Practicing Liberal Education

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THOUGH LIBERAL EDUCATION has assumed many forms across differenttimes and places, it has always been concerned with important educa-tional aims: cultivating intellectual and ethical judgment, helping stu-dents comprehend and negotiate their relationship to the larger world,

and preparing graduates for lives of civic re-sponsibility and leadership. On the merits, then,

we might expect that liberal education would be the uncontested prefer-ence of virtually everyone who goes to college.

And yet, American society today exhibits a striking ambivalence to-wards the traditions of “liberal” or “liberal arts” education. Liberal educa-tion is at one and the same time prized, despised, revised and disguised.

Prized? Liberal education is recognizably the philosophy of choice atthe nation’s most famous institutions, the campuses where admission isseen as virtually synonymous with the expansion of opportunity. Thereis, moreover, a persistent identification of liberal education with democra-tic freedom, scientific progress and excellence that goes back to the revo-lutionary period when many civic and political leaders both extolled theliberal arts and also challenged them to embrace the scientific and prac-tical needs of the new republic. W.E.B. du Bois reaffirmed the inter-changeability of “liberal education” and “excellence” when he argued, acentury ago, that future leaders in the African-American communitydeserved a college-level liberal education—that is, the best kind ofhigher education, not just narrow occupational training. Most accred-ited colleges and universities still espouse this liberal education idealand typically require that their students take some fraction of their stud-ies in courses and programs aligned with the broader aims of education.

Despised? Many analysts and policy leaders declare without apologythat liberal education is already being consigned to the dustbin of history.Markets, they sniff, are keyed to short-term outcomes and have no pa-tience for forms of learning that pay off over a lifetime. Practical studieswill sell; the rest will just wither away. First generation, low-income, andadult learners in particular, such observers contend, need job training

Every collegestudent

deserves a liberal

education

CAROL G. SCHNEIDER is the president of the Association of American Collegesand Universities.

Formative Themes in the Reinvention of Liberal Learning

C A R O L G . S C H N E I D E R

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opment. Like school leaders inthe twentieth century, thesehigher education realists arecontent to provide “elite” ed-ucation to elites and voca-tional skills to everyone else.Other observers, more critical of the academyitself, believe that liberal education is fallingvictim to its own rigidity. The liberal arts, thesecritics suggest, are so ensconced in disciplinarysilos and so resistant to the practical needs ofthe wider society, that they will surely go theway of the classics, moving inexorably fromcentrality to subsidized marginality.

Revised? At the Association of AmericanColleges and Universities, we see a much morecomplex picture—a picture at once bothpromising and constrained. The truth is thatliberal education at the start of the twenty-firstcentury is anything but a moribund tradition.Historically, the practice of liberal educationhas changed radically over the centuries, andit is in the midst of far-reaching—if largelyunreported—change today.

As we work with literally hundreds of collegesand universities, my colleagues and I can seeplainly that the nation’s campuses are dottedwith a vibrant new generation of innovativeprograms and pedagogies. The majority of theseinnovations are indisputably reinventions of a

more traditional liberal educa-tion for this new global eraand for today’s newly diversepopulation of students. In-deed, we are starting to see theoutlines of an emerging con-sensus on what this newly

reinvigorated liberal education should entailand even on the imperative of ensuring thatmore students—including first generation andadult students—can gain from its benefits.

Three formative themes in the reinvention of liberal educationAs we survey developments across the spec-trum of higher education reform, three majorthemes emerge as keys to the newly engagedand practical liberal education for the twenty-first century. These themes are intellectualjudgment, social responsibility, and integra-tive learning.

Inquiry and Intellectual Judgment: College anduniversities no longer assume that analyticalcapability emerges automatically as studentstake courses. Instead, faculty members are de-signing new curricula and new teachingstrategies—online as well as face-to-face—tohelp today’s diverse students develop stronganalytical and communication skills, honed“across-the-curriculum” and at progressivelymore sophisticated levels. From intensive

8 L I B E R A L ED U C A T I O N SP R I N G 2004

The nation’s campusesare dotted with a

vibrant new generationof innovative programs

and pedagogies

Annual Meeting

first-year seminars on liberal arts topics towriting-in-the-disciplines programs to under-graduate research to senior capstone projectsand courses, colleges and universities are pio-neering new educational practices clearly in-tended to teach all students how to makesense of complexity, how to find and use evi-dence, and how to apply their knowledge tonew problems and unscripted questions. Indoing so, they are bringing new vitality to oneof the oldest and most enduring goals of lib-eral education: the thoughtful and creativeuse of human reason.

Social Responsibility and Civic Engagement:There is also a pervasive new focus on puttingsocial and civic responsibility into the cur-riculum. From Hawaii to Indianapolis to theBronx, faculty at every kind of college anduniversity are providing students with real-world experience and rich opportunities toaddress social problems in cooperation withothers. This revival of civic engagement andsocial responsibility is happening in nearlyevery field—from science courses taughtthrough the lenses of important contemporarysocial and ethical questions such as HIV/AIDSto social justice issues addressed in professionalfields to internships, service learning, andfield-based projects where students work withthe community to solve important problems.Simultaneously, the diversity and global educa-tion movements also have developed a wealthof programs—curricular and co-curricular—that help students develop essential intercul-tural skills and a sophisticated sense of how tocollaborate “across boundaries” in a diversebut still highly fractured and violent world.Collaborative, intercultural, and community-based learning is the new civic frontier for ourtwenty-first century world of diversity, contes-tation, and inescapable interdependence.

Integrative and Culminating Learning: Educa-tional leaders are rapidly inventing new formsof integrative and culminating studies for theirstudents. From first year learning communitiesto senior year interdisciplinary general educa-tion courses to capstone projects and the pop-ularity of field-based learning, today’s studentsnow have multiple, structured opportunities tomake connections across disciplines and fields,to connect theories to practice, and even to en-gage their own lived experiences in the con-text of what they are learning in general edu-cation and in their majors. This commitment

to integrative learning helps ensure that stu-dents will learn to take context and complexityinto account when they apply their analyticalskills to challenging problems. The new im-portance of integrative learning also holds thepower to bridge—at last—the long-standingcultural divide in which one set of disciplines,the arts and sciences, has been regarded as in-tellectual but not practical, while the profes-sional fields are viewed as practical but, forthat very reason, inherently illiberal. Analysisand application are starting to come together,where once they were presented as alternativeeducational pathways.

Each of these new designs for undergraduatelearning is intended to help today’s diverse

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OFTEN CONFUSED TERMS

Liberal EducationA philosophy of education that empowers in-dividuals, liberates the mind from ignorance,and cultivates social responsibility. Character-ized by challenging encounters with importantissues, and more a way of studying than specificcontent, liberal education can occur at alltypes of colleges and universities.

Liberal ArtsSpecific disciplines (the humanities, social sciences, and sciences).

Liberal Arts Colleges A particular institutional type—often small,often residential—that facilitates close inter-action between faculty and students, whilegrounding its curriculum in the liberal arts disciplines.

Artes Liberales Historically, the basis for the modern liberalarts; the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) and the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric).

General Education The part of a liberal education curriculumshared by all students. It provides broad expo-sure to multiple disciplines and forms the basisfor developing important intellectual and civiccapacities.

—from Greater Expectations: A New Vision forLearning as a Nation Goes to College

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liberal education: intellectual acuity and judg-ment, civic and social leadership, expandedhorizons. Taken together, these new designs forwhat we might call the “liberal arts of practice”have the potential to make college learningmore engaged, better connected with communi-ties beyond the campus, more “hands-on,” and,in the long run, more educationally powerful.

Disguised? Even as specific practices withinliberal education are being reinvented andreinvigorated, the tradition itself is largely dis-guised from public notice. The educationalinnovations described above are heavily pro-moted by the academy but rarely described incampus promotional materials as “liberal” or

“liberal arts” education. Students who partici-pate in them may never even be told that theyare engaged in contemporary forms of liberaleducation. Graduate students preparing toteach spend virtually no time consideringtheir own role either in these innovations orin the larger traditions of liberal learning.

