The Liