on an M.B.A. or a technical major, she has capitalized on a seldom-appreciated liberal-arts discipline—sociology—to power her career forward. Now, she describes herself as a “bureaucratic ninja” who doesn’t hide her stormy journey. Instead, she recognizes it as a valuable asset.

“I know what it’s like to be too poor to own a computer,” Garcia told me recently. “I’m the one in meetings who asks: ‘Never mind how well this new app works on an iPhone. Will it run on an old, public-library computer, because that’s the only way some of our residents will get to use it?’”

By its very name, the liberal-arts pathway is tinged with privilege. Blame this on Cicero, the ancient Roman orator, who championed the arts quae libero sunt dignae ( cerebral studies suited for freemen), as opposed to the practical, servile arts suited for lower-class tradespeople. Even today, liberal-arts majors in the humanities and social sciences often are portrayed as pursuing elitist specialties that only affluent, well-connected students can afford.

Look more closely, though, and this old stereotype is starting to crumble. In 2016, the National Association of Colleges and Employers surveyed 5,013 graduating seniors about their family backgrounds and academic paths. The students most likely to major in the humanities or social sciences—33.8 percent of them—were those who were the first generation in their family ever to have earned college degrees. By contrast, students whose parents or other forbears had completed college chose the humanities or social sciences 30.4 percent of the time.

Pursuing the liberal-arts track isn’t a quick path to riches. First-job salaries tend to be lower than what’s available with vocational degrees in fields such as nursing, accounting, or computer science. That’s especially true for first-generation students, who aren’t as likely to enjoy family-aided access to top employers. NACE found that first-generation students on average received post-graduation starting salaries of $43,320, about 12 percent below the pay packages being landed by peers with multiple generations of college experience.

Yet over time, liberal-arts graduates’ earnings often surge, especially for students pursuing advanced degrees. History majors often become well-paid lawyers or judges after completing law degrees, a recent analysis by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project has found. Many philosophy majors put their analytical and argumentative skills to work on Wall Street. International-relations majors thrive as overseas executives for big corporations, and so on.

For college leaders, the liberal arts’ appeal across the socioeconomic spectrum is both exciting and daunting. As Dan Porterfield, the president of Pennsylvania’s Franklin and Marshall College, points out, first-generation students “may come to college thinking: ‘I want to be a doctor. I want to help people.’ Then they discover anthropology, earth sciences, and many other new fields. They start to fall in love with the idea of being a writer or an entrepreneur. They realize: ‘I just didn’t have a broad enough vision of how to be a difference maker in society.’”

A close look at the career trajectories of liberal-arts graduates highlights five factors—beyond traditional classroom academics—that can spur long-term success for anyone from a non-elite background. Strong support from a faculty mentor is a powerful early propellant. In a survey of about 1,000 college graduates, Richard Detweiler, president of the Great Lakes Colleges Association,  found that students who sought out faculty mentors were nearly twice as likely to end up in leadership positions later in life.

Other positive factors include a commitment to keep learning after college; a willingness to move to major U.S. job hubs such as Seattle, Silicon Valley, or the greater Washington, D.C., area; and the audacity to dream big. Finally, students who enter college without well-connected relatives—the sorts who can tell you what classes to take or how to win a choice summer internship—benefit from programs designed to build up professional networks and social capital.

Among the groups offering career-readiness programs on campus is Braven, a nonprofit founded by Aimée Eubanks Davis, a former Teach for America executive. Making its debut in 2014, Braven already has reached about 1,000 students at Rutgers University-Newark in New Jersey and San Jose State University in California. Expansion into the Midwest is on tap. Braven mixes students majoring in the liberal arts and those pursuing vocational degrees in each cohort, the theory being that all can learn from one another.

One of Braven’s Newark enrollees in 2015 was Dyllan Brown-Bramble, a transfer student earning strong grades in psychology, who didn’t feel at all connected to the New Jersey campus. Commuting from his parents’ home, he usually arrived at Rutgers just a few minutes before 10 a.m. classes started. Once afternoon courses were done, he’d retreat to Parking Lot B and rev up his 2003 Sentra. By 3:50 p.m., he’d be gone.

Brown-Bramble’s parents are immigrants from Dominica. His father runs a small construction business; his mother, a Baruch College graduate, manages a tourism office. Privately, the Rutgers student is quite proud of them, but it seemed pointless to explain his Caribbean origins to strangers. They typically reacted inappropriately. Some imagined him to be the son of dirt-poor refugees struggling to rise above a shabby past. Others assumed he was a world-class genius: “an astrophysicist who could fly.” There wasn’t any room for him to be himself.

When Brown-Bramble encountered a campus flier urging students to enroll in small evening workshops called the Braven Career Accelerator, he took the bait. “I knew I was supposed to be networking in college,” he later told me. “I thought: Okay, here’s a chance to do something.”

Suddenly, Rutgers became more compelling. For nine weeks, Brown-Bramble and four other students of color became evening allies. They met in an empty classroom each Tuesday at six to construct LinkedIn profiles and practice mock interviews. They picked up tips about local internships, aided by a volunteer coach whose life and background was much like theirs. They united as a group, discussing each person’s weekly highs and lows while encouraging one another to keep trying for internships and better grades. “We had a saying,” Brown-Bramble recalled. “If one of us succeeds, all of us succeed.”

Most of the volunteer coaches came from minority backgrounds, too. Among them: Josmar Tejeda, who had graduated from the New Jersey Institute of Technology five years earlier with an architecture degree. Since graduating, Tejeda had worked at everything from social-media jobs to being an asbestos inspector. As the coach for Brown-Bramble’s group, Tejeda combined relentless optimism with an acknowledgment that getting ahead wasn’t easy.

“Keep it real,” Tejeda kept telling his students as they talked through case studies and their own goals. Everyone did so. That feeling of being the only black or Latino person in the room? The awkwardness of always being asked: Where are you from? The strains of always trying to be the “model minority”? Familiar territory for everyone.

“It was liberating,” Brown-Bramble told me. Surrounded by sympathetic peers, Brown-Bramble discovered new ways to share his heritage in job interviews. Yes, some of his Caribbean relatives had arrived in the United States not knowing how to fill out government forms. As a boy, he had needed to help them. But that was all right. In fact, it was a hidden strength. “I could create a culture story that worked for me,” Brown-Bramble said. “I can relate to people with different backgrounds. There’s nothing about me that I have to rise above.”

This summer, with the support of Inroads , a nonprofit that promotes workforce diversity, Brown-Bramble is interning in the compliance department of Novo Nordisk, a pharmaceutical maker. Riding the strength of a 3.8 grade-point average, he plans to get a law degree and work in a corporate setting for a few years to pay off his student loans. Then he hopes to set up his own law firm, specializing in start-up formation. “I’d like to help other entrepreneurs do things in Newark,” he told me.

Organizations like Braven draw on “the power of the cohort,” said Shirley Collado, the president of Ithaca College and a former top administrator at Rutgers-Newark. When students settle into small groups with trustworthy peers, she explained, candor takes hold. The sterile dynamic of large lectures and solo homework assignments gives way to a motivation-boosting alliance among seat mates and coaches. “You build social capital where it didn’t exist before,” Collado said.

For Mai-Ling Garcia, the leap from community college to Berkeley was perilous. Arriving at the famous university’s campus, she and her then-husband were so short on cash that they subsisted most days on bowls of ramen. Scraping by on partial scholarships, neither knew how to get the maximum available financial aid. To cover expenses, Garcia took a part-time job teaching art at a grade-school recreation center in Oakland.

Finishing college can become impossible in such circumstances. During her second semester, Garcia began tracking down what she now refers to as “a series of odd little foundations with funky scholarships.” People wanted to help her. Before long, she was attending Berkeley on a full ride. Her money problems abated. What she couldn’t forget was that initial feeling of being in trouble and ill-prepared. Her travails were pulling her into sociology’s most pressing issues: how vulnerable people fare in a world they don’t understand, and what can be done to improve their lives.

Simultaneously, Berkeley’s professors were arming Garcia with tools that would define her career. She spent a year learning the fine points of ethnography from a Vietnam-era Marine, Martin Sanchez-Jankowski, who taught students how to conduct field research. He sent Garcia into the Oakland courthouse to watch judges in action, advising her to heed the ways racial differences tinged courtroom conduct. She learned to take careful notes, to be explicit about her theories and assumptions, and to operate with a rigor that could withstand peer-review scrutiny. Her professors would stay in academia; she was being trained to have an impact in the wider world.

What can one do with a sociology degree? Garcia tried a lot of different jobs in her first few years after graduation. She spent two years at a nonprofit trying to untangle Veterans Administration bureaucracy. After that, she dedicated three years to a position at the Department of Labor, winning many small battles related to veterans’ employment. She had found job security, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that a technology revolution was racing through the private sector—and leaving government far behind.

Companies like Lyft, Airbnb, and Instagram were putting new powers in the public’s hands, giving them handy tools to hail a ride, find lodging, or share photos. By comparison, trying to change a jury-duty date remained a clumsy slog through outdated websites. Instead of bemoaning this tech gap, Garcia decided to gain vital tech skills herself. She signed up for evening classes in digital marketing and refined that knowledge during an 18-month stint at a startup. Then she began hunting for a government job with impact.

In 2014, Garcia joined the City of Oakland as a bridge builder who could amp up online government services on behalf of the city’s 400,000 residents. This wasn’t just an exercise in technology upgrading; it required a fundamental rethinking of the way that Oakland delivered services. Buffers between city workers and an impatient public would come down. The social structures of power would change. To make this transition, it helped to have a digitally savvy sociologist in the house.

Over coffee one afternoon, Garcia told me excitedly about the progress that she and the city communications manager were achieving with their initiative. If street-art creators want more recognition for their work, Garcia can drum up interest on social media. If garbage is piling up, new digital tools let citizens visit the city’s Facebook page and summon services within seconds.

Looking ahead, Garcia envisions a day when landing a municipal job becomes vastly easier, with cities’ Twitter feeds posting each new opening. Other aspects of digital technology ought to help residents connect quickly with whatever part of government matters to them—whether that means signing up for summer camp or giving the mayor a piece of one’s mind.

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This article has been adapted from George Anders’s new book, You Can Do Anything.

About the Author

Why Liberal Arts?

Permission to Hope

Welcome back to the weather channel! For today’s forecast, we predict high wind speeds, freezing temperatures, a 99% chance of precipitation… uh, yes, altogether a gloomy week ahead in the land of Higher Education. With the looming threat of volatile post-pandemic labor markets, students are scrambling to hold onto any semblance of stability.

In the face of sweeping change, humans tend to seek shelter in the pragmatics, tossing hopes and dreams aside for formulaic predictors of success (or heck, survival). This phenomenon manifests not only in students, but also in the scholarly discourse around the plight of higher education. I’m talking, in particular, about the proponents of the liberal arts—a pedagogy that seems to be less defined by what exactly it is, but what exactly it isn’t: a technical education that trains young adults for a specific profession. Think not of pre-med tracks, trade schools, and vocational programs, but of a holistic undergraduate experience that exposes students to a breadth of intellectual disciplines. One such proponent, Martha Nussbaum, a prescient thinker in philosophy and academia at the University of Chicago, assigns a liberal arts education the purpose of  “liberating the mind from the bondage of habit and custom” (38). Her work centers on the preservation of democracy through the instruction of the classical humanities, which uniquely equips graduates with the superpower to remain skeptics of authority, transcend a self-centered worldview, and approach others with empathy (38-40). But again, this rhetoric of pragmatics persists. By Nussbaum’s logic, the liberal arts is not that different from a technical education in its intention: both prepare young adults to be active participants of society, whether broadly as citizens or more narrowly as employees. One just does so more discretely by one-sidedly lauding the humanities, a presently more “useless” field.

But wait. Why should we concede so early that students should regard their education solely in terms of its practical utility? Aren’t we still telling students what they should do, rendering them beholden to external authorities, rather than asking them what they want to do? Timothy Burke, curiously, a history professor at a top liberal arts college, speaks to the absurdity of the argument that students must willfully adapt to the ever-changing demands of the powers that be. In his timely article, “An Unconvincing Argument for the Liberal Arts,” he questions whether the liberal arts even prepares students to weather the pandemic storms—a foregone conclusion for many of its advocates—and, crucially, whether it should. On the former point, he cautions against a reductive caricature of vocational education, which may be the only financially viable path for many, and highlights COVID-19 as testament that coping with uncertainty has more to do with socioeconomic privilege than with the extolled virtues of “‘resilience,’ ‘emotional intelligence,’ or ‘grit’” (5). On the latter point, Burke hints at a much more deep-seated, unnatural trend: “uncertainty [is] engineered on purpose… to produce insecurity and precarity for the benefit of a few” (6). To fill in the subject for the passive-voice phrase, he singles out “the oligarchs of the present American moment” (7) keen on puppeteering the labor markets for a quick buck. For him, we should be actively educating students to wholly reject any form of “unwarranted benediction” (8) and loyalty to that corrupt elite class.

I’m taking his argument one step further. Not only do the capitalist oligarchs engineer uncertainty, they engineer hopelessness under the crushing pressure of that uncertainty, all while enlisting the help of schools, teachers, and parents to push students to fall in line. And how do I know that? Because hopelessness infuses the very fabric of my experience in college thus far—at a liberal arts institution, at that—manifesting in the tiny side remarks among peers that can only be met with an awkward silence:

“In an ideal world where my parents weren’t chemists and the world wasn’t going to shit, I’d want to be a radio talk show host. But…” 

In this paper, I’ve charged myself with the rather challenging goal of providing a satisfying answer to this heartbreaking comment.

Coming from an elite Bay Area STEM private high school (woah what a mouthful), I had become painfully aware of how early people start with the “but,” automatically subscribing to a path of rigid, impersonal career training. Among peers pumped chock-full of SAT prep and (nepotistic) internships since sixth grade, I had always felt insane for taking two arts electives a year and treating summers as mental health breaks. In some perverted, perhaps self-sabotaging attempt to “not be like other Harker students,” I disavowed most of the Ivies and set search for a small liberal arts college. 

And by the luck of the draw, I ended up at Dartmouth—the best of both worlds, as far away as possible from my old world. Since my biggest fear was boxing myself into a specialized future, my biggest criterion was a school that actively encouraged exploration and flexibility. My rationale: only with exposure to all the available areas of study can I, myself, make a rational decision to focus on one. Thus, building upon Burke’s insights as well as my personal experience, I argue that the exclusive value of a liberal arts education (done right) comes not from its inclusion of the “arts,” but from the “liberal” structure of its host institution. By giving young people back the power of choice and agency, the liberal arts uniquely renews hope, the rainbows-and-unicorns notion that a better future is out there, despite all odds . But hope operates on one key condition: you must do the work of reimagining the future in terms of what you want and what you are capable of changing. It’s a slow, arduous process only possible with a confidence that there is always more to learn and always a personal and societal value to learn. This metric of a student’s love of learning, then, becomes the ultimate litmus test for the success of a liberal arts institution.

Qualifying Nussbaum’s definition of “liberal,” I see “liberating the mind” as less about thinking for yourself and more about choosing for yourself. For me, the liberal arts means plopping students into a free-ranging intellectual playground that celebrates all kinds of learning, empowering students self-select purposes they find worthwhile. Here, I would be remiss not to highlight John Dewey, the pioneer of modern educational philosophy. While he predominantly catered to primary school educators as his audience, his work on experiential learning rings harmoniously with my discussion of the liberal arts in higher education. In chapter five of Education and Experience , “The Nature of Freedom,” Dewey hones in on the importance of a classroom that facilitates intellectual freedom. By eliminating a culture of rigid rule-following and restricted movement, educators can fabricate a healthy social dynamic that prompts “free play for individuality of experience” (58).

While, luckily, we rarely witness such disciplinarian environments in the classroom today, more clandestine forms of social control endure. Prior to college, many teens—soiled by the many adults whispering in their ears—do not have this privilege of “free play,” as evidenced by my peers at Harker. Perhaps, what distinguishes the liberal arts from a vocational education is not the perception of how much agency a young adult deserves to have, but how much they truly and verifiably have. A vocational education prescribes that you must have already figured out what to do with your life by junior year in high school, failing to consider whether that decision is fully yours to begin with. I behoove you to ask yourself: to what extent did your dream college, major, job at sixteen align with your dreams “in an ideal world”? For the friend I cited earlier, it clearly did not; she herself admitted defeat to the will of her parents. And after all, before I explored my soft spot for philosophy and public policy, I was pre-med to the core. (That was more a function of Grey’s Anatomy than parental pressure, but you get the gist.) 

If you could look at my first-year course load now, you wouldn’t leave with any cohesive story. Calculus, Public Policy, Computer Science, Acting, Psychology all appear as disparate disciplines, but that’s precisely intentional: Dartmouth’s liberal arts structure affords me the opportunity to extract my favorite flavors from each to concoct my own little personalized, nuanced intellectual hotpot. Though it somewhat pains me to acknowledge, such a liberal fabric may be more thorny in practice, however. Who’s to say that after escaping Harker, I didn’t subconsciously latch onto a new external control at Dartmouth? Dewey would concur that freedom is not an end in itself, but a means to developing a capacity for self-control through an intensive reevaluation of the self (61). When you don’t stay faithful to your authentic, internal impulses and let them inform your educational decisions, “it is easy to jump out of the frying-pan into the fire” (64). One such fire-lined pitfall may be Dartmouth’s distributive requirements—the very quality that makes the institution liberal arts, some might argue. For students with preordained academic goals, is taking distributive-fulfilling courses sufficient in instilling curiosity if there was none to begin with? For those already poised to use college to explore, does making intellectual breadth required invalidate or override the intrinsic value of learning those disciplines? 

Perhaps contradicting Dewey’s emphasis on self-control, the new form of authority may very well originate from within, as a product of an inundating culture of maximizing achievement. Just mastering one subject isn’t enough, you must master them all. William Deresiewicz, former Yale English professor and author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite , provides copious first-hand accounts of this mindless box-checking, a narrative borne out of the admissions officer’s paragon of the “well-lopsided” (51) student who excels at everything. He quotes a student: “Yale students… are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation” (27-28). Curiously, the expectation of possibility can itself become so crippling that it undermines the value of a liberal arts curriculum. And make no mistake: this possibility has little to do with hope. The students who learn horizontally may only do so because they can or they have to , not necessarily because they want to . Once again, exploration has been reduced down to a practical exercise of hopelessly pandering to an external authority, whether the admissions officer or the employer. 

So how do we reframe the purpose of the liberal arts to teach students to use their newfound agency to nurture their own interests and passions? We must radically reinstate the importance of instant gratification, the temptation to forgo a long-term benefit to enjoy a short-term reward. According to psychology, the ability to delay gratification predicts higher levels of achievement and self-worth later down the line (Gazzaniga 226). But also according to psychology, our reward center—the nucleus accumbens—develops before our rational decision-maker—the frontal lobe—in order to get us out into the world and make dumb mistakes in our youthful years when the consequences are still tame (213). Our brains don’t want us to always plan ahead. Like I alluded to earlier, this notion of harnessing your fleeting impulses goes hand-in-hand with Dewey’s idea of a progressive pedagogy. While the traditional educational approach seeks to keep our beastly instincts in check by imposing discipline in the classroom, the progressive educational approach assumes that humans are born with innate capacities that should be nurtured through experience (12). Dewey further contends, “only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future” (49). More important than preparing students for (certain) uncertainty, the challenge of an effective liberal arts education—aptly positioned at the tender transitional stage from youth to adulthood—lies in teaching students to maximize each passing moment and transfer that skill into the real world. Only then can students carefully and intentionally mold their impulses into purpose.

Yet, as evidenced throughout this paper, young adults are now taking delayed gratification to new heights, rowing upstream against their psychology to train themselves for survival. If this sounds depressing, it is. Delayed gratification is the very antithesis of hope. It asserts that enjoying the present moment is a wasteful investment, because you should rather expend your energy on x, y, z things that feel required by society, like conducting first-year research, graduating summa cum laude , and climbing the corporate ladder. It inextricably implies sacrifice, but that’s not what they tell you when you sign up to be an adult.

Deresiewicz exhorted that “if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning… Go back and do it again” (101). I say: if you come out of formal schooling believing you have nothing left to learn, go back and do it again. Forfeiting a love of learning suggests a loss of not only self-efficacy, but also an outward-looking societal efficacy—the belief that your knowledge and actions can fix the problems you see in the world and that the world itself is worth fixing. Instant gratification, then, is the permission to hope. It’s the encouraging shoulder squeeze that tells you, hey, that thing you’ve tossed aside as useless, it’s exactly what you need right now . You deserve to manifest your “ideal world.”

But even I can’t respond to my friend that way with full confidence. Such a rose-colored view of the future soothes the ears, but fails to soothe the soul. I previously brought up, almost as a passing comment, Burke’s point about privilege as a predictor of who survives the storm. From here, another question arises: should we even hope, when not everyone can afford to hope? I would answer that with another, perhaps more despairing proposition: the moment we concede that hope is misplaced or irrational should be a massive wake-up call to the deep-rooted inequities of our educational system. We have managed to excommunicate hope into an “ideal world” only some of us can easily access.

At least for me, in my next three-and-a-half years at Dartmouth, I’m juicing every last drop of my privileged right to choose. I’m choosing hope because the opposite means raising a white flag to the powerful incentive systems that toil to keep us hopeless. Now begins the harder work of granting everyone not only the permission to hope, but also the vocabulary to use it effectively. But that’s a problem much bigger than the liberal arts, even in its uniquely youth-empowering design, can begin to tackle.

Works Cited

Burke, Timothy. “An Unconvincing Argument for the Liberal Arts.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 July 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/an-unconvincing-argument-for-the-liberal-arts. 

Deresiewicz, William. Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. , 2014. Print.

Dewey, John. Experience and Education. New York: Macmillan, 1963. Print.

Gazzaniga, Michael S, Todd F. Heatherton, and Diane F. Halpern. Psychological Science . New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2010. Print.

Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity and World Citizenship. , Future Forum 37, 2007.

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Why the liberal arts still matter.

Never has a broad liberal education been more necessary than it is today, and never have colleges and universities done such a poor job of delivering it. Radical measures are needed.

Everyone is in favor of liberal education. Praise of its benefits is found in countless university commencement addresses and reports by commissions on higher ­education. But it seems that nobody can agree on what liberal education is.

For some, liberal education means a general education, as opposed to specialized training for a particular career. For others, it refers to a subject matter—“the humanities” or “the liberal arts.” Still others think of liberal education in terms of “the classics” or “the great books.”

All of these conceptions of liberal education are ­right—­but each is only partly right. The tradition of liberal education in Europe and the Americas is a synthesis of several elements. Three of these have already been mentioned: nonspecialized general education; an emphasis on a particular set of scholarly disciplines, the humanities; and acquaintance with a canon of classics. The traditional Western synthesis included two other important ­elements: ­training in rhetoric and logic, and the study of the languages in which the classics and commentary on them were written (Greek and Latin, and, in the case of Scripture, Hebrew as well).

What brought all of these different elements together in the liberal education model was their purpose: training citizens for public life, whether as rulers or voters. Liberal education is, first and foremost, training for citizenship. The idea of a liberal education as a “gentleman’s education” reflects the fact that, until recent generations, citizenship was restricted in practice if not law to a rich minority of the population in republics and constitutional monarchies. In a democratic republic with universal suffrage, the ­ideal—­difficult as it may be to ­realize—­is a liberal education for all ­citizens.

Liberal education, in different versions, formed the basis of Western higher education from the Renaissance recovery of Greco-­Roman culture to the late 19th century. In the last century, however, liberal education as the basis for higher education in the United States and other nations has been almost completely demolished by opposing forces, the most important of which is utilitarianism, with its demand that universities be centers of practical professional training. So completely has the tradition been defeated that most of the defenders of liberal education do not fully understand what they are ­defending.

The first thing that must be said about liberal education is that the word “liberal” is misleading. In this context, “liberal” has nothing to do with political liberalism, or “liberation of the mind” (a false etymology that is sometimes given by people who should know better).

“Liberal arts” is a translation of the Latin term artes liberales. Artes means crafts or skills, and liberales comes from liber, or free man, an individual who is both politically free, as a citizen with rights, and economically independent, as a member of a wealthy leisure class. In other words, “liberal arts” originally meant something like “skills of the citizen elite” or “skills of the ruling class.” Cicero contrasted the artes quae libero sunt dignae (arts worthy of a free man) with the artes serviles, the servile arts or ­lower-­class trades. As the Renaissance humanist Pier Paolo Vergerio wrote in “The Character and Studies Befitting a ­Free-­Born Youth” (1402–03), “We will call those studies liberal, then, which are worthy of a free man.”

Once “liberal arts” is understood in its original sense as “elite skills,” then the usefulness of elements of a traditional liberal arts education for a ruling elite becomes ­apparent:

Classical languages. In the last 200 years, as the study of Greek and Latin declined, its proponents often argued that learning these two languages was valuable in itself, or that it provided “mental discipline.” But such ­far-­fetched arguments were unnecessary for nearly two millennia. In their day, the relatively unsophisticated Romans needed to read and understand Greek in order to read most of what was worth reading on subjects from philosophy, medicine, and military tactics to astronomy and agriculture. Greek was also the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean, shared by the Romans with their subjects. Subsequent generations of Europeans and Americans learned Latin and, sometimes, Greek for equally practical ­reasons.

Rhetoric and logic. The members of the ruling ­class—­whether they were citizens in democratic Athens or republican Rome, or courtiers in a ­monarchy—­were expected to debate issues of public policy. The Greeks and Romans naturally emphasized rhetoric and logic. Rhetoric helped you persuade the voters or the king, while logic permitted you to rip your opponent’s arguments to ­shreds.

Beginning with Plato, philosophers and theologians often railed against rhetoric as the seductive art of prettifying falsehood. In modern, democratic societies, rhetoric is often equated with bombast—“mere rhetoric.” But the great theorists of rhetoric, from the Athenian Isocrates to the Romans Cicero and Quintilian, insisted that their ideal was the moral and patriotic citizen, and manuals of rhetoric subordinated flowery language to clarity of ­thought.

General education. On hearing his son Alexander play the flute, King Philip of Macedon is reported to have asked, “My son, have you not learned to play the flute too well?” A governing elite, whether in a republic, a monarchy, or a dictatorship, must know a lot about many subjects but not too much about any particular subject. An aristocrat or general should show some accomplishment in arts such as poetry, scholarship, music, and sports, but only as an amateur, not a professional. Even in modern democracies, the same logic applies. U.S. senators and presidents must know enough to be ­well ­informed about many subjects, from global warming to military strategy to Federal Reserve policy. But a senator or president who neglected other issues while devoting too much time to studying one favorite subject would be guilty of dereliction of ­duty.

A focus on the humanities. While the ­liberally ­educated elite could master the basics of any subject, subjects in the the humanities or liberal arts were of particular importance in the education of rulers, in republics and autocracies alike. Studies in these areas, according to Romans such as Cicero and Seneca, helped an individual cultivate humanitas, by which is meant not humanitarianism (although education might promote understanding of others), but rather the higher, uniquely “human” faculties of the mind and character, as opposed to the lower faculties needed by peasants and craftsmen, those human beasts of burden (once again, the class bias of the liberal arts tradition is evident).

In the Middle Ages, the “seven liberal arts” came to be thought of as the trivium (grammar, dialectic or logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy)—in essence, literacy and numeracy. Renaissance humanists, rebelling against the ­logic ­chopping they associated with medieval Christian Scholasticism, downgraded the mathematical subjects in favor of their own list of the “humanities,” including grammar, rhetoric, politics, history, and ethics. Mathematics, however, survived as part of the liberal arts curriculum in the West until the 19th ­century.

The classics. Like most premodern societies, the premodern West viewed the past as the source of wisdom and virtue, not as an outmoded former stage in a history of ­never-­ending progress. Whatever their other studies, elite Greeks were expected to be familiar with Homer and other ancient poets, who were viewed as sources of knowledge, not just aesthetic pleasure. The Romans, and later, the Europeans and Americans, added Virgil, Horace, and other Latin authors to the ­canon.

Some Christians in the later Roman Empire and the ­post-­Roman West viewed the pagan classics with suspicion. But in Catholic and Protestant countries alike, a version of the ­Greco-­Roman gentleman’s education, supplemented with liberal doses of Christian ethics and theology, provided the basis of higher education from the Renaissance until the 19th ­century.

I’ve said nothing so far about philosophy, for good reason. The founding fathers of liberal education are the Roman statesman and thinker Cicero and the unjustly neglected Athenian orator Isocrates, a contemporary of Plato and Aristotle. Isocrates ridiculed the Socratic philosophers for wasting their time on metaphysical puzzles instead of educating virtuous statesmen and citizens. This skepticism toward metaphysical philosophy and theology was shared by the great figures of the Western humanist tradition, from Cicero and Seneca to Petrarch, Erasmus, Montaigne, and Hume. It was only in the 20th century that Americans, influenced by ­19th-­century German thought, began to treat Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, rather than orators such as Isocrates and Cicero and poets such as Homer and Virgil, as the founding fathers of Western civilization. The assertion, frequently encountered today, that the tradition of liberal education is based on the Socratic method is completely ­incorrect.

The premodern Western liberal arts curriculum served a variety of governing classes quite well for two millennia. In colonial America and the early United States, most colleges were Protestant denominational institutions whose curricula would have been familiar to Romans and Renaissance Italians alike. For example, in the 1750s Harvard required every applicant to be able “extempore to read, construe, and parse Tully [Cicero], Virgil, or such like common classical authors, and to write Latin in prose, and to be skilled in making Latin verse, or at least in the rules of the Prosodia, and to read, construe, and parse ordinary Greek, as in the New Testament, Isocrates, or such like, and decline the paradigms of Greek nouns and verbs.” Thomas Jefferson thought that before being admitted to college, students should learn “Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic.”

The crisis of liberal education began in the late 19th century and continued until the middle of the 20th. One by one, the traditional elements of a liberal arts education came under assault from reformers. Utilitarians argued for replacing the study of Greek and Latin with the study of modern languages. Rhetoric was disparaged, on the grounds that it was unscientific or undemocratic. General education was challenged by vocational training for jobs in the new industrial economy. The subject matter of the traditional humanities was carved up between the “social sciences,” including mathematical economics and political science, and the “arts” or “fine arts,” which romantics redefined as the realm of the nonrational and “creative.” Of the traditional humanities, only history and philosophy retained their premodern ­forms.

The ­Anglo-­American liberal arts college, founded in emulation of Renaissance Italian academies, was increasingly remodeled along the lines of the new German research university, whose main purpose was rigorous, original scholarship. Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876, was the first ­German-­style research university in the United States. By World War I, most prestigious universities in the United States had rebuilt themselves along German lines. Increasingly, that Germanic degree, the Ph.D., became a requirement for college teaching. In German fashion, professors concentrated on research and writing for their specialist colleagues, rather than on undergraduate teaching. In the new research university, the original purpose of higher ­education—­producing ­well-­rounded, versatile civic leaders who shared a common cultural ­tradition—­came to seem ­anachronistic.

T he amazing thing is that liberal education survived at all. It was rescued thanks only to two measures initiated between the late 19th century and World War II. First, a number of universities made an undergraduate liberal arts education a prerequisite for specialized professional training in law, medicine, and other fields. Second, the study of Latin and Greek was abandoned in favor of study of “the great books” in English ­translation.

The importance of the first reform was pointed out by the cultural critic Louis Menand in a 2004 lecture, “After the Liberal Arts.” In the early 1900s, Charles Eliot Norton, the president of Harvard, compelled the university’s professional schools to accept only applicants with undergraduate degrees. “Eliot’s reform, once it had been widely adopted, saved the liberal arts,” according to Menand, by making a generalist liberal arts undergraduate education the precondition for a specialized professional ­education.

The other reform that arguably rescued the liberal arts from extinction was the replacement of study of the classical languages with study of the classics in translation. This reform is associated with President Charles Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago, who introduced the “Great Books” program in the 1930s. Columbia University adopted a similar approach at the same time. In addition, Columbia turned a propagandistic World War I course instructing U.S. servicemen on Western civilization, whose preservation was the supposed goal of the war, into the first of many “Western Civ” core curriculum programs. Classics departments dwindled in resources and prestige as other disciplines assumed many of their ­functions.

As a result of these reforms, by the mid-20th century a new kind of undergraduate liberal arts education had taken shape in the United States, one that would have puzzled Thomas Jefferson and Cicero. Rhetoric had been downgraded to “composition,” also known derisively as “bonehead English,” and logic was encountered, if at all, in math classes. The chief emphasis was no longer on rhetoric and logic, but on the study of classic and contemporary literature, in English translation rather than in the original languages. The humanities still included history and philosophy. But political science had torn away the study of politics, while political economy, now called economics, also claimed the status of a social science. This tilted the definition of the humanities away from the subjects of practical concern to statesmen and citizens and toward the fine or “creative” ­arts.

In the 1950s and ’60s, this new kind of liberal arts education managed to hold the menace of vocationalism at bay for a while. In the booming ­post–World War II economy, liberal arts enrollment increased. But by the 1970s and ’80s, a troubled economy and an uncertain job market pressured students to focus on career training. At the same time, increased competition for admission to selective professional schools inspired a growing number of undergraduates to follow ­“pre-­professional” ­tracks.

In recent decades, debates over humanities curriculums and Western Civ courses among multiculturalists, postmodernists, and traditionalists have attracted considerable public attention. But the rival sides are fighting for a few planks from a ship that has already sunk. By the beginning of the 21st century, only three percent of American undergraduates were choosing a liberal arts major. The most popular undergraduate majors in the United States were business (20 percent), education (eight percent), and health care (seven percent).

Today, as so often since the late 19th century, the chief danger to liberal education comes not from radical ideologies but from the utilitarian center, which views the university as the training ground for the U.S. work force. In its attempt to become the governing philosophy of the modern American university, utilitarianism has advanced in two great ­waves. The first began with the importation of the model of the German research university around 1900. The second, originating after World War II, started with the growth of government and corporate funding of university research, combined with the proliferation of professional ­schools.

A third wave of utilitarianism may be on its way. The economic and technological progress of China and India already is prompting calls for more emphasis in American education on math, science, and technology, as in the ­post-­Sputnik era of competition with the Soviet ­Union.

Another factor is demand by students and their parents. Most of the jobs being created in the United States are ­low-­wage, ­low-­prestige ­service-­sector ­jobs—­waiter, food preparer, retail worker, nursing ­aide—that do not require college degrees. In these circumstances, it is only to be expected that most students going to college will focus on the ­high-­wage professions rather than the liberal arts, and that they will prefer specialized, ­pre-­professional undergraduate courses of study that maximize their chances of admission to elite professional ­schools.

In an era when business elites and government officials are demanding more scientists and engineers to help the United States compete with Asia, while most students go to college in the hope of obtaining a ­well-­paid job, any project to make the liberal arts the basis of undergraduate education will almost certainly fail. Insisting on a broad curriculum by means of distribution requirements for all ­pre-­professional students is probably the most that defenders of liberal education can ­do.

T his raises the question: Why have liberal education in the modern world at all? The argument for liberal education, from Isocrates and Cicero onward, has been that the leaders of society, even if they practice one or another profession, need to be ­well-­rounded, ­well-­informed generalists if they are to make sound decisions in public and private life. Even in a society transformed by science and technology, the need for a ­liberally ­educated elite ­remains.

Defending liberal education against the excesses of professionalism in elite schools, then, is a priority. But even if that campaign succeeds, a second question will remain: In a democratic republic, isn’t it necessary for all citizens to have at least the basics of a liberal education? Even if their participation in public life is limited to voting occasionally, citizens cannot adequately perform that minimal duty unless they have the training in reasoning, rhetoric, and fact that in aristocratic and patrician republics was needed only by the ­few.

Is the democratic dream of a gentleman’s classical education for every citizen impossible? Not necessarily. The ­century-­long takeover of the university campus by science, business, and the professions cannot be reversed. But the defenders of universal liberal education might consider retreating to the more defensible ground of secondary ­education.

As we have seen, the demands of liberal education and professional education were balanced for a few generations by universities that made an undergraduate degree a requirement for professional education. But this compromise was already breaking down by the late 20th century, as an increasing number of students who planned to go on to professional school chose specialized vocational or ­pre-­professional bachelor’s ­degrees.

The ­two-­degree system can also be criticized for contributing to inequality in the United States. Whatever its legitimate purposes, the requirement of an expensive ­four-­year undergraduate degree prior to three or more years of law school or medical school has had the effect of driving up the fees of professionals by restricting the competition. And paying for every American to obtain at least two degrees and to enjoy seven or more years of higher education would be prohibitively ­expensive.

What if Charles Eliot Norton was right that liberal general education should precede specialized professional ­education—­but wrong about the age range? When the modern research university and the modern professional schools were being introduced in the late 19th century, some American educators argued that the high school rather than the ­four-­year liberal arts college should be the site of liberal education. Indeed, that was the course chosen by the nation that gave us the research university. While most German secondary students today receive an education that is tilted toward the vocational, the elite high school, or gymnasium, has long served as the equivalent of the American liberal arts college. ­College-­level liberal arts education is also offered at the secondary level in many other European countries, and even in a handful of America’s more rigorous high ­schools.

At a time when many universities are forced to provide remedial instruction to high school graduates, the idea of a quality basic liberal arts education in high school may seem utopian. But consider the social benefits. Because public high schools are free, every citizen could obtain the advantages of a basic liberal arts education, without the need for wealthy parents, student loans, or ­scholarships.

In the late 19th century, before Norton’s reform, it was possible to go directly to professional schools from secondary schools. At many schools, for example, law degrees were undergraduate degrees. Suppose that this trend had continued. If it were possible to go directly from high school to law school or medical ­school, there would undoubtedly be more lawyers and doctors from working-class and middle-class backgrounds.

Making high school, rather than the ­four-­year college, the basis of liberal arts education would mark a return to the older Western tradition, in which elite education ended and adult life began much earlier. And because high school attendance is compulsory and universal, the dream of the democratization of liberal education might be achieved, at least in a rudimentary ­form, ­in high school rather than in ­college.

Reforms like these can be debated. Of one thing we can be certain: Liberal education in some form will survive, as long as societies need not only leaders but also ordinary citizens who know how to read, write, and ­reason.

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Book Review: Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First Century

Luckett jr., robert e., ed. redefining liberal arts education in the twenty-first century. jackson: university press of mississippi, 2021. xvii + 286 pp. isbn (paperback): 978-1-4968-3317-4., by colin a. anderson, hiram college.

Banner photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

John Warner has suggested that “general education is a problem of pedagogy not subject matter.” 1 If so, and if the venerable tradition of liberal education is to adapt and thrive, the challenge we face is not to come up with a slate of courses, or course options that would collectively “liberally educate” students for the 21 st century, but instead to transform learning for liberal education in whatever courses might constitute a required curriculum. The traditional distributional model of general education, inherited from the 1945 Harvard report, “General Education in a Free Society,” arguably exhausted itself after a fifty-odd-year tenure, initiating the fin-de-siecle search for a conception of liberal education that might take us into the unknowns of the 21 st century. 2   A contemporary consensus evolved out of the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ LEAP initiative (Liberal Education and America’s Promise), which foregrounded transferable skills—such as written communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving, among others—that are now widely seen as the essence of liberal education. 3   The task that the AAC&U’s initiatives leaves for us is the adaptation of traditional “liberal arts” disciplinary courses to this new orienting purpose which will carry the justification of continuing commitment to liberal education in our era of hyper-specialization and disciplinary instrumentalization.

Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First Century takes up this task in a collection of seventeen essays grouped under six topical headings 1) Digital Humanities, Technology; 2) The Arts; 3) Pedagogy; 4) Writing; 5) Social Issues; 6) The African American Experience. In addition, the volume includes a preface, introduction, and conclusion. The essays were, it appears, delivered at an eponymous 2016 conference at Jackson State University, and the faculty and departments of the home institution are broadly represented in twelve of the nineteen chapters.

Before surveying the contents of these essays, it is worth indicating that they share, essentially, the consensus defense of liberal education summarized above, and that argument is made in most or all of these essays, which leads to a significant degree of repetition if the volume is read start to finish. Authors from different disciplines, of course, emphasize different skills and outcomes, but in almost all the essays, we find the same core argument that the liberal arts are especially equipped to cultivate skills that technical, vocational, and specialized curricula overlook, and which are essential for the development of good democratic citizens.

To give a sense of the wide-range of disciplinary perspectives and pedagogical innovations across the seventeen essays, I will briefly survey the core aim of each essay while highlighting the contents of several that stood out for a variety of reasons. The six topical headings that organize the volume are discussed below in pairs.

Technology and the Arts: The first two sections of this volume explore some ways in which technology and pedagogy can reorient traditional disciplinary courses, especially in the arts, and engage students in new ways. In her essay, “Digital Arts as a LEAP High-Impact Practice,” Seretha Williams shows how digital humanities methodologies can help students achieve LEAP or higher learning goals in writing courses, providing multiple examples of projects from courses and student work. Monica Flippin Wynn (“Technology in the Liberal Arts Classroom”) explains how to develop a “digital toolkit” for teaching, exploring some of the pedagogical intricacies through examples from her own toolkit. Yumi Park Huntington’s contribution, “Teaching Art History to STEM,” explores strategies to reconfigure art history pedagogy to engage STEM students in cultivating the visual and analytic skills central to art history and also to their chosen majors. The discussion includes brief reference to some of the digital platforms that might be useful in this regard. Sarah Archino significantly develops Park Huntington’s argument in her own contribution on visual literacy, “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultivating Visual Literacy.” Using the example of the documented benefits of visual literacy workshops for medical students, Archino’s essay develops a precise argument for the benefits of developing courses in visual literacy for general education students in addition to more traditional art history curriculum. The ability to translate the curriculum into documentable transferable skills provides a powerful argument for the importance of visual literacy via art history for general education. Floyd Martin returns to Erwin Panofsky’s essay on art history as a humanistic discipline to articulate the benefits of such study, alongside some confirmation of these concerns culled from recent articles in The New York Times . 4   Finally, Lauren Ashlee Messina describes and explores “Dancing the Humanities” as a pedagogy for tackling contemporary social issues.

Pedagogy and Writing: The next two sections explore a variety of topics connected to revitalizing the pedagogy to meet students “where they are” and enable transformative learning. Helen Chukwuma (“Test-Oriented Pedagogy in the Teaching of Communication Skills”) opens the section on pedagogy with a defense of a “test-centric” pedagogy for teaching communication skills, in which she seems to understand “test” in a much wider-range of assessments and evaluations than is customary. Kathy Root Pitts’s essay, “Flexible Thought for the Test-Focused Student,” plumps for a greater role for creativity in liberal arts courses in order to free students from the culture of standardized testing through creative engagement with the meaning of art objects. Lawrence Sledge argues that liberal arts courses need to be transformed through student-sensitive pedagogies (understood as culturally relevant/responsive teaching) if they are to maintain their importance (“Developing a More Student-Sensitive Approach in the Liberal Arts”). Beginning the group of essays on writing and liberal arts, Tatiana Glusko and Kathi Griffin’s essay “Conversation in the Writing Center” proposes a reconceptualization of the role of the writing center as a place for dialogue and community rather than a helpdesk or a place for copy-correction. In one of the richest contributions to the volume, Eric Griffin (“Translingualism, Transhistoricism, and Shakespeare in a Freshman Seminar”) describes how he transformed his Shakespeare course with a translingual pedagogy. This essay exemplifies the way in which pedagogy drives curricular evolution and the process of redefining the liberal arts through copious examples of innovative assignments that engage students “where they are” rather than bemoans the decline of an imagined liberal arts consensus. Rounding out this section, a group of four authors (Preselfannie W. McDaniels, Byron D’Andra Orey, Rico D. Chapman and Wynn) present their experience of developing a “writing boot camp” program for liberal arts faculty to facilitate and enrich their academic and scholarly work through community and mutual support.

Social Issues and the African American Experience: The last two sections of the volume broaden its scope by exploring the intersection between liberal arts education and a variety of social issues. Rashell Smith-Spears (“You Can’t Say That: Warnings, Political Correctness, and Academic Freedom”) examines how education is being transformed around issues of academic freedom including trigger warnings and “political correctness.” In “Not All Apples Are Red,” Katrina Byrd explores the ways in which power, conformity, and society structure curriculum and classroom in a provocative call for transformative, active, and collaborative pedagogies. Thomas Kersen brings a sociologist’s eye to identify the ways in which liberal arts education and educators can function as a “molder of consensus” for society (Mississippi in particular) and restore a sense of common good and purpose in the public arena. The volume’s editor, Robert Luckett, Jr., contributes a fascinating historical essay, “Historical Memory and the Meredith Monument at Ole Miss,” concerning the creation of the Civil Rights Memorial at Mississippi University which played out as a recapitulation of the white supremacist tactic of “practical segregation”—erasing the experiences of those who fought and replacing them with a positive and optimistic message focused on the outcome. In Luckett’s telling this decades-long struggle over the design, siting, and fund-raising for this memorial can reveal the importance of a liberal education in anti-racist struggles. The final chapter before the conclusion, “(Re)Engineering a New Liberal Arts Experience: Future Studies and HBCUs,” is written by a trio of authors, Joseph Martin Stevenson, Dawn Bishop McLin, and Karen Wilson-Stevenson. They argue that HCBUs should develop “future studies” and “futuring methods” as a way of positioning themselves in a forward-looking evolution of the liberal arts tradition. Although there are important ideas captured in this final essay, the prevalence of an airy “consultant-speak” may frustrate the academic reader.

At its best, this book explores some of the many ways in which liberal arts education is dynamically developing and adapting to changing students, technologies, and social-political environments. It provides testimony of the efforts of faculty across many different disciplines to revitalize liberal education through inventive and ambitious pedagogical changes. The repetition of the core argument in defense of liberal education can veer towards a sermon preached for the choir, although the fact that the essays include either practical suggestions for the classroom or curriculum or reviews of relevant literature from other experts on the chosen topic will repay the choir’s attention.

• John Warner, “Gen Ed Is a Problem of Pedagogy, Not Subject Matter,” accessed 13 December 2023, https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/gen-ed-problem-pedagogy-not-subject-matter .
• “General Education in a Free Society” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945).
• Carol Geary Schneider, Making Liberal Education Inclusive: The Roots and Reach of the LEAP Framework for College Learning (Washington: AAC&U, 2021).
• Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” in  The Meaning of the Humanities , ed. Theodore Meyer Greene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 89–118.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“General Education in a Free Society.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945.

Panofsky, Erwin. “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline.” In  The Meaning of the Humanities , edited by Theodore Meyer Greene, 89–118. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940.

Schneider, Carol Geary. Making Liberal Education Inclusive: The Roots and Reach of the LEAP Framework for College Learning . Washington, AAC&U, 2021.

Warner, John. “Gen Ed Is a Problem of Pedagogy, Not Subject Matter,” Inside Higher Ed, Accessed 13 December 2023. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/gen-ed-problem-pedagogy-not-subject-matter .

The Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education

By Jennifer Hollis Admissions Counselor Rutgers University–New Brunswick

Never has it been more difficult to predict what life will be like in 20 years, or what careers will be in demand in the future. Careers we haven’t even thought of yet will emerge, and old careers will be transformed.

You do not need a very specific education for a particular job that may or may not exist or be in demand in 10 or 20 years. You need instead an education that empowers you for success and allows you to design your own future in our rapidly changing society and economy.

Liberal arts education is typically broad-based and exposes students to science, mathematics, social sciences, and humanities. This broad knowledge of the wider world will prepare you to deal with complexity, diversity, and change. A liberal arts education will also help you develop a strong sense of social responsibility as well as strong and transferable intellectual and practical skills, such as communication, analytical, and problem-solving abilities, and a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings.

The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) did an online survey of employers  and found that 93 percent of them agree that candidates’ demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major. Four out of five employers also agreed that all students should acquire broad knowledge in the liberal arts and sciences. There are a lot of jobs that don’t require a specific college degree and allow for a broad range of degrees or simply require any college degree.

If you major in the humanities, you are not doomed to be unemployed for the rest of your life. The same report by the AAC&U shows that liberal arts majors are on average making more money by their mid-50s than those who studied in professional and pre-professional fields, and they are employed at similar rates. Employers consistently say they want to hire people who have a broad knowledge base and can work together to solve problems, debate, communicate, and think critically, all skills that liberal arts programs aggressively teach.

Data also shows that people change jobs and careers more often than they have in the past. With a liberal arts background you will be able to be flexible, adaptable, and well-equipped to handle career changes and shifts in the job market. Even in the current tech-dominated economy, employers prize liberal arts graduates because of their ability to provide creative solutions.

In 2010, Steve Jobs famously mused that for technology to be truly brilliant, it must be coupled with artistry. "It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough," he said. "It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing." Did you know that  some of America’s most successful CEOs were humanities majors?

No Major? No Problem!

How to write — and not write — a college essay.

163 Liberalism Topic Ideas & Examples

Need to write a liberalism essay? Looking for good topics and liberalism essay examples? You’re in luck—keep reading this article!

🏆 Best Liberalism Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

🎓 simple & easy liberalism essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on liberalism, 💡 interesting topics to write about liberalism, ❓ questions about liberalism.

In a liberalism essay, you can write about the importance of liberalism, characteristics of classical liberalism, and other topics. Check out the following list of 46 ideas and get inspired!

