The Liberality of Liberal Education

There used to be a distinction that signaled the difference between study for the sake of acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary for some specific line of work or trade and a higher form of study that was undertaken because it was thought worthy in itself. I am speaking, of course, of the traditional division between the servile and the liberal arts. For example, Aquinas, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, calls liberal or free those arts which are concerned with knowledge for its own sake, and servile those arts which are concerned with utility, where the knowledge sought is for the sake of some already pre-determined, practical end.

This traditional distinction has been all but lost to contemporary discourse. At a recent talk that I gave on liberal learning, an alarming number of members of the audience thought it must mean the teaching of progressive doctrine to impressionable young minds. This assumption is not completely off-base. It is a fact that professors have too often treated the classroom as a space of left-wing activism rather than a space of searching inquiry into the truth. In reaction to this, some conservatives have pushed back by using liberal education for explicitly conservative political ends. And it is a fact that young conservatives are too often silenced, bullied, or in more subtle forms ostracized on our campuses.

But in its original sense, the distinction has nothing to do with partisan politics. That we cannot grasp this is part of the situation we find ourselves in. We are in a strange state where we retain the language of higher and liberal education, but we no longer recognize that its true meaning presumes a distinction between two different states of mind: work and leisure.

The servile arts—what today we would call professional schools and majors—dominate today’s academy. In spite of all the hysteria around gender studies or critical race theory, very few students are pursuing these or other humanistic modes of inquiry—including traditional liberal arts, such as mathematics, music, and philosophy. Even natural sciences like physics and chemistry seem increasingly pointless.

The reason has nothing to do with politics: it is simply not obvious what the practical goal of such study might be. Unless there is an answer to the question of utility, study seems vain or empty. But this has things exactly backward. If all one’s study is for the sake of making oneself useful and productive, what gets lost is the most essential task: the formation of the person who must grasp the ends their productivity serves. A person who has not been trained to do this will exhaust themselves on a hamster wheel; they will realize, at some point, that they never bothered to ask where they are going or what their efforts are ultimately for.

No one denies that the servile arts are necessary and important for human society, or that they have a place in the higher education landscape. We need bright young people who can design and build bridges, run successful businesses, and write code for our computers. But surely we also want these people to have some sense of the good of these endeavors beyond the works themselves. Where is the bridge taking people? What product is the business making and are its effects on those who consume it good or bad? How does the algorithm change how we think and live, and are these changes desirable? The technical arts are not aimed at asking or answering these latter questions, but we dismiss or retreat at the cost of our deepest human needs and aspirations.

As a culture, we seem to have forgotten that utility as a measure of value piggybacks on something higher than it. Money is perhaps the most useful good in our market economy, but if we are rational, we pursue it only insofar as it helps us get other things we want. What is useful and instrumentally valuable in human life and society—at least in a society that is well-ordered—is always for the sake of what is highest or ultimately choice-worthy in human life or society. I want money for a car, and I want a car for transportation, but where do I want to go and why? This final question does not ask for means but for an end or goal—it asks what the means is for. If there is no vision of what is ultimately valuable and choice-worthy for individuals and societies—then something is deeply amiss. If there is no vision of what is ultimately valuable and choice-worthy for individuals and societies—then something is deeply amiss. Click To Tweet

It follows that an education that is primarily directed towards preparation for work is lacking something essential for human fulfillment. For it is obvious that no matter what career you choose in life, you still have to know what your work is for, what your money is for, and what you are living for. If our minds are only trained to reason instrumentally, then we will only be able to carve out for ourselves an empty and vain existence—one in which we work, for the sake of making money, so that we have the things we need in life and can have a modicum of rest, so that we can get back to work, for the sake of making money, and so on until we die, thus breaking the unending cycle of being useful for someone else. If we are never trained to ask and answer the question of what our work is for, because we have only ever been slaves to the purposes of others, then we are not truly free. And our so-called free time is nothing more than a brief restorative period that allows us to work more efficiently for someone else.

For our highest achieving students, those who are most likely to be the next generation of leaders, the most important question they face concerns ends rather than means. Liberal learning is designed to prepare students to face such questions and to have the sort of cultivated mind that has a fighting chance of answering them with clarity and depth of vision. The university used to be the place where liberal learning was honored, valued, and thrived. As Allan Bloom so aptly put it, “a great university presented another kind of atmosphere, announcing that there are questions that ought to be addressed by everyone but are not asked in the ordinary life of work and are not expected to be answered there.”

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