Given this conspiracy of voluntary silence,there is very little public understanding or evenawareness of liberal education, despite its en-during influence on both established and in-novative curricula. Studies show that the pub-lic does not value it as named, even thoughthe same public places high value on the out-comes—such as analytical judgment, socialresponsibility, and economic opportunity—to

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1. Inquiry Skills and Intellectual Judgment—Across-the-Curriculum

Student Learning Outcomes:goals for learning articulatedacross the entire curriculum,guiding liberal arts and sci-ences disciplines and profes-sional studies alike;

First-Year Experiences: first-yearprograms and seminars thathelp students learn what isexpected of them educationallyand work proactively todevelop better skills in analy-sis, research and communica-tion—including informationliteracies;

Skill-Intensive Content Courses:designs for practicing impor-tant skills recurrently “across-the-curriculum” in coursesexplicitly tagged for theiremphasis on intensive writing,technology, quantitative rea-soning, second language, and,sometimes, ethical reasoning;

Undergraduate Research:involving students in inquiryand hands-on research.

2. Social Responsibility and Civic Engagement

Big Questions: imaginative waysof teaching the arts and sci-ences that connect the contentof these courses to importantquestions in the larger world;

Field-Based Learning: a newemphasis on internships, servicelearning, and other forms ofpractice that help studentsconnect their academic learn-ing with “real-world” experience;

Diversity, Global, and CivicEngagement: a wealth of pro-grams, both curricular and co-curricular, intended to fostercivic engagement, diversityand global learning, and socialresponsibility;

Community-Based Research: agrowing emphasis on commu-nity-based research, often donecollaboratively.

3. Integrative and CulminatingStudies, including

Liberal/Professional: new connections between liberaland professional education (see #1);

Learning Communities: themati-cally linked courses in differentdisciplines that students takeas a “set” with the expectationthat they will examine impor-tant human, scientific, or soci-etal questions from multiplepoints of view;

Advanced InterdisciplinaryGeneral Education: courses that invite comparison and connection;

Portfolios and E-Portfolios: documenting and assessing students’ intellectual progressover time;

Capstones: capstone coursesand/or experiences that helpstudents integrate their learn-ing both in the major and ingeneral education arenas;

Culminating Projects andAssessments: required for com-pletion of the degree, assessedfor important student learningoutcomes.

Pedagogies of Engagement and Goals for Student Learning: A Guide to Contemporary Reforms

which liberal education leads. Campus leadersreport that students also don’t know what lib-eral or liberal arts education is and that manyfaculty are uncertain.

The nation is thus in danger of squanderingan extraordinary and unprecedented opportu-nity. With millions of students of all ages andbackgrounds both aspiring to higher learningand actually enrolling, a new majority of Amer-icans could, in principle, now achieve the kindof capacious and public-spirited liberal educa-tion once reserved for a tiny elite. But it is hardto insist on the best when you don’t even knowthat the best is an option. And without publicsupport and student demand, these new educa-tional practices are likely to remain both under-developed and vulnerable.

AAC&U’s 2002 report, Greater Expectations:A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes toCollege, recommends that every college studentdeserves a liberal education, one redefined toembrace and address the way knowledge is ac-tually used in the world, including the world ofwork and civil society. Strongly endorsing the

trends described above, the report calls for anew synthesis between liberal and practical ed-ucation throughout the educational experience:“Liberal education,” the report asserts, “must . . .become consciously, intentionally pragmatic,while it remains conceptually rigorous; its testwill be in the effectiveness of graduates to useknowledge thoughtfully in the wider world.”

Sounding the callIn this context of opportunity and opposition,the challenges confronting today’s educationalleaders are two.

The first is summoning the vision, the will,and the long-term commitment to coalesce in-novations already flowering around us intomore intentional, connected, and cumulativelypowerful frameworks for all students’ learning.

And the second is the willingness to callthese innovations what they are: a twenty-firstcentury vision for an inclusive liberal education.

The future of liberal education and the fu-ture of our core educational missions are oneand the same. nnnnn

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