Losing Our Souls: The Neglect of the Liberal Arts
In the past century, the liberal arts have come upon hard times. For some, they’re just not that useful for vocational success. For others, they’re associated with a harmful cultural elitism of the West. However, these critiques, and others like them, are neither quite right nor fair.
Whatever our cultural or ethnic or socioeconomic background, and whatever our vocational realities or aspirations, the liberal arts are important. Far from being harmful, they’re invaluable in shaping us as living souls with a full-orbed view of life and the world.[1]
What Are the Liberal Arts?
The liberal arts have nothing to do with being culturally, politically, or theologically liberal.
Rather, they go back to the Greeks, who “believed that there was some basic knowledge that all people should know if they were going to become ‘philosophers’ (‘lovers of wisdom’).” This knowledge, they believed, gave one a “rounded education.” Later, the Romans began calling this body of knowledge the liberal arts, perhaps “implying that such knowledge is appropriate for a liber, a free man or citizen who could take part in the debate in the public square.”[2]
As Christianity gained prominence in the West during the late Roman Empire and early Middle Ages, the Christian church received this liberal arts tradition, assimilating it into its approach to and understanding of knowledge. Thus when the modern university began developing in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries in Christian Europe, its curriculum centered on the classical liberal arts, “precisely because they aimed to expose their students to the universitas or ‘the whole’ of Christian learning.”[3]
Curricula consisted of the trivium, which included grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium, which included arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music. After completing these subjects, students studied philosophy and then, the queen of the sciences, theology. During the Renaissance, subjects such as ethics, history, language, and poetry were added to this basic body of knowledge.
These subjects didn’t simply impact how educators approached curricula. They gave everyday people a unified understanding of knowledge and life, morals and truth, even if they differed over the details. More or less, this educational philosophy reigned until the late nineteenth century.
However, subtle changes had been occurring for several centuries prior to this regarding how we approach knowledge. These changes culminated with the advent of a progressive approach to education and knowledge, which resulted in the rejection of the liberal arts. This change wouldn’t stop with education and curriculum, though. It would result in a seismic shift that ultimately changed how everyday people viewed life and the world.
Why Were the Liberal Arts Rejected?
Progressive educators replaced a classical liberal arts education with a pragmatic one. For them, education, and therefore knowledge, wasn’t so much about one generation handing down a great body of truth to another generation. It’s about teaching life skills and problem solving. It’s about whatever is demonstrably practical or useful for that moment (according to the tenets of whoever happens to be in charge).
In truth, truth is just a relative construct for the progressive educator anyhow: “Truth, evolutionary in nature, partakes of no transcendental or eternal reality and is based on experience that can be tested and shared by all who investigate.”[4]
Through the following decades and even unto the present day, this general spirit concerning education, knowledge, and truth has gained momentum. With the rise of modernism, spiritual questions were excluded; and with the rise of postmodernism, knowledge came to be fragmented. No longer would universities teach truth as unified or pass on what they had received. No longer would we have the security of a unified view of knowledge that includes metaphysics: knowledge about the truth and reality which exists in the world beyond the senses or the physical.
Instead, progressive educators started afresh, creating a new canon of knowledge that bore little resemblance to the world that preceded it. This siren call hasn’t simply come from educators. It’s come from columnists, lobbyists, politicians, students, and others. This very year we have seen the effects of these shifts, whether in a majority of Stanford students voting against requiring History of Western Civilizations in their curriculum,[5] or in Yale students refusing to study major English poets.[6]
Why Should We Care About the Liberal Arts?
If we approach life uncritically and unthinkingly, we breathe the air of modern education and inhale its view of knowledge and truth, blackening our lungs. For our own spiritual health, we need the classical liberal arts. We need to reclaim our tradition and carry it forward.
The subjects that comprise the liberal arts, that great body of knowledge that has been tested and tried for more than two thousand years, guard us from error. When we approach them with a distinctly Christian vision of knowledge and truth, they lead us to truth, goodness, and beauty. As living souls, they shape our consciousness and imagination. They mold our thoughts, affections, and habits, teaching us about excellence and honor and that which is worthy of praise. They build us up as human beings, communities, and societies. They help to make us whole and complete, in all areas of life.
Whatever our present or eventual vocation, we all need exposure to the liberal arts. Vocational training is important and necessary, absolutely. So are the liberal arts.
How Can I Learn About the Liberal Arts, Practically?
Exposure to the liberal arts should occur in different ways and venues.
For example, we should learn about the liberal arts in all levels of education. To the extent that we can influence educational curricula as parents, students, administrators, or something else, even in small ways, let’s do so.
Students entering higher education should seriously consider attending a Christian college with a classical liberal arts curriculum. The college they choose and the courses they take will change their lives forever one way or another. Students called by God to pursue professional, technical, or vocational degrees may still do so, remembering that whereas vocational training prepares them to make a living, the liberal arts prepare them for life. And what have we if we haven’t the knowledge to live a life worth living? What have we benefited if we’ve gained the world and yet forfeited our soul?
