My Proposed Solution. When I look around for past statements of purpose for liberal arts education, I turn to the little noticed 84-page book entitled THE PAIDEIA PROPOSAL: AN EDUCATIONAL MANIFESTO (1982), written by Mortimer J. Adler on behalf of the other 21 members of the Paideia Group. This proposal for American elementary and secondary education probably received relatively little notice at the time it was published because it is arguably over-ambitious. But I return to it only regarding the purposes of liberal arts college education, which is not explicitly discussed in the proposal.
The 22 authors of the proposal, being Americans, frame their approach to education in terms of a vision of democracy in which the citizens actively work toward becoming liberally educated persons, as distinct from mere specialists of the sort who teach in graduate schools in the United States today. This point gives rise to the key question, Can the specialists on the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard today be entrusted with designing liberal education for undergraduates at Harvard? Or does something about becoming a specialist render one incapable of becoming a liberally educated person oneself and therefore a qualified liberal arts teacher? In short, are specialists seriously under-educated in the liberal arts? I hope not.
Now, as to the purposes of liberal arts education, the 22 authors urge us to think about the famous American slogan about the pursuit of happiness. I take the pursuit of happiness to be roughly equivalent to what Aristotle means by flourishing.
You cannot flourish on an empty stomach. So to avoid starving to death prematurely, most of us will have to work to make a living, except for those among us who inherit great wealth. So for most of us, earning a living is a necessity.
However, in addition to earning a living, there is the need to live well, because human flourishing is related to living well, not just to earning a living and avoiding starvation and premature death. But "[t]o live well in the fullest human sense," declares Adler, "involves learning as well as earning." Catchy, eh?
Now, we have clarified the primary purpose of liberal arts education: to help train undergraduate students in how to become lifelong learners in the liberal arts, even though they are working to make a living.
But what kinds of learning in the liberal arts should one devote oneself to? Adler identifies three kinds of learning that I associate with liberal arts education: (1) learning an organized body of knowledge in various liberal arts fields, (2) learning how to develop certain intellectual skills in the liberal arts fields (intellectual skills such as critical reading and speaking and writing), and (3) learning how to understand philosophic thought and insight, and learning literary and artistic criticism and appreciation.
But can the famously individualistic faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard, under the leadership of President Faust, lead us by their example by organizing a defensible liberal arts curriculum around these three broad kinds of learning?
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