• Comparison Between Theories: Realism vs. Liberalism Research Paper While realism is taken to portray pessimism in the relations between states in the international system, liberalism depicts optimism and positivism in as far as the relations and goals of states in the international system […]
• Socialism and Liberalism Comparison From aristocracy to socialism, equality and equitable distribution of wealth has been the reason for conflict between the masses and their leaders.
• John Rawls’ Philosophy of Liberalism: Strengths and Weaknesses It is possible to note that Rawls’ philosophy can be applicable in the contemporary world as it addresses major issues associated with unequal distribution of resources.
• Liberalism versus Marxism Marxism isolates the predispositions and laws of capitalism so as to understand the direction of capitalism; and in this case the direction of capitalism is in four phases which include the beginning, maturity, decline and […]
• Liberal Arts Education and Value Breadth Areas I learned that the knowledge of this area of liberal arts is related to behavioral and social sciences and enhances individuals’ understanding, enabling them to be productive within relationships and contribute positively and other people […]
• Liberalism in International Relations In international relations theory, liberalism is a social school of thought that emerged in the 1970s. According to political theory, the state is not subject to the internal or external authority of the military or other internal authorities (Sørensen et al., 2021). Furthermore, understanding the elements of liberalism has become even more crucial due to […]
• Locke vs. Burke: From Political Authority and Glorious Revolution to the Interpretation of Liberalism and Conservatism Therefore, it seems that the Glorious Revolution was more of a revelation for the people of their power to choose and to change.
• Schools of Political Economy: Marxism, Liberalism and Mercantilism It seeks to understand the driving forces of the economy and the key actors in the world economy. Governments and economic actors are the key elements in the economy, according to liberalism.
• Human Freedom: Liberalism vs Anarchism It is impoverished because liberals have failed to show the connection between their policies and the values of the community. More fundamentally, however, a policy formulated in such a way that it is disconnected from […]
• The Aspects of Abstract Liberalism This paper discusses abstract liberalism, as it is considered the most important among other frames and the hardest to explain. Bonilla-Silva states that the abstract liberalism frame entails combining notions associated with political liberalism and […]
• The Value of Liberal Arts Education in College or University This paper will argue that liberal arts education should be encouraged since it adds value to society by offering the ideal college experience that promotes intellectual growth, personal development, and the acquisition of a wide […]
• What Is ‘Liberal Representative Democracy’ and Does the Model Provide an Appropriate Combination of Freedom and Equality? Freedom and equality are guaranteed under this form of democracy because they are enshrined in the constitution which is always the supreme law of a given country.
• French Revolution: Liberal and Radical Portions Of course, a hope that the presence of revolution promoted certain changes and made the government to think about the improvement of citizens’ lives and wellbeing was inherent to the French.
• Liberalism: History, Ideologies, Justification As of today, liberalism-related discourses incorporate a vast variety of liberalism’s definitions, which in its turn; can be explained by the fact that the very concept of liberalism never ceased being the subject of an […]
• Liberal Education and Moral Values of World Citizens While the issue is approached differently, one common theme is a deterioration of moral and ethical principles and lack of objective foundation resulting from the openness as the main direction taken by the primary education.
• Neo-Liberalism vs. Classic Liberalism One of the reasons for this is that, unlike what it happened to be the case with Classic Liberalism; Neo-Liberalism refuses to refer to the notion of freedom as an abstract category, which represents the […]
• The Concept and History of Liberal Nationalism It can be argued that it is only in the “Age of Renaissance where one can find the emergence of this particular idea, the idea that a group of people came together to form an […]
• Contemporary Religious Education and Liberal Arts The provision of contemporary religious education becomes a necessity and guide and ensures that more people are in a position to transform their lives.
• Liberal, Formal, and Natural Education Comparing formal education with the process of learning in the context of surviving in the environment, the author claims there are no uneducated people in the world.
• Liberal vs. Conservative: Comparative Analysis Some of the ideas associated with liberals include the belief in the power of education to improve society, support for a strong central government, civil rights and equality, and belief in the importance of helping […]
• The Liberal and Conservative Perspectives on Free Healthcare It is worth mentioning that the US healthcare system is a complex system and a leader in terms of the resources concentrated in it.
• Aspects of Classical Liberalism The renowned theme of Separation of Church and state is one of the multiple interconnected ideas that could be summarized as the separation of the economy from the state, differentiation of the land from the […]
• Woke Liberals Abuse History to Control Present This article relates to the topic and readings of federalism because it talks about how a group of people with different ideas on politics can come together and agree on something suitable for everyone.
• Liberalism, Socialism, and Anarchism For instance, the existence of anarchic views that deny the superiority of the law and the power of the government is acceptable from the liberal point of view when the person does not infringe the […]
• Liberalism and Conservatism in the US Moreover, the examples of potential citizens’ beliefs in relation to liberalism and conservatism further skillfully illustrated the existence of the “gray area,” often ignored by the media.
• The Meaning of Liberal Democracy in the US The establishment of diplomatic relations with the USSR during Roosevelt’s presidency was an important event in the history of the two states and the entire history of the world.
• Conservative and Liberal Arguments on Abortion Governments and health organizations’ move to control access to abortion led to the emergence of groups and movements supporting and opposing abortion.
• Why Liberals and Conservatives Flipped on Judicial Restraint The legal power of the USA arms of government, the Executive and the legislative actions to be subjected to review and the power to examine their conventionality with the constitution.
• Conservatism and Liberalism: Discussion of the Decline of Nuclear Families The role of the institution of family in present-day society is one of the major subjects which evokes the concerns of scholars.
• Democracy, Republicanism, and Liberalism in 19th Century Mexico and Colombia They emphasized the role of Mexico and its republican, democratic, and liberal principles in those changes. They started to imitate the political principles in Europe and the U.
• “Neo-Liberalism as a Creative Destruction” by Harvey Starting from the explanation of neo-liberalism, Harvey draws the reader’s attention to the “naturalization” of the neo-liberal approach and the reasons behind the global neo-liberal turn.
• Realism vs. Liberalism: Differences in Examples The proponents of this theory argue that the war between all is a natural human behavior, which is reflected in the interaction of states on the global scale.
• Political Philosophy: Liberalism and Libertarianism Following the release of A Theory of Justice by John Rawls in 1971, which marked a milestone in the development of the enlightenment project, Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, published in 1974, represented the application […]
• The Fundamentals of Liberalism Thus, when talking about liberalism, it is important to take into account that international cooperation implies independent contributions of the states in order to maintain peace and supply equality.
• Triumph of Capitalism and Liberalism in Kagan’s “The Jungle Grows Back” In this situation, Kagan argues that it is not rational for the US “to mind its own business and let the rest of the world manage its problems”. It is to demonstrate the need to […]
• “The False Promise of Liberal Hegemony” and “Can China Rise Peacefully?” by Mearsheimer The arguments in the first lecture relate to the explanation of the liberal hegemony and how it leads to failure, concluding that it contradicts the country’s values.
• Classical and Modern Liberalism Classical liberalism focused on the issues of political and economic freedoms, the natural rights of the individual, and the social contract. The novelty of the ideas of classical liberalism is based on the European and […]
• Francis Fukuyama: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class? Then, the author shifts to explaining the importance of the existence of a strong and abundantly represented in the society middle class layer as it is a foundation for all the democratic values in the […]
• Achieving Communicative Liberal Learning Outcomes The fact that the major components of the traditional path I took to achieve the critical thinking outcomes were obscure in nature brings in the similarity between this traditional path and the nontraditional path that […]
• US Healthcare Debate: Social and Liberal Analysis A social democratic analysis of the healthcare system would therefore seek to create a welfare state that seeks to cater to the needs of everyone by providing a system that empowers the citizens economically through […]
• Terrorism and Liberal Democracy: What We Should Know When confronted with external coercion like global terrorism, democracies react like a pendulum by first of all providing security and then vacillating back in the direction of moderation, the quest of lenience, and the encouragement […]
• Why Wars Happen: Liberal, Realist, Identity Perspectives The Kuwaiti attack by Iraq saw the torching of oil fields, the death of several Iraq and Kuwaiti soldiers as well as the citizens of the two countries.
• Culture War in Australia: Conflict Between the Conservatives and Liberals This paper will attempt to investigate the origin of culture wars and Australia’s involvement since early 1990, its relation with the struggle between Keating and Howard, the Media’s role in promoting a focus on culture, […]
• Study of Liberal Democracy In the true sense of liberal democracy, the government is chosen by the voters, and in this sense, the government should answer to the people.
• Neοliberal Regime in Facilitating Ecοnοmic Activity In place of government allocation of shares across constituents, the market ensures that the distribution of rewards across economic actors is tied to their respective contributions to output.
• Liberal Definition of Freedom Its origins lie in the rejection of the authoritarian structures of the feudalistic order in Europe and the coercive tendencies and effects of that order through the imposition of moral absolutes.
• Humanities. Liberal Party of Canada The Liberal Party of Canada declares the adherence to liberal principles of individual freedom, responsibility, and the dignity of the person within the limits of a fair society and political freedom within the limits of […]
• My Journey Through Liberal Arts Art is one of the main forms of liberal arts which influences the perception of the world and understanding of its beauty, allows a person to adapt to the new environment, and develops critical thinking […]
• Canada as a Liberal Capitalist Democracy It includes also the re-organization of the enterprises in order to make a profit, for instance, changing management of the enterprise or adding new departments in the organization.
• Liberal Feminism Movement Analysis The outcome of eradicating the concept of a patriarchy can only result in the liberation of women, gays, minorities and men as well.
• Feminism: Liberal, Black, Radical, and Lesbian 2 In the 1960s and the 1970s, liberal feminism focused on working women’s issues and the impact of experiences that females of any race could have.
• Economics: Socialism vs. Liberal Capitalism Karl Marx, a great proponent of socialism, refers to the ethical, economic, and political contribution of socialism to the welfare of the society in asserting his position on the debate of the best economic model.
• Western Liberal and Democratic Values The principal idea of Fukuyama’s end of history resides in the assumption that the spread of western liberal and democratic values signifies the end of the sociocultural evolution.
• Liberals and Conservatives’ Differences in Politics Lakoff puts the state as a family and the government as a parent to illustrate opposing political views of conservatives/Right and liberals/Left even when the two use same the metaphor to discuss the same topic […]
• Visual Symbol of Classical and Modern Liberalism The bag as a collector and protector of money represents the outcome of the application of the principles of Classical Liberalism.
• “The Retreat of Liberalism” by Robin Niblett He pointed out that the United States and the United Kingdom were at the forefront in the global expansion of the so-called international liberal order.
• David Ricardo’s Liberal Economic Theories However, it is still worth noting that, at a comparatively young age, he experienced a change in environment as his family moved to Amsterdam, which was swarming with financial and economic opportunities, Credited as the […]
• Liberalism and Its Critics Karl Marx was one of the philosophers who opposed liberalism arguing that the system is based on a defective policy that allows the rich and the powerful in society to own the means of production […]
• Liberal and Illiberal Democracies Comparison In addition, Zakaria is of the opinion that for a government to be described as liberal, it must reinforce the rule of law from the top to the lower levels of governance. Every citizen in […]
• Cornel West’ Views on Liberalism West is of the view that blacks in the United States are different from those in other parts of the world because of the exceptional levels of unregulated and uncontrolled violence that is always directed […]
• Gender Studies of Feminism: Radical and Liberal Branches This type of feminism is the most suitable for me because it states that women have the right to provide for their families and be successful suppliers independently from men.
• Liberalism and Realism: Ensuring the Nation’s Growth Liberalism set up a code of conduct in the political structure of a nation through identifying the norms of a state or country.
• Trade Liberalization: Public Concerns and Comparative Advantage The essay discusses the reasons for the disquiet among the public. Under a free market, firms have the opportunity to practice a comparative advantage than in a market of regulations and trade laws.
• Liberal Ideal in History He was a great contributor of liberal ideas which have been firmly grounded in the governing principles of Finland and Sweden as well as across the world from as far as the 18th century to […]
• Mid-Nineteenth Century Liberalism The articles are “The Exhibition The Crystal Palace” and “The First Half of the Nineteenth Century: Progress of The Nation and Race”.
• Economic and Political Liberalism and Democracy The essay also examines the importance of the concept of economic and political liberalism and the relationship between liberalism and democracy.
• “The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War” by Alan Brinkley The objective of the book is to give a fresh look to the Great Depression and the post war liberal new deals.
• Contemporary Stage of Globalization and Neo-liberalism in Europe When evaluating the globalization level in the European regions, it is vital to begin by classifying the substantial elements that describe the changes that globalization induces and their likely influence on the economy.
• Pluralism and Neo-Liberalism on a Contemporary Workplace This is regurgitated in the context of collective representation of the employees. Articulation of diverse views is more welcomed and makes the society a healthy place to live in.
• Liberal Democracy, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust The Nazis and other populist political movements in Germany believed that the Jews had undue influence in the country through their prominent positions in the media and the financial system4.
• How is Narco-Governance Related to Political Liberalism? The impunity displayed by these drug lords goes beyond just controlling the government spending; the government is always at their beck and call and any disgruntled voices are either intimidated into silence or killed, in […]
• Financing, Liberal Arts, and Equity as the Educational Issues Thus, the proper examination of this issue requires paying much attention to such aspects as the difference between equity and adequacy in financing schools, the value of a liberal arts education, and the peculiarities of […]
• Conservatism and Liberalism Approaches in Analysis Public Policies Liberalism is inclined on the ideas of existence of a compact between government and its people to which people are accorded the rights of revolution in case the compact is breached. Ideally, this means that […]
• Liberal Person: Characteristics and Values One of the types of people is the liberal person. The liberal person is of the opinion that respect should be accorded to the different beliefs that people have.
• The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live The authors’ claims to develop the work of Foucault and in addition extend his conception of bio-politics to the liberal way of war.
• What Is More Valuable in a Liberal Democracy: Positive or Negative Liberty? In the understanding of the concept of liberty, it is equally important to underscore the fact that it promotes freedom within a society.
• Concept of Liberalism Ideology in Modern Society For instance, the advertisements made on television, print media, and the social media do not represent the views of the consumer, but instead they aspire to convene the interests of the capitalists, including the most […]
• Liberal Theories and Society The structure of payoff, the future of the shadows, and the players’ numbers are the factors that affect existence of cooperation in states that are afflicted by anarchy.
• John Rawl’s Philosophy of Liberalism The contribution that members of a given society have in forming rules that decide how social and economic resources are distributed improves living standards for all.
• Political Liberalism Pros and Cons According to Rawls, some of the good things are exceptions as the society remains neutral and retains the values of justice.
• Thomas Paine: Liberal and Conservative Ideas Paine mentions the royal family and notes that the very existence of the king in the society is a sign of its being wrongful.
• The Liberal Position of Democrats and Republicans In this regard, the right to own property and the principles of capitalism are given great emphasis whenever leaders stand to speak to the public.
• Classical Liberalism: A Faction within Ideology Nonetheless, liberals of the twentieth century claimed that this was not a restriction, but a guidance to ensure equal opportunities for all.
• Minimal State Liberals & Active State Liberals: A Critical Discussion In similarities, it is clear both welfare and neo-classical liberals believe in the value and promotion of individual liberty and a desire for a more open and tolerant society, not mentioning that they are guided […]
• Similarities and Differences Between Minimal-State and Active-State Liberals The purpose of the discussion is to identify the differences and similarities between the two forms of liberalism based on a modern concept.
• Minimal State Liberalism vs. Active State Liberalism Minimal state liberals argue strongly that government intervention is a bad thing for the freedom of Americans and active state liberals argue strongly that government intervention is necessary to preserve the freedom of Americans.
• Realist and Liberal Theories of International Relations Realism is a theory of international relations that arose slowly out of the work of various theorists who took a distinctive attitude and view in the analysis of international affairs.
• Liberal and Socialist Feminist Theories The development and growth of feminist movements and gender roles were accompanied with the emergence of various theoretical models that explained the roles of women and their positions in the society.
• Realizing Development Objectives: Neoliberalism Requirements In order to ensure that the economy realizes relevant development, governments need to ensure that the interest rates in the country are determined by the market.
• Principles of Liberalism and Its Connection to Enlightenment and Conservatism A person has the freedom to be in business according to the classical liberalism. There were inspectors to check the working conditions of the workers.
• To What Extent Are Liberal Theories of Humanitarian Intervention Complicit With Imperialism? In this, traditional theories such as Liberal Internationalism, which forms the basis of discussion in this essay, have also undergone a revival; particularly since the end of the Cold War, when with the failure of […]
• Liberal Optimism for Post Cold-War Period Essentially, the liberals believed that the damage caused to the allies in the Cold War would clarify the stance of the liberals.
• Liberal Vision of the Society The traditional view of a woman as a house wife and minority in the society has been overtaken by the liberal acceptance of a modern and successful career lady.
• The Conscience of a Liberal Thereafter, he develops the theory of movement conservatism that he argues led to the collapse of the New Deal policies. One of the factors that led to the rise of the party was the naturalization […]
• Realism vs. Liberalism In the international system, the United Nations plays an important role in influencing the foreign behavior of states. In contrary, realists observe that the only actor in the international system is the state.
• The Impact of Premature Financial Liberalisation on Macroeconomic and Financial Stability Effects on rate of savings and investment One of the roles of liberalisation is to remove rigidity in the control of rates of exchange and rates of interest, compulsory allocation of credits from banks, and […]
• Mercy Otis Warren: Liberal Woman and Explorer Warren’s place, as a woman, gave her plenty of time to consider the activities of the revolution and offered a keyhole, which allowed her to record the events of the war.
• Assessing the Role and Impact of Social and Political Structures in the Working of Modern Liberal Markets The main purpose of this research is to prove the difference in the level of embeddedness between economic structure and the social and political structures.
• Definition of the Liberalism Ideology The generation of wealth is the collective duty of every member of the society, and rules of justice only seek to enhance the ownership and distribution of these resources.
• The Era of Liberal Consensus When republican Dwight Eisenhower succeeded the presidency, he continued the New Deal policies, enlarging the scope of the Social Security and promoted the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 which authorized the construction of the Interstate […]
• World Politics: Realist, Liberals, and Feminists Theories The development of the League of Nations to protect the interest of the allies, the partnership of France, Britain and USA to form the allies and the struggle for Germany to control Eastern Europe clearly […]
• Conservative and Liberal Languages For example, in his debate for gay marriage Sullivan indicates that conservatives consider gay marriage to be “a slippery slope towards polygamy and other things such as pedophilia, or even bestiality” and as such it […]
• Concept and History of the Liberal Feminism Hence, the individual feminism theory stands as a core vehicle that could be exploited to create a favorable condition in which women are treated equally as is men.
• Thinking Government: Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Post World War II Canada This leads to the second implication which was summarized by political scientists in the following statement: “nothing can be guaranteed in life and that all individuals are also free to fail, to stumble to the […]
• Political Liberalism Ideology and the U.S. Politics Rather, it is the establishment of a particular form of political stratification and liberal procedures. Instead, they should be founded on an ethos of belief which according to Schmitt is the foundational basis of all […]
• Neo-liberalism in Latin America: Brazilian and Cuban Models It entailed the reduction of economic roles of the Brazilian state, characterized by the transfer of several trade functions traditionally under the control of the state to the markets.
• Development Of Classical Liberalism, Its Critique By Modern Liberalism The origins of Modern Liberalism range from the anti-industrialism of the Luddites, to the Utopian visions of the early Socialists, to the readiness for violent revolutionary action of committed Communists.
• Modern Liberalism and Modern Conservatism Modern conservatism has it that God’s law is the ruler of both people and the countries and should ever be in their hearts.
• What Are the Main Ideas of Liberalism?
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• How Has Liberalism Changed Over the Twentieth Century?
• How Concerns About Gender, Sexuality, and Manhood Re-Formed American Liberalism?
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• Has Modern Liberalism Abandoned Individualism and Embraced Collectivism?
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• Why Did Liberalism Lose Its Luster?
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• Which Provides the Best Conception of Freedom, Liberalism or Socialism?
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• How Does Economic Structuralism Differ From Liberalism?
• What Does the Term Liberalism Mean?
• What Success Has Liberalism Sought to Emancipate Individuals?
• Which Human Qualities Can Economic Liberalism Be Based On?
• Are the Principles and Practices of Pure Economic Liberalism Able to Secure an Equal International Economic Development?
• Does Liberalism Offer the Most Freedom?
• How and With What Success Has Liberalism Sought to Emancipate Individuals?
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Argumentative Essay On Liberal Arts Colleges

Recently, the job market has been very competitive especially for students straight out of college, however students with a liberal arts background have a greater advantage as they are more appealing to employers. There are hundreds of liberal arts colleges in the United States, however they are often overlooked due to false perceptions regarding price. Liberal arts schools prepare students for the real world by providing a well-rounded education , smaller class sizes that allow for more individualized learning, and a unique college experience. Liberal arts schools aim to provide students with a wide variety of knowledge instead of requiring them to specialize as freshman. General education classes help set students up for a successful career path. By not specializing in a specific field taking general education classes it allows students to see the different potential career fields. For example, Heidelberg University is a liberal arts school and allows …show more content…

Connections can open doors for anyone. Students are often taught to build their professional network early, however students on smaller campuses can do this easier than others. Unlike others studying at big schools, students at a liberal arts college know the majority of people on their campus. It is very common for students at a small institution to recognize someone from a class, sports team, greek group, or dorm walking around campus. Having a small campus allows students to quickly grow their professional network starting from the day they set foot on campus. While building connections with those on campus is important alumni are significant as well. For example, a small community such as Heidelberg University is able to connect their current students with alumni all over in order to create endless opportunities. This unique college experience can only be found at liberal arts

Sanford Ungar The New Liberal Arts Summary

Education in America is important; due to rising costs, he claims many think liberal-arts degrees are too expensive for the average family to afford. Ungar suggests that a liberal-arts degree prepares people for adapting in their respective career field. Career specific majors are not offering students the broad range of qualities one needs for job opportunities. While he acknowledges the stronger start of students with prior experience in college, it is those students with little experience that end up with the most original ideas, making them valuable to an employer.

Hacker And Dreifas

Liberal arts colleges have established small environments, they have put effort making sure their environments are small by admitting the few students to their campus. This quality has enabled them to keep a close relation between the professors and students, According to Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, they claim that liberal arts college professors are attentive to the every students in their classroom. In this environment students are able to study in a class where a professor knows your name and has interest in your success and future .The university of the Ozarks has also been doing a good job in maintaining a small environments because for the past few years it has recruiting

Kenyon Commitment Speech Summary

A liberal arts degree is much more than a piece of paper representing a waste of time and money, as some may believe. Instead, a liberal arts degree is a piece of paper representing true utilization of what further education should really be. Often times, people get caught up in the question of where they're going, but while it's important to strive for success, they forget to strive for quality. This applies to college students in the sense that, when choosing a major, practicality is often prioritized over passion.

Argumentative Essay On Community College

When people talk about college, they are often talking about typical four year colleges and universities, but there’s another option. One that’s less talked about. Maybe because it’s viewed as less prestigious or maybe because it’s just not that common of a choice. Except that it is. Students from across the nation choose to attend Community Colleges for a myriad of different reasons. So why is Community College often viewed in a negative light when so many students are attending them? Why are so many students looked down upon for choosing Community College if it helps them achieve their goals in life? Your choice of college doesn’t diminish your achievements unless you let

Ap World History

Attending college will not only allow me to better my interpersonal skills, it also will allow me to network with a diverse student body. Clubs and teams, among other ways to get involved, create many connections between students. From internships to employment opportunities, the connections made at universities have the potential to be life-changing.

Essay about College as the Pathway to the American Dream

• 8 Works Cited

“Misconception No.1: A liberal arts education is a luxury that most families can no longer afford. ‘Career-education’ is what we must now focus on.” (Ungar, 2010, pp.191) As Ungar has claimed, there is a recent misconception that a liberal arts education is no longer a necessity but luxury because it doesn’t provide an instant career launching education. With so many people having to a need to spend as little money as possible, they are determined to only spend money on preparation for their future career. For this reason they go to college only to take courses that are necessary for their future. “She is in college to take vocational training. She wants to write computer code. Start a business. Get a job in television. She uses college to take vocational courses that pertain to her career interest.” (Murray, 2008, pp.228) Murray explained the story of a girl who is in college solely for preparation for her career. Because of this, she isn’t interested in a liberal arts education. If the course doesn’t directly pertain to her desired career, she prefers not to take it.

The Case Of Working With Your Hands Analysis

The freedom to choose a students own career path and not have such restraints against where students go and what students have to do. Of course there are the usual school related rules, but not for courses. Studies start to ask what do liberal arts schools have little to do with ‘’harsh realities’’. Roth says ‘’Post secondary education should help students to discover what they love to do,to get better at it, and to develop the ability to continue learning so that they become agents of change- not victims of it’’ (‘’What’s a Liberal Arts Education Good For’’)this says that a liberal college doesn't help anything , that it makes it worse. Roths whole article states that liberal arts college is a colege of freedom. Its does not prepare their students for the real

Liberal Arts Education Research Paper

A liberal arts education to me means that a person is widely educated and with this wide education it improves their abiliy to solve problems and think critically. A liberal arts education also makes a person more well-rounded by leading them outside of their comfort zone. I think this is incredibly important when it comes to life after college, since in the workforce you will find yourselves having to problem solve, think critically, and interact with different people, and a liberal arts

Essay on The Benefits of a Liberal Arts Degree

Liberal Arts are academic subjects such as literature, philosophy, mathematics, and social and physical sciences as distinct from professional and technical subjects. This approach to education provides students with specialized ability in a chosen major as well as builds a foundation of skills and knowledge that can be applied among many career paths and academic pursuits. Employers value the ability to solve problems, adapt to change, work across disciplines, and collaborate with others, which are distinctive tenants acquired when you pursue a major in liberal arts. Clearly, all successful careers require critical thinking, teamwork, sensitivity to cultural, demographic, economic and societal differences and political perspectives. A

Liberal Arts University Essay

By attending a liberal arts university, I will stand out more when I apply for a job, because I will have many different skills. A liberal arts university will enrich for my part empower me and prepare me to deal with complexity, diversity, and change. Also, classes are smaller so I’m able to interact with the teacher without struggling. Communication skills are greatly valued in the workplace, and they can also increase your quality of life.

Why Do Students Receive A Liberal Arts Education?

The debate over whether or not a student should receive a liberal arts education has been prevalent in society since its first appearance. As previously shown, some people see it as a waste of time, while others see it as having value in the balance that it gives students. Still, others hold a liberal arts degree in high esteem. Each group has different reasons for their argument, but the essence of each inquiry is the same; are the skills that a liberal arts education teaches profitable enough to receive one? A much needed factor not included in the discussion, however, is how it affects one’s life later on. This should be one of the most influential aspects of deciding whether or not a liberal arts education is worthwhile gaining because where one wants to go establishes what one should do to get there. Therefore, the effects of a liberal arts education should be further examined to accurately determine its worth.

Process Analysis Audience

The college must discover what similarities it has with the audience and their family and friends. For example, if my college uses social media to connect to them and who they know, they will be able to raise awareness of the college and what it has to offer. Through these communities, the college can change its perception and get those to attend the college by offering information, stories, and statistics. Hinton and Hjorth (2013).

In New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton announced that she will make the college more affordable. It happened in March 3, 2015. Hillary Clinton is candidates from democratic party and Former Secretary of State. The article forced about her speech that make the high education less cost and free two years at community college .American people can attend the college. It was hot topic for Democratic party.

Argumentative Essay On College Education

The path to success has been remodeled over the years by different generations due to the developing mind. College does educate and challenges people to do more and think more. We can clearly see this example because the developers of this debate are both college graduates. Later on in life more and more questions will be asked and answered. College has an importance that is so popular but that importance has a value. The developing world and society will always view college as something necessary no matter what because is has proved to be a path and a escape to a better life. People that have specific circumstances and cannot pursue college have often been denied of a huge opportunity that can be life changing to almost everyone. No one can judge intelligence based on economical stability or tests, but what the educational system seems to be judging intelligence on is the bank account of the projected student. There is a saying that says "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." But as technology is constantly advancing and computers are running almost anything, is a college education really necessary? There are people whom have never set foot in a college and are doing better than people who have their master's degree. There are views from both sides that contain a valid argument.

The Benefit of Liberal Arts Education Essay example

Although, it is common for an undergraduate student to change their career path, adults often alter their job direction as well. The reasons for an individual to begin a new job are endless. In an article by Betty Southwick it is estimated that in the year 2009 twenty percent of workers will start a new job. Especially in our current economic downfall with an estimated 2.4 million Americans unemployed, according to the Associate Press, it is extremely important for one to be proficient in multiple skills and have a broad knowledge base. The background information learned in a liberal arts education gives one the knowledge to succeed if they are forced to find work outside the field in which they have a degree. A liberal arts education creates a well-rounded individual. If liberal arts education were replaced with specialized education, in universities, students would be at a disadvantage. Focusing solely on one area handicaps an individual and limits their knowledge base. Therefore, making opportunities harder to come by during rough economic times like our society is currently experiencing.

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• Higher education
• Liberal arts
• History of education

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A Guide to the Discourse About Liberal Education

Some of our observations on the discursive categories we've identified..

Arguments about liberal arts accumulate slowly, almost imperceptibly, on the forest floor of higher education. The detritus of more than a century of episodes in the rhetorical life of liberal arts education, they are built up by cycles of the fierce argument, exuberant expansion, portents of doom, and beneficient forgetting that characterize modern higher education’s relation to the idea of the liberal arts. 

Three years into our work as directors of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, we’re newly conscious of the provenance of these claims about liberal arts that circulate within the contemporary American public sphere, across the global span of higher education, and backwards in time. Some of these claims are newer; others have long histories. 

Everyone seems to have a take on the liberal arts. College admissions officers, authors of , earnestly-written books that about the future of academia, former college presidents, higher ed policy-makers, interested journalists, college professors, high-school guidance counselors, Twitter randos, conservative pundits, ed tech executives , business leaders. All of them try to offer a definition of “liberal arts” as they speak to their audiences. The googleable history of the idea is recited dutifully: we are reminded of the trivium and quadrivium; the fateful meeting between the American college and German research university is rehearsed. But far more history is forgotten, ignored, or side-stepped. In place of history, we list the virtues of liberal arts in a vague and comforting way. They vacillate between a melancholic yearning for a lost form of liberal arts education and a blustery confidence in liberal arts as a weapon with which to meet an uncertain and slightly menacing future. But few offer a tangible definition of the concept of liberal arts, and therefore few offer much confidence. 

Part of the problem with defining liberal arts is that the concept seems so open that almost everyone can claim to be profoundly identified with it. The term is so plastic that “liberal arts” frequently serves in public discourse as an all-purpose scornful stand-in for any number of tenuously related things:  for higher education, for educated elites, for the opposite of useful or instrumental education, even for any political disposition even slightly to the left of the far right. 

And yet we can see some some persistent lineages emerge from out of the sea of formless talk that invokes “liberal arts”. Each of those strains has ties to a specific history of practice and ideology within higher education or public culture. Some align closely and intentionally with a particular agenda; others seem like accidental creations. Some trace a consistent line across more than a century; others have seen their fortunes rise dramatically and fall precipitously over time. But each of the twelve propositions we’ve identified intrigue us; they offer the seeds of research projects of various scales and types that we hope to undertake and support.

By uncovering the conditions in which they came into being, expanding the institutional landscape,  repopulating the narratives with a wider array of individual figures, and turning towards the intractable problems they often both mark and gloss over, we hope to uncover both some more concrete definitions, particular practices, and a wider world of what liberal arts education has been, is now, and might be in the future. 

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A Deeper Look

Uncertainty. The view that liberal arts is the best possible response to uncertain futures of work and life is particularly common in 2018. But it has a long history, arguably reaching  all the way back into the medieval university or classical era and their assumptions about what a “free man” required from education in order to rule himself and the world around him. In the nineteenth century when Harvard President Charles Eliot introduced the elective course into higher education, he argued in part that individuals needed to make their own choices about what to learn in the process of their own unpredictable personal journey through life. Since then, the definition of liberal arts as unpredictability has been tied both to this romantic vision of individual flourishing and to the sense that white-collar or professional employment requires some measure of adaptability and flexibility to unforeseen circumstances. Unpredictability in this sense is both a justification of a liberal arts approach and an explanation of the variability of the courses and majors available within a liberal arts curriculum. Rarely, however, do liberal arts faculty and administrators think deeply about whether unpredictable conditions of study produce (or even resemble) the capacity to navigate uncertain future contingencies in work and life . 

Recombination. The idea that the liberal arts is about the freedom of individual learners to make their own choices about subjects and methods they wish to learn and then to combine what they know in original or distinctive ways is possibly the most comforting of all to students, parents, professors, college presidents and most of the public. The physicist who is also a virtuoso pianist, the philosopher who designs solar-powered cars, the Shakespeare expert who writes white papers on the epidemology of ebola, are guaranteed a place in their alumni magazines, in the hearts of the faculty that taught them, and in the MacArthur genius grants of tomorrow. As with unpredictability, Charles Eliot’s revisionary insistence on the elective as the heart of American higher education is an important part of this story. But it’s also difficult to really pinpoint the structures or approaches in contemporary liberal arts institutions that consciously engender these kinds of recombinant outcomes–and hard to shake the suspicion that other double majors, other students with uniquely conceived courses of study, never really reconcile or connect the divergent threads of their education; liberal arts institutions like the claim a share of the credit for the achievements of its graduates, yet rarely assume responsibility for their failures or disappointments. Nor is it easy to separate out the legacies of a four-year undergraduate education from later experiences that might more richly inform or shape a distinctive fusion of divergent forms of knowledge and skill in a given graduate.

Autodidactism. Almost as comforting is the proposition that liberal arts students “learn how to learn”, that they are acquiring meta-knowledge of disciplines, methods, and skills that sets them apart from people who have not had this kind of education. While many institutions design disciplinary and interdisciplinary structures to emphasize method and meta-knowledge, this claim appears as often in contexts where students encounter disciplines with fiercely specific and highly bounded methods; in this latter case, “learning how to learn” must arise from the proximity of different learning experiences or from the particular pedagogy of  Like many assertions about liberal education, it’s difficult to separate from the abilities and social capital that many students carry into higher education from the benefits they reap from it four years later. It also can be difficult to clearly trace how separate disciplines that may hold themselves to have specific and highly bounded methods and epistemologies nevertheless produce this metaknowledge in liberal learners. 

Critical Thinking. “Learning how to learn” is miles more specific and tangible than another very common claim, that liberal arts education is “critical thinking”. In a sense, “critical thinking” and “liberal arts” are a match made in heaven–that is, of two often-invoked ideas that can mean almost nothing and almost anything all at once, and that can in fact each mean something deeply important and brimming with potential. Thinking, slightly modified; the value-added imagined here is “critical,” which holds the bag for everything that education may be said to have done while also preserving an alibi. Critical thinking attempts to strip ideology and even any particular content away from the idea of liberal education; it invokes the autonomy of individuals, their ability to think independently of and about the conditions of their education. 

Humanities. Critical thinking is therefore very different for those uses of liberal arts to mean humanities disciplines pure and simple – as often seen in far-right trolling (snowflake liberal arts majors) as well as in a more subtle, background assumption within the culture of academia itself. The association of the two is not unfounded: as Laurence Veysey points out, the defenders of “liberal learning” who armed themselves against the rise of the practical or utility-driven research university expressly identified themselves as humanists opposed to new disciplinary forms of scientific inquiry. In the swirl of current anxieties about science majors, those older views are sometimes pulled up as sediments that color ongoing conversations and deliberations with an irritable turbidity. At the same time, almost no one in the contemporary environment seriously advocates framing a liberal arts curriculum as an exclusively humanistic one. 

Core Curriculum, Western Tradition. Though perhaps there is some element of that framing in various academic projects that define themselves as upholding “traditional” visions of the liberal arts: Columbia University’s Core Curriculum and St. John’s College’s “Great Books” approach, for example, as well as a number of religious colleges. With varying degrees of comfort, most of these institutional frameworks not only see themselves as defining liberal arts in terms of adherence to past approaches but even more specifically as connected to the “Western tradition”. Even for institutions that have no interest in defining liberal education in these terms, there is a seemingly unavoidable degree to which the concept references a specific history of teaching and institution-building in Western Europe. The rise of movements to decolonize or more thoroughly universalize university curricula are at least partially a result of this lingering connection. It’s hard to ignore the degree to which the defense of liberal arts is often undertaken by white male authors (both inside and outside of academia), but many of the virtues claimed for liberal learning as an approach have potential analogues in other historical traditions of formal education in East and South Asia and perhaps elsewhere. To us, at least, it feels as if the persistent, sometimes unspoken, connection between ideas about liberal learning and “the Western tradition” creates some unfortunate constraints on its future–but this is also a conversation so thoroughly implicated in long-standing culture wars that it is hard to engage it in a useful or interesting way. 

Anti-Vocational. Far more interesting to us is the intricate, contradictory domain of claims about the relationship between liberal learning and the work that its graduates undertake subsequently in life. To a great extent, we think this is the single most interesting thread that we would like to unravel and trace. The proposition that a liberally educated person must not be intentionally prepared for a single specific career reverberates all up and down the timeline of liberal arts as an idea, though in radically different contexts in classical and medieval institutions, and even in the 19th Century American academy. No other idea produces so many invocations–and misrepresentations–of the classical and medieval conceptualization of the educated person. The history of higher education in the United States is a series of confrontations between practicality and philosophy, utility and character-building, specificity of professional training and generality of liberal learning. The contemporary American debate about higher education, whether staged on Twitter, in family living rooms, in diners, in legislatures, or in faculty meetings, is drawn compulsively to the question of whether and how higher education should prepare students for future careers, and whether or not it already does so in some fashion. These conversations criss-cross a riotous range of informed descriptions of the actual curricula and pedagogy of higher education, mythological visions of college in the past and present, unexamined assumptions about the process of learning, and anxious marginally-informed pronouncements about the present and future of work and social transformation. We’ve decided that this theme is our greatest area of current engagement for the Aydelotte: there is so much to interpret and study within this domain, and the answers are so urgent for the present moment. Status Quo. At least some working understandings of liberal arts, on the other hand, amount to a quiet and simple blank-check benediction for the status quo, either at particular colleges or universities or across academia. Meaning, when asked “what do you mean by ‘liberal arts’”, at least some institutions effectively answer by saying, “Whatever we’re doing this second? That’s liberal arts”. This is less shallow than it might seem: what this approach really means to say is that existing structures of faculty governance and administrative management are trustworthy custodians of the meanings and implementation of liberal arts, and that liberal education arises as an emergent form out of the interaction of their various decisions. Considering that contemporary anxieties about higher education are far less novel or unprecedented than they are frequently described as being, it makes a certain kind of sense to serenely assert a kind of custodial duty to liberal learning and to carry on with that duty without being overly distracted by any given moment of supposed controversy or threat. Small Colleges. In a similar vein, there are more than a few definitions of liberal arts that simply assert that the term is defined not by concepts or histories but that it is a proxy for a specific kind of institution, namely small American colleges that are focused substantially or entirely on undergraduate education. The common acronym SLAC expresses this neatly: “small liberal-arts college”. This seems to us to be both true enough (that the term tends to invoke small colleges) and completely uninteresting. If liberal arts is simply a synonym for selective small colleges that collectively educate only a teeny fraction of the students graduating with bachelor’s degrees in the United States, it certainly cannot carry the weight of all the other expectations and anxieties that surround it. 

Citizenship. Finally, we’re interested in but also puzzled by a powerful, long-standing idea about liberal education that often haunts almost every other invocation of the concept. Namely, that liberal learning is peculiarly suited to the formation of character, the shaping of morality, or the creation of civic virtue. This is a proposition of long-standing, beloved by college presidents in 1875, 1925, and 2018, even if some of the descriptive vocabulary of virtues attributed to liberal learning shifts over time. “Ethical intelligence”, “global citizenship”, “social justice”, are in some sense the descendants of other virtuous attributes that colleges and universities claimed to hone or awaken in young people a century earlier. These claims puzzle us because in some sense they propose an empirical standard that perhaps unsurprisingly educational institutions have been in no hurry to test or examine further. Are graduates of liberal arts institutions better citizens by some measure? (And what would be “better”?) Are they ethically intelligent? (Are scholars who study ethics, for example, in any sense more likely to be ethical?) Any of these questions, if they could be answered in the affirmative through any kind of evidence of any kind, would pose a second set of questions: what is it about liberal education that is producing such an outcome? How do we know this isn’t better described as “class formation”? (Which, if it were, would not be self-evidently bad to everyone who expresses it–it’s just that that would be different than what educational institutions commonly imagine as their intentional practices.) We recognize that there are many interesting sentiments and histories bubbling under the surface of these kinds of claims, but for the moment, we are inclined to push them aside until we can think of a way to tackle them usefully. 

Character. This theme could also just as easily be titled “social or class reproduction”. Higher education outside the United States has been more explicit regarding this as a function of the university. The major public university systems of many European countries and their former colonies have long used qualifying examinations and other mechanisms to sort young adults into overtly class-linked hierarchies closely connected to particular kinds of employment. A small fragment of institutions that have conventionally described themselves as training for elite government and corporate leaders and a handful of esteemed professions, such as Oxford, Cambridge or the Sorbonne, have claimed to be involved in building “character”, a sort of mannerly public morality that once upon a time stretched from how to behave on the polo field or while eating ortolans to how to act in public when your spouse has an affair or when feeling in middle age that life has ceased to have joy and meaning. Some tie to older ideas of liberal education–the training of a ‘free’ citizen–has been visible within this commitment to cultivating character.

“Character” in the American academy has a more complicated and tortured history. As Veysey observes, the ascendant research university in the latter half of the 19th Century set itself against the “liberal education” of many private and religious institutions by promising that the research university was open to all citizens, and could offer to all students a kind of socioeconomic mobility untainted by “character”. A student could learn the arts and skills needed by a fast-paced industrial society, skills whose value could be stripped of the need for embedded or inherited cultural capital. With those skills, a graduate’s horizon was said to be unlimited. Veysey notes that for a good while, the response of the defenders of liberal education to this critique was not to deny the accusation but to embrace it, to agree that liberal education did in fact refine and extend the social virtues of the scions of elite or haut-bourgeois families. Nevertheless, in the early 20th Century, many small college and private universities adopted some of the features of the research university and with them began to scuff over or obscure the degree to which character and social standing were synonymous or connected, either by extending the benefits of character to anyone who might matriculate or preaching the importance of character to the proper use of professional or technical skills.

The link between liberal learning and the shaping of character–or many related ways to describe some combination of manners, ethics, behavior and affect–has remained strong up to the present in American higher education even as that connection also produces discomfort, embarrassment and anger. A prominent strain of criticism of the contemporary academy by writers like Mark Edmundson and William Deresiewicz complains of the extent to which higher education has abandoned the forging of character. Many make the opposite charge: that liberal learning is still tied too closely to the reproduction of the specific cultural identity of an older white, male establishment elite and hostile to everyone else. Faculty and administrators often look desperately for ways to renarrate or redescribe ‘character’ either as a technical-philosophical skill (“emotional intelligence”, “self-presentation”, “ethical intelligence”, “cultivating humanity”) or to re-situate it within larger and more open social formations (“global citizenship”, “cosmopolitanism”, “pluralism”).

At the same moment, the undeniably intensified role of higher education in producing social class in the United States has become a profoundly unsettling subject within academia and an explicit premise of public conversation about academia, not to mention an important underpinning of recent American politics. Here the theme of anti-vocationalism gets a particularly intense inflection from its relationship to both character-producing and class-producing visions of liberal education. So this is an area of both strength and weakness within the body politic of academia that we intend to persistently explore and prod at even as we are also aware of the jangled nerves and knotted musculature that flinch as a result of such prodding.  

This taxonomy of “liberal arts” and its meanings is both a product of research and a guide to research. We can see meanings of the term that are banally or historically shallow, and others that have a tendency to be anodyne or superficial. We see others that are zones of heavy, if often unreflective, contention both within academia and between academia and its myriad publics. It is enough to keep us occupied for a long time; we hope with some useful results. 

Timothy Burke's main field of specialty is modern African history, specifically southern Africa, but he has also worked on U.S. popular culture and on computer games.

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The Research Argument: Resources

• College Writing

An argumentative essay attempts to convince your reader of the validity of a particular opinion on a controversial issue.  These following steps may assist you in forming your written argument:

1. Choose a topic that interests you.  It doesn't have to be a vital topic of the day but it should be something that you can feel strongly about. 2.  Clearly identify the issue at stake, and where you stand on it in the introductory paragraph. This is your thesis. 3.  Provide support to your stated argument (thesis) in the subsequent body paragraphs. Support this thesis with the 3 strongest arguments you can find. Draw on statistics, expert opinions, facts, personal experiences, research studies drawn from journals, books, newspaper articles, reports etc.. 4. Acknowledge and address opposing viewpoints and repudiate them using your sources. This will lend additional persuasiveness to your argument. 5. Provide a forceful conclusion that restates your position in different words. It may include a call to action. (Adapted from Indian River State College Writing Handout)

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Acknowledgement

Thank you to Edward Metz for his permission to adopt and adapt his guide The Argument Essay .

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Organizing Your Argument

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How can I effectively present my argument?

In order for your argument to be persuasive, it must use an organizational structure that the audience perceives as both logical and easy to parse. Three argumentative methods —the  Toulmin Method , Classical Method , and Rogerian Method — give guidance for how to organize the points in an argument.

Note that these are only three of the most popular models for organizing an argument. Alternatives exist. Be sure to consult your instructor and/or defer to your assignment’s directions if you’re unsure which to use (if any).

Toulmin Method

The  Toulmin Method  is a formula that allows writers to build a sturdy logical foundation for their arguments. First proposed by author Stephen Toulmin in  The Uses of Argument (1958), the Toulmin Method emphasizes building a thorough support structure for each of an argument's key claims.

The basic format for the Toulmin Method  is as follows:

Claim:  In this section, you explain your overall thesis on the subject. In other words, you make your main argument.

Data (Grounds):  You should use evidence to support the claim. In other words, provide the reader with facts that prove your argument is strong.

Warrant (Bridge):  In this section, you explain why or how your data supports the claim. As a result, the underlying assumption that you build your argument on is grounded in reason.

Backing (Foundation):  Here, you provide any additional logic or reasoning that may be necessary to support the warrant.