Other students may be called to purse a liberal arts degree. Almost immediately, some will ask, “Don’t you just spend more to make less with a liberal arts degree?” The short answer is “no.” According to the research, those who learn a skill or trade often (but not always) make more money in the first years after their graduation. However, those with liberal arts degrees often catch up as they advance in their careers, according to George Anders in “Good News Liberal-Arts Majors: Your Peers Probably Won’t Outearn You Forever.”[7]
Within God’s “divine division of labor,” all legitimate vocations have value in God’s economy of work.[8] For some of us, following God’s call may mean pursuing a liberal arts degree, and for others it may not. But whatever God’s specific call(s) on our lives, the liberal arts are valuable for all of us.
Exposure to this great tradition should also occur in the church. If part of the church’s function is to help its people holistically understand the world in which God has placed them, then it will extol the great truths to them. This will help people “see the whole of life from a Christian perspective” and to “think deeply and Christianly about life and culture.”[9]
Pastors, teachers, and leaders in the church, then, have a profound responsibility and opportunity. We certainly can’t depend on others to give them a Christian vision for life and the world. That said, this will look different in a church than in a school. Perhaps it can happen through a Sunday school, Sunday night, or Wednesday night series; maybe it can be part of a men’s study group or some other ministry of the church.
Recently a youth pastor emailed me, asking how he might Christianly teach non-biblical history to his youth group. “How does a Christian teach about the Sumerians, Greeks, Romans, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and so forth?” he asked. The reason for his questions was that his kids were learning a view of history at school that didn’t line up with a Christian vision of these matters. Indeed, the church, in so far as it is a kingdom outpost, representing the sovereign King of the universe, has a broad responsibility to teach its people about God’s world and His work in it.
However church leaders expose those within their care to a premodern approach to and understanding of that great body of knowledge, the important thing is that they see the value of it, and, somehow, with hard work and intentionality, translate that to them. After all, human beings haven’t changed; why should our philosophy of education have changed?
Conclusion
Augustine famously explained that all truth is God’s truth, wherever we find it. In the liberal arts we find a great body of truth that Christians particularly have helped shape and sharpen and steward. We, too, can share in this tradition for ourselves, our communities, and, indeed, our world.
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[1] By the term living soul, I mean that mankind, as created by God in Genesis 2, is composed of an immaterial and material aspect. We are necessarily material and spiritual beings, or living souls. Matthew McAffee writes,
God fashion[ed] man from the dust of the ground. He breathes into man the breath of life so man becomes a living soul. . . . Man became a “living soul.” He didn’t become simply dust plus life-breath. No, through God’s creative process, He built us up from the dust of the ground and invested us with the life-breath of human personhood, which means we become a living soul. For this reason, human life, as intended from the beginning, can’t be separated from the body in this life.
(J. Matthew Pinson, Matthew Steven Bracey, Matthew McAffee, and Michael A. Oliver, Sexuality, Gender, and the Church: A Christian Response in the New Cultural Landscape (Nashville: Welch College, 2016), 17, 151-52).
With respect to the liberal arts, then, they don’t simply sharpen our minds, or effect our affections, or shape our habits. They shape who we are as human beings, our entire being, as living souls. By contrast, the absence of the liberal arts, and of what they represent, also affects us, in the opposite direction.
[2] Welch College Catalog 2016-2017, “The Welch College Core” (Nashville: Welch College), 50.
[3] Ibid.
[4] The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Columbia University Press, 2013; in “John Dewey,” The Free Dictionary; http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/J.+Dewey; accessed September 17, 2016; Internet.
[5] Dennis Prager, “Why the Left Loathes Western Civilization,” National Review, April 26, 2016; http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434549/left-western-civilization-case-hatred; September 17, 2016; Internet.
[6] Rich Lowry, “A Safe Space from Chaucer,” National Review, June 7, 2016; http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436268/yale-students-major-english-poets-curriculum-has-too-many-white-males; September 17, 2016; Internet.
[7] George Anders, “http://www.wsj.com/articles/good-news-liberal-arts-majors-your-peers-probably-wont-outearn-you-forever-1473645902,” Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2016; http://www.wsj.com/articles/good-news-liberal-arts-majors-your-peers-probably-wont-outearn-you-forever-1473645902; accessed September 17, 2016; Internet. See also James Grossman, “History isn’t a ‘useless’ major. It teaches critical thinking, something America needs plenty more of,” Los Angles Times, May 30, 2016; http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-grossman-history-major-in-decline-20160525-snap-story.html; accessed September 17, 2016; Internet. The fact is that some liberal arts majors make more than some non-liberal arts majors, and some don’t. It’s just too simplistic to say that all, or even nearly all, liberal arts majors make less than those who don’t major in the liberal arts.
[8] Gene Edward Veith, Jr., God At Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life (Wheaton: Crossway, 2002), 40.
[9] Welch College Catalog 2016-2017.
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