Liberal Arts: “2.0”?

If you get an email from me at my school address, you’ll see this in my signature line:

The University of Wisconsin-Waukesha, as a campus of the UW Colleges, makes the Wisconsin Idea a reality by delivering excellence in a liberal arts education to its students and by extending the resources of both the campus and the University of Wisconsin System to the residents of Waukesha County and the region.

That’s our mission. The core of it is “delivering excellence in a liberal arts education.”

So what’s a liberal arts education? And, more importantly: why should you care whether you have one?

These are questions being kicked around a lot nowadays, and I’ve written on them in this space before. (See “The Importance of a Liberal Arts Education”) What I had to say then is still true—that in an age of not only great change, but change that is discontinuous—change that is sudden, sharp, and can’t be readily predicted from what has gone before—a liberal arts education is your best bet for coping with this kind of future. “The best start for the life you want,” as we say around here.

But just what is a liberal arts education? And is it what it should be? These questions are surprisingly old ones. The idea of what constitutes a “core curriculum,” of what is a “general education,” of the definition of the “liberal arts,” have changed, and changed greatly, in the thousands of years that these concepts have existed and had effect on Western education. Music—in or out? What about the rest of the arts—and should we just study them, or learn how to do them? How much math? What kind of sciences? Which books should be included in the so-called “canon” of literature? Should we teach about popular culture? Should we include books simply for the sake of diversity? How much should a person know about cultures outside their own? 

When you look at the “gen ed” requirements, the core curriculum in most university educations, you’ll find the hard-fought, hard-won answers to these and a host of other questions, argued about, written about, discussed, and usually voted on by the faculty of a school. If you did a research project and compared “gen ed” requirements in a dozen universities across the country, you’d probably find more broad similarities than differences.

The question of what should be in the liberal arts has surfaced again, this time, not surprisingly, on the Web, and this time, not surprisingly, from the perspective of what the Internet can do, and has done, for us (and, some would say, to us). Some of the most recent critics call this presumably new idea of the liberal arts, “Liberal Arts 2.0”—using the language of computer programming and marketing to indicate a significant revision of the original (and also pointing to “Web 2.0”, the notion that today’s Web, with its emphasis on social networking—Facebook, Twitter, et al.—is very different from the original Web—if not your father’s Web, then certainly your older brother’s Web).

You can take a look at a number of lists of what would be in various people’s liberal arts at this site. Oddly enough, there’s not much in those lists that you won’t find, in one way or another, in most “General Education Requirements” in college catalogs today. Or you can look at Kottke.org, a blog that promises to be about the “2.0” in the liberal arts. As I noted earlier, social networking and the ability to use the new tool that is the Internet seems to be big in many people’s definitions.

In many ways, though, this approach to the liberal arts is what Eugene O’Neill would call “a mug’s game”—it’s a game you’re not going to win no matter how often you play it or even how good you get at it. Content is always going to change; tools are always going to change. So does the phrase “a liberal arts education” mean anything?

What if we approach the question from the back instead of the front? What if we ask the question, what should people be able to do after they take an education in the liberal arts?
If we use this approach, we can stabilize things—tools may change, content may change, but what we’re able to do will pretty much stay the same. I think those come down to five things:

We should be able to communicate effectively. 500 years ago that meant a student should be able to write clearly and speak with power. Those requirements haven’t changed, but we should add today that they should be able to use the Web to communicate as well. One more thing: we should be able to listen well. Communication, after all, is a two-way street.

1. We should be able to think effectively—creatively, skeptically, synthetically, and above all critically. Two things here: we should be able to solve problems, yes, but even more so, we should be able to frame problems. It’s pretty easy to solve a problem you’re given (“Two trains leave at the same time, one from Phoenix, the other from New York…”) It’s a lot harder to figure out what the problem really is. To do both these things requires broad skills and a broad association with various kinds of subjects. It’s a generalist’s skill, when you come right down to it.
2. We should possess information literacy. This is a lot more than “looking things up,” and it’s a lot more than Googling—and it’s a heck of a lot more than using Wikipedia. It’s the ability to both find and store information effectively. It’s the ability to distinguish between sources and the truth each contains.  It’s the ability to recognize when you need to look something up, and then to use what you find with intelligence.
3. We should be able to work well in groups. This is probably the newest thing in this list of outcomes. For centuries, a liberal arts education has allowed for this as one of the things that students should be able to do (16th century university students put on plays, for example; law students organized moot courts; and lab sciences have often had students work in partnerships), but only recently have educators come to recognize this skill as one that should be designed into the curriculum. With the ability to connect through the Web, and the understanding that the vast majority of the problems that we’ll face in the future can’t be solved by a single person, group work has become much more prominent when educators think about what the education they provide should be able to do for their students.
4. Finally, a good liberal arts education should instill in its students a desire to learn continually, the tools to learn continually, and the understanding that in this world, you can never stop learning. I’ve talked to a number of students whom I’ve asked, “Are you going to grad school?” They sigh and tell me they’re tired of school. And I can understand that—I can understand being tired of the structure of schooling, but I can’t understand, and I certainly can’t forgive, being tired of learning. For one thing, to live is to learn; to stop learning is to die, on at least one level. But at the core of the future we’ve moved into is that, for all of us, continual learning is simply now the order of the day. We can’t escape it, unless we want to experience what my children call “epic fail.” A good liberal arts education will not only make you recognize the need for learning, it will give you a tremendous desire to keep learning. It will stoke your curiosity. It will make you hungry to learn more, knowing that you’ll never learn even a tiny fraction of all the wonders that the universe has to offer. (Humility is a byproduct of a good liberal arts education.)

So, to sum up: Liberal Arts 1.0, or Liberal Arts 1.1, or Liberal Arts 2.0—it doesn’t much matter, as long as the education entails in it everything I’ve listed above.
It’s what we do here at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha. It’s the heart and soul of the education we offer—“the best start for the life you want.”