A college liberal arts education is a dinosaur, a creature of the past. Because the cost of college today means an earned degree must pay for itself quickly after graduation, college is not about learning for life but for a livelihood. Our last best chance to assure future adults acquire the broad knowledge needed for life and lifelong learning is a high school curriculum designed as a liberal arts education.
High tuition costs and the prospect of lengthy debt payments is the number one cause for current declines in college and university enrollments. The value of a college education is not what it used to be; no longer is college the gateway to the American Dream. Marketability is more important than a major. Thus died the liberal college education, a broad and balanced course of study. Because a major now begins in the college freshman year, high school curriculum is the foundation and last bastion of a liberal arts education.
School boards need to pay attention for this essential reason: the last instruction our future adults will receive in US history, US government, world history, the general sciences, non-technical mathematics, non-technical writing and speaking, literature, the arts, and so-called soft skills will be in your high school classes. A high school education, more than ever before, will be the common denominator for Americans to understand America and what it means to be an American.
What do we know?
Our Founding Fathers valued an educated and informed population. Thomas Jefferson emphasized the need for a literate and informed voter if the United States experiment in democracy and representative government were to succeed. Correspondingly, America’s first colleges and universities, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Virginia, emphasized a liberal and rounded education.
“The liberal arts college model took root in the United States in the 19th century, as institutions spread and followed the model of early schools like Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. The model proliferated in the 19th century; some 212 small liberal arts colleges were established between 1850 and 1899. As of 1987, there about 540 liberal arts colleges in the United States.”
“Such colleges aim to impart a broad general knowledge and develop intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional or vocational curriculum.”
For many years, Wisconsin had one of the finest public-university systems in the country. It was built on the Wisconsin Idea: that the university’s influence should not end at the campus’s borders, that professors and the students they taught should ‘search for truth’ to help state legislators write laws, aid the community in technical skills, and generally improve the quality of life across the state.
But the backbone of the idea almost went away in 2015, when Governor Scott Walker released his administration’s budget proposal, which included a change to the university’s mission. The Wisconsin Idea would be tweaked. The ‘search for truth’ would be cut in favor of a charge to ‘meet the state’s workforce needs’”.
“As faculties and administrators become more and more uncertain about the value of knowledge for its own sake and about what a curriculum should include, the colleges’ dependence on the whims of their late teenager clientele is not only increased, but the very reason for the continued existence of the liberal arts college is being whittled away.” “In the decades since, fears about the demise of liberal arts education have been routinely reiterated, particularly in the wake of the Great Recession, as college applicants grew increasingly concerned about the number of job opportunities yielded by their degree. Advances in technology have also spurred predictions about the decline or death of the liberal arts — ChatGPT being the latest.”
At a micro level, “Kovach (a student considering an English major as a preparation for a career in theater and the arts) will graduate with some thirty thousand dollars in debt, a burden that influenced his choice of a degree. For decades now, the cost of education has increased over all and ahead of inflation. One theory has been that this pressure, plus the growing precariousness of the middle class, has played a role in driving students like him toward hard-skill majors. (English majors, on average, carry less debt than students in other fields, but they take longer to pay it down.)”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major
The problem of indebtedness after graduation and a new concept as to the purpose of a collegiate education radically changed the perception of and interest in a liberal arts education.
What is a liberal arts education?
“The goal (of the liberal arts) is to become broadly educated, well-rounded members of society that can understand lots of different domains of knowledge, learn how to learn, and have a specialization of sorts,” says Mark Montgomery, founder and CEO of Great College Advice, a college admissions consultancy with offices across the U.S.
Most liberal arts colleges do not offer separate professional education programs, such as business and engineering schools, which are designed to give students specialized training for specific professional practice.”
A liberal curriculum includes many academic disciplines, especially the skills of communications, writing proficiency, analytical thinking, and leadership skills. Often, a second or third language and courses in the humanities are included.
In the 1950s and 60s when ex-servicemen enrolled in college under the GI Bill and growing numbers of women found opportunities for a college education, a liberal arts education was a popular course of study. Graduates were proud of their BA with a major in the liberal arts. English majors provided insurance that company communiques were correctly written. History and political science majors provided insight into community and state leadership. The liberal arts also were a foundation and springboard for graduate studies.
