As every student who has taken Principles of Microeconomics with me knows, I have a particular frustration with words that provide little clarity but that are used by some to convey a kind of gravitas. A term used a great deal around Covenant College has made its way onto that list. That term is the “liberal arts.”
When this sacred term is mentioned on campus, I feel that I am expected to nod knowingly and then gird myself for battle, readying a defense against those who would either foolishly undermine it or simply ignore it out of apathy or short-sightedness. Instead, I have come to the point where I think that we should go ahead and abandon the term as part of our contemporary lexicon.
Let me note that I am not rejecting the college’s approach to a broad-based education that will equip our graduates intellectually, spiritually and professionally to serve the world in their vocations, their families, their churches and their communities. I am as committed to broad-based Christian education as one can be.
My 22 years of education were grounded in this approach. Even for my PhD studies, which are necessarily more narrowly focused than undergraduate training, I chose my program because it was the only program in the country where I could study the mainstream of my discipline as well as the schools of heterodoxy that challenged it, while simultaneously drawing from the departments of history, liberal studies, finance, physics and the MBA program in a multidisciplinary reflection alongside of my discipline.
In addition to learning a great deal from my economics professors, I have been deeply formed by R. Scott Clark, Mark Noll, Alan Jacobs, Joseph Spradley, Betty Basista Ronaldson, George Marsden and numerous other professors outside of my discipline as well as by college staff like “C-Train” Edwards, Pauline Snyder and Scott Bradley at the colleges where I have attended and worked.
I continue to work at Covenant College because I have witnessed the profound nature of what can happen here. It is because of, not in spite of, my love for broad-based education that I suggest that the term “liberal arts” may be more detrimental than productive for framing how we construct and describe the program that achieves the type of learning that I hold in such high regard.
Let me start by explaining why we should reject some of the original tenets of the liberal arts. Unlike some contemporary dialogue on the matter, the artes liberales (“liberal arts”) were held by classical antiquity to be the form of education appropriate for free persons to equip themselves to participate in a democratic society with responsibilities to vote, to take part in civic debates, and to serve on juries.
These were distinguished from the artes serviles (“servile arts”) which were focused on engaging in material employment. Implicit in this basic distinction between these two forms of arts is the belief that a person was called either to a role of active participation in democratic society, or to vocational work, but not to both.
I agree that we need to be wary of a narrow “careerist” interpretation of our task. A student who only asks “What job can I get with a degree, major or specific class from Covenant?” is missing out on an essential part of our collective endeavor.
A reformed perspective on vocation, leads me to believe that the student who never asks about practical applications (including jobs) is missing out on an equally essential part of the education we offer.
As your faculty, we should be cautious not to dismiss or denigrate the person who asks the “jobs” question. Furthermore, we should be emphasizing that a graduate of Covenant College should not only “know how to think,” but should also be someone whose affections are rightly ordered and who is inspired to bring energy, initiative and skill to the numerous vocations to which they are called. This is quite a task, but it is the one that excites me as I come to work each day.
My greater frustration is that I do not believe that the term “liberal arts” has enough of an agreed upon definition for us to use it in nearly any meaningful discussion. Plenty of surveys reveal that there is little central tendency in how most people define the liberal arts.
I regularly hear people use mixed and even contradictory definitions in the same conversation. Moreover, almost none of them actually describe any historical definition of the liberal arts. Some people use “liberal arts” to mean anything that does not directly prepare you for a job. Others use it to mean anything not math-based, which essentially redefines it as the humanities.
The seven classical liberal arts consist of the linguistic trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the mathematical quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). The clustering is structured around how it is believed that our minds come to understand the world. The traditional ordo disciplinarium guided the order in which these were to be taught, with the goal of providing the appropriate sequence of contemplation, moving from linguistic to mathematical disciplines.
Within the trivium, grammar teaches rules of speech and writing, logic informs us of language’s rational ordering, and rhetoric instructs us in its presentation. The ordo disciplinarum had these taught first because, at its most basic levels, knowledge about the world is initially mediated to us through linguistic symbols. An understanding of them must precede our grasp of more abstract scientific and mathematical symbols and the concepts which can be understood through them.
These latter tools of the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, equip the student to pursue the search for knowledge through observation. Sense perception mixed with reasoning, with both linguistic and mathematical symbols, more fully equipped the student to understand reality.