[This post continues my series on the new book The Liberating Arts: Why We Need a Liberal Arts Education from Plough Publishing. You can read previous posts in the series here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.]
Of all the objections to the liberal arts rebutted in this book, this one might be the most plain irritating. The good news is that I don’t hear it all that often these days. However, I do occasionally hear people say that most people don’t have the intellectual capacity to benefit from a liberal arts education. Or at least (they say), people who work with their hands for a living, stay-at-home moms, and other people who don’t do “knowledge work” have no need for the liberal arts.
When I hear the claim that most people can’t handle the liberal arts, I like to refer the naysayer to a section (starting around the 30-minute mark) of William F. Buckley’s 1970 Firing Line interview of Mortimer Adler in which Adler talks about the propriety of liberal arts education for children of various intelligence levels:
My other short response to the objection is that anyone who is eligible to vote needs the liberal arts because they fit you for public life.
But this post is about Chapter 10 of The Liberating Arts, so let’s return to that. The two framing case studies here are Nathan Beacom’s “Lyceums: Places to Think with Neighbors” and Peter Mommsen’s “Small Magazines as Educational Communities.” Beacom recalls the history of the American Lyceum, present in thousands of communities across the country through the middle decades of the 19th century before disappearing during the social disruptions of the Civil War and Gilded Age. Today, partly in response to the decline in civic engagement documented by Robert Putnam and others, Beacom touts the formation of a new Lyceum Movement operating in several states. The hope is that these local organizations will strengthen common life and provide a shared vocabulary for confronting contemporary problems.
I really liked Mommsen’s essay. He is editor-in-chief of Plough, the quarterly magazine published by the Bruderhof since the mid-20th century, so he has some insight into his subject. He writes, “The aim of small magazines like Plough is not simply to inform or entertain but to offer fresh perspectives that help readers think differently and equip them to live their lives more intentionally.” This statement resonated with me because I have vivid, repeated memories of discovering magazines that gave me “a-ha” insights and changed my perspective on various topics.
The chapter’s core essay is Jessica Hooten Wilson’s “Liberal Learning for All.” In a sense, the essay is a good encapsulation of the entire book’s case of the need for liberal learning. After discussing the importance of the liberal arts for culture making in community, Wilson adds a section on “Liberal Education versus Liberal Arts Schooling.” She leads it off with this statement:
To categorize the liberal arts as a luxury for the rich and nerdy is to miss out on the education that so many have fought for, particularly women and African Americans. What was once held out of reach is now widely available, yet despite being accessible, it’s not sufficiently desired and pursued.
Wilson holds out hope that universities will reinvest in the liberal arts after recognizing how critical they are to their missions, but also states that we’ll need ways to transmit that learning whether or not higher ed gets back on board.
I should also mention that the essay contains a lot of Aristotle, so props to Wilson for that.
There’s no conclusion or summative chapter to The Liberating Arts; the editors just end things after Chapter 10. It would have been nice to have some kind of restatement of the overall thesis of the book and a recapitulation of its main arguments.
On the whole, this book gets a solid B+ from me. It presents a pretty wide array of voices that affirm the value of a liberal arts education and shows how it can benefit ordinary people in many unexpected ways. It also offers insights on several interesting ways that adult can “come back to the liberal arts” during their post-schooling years. As I have mentioned in one or two other posts in this series, I do think the editors took their eye off the ball a bit by not focusing more of the overall argument on the continuing need for the liberal arts in secondary and higher education. That seems to be where so much of the fight is today, and I already know from conversations in the faculty reading group I moderated that the college professors for whom this book appears to be intended really want more material along those lines.
If you have followed this series of posts from the beginning, I hope you have picked up some effective replies to people who are skeptical of the liberal arts. I believe I did!