Counterclaim:  You should anticipate a counterclaim that negates the main points in your argument. Don't avoid arguments that oppose your own. Instead, become familiar with the opposing perspective.   If you respond to counterclaims, you appear unbiased (and, therefore, you earn the respect of your readers). You may even want to include several counterclaims to show that you have thoroughly researched the topic.

Rebuttal:  In this section, you incorporate your own evidence that disagrees with the counterclaim. It is essential to include a thorough warrant or bridge to strengthen your essay’s argument. If you present data to your audience without explaining how it supports your thesis, your readers may not make a connection between the two, or they may draw different conclusions.

Example of the Toulmin Method:

Claim:  Hybrid cars are an effective strategy to fight pollution.

Data1:  Driving a private car is a typical citizen's most air-polluting activity.

Warrant 1:  Due to the fact that cars are the largest source of private (as opposed to industrial) air pollution, switching to hybrid cars should have an impact on fighting pollution.

Data 2:  Each vehicle produced is going to stay on the road for roughly 12 to 15 years.

Warrant 2:  Cars generally have a long lifespan, meaning that the decision to switch to a hybrid car will make a long-term impact on pollution levels.

Data 3:  Hybrid cars combine a gasoline engine with a battery-powered electric motor.

Warrant 3:  The combination of these technologies produces less pollution.

Counterclaim:  Instead of focusing on cars, which still encourages an inefficient culture of driving even as it cuts down on pollution, the nation should focus on building and encouraging the use of mass transit systems.

Rebuttal:  While mass transit is an idea that should be encouraged, it is not feasible in many rural and suburban areas, or for people who must commute to work. Thus, hybrid cars are a better solution for much of the nation's population.

Rogerian Method

The Rogerian Method  (named for, but not developed by, influential American psychotherapist Carl R. Rogers) is a popular method for controversial issues. This strategy seeks to find a common ground between parties by making the audience understand perspectives that stretch beyond (or even run counter to) the writer’s position. Moreso than other methods, it places an emphasis on reiterating an opponent's argument to his or her satisfaction. The persuasive power of the Rogerian Method lies in its ability to define the terms of the argument in such a way that:

• your position seems like a reasonable compromise.
• you seem compassionate and empathetic.

The basic format of the Rogerian Method  is as follows:

Introduction:  Introduce the issue to the audience, striving to remain as objective as possible.

Opposing View : Explain the other side’s position in an unbiased way. When you discuss the counterargument without judgement, the opposing side can see how you do not directly dismiss perspectives which conflict with your stance.

Statement of Validity (Understanding):  This section discusses how you acknowledge how the other side’s points can be valid under certain circumstances. You identify how and why their perspective makes sense in a specific context, but still present your own argument.

Statement of Your Position:  By this point, you have demonstrated that you understand the other side’s viewpoint. In this section, you explain your own stance.

Statement of Contexts : Explore scenarios in which your position has merit. When you explain how your argument is most appropriate for certain contexts, the reader can recognize that you acknowledge the multiple ways to view the complex issue.

Statement of Benefits:  You should conclude by explaining to the opposing side why they would benefit from accepting your position. By explaining the advantages of your argument, you close on a positive note without completely dismissing the other side’s perspective.

Example of the Rogerian Method:

Introduction:  The issue of whether children should wear school uniforms is subject to some debate.

Opposing View:  Some parents think that requiring children to wear uniforms is best.

Statement of Validity (Understanding):  Those parents who support uniforms argue that, when all students wear the same uniform, the students can develop a unified sense of school pride and inclusiveness.

Statement of Your Position : Students should not be required to wear school uniforms. Mandatory uniforms would forbid choices that allow students to be creative and express themselves through clothing.

Statement of Contexts:  However, even if uniforms might hypothetically promote inclusivity, in most real-life contexts, administrators can use uniform policies to enforce conformity. Students should have the option to explore their identity through clothing without the fear of being ostracized.

Statement of Benefits:  Though both sides seek to promote students' best interests, students should not be required to wear school uniforms. By giving students freedom over their choice, students can explore their self-identity by choosing how to present themselves to their peers.

Classical Method

The Classical Method of structuring an argument is another common way to organize your points. Originally devised by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (and then later developed by Roman thinkers like Cicero and Quintilian), classical arguments tend to focus on issues of definition and the careful application of evidence. Thus, the underlying assumption of classical argumentation is that, when all parties understand the issue perfectly, the correct course of action will be clear.

The basic format of the Classical Method  is as follows:

Introduction (Exordium): Introduce the issue and explain its significance. You should also establish your credibility and the topic’s legitimacy.

Statement of Background (Narratio): Present vital contextual or historical information to the audience to further their understanding of the issue. By doing so, you provide the reader with a working knowledge about the topic independent of your own stance.

Proposition (Propositio): After you provide the reader with contextual knowledge, you are ready to state your claims which relate to the information you have provided previously. This section outlines your major points for the reader.

Proof (Confirmatio): You should explain your reasons and evidence to the reader. Be sure to thoroughly justify your reasons. In this section, if necessary, you can provide supplementary evidence and subpoints.

Refutation (Refuatio): In this section, you address anticipated counterarguments that disagree with your thesis. Though you acknowledge the other side’s perspective, it is important to prove why your stance is more logical.  

Conclusion (Peroratio): You should summarize your main points. The conclusion also caters to the reader’s emotions and values. The use of pathos here makes the reader more inclined to consider your argument.  

Example of the Classical Method:  

Introduction (Exordium): Millions of workers are paid a set hourly wage nationwide. The federal minimum wage is standardized to protect workers from being paid too little. Research points to many viewpoints on how much to pay these workers. Some families cannot afford to support their households on the current wages provided for performing a minimum wage job .

Statement of Background (Narratio): Currently, millions of American workers struggle to make ends meet on a minimum wage. This puts a strain on workers’ personal and professional lives. Some work multiple jobs to provide for their families.

Proposition (Propositio): The current federal minimum wage should be increased to better accommodate millions of overworked Americans. By raising the minimum wage, workers can spend more time cultivating their livelihoods.

Proof (Confirmatio): According to the United States Department of Labor, 80.4 million Americans work for an hourly wage, but nearly 1.3 million receive wages less than the federal minimum. The pay raise will alleviate the stress of these workers. Their lives would benefit from this raise because it affects multiple areas of their lives.

Refutation (Refuatio): There is some evidence that raising the federal wage might increase the cost of living. However, other evidence contradicts this or suggests that the increase would not be great. Additionally,   worries about a cost of living increase must be balanced with the benefits of providing necessary funds to millions of hardworking Americans.

Conclusion (Peroratio): If the federal minimum wage was raised, many workers could alleviate some of their financial burdens. As a result, their emotional wellbeing would improve overall. Though some argue that the cost of living could increase, the benefits outweigh the potential drawbacks.

Argumentative Essay: The Liberal Arts Education

The liberal arts education that Ouachita has tried to embody in to its education system is one the aims to unite a wide range of educational topics in hopes that the students will not only accomplish their career goals, but also live with a sense of purpose, integrity, and a willingness to serve. They believe that students who are educated in the liberal arts tradition possesses knowledge, and discernment. They desire that the knowledge they give us is not only rich, but useful in practice; they hope that it imprints scholarly disciplines needed in the real world. They also believes that is allows self-reflection. If you can see something in a new light, you can see what issues arise in your own life. The liberal arts education allows students

The New Liberal Arts Summary

“The New Liberal Arts” is written from the author's point of view. The author, Sanford J. Ungar, writes strongly on “Misperception” of Liberal Arts. He writes down each misperception and gives his reasoning, backed up with facts as to why he, the author, considers each one a misperception. The author writes about each misperception by numbering them and also gives reasoning. For example, “Misperception NO. 1: A liberal-arts degree is a luxury” and reasoning, “families can no longer afford… depths of the recession” (p. 227).

Summary Of The Liberal Arts Approach To College By Ken Saxon

In this essay that Ken Saxon writes, he talks about the liberal arts approach to college. He goes back and gives examples from his own life and how his college and after college careers played out. He is attempting to reach out to college students and high school students who are about to go to college. His purpose is to get more students to take a liberal arts approach to college. I plan to break down Saxon’s essay and see if he has anything that is helpful for me, as I get ready for college in the next year.

Faread Zakaria In Defense Of Liberal Education Analysis

Jamaladeen Obaid English 5 Professor 10/21/2015 Knowledge is light and the darkness of ignorance In the early days Liberal art education provided students with information that allowed them to expand their knowledge. It brings a strong foundation for students because it highlights the necessity of science, writing, art, philosophy, and history. These are fundamental to being a well-rounded and successful student.

Rhetorical Analysis Of Why We Undervalue A Liberal Arts Education

In the article “Why We Undervalue a Liberal Arts Education” by Adam Chapnick, the author points to reasons why the liberal arts degree is undervalued. While his article lacks direction, it is effective because he talks about the topics he promised and he backs up his claims efficiently through the use of ethos,pathos and logos. Overall his argument is legitimate and the article is well written. To my understanding, the article is analyzing the way the world looks at liberal arts degrees and how they should be teaching the students to appreciate them. Chapnick clearly thinks that the liberal arts degree is unappreciated by today’s society as you can see in this quote, “The message coming from the policy world is clear: if you want

Why We Undervalue A Liberal Arts Education By Adam Chapnick

Things like that is what student these days see and find unappealing. So let's take Adam Chapnicks’ advice and conceive and developed more way to appeal students to think about the liberal arts. Teacher should learn how to make it fun to learn. One thing Adam does not mention, which seem to be a great idea is that students should not be required to take intensive classes of liberal art. Once you enter high school you start to think about your career.

William Cronon Only Connect Analysis

Ever wanted to throw down that textbook and read something enjoyable for once? Well, go ahead! Chunk that dull textbook out a window and pick up a comic; it will be more beneficial to your education than you think. The skills and values that liberally educated people should posses can vary from different views, yet the list of ten qualities that William Cronon created in his article, “’Only Connect…’ The Goals of a Liberal Education”(1998), is an inspirational goal for the liberally educated. Cronon’s list of qualities includes solving problems and puzzles, empowering others, and understanding how to get stuff done in the world.

William Cornon Only Connect Summary

Some that I found myself being able to relate in past and present experiences. Cronon implies that, “… Liberal education in particular is about nurturing human freedom- helping young people discover and hone their talents- and this too sounds as if education exists for the benefit of individuals” (Cronon 5). As at Los Angeles Trade-Tech College, I can relate to this quote.

Purpose Of Education During The Colonial Era

In the past, schools prioritized strict discipline over the development of students' skills. Today we use strategies that support inquiry, critical thinking, and creative expression as well as have student-centered learning environments. The liberal-pedagogical group believed that advancing democracy, social justice, and personal growth were the main goals of education. By doing this, it could create more learning environments that were experiential and child-centered. They continue to have an impact on students' intellectual development, civic involvement, and personal growth.

Liberal Arts Studies Self-Analysis

Introduction The determination of this self-assessment is to evaluate the growth of my knowledge, skills, and values of the Ottawa University learning outcomes for Liberal Arts Studies. This will occur through reflecting on my understanding of a liberal arts education and my learning in each breadth area. This will also entail references to the current course (LAS 45012 Global Issues in the Liberal Arts) and life experiences that have contributed to my learning and growth in each area. The conclusion will involve an elucidation regarding any steps I may take going forward to continue my learning in these areas in the future.

Liberal Arts Misperception Essay

Liberal Arts Misperception The liberal arts are those subjects or skills that in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free person (Latin:liberal, "worthy of a free person") to know in order to take an active part in civic life, something that (for Ancient Greece) included participating in public debate. These two articles are talking about the misperception that people see about Liberal Arts. Most people hear liberal arts and think, I will not get a good job with this degree, or nobody will hire me.

Purpose Of A Liberal Arts Education

(2016). Liberal arts in the modern university. Academe, 102(1), 31-33. Retrieved from http://proxy.campbell.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 1759174582?accountid=9858 Accessed 5 Nov. 2016 This magazine article talks about the value of a liberal arts education.

Analysis Of The New Liberal Arts By Sanford J. Ungar

Ungar’s essay, Charles Murray discusses why a liberal arts degree is unnecessary in his essay, “Are Too Many People Going to College?”. Murray believes that the basics of a liberal education are indeed important, but that students should be provided the basics of liberal arts in elementary and middle school (Murray 223). In this essay, Murray cites E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.” Hirsch Jr. and Murray believe that there is a “body of core knowledge” that all students should have, and that “this core knowledge is an important part of the glue that holds the culture together” but that this core knowledge should be taught in grades K-8 (Murray 224). Murray discusses how young children are much better at memorizing facts than adults are, to support his position that kids should be memorizing this core knowledge at a younger age (Murray 224).

Argumentative Essay: The Cost Of College

College is one of the most important and life changing times in the life of an American. Leaving high school behind and venturing out to the adult world is an amazing experience that every individual should experience. However, young adults from every corner of the country leave college with crippling debt or do not go to their preferred college of choice. College education should be cheaper as it will help families and students financially and give them the satisfaction with having the opportunity to go to their first choice for college.

Liberal Arts Argumentative Analysis

With the year-round pressure pertaining to college applications on high school seniors follows the impending decision of choosing an appropriate college major. Generally, the decision-making process involves prioritizing one field of interest over another, however, due to globalization and constant innovation in technology determining a college major has increasingly become the modern day equivalent of the metaphorical line between life and death. Even so, the obvious choice would be the prestigious STEM fields over liberal arts due to the instant job opportunities which are seemingly ludicrous to a recent graduate. Nevertheless, liberal arts education should be encouraged to be pursued at higher education institutions in USA because it helps

Argumentative Essay: Is Higher Education Worth It?

Is Higher Education Worth It? Nowadays a lot of people argue whether a higher education is still worth it or not. They think that not everyone needs an extra four-year of learning to get an extra title. Many people still believe that higher education is useless. Moreover, to obtain a higher level of education, it takes lots of money.

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Related topics.

• History of education
• Liberal arts