In past US Census reports most people reporting a college education were graduates of liberal arts colleges or liberal arts programs in state universities. A broad college education, their last formal education, gave them a basis for understanding America and the world.
Instead of a liberal arts education.
Today the trend is changing. “According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, US colleges and universities awarded two million bachelor’s degrees in 2018-19. More than half of these degrees were concentrated in just six fields of study. Plentiful job opportunities and high entry-level salaries make certain fields more attractive. For example, business and health degrees account for nearly one-third of all undergraduate degrees.”
What is general information?
There is no consensus on what constitutes the basic information of an education. Every discipline of study has its own answer. Given this lack of clarity, we can build an understanding of the information a 4K-12 education must generate from the purpose of education and examples of what a lack of correct information looks like.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr. wrote in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, “Only by piling up specific, communally shared information can children learn to participate in complex, cooperative activities with other members of their community.” “Americans are different from Germans, who are in turn different from Japanese, because each group possesses specifically different cultural knowledge. The basic goal of education in a human community is accumulation, the transmission to children of the specific information shared by the adults of the group or polis”.
A public education should, among other goals, educate children to understand the history, culture, and working mechanisms of their country, state, and local community. If not, children are aliens in their own land.
The following are examples of what a lack of or misunderstanding of general information looks like.
• More Americans could identify Michael Jackson as the composer of “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” than could identify the Bill of Rights as a body of amendments to the Constitution.
• More than 50 percent of respondents attributed the quote “From each according to his ability to each according to his needs” to either Thomas Paine, George Washington, or President Obama. The quote is from Karl Marx, author of “The Communist Manifesto.”
• More than a third did not know the century in which the American Revolution took place, and half of respondents believed that either the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, or the War of 1812 occurred before the American Revolution.
• With a political movement now claiming the mantle of the Revolutionary-era Tea Party, more than half of respondents misidentified the outcome of the 18th-century agitation as a repeal of taxes, rather than as a key mobilization of popular resistance to British colonial rule.
• A third mistakenly believed that the Bill of Rights does not guarantee a right to a trial by jury, while 40 percent mistakenly thought that it did secure the right to vote.
• More than half misidentified the system of government established in the Constitution as a direct democracy, rather than a republic – a question that must be answered correctly by immigrants qualifying for U.S. citizenship.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/americans-vs-basic-historical-knowledge/340761/
Some may consider general information to be trivia or clues on TV’s Jeopardy show. But accurate and complete understanding clears up so many misinterpretations and misstatements that populate everyday conversation. For example, children cannot speak about global warming without background of the earth’s atmosphere, the world’s geography, and how nature replenishes oxygen and cleans carbon dioxide from the air we breathe. They cannot engage in conversation about global warming without analytical thinking and problem-solving skills, filters for fact and non-facts, and civil conversation and communication skills. These are part and parcel to what Hirsch considers our cultural literacy and abilities to use knowledge in engaging with our world.
Drive the point with this fact. Just 39 percent of American adults can pass a multiple-choice test required for US citizenship. The passing score is 60 correct out of 100 questions.
The big Duh!
Rousseau wrote that children learn best in a natural environment where, as they encounter the need to know, they engage and begin to understand. Our world is not that natural environment and our children do not exist in Rousseau’s theoretical garden. Responsible adults must create a public education that prepares all children for adult life and that preparation includes a firm foundation of the knowledge and skills that are within the liberal arts.
High school is the last opportunity for all children to gain a Jeffersonian education for an informed citizenry. High school graduation requirements are the last stipulation for ensuring all children have a broad yet appropriately deep knowledge and use of skill sets in literature, history, the sciences, mathematics, the arts, second languages, and the soft skills of reading, writing, analytical thinking, reasoning, and argumentation. These four years set the foundation for what a graduate will say “I was taught …” for the next 80+ years of life. Almost all graduates will engage in training and professional development related to their chosen occupations and avocations. Equally, almost none will re-engage in the curriculum of 4K-12 education. That door closed. We must ensure that when a high school graduate closes her 4K-12 door, she possesses a liberal arts foundation that will serve for the rest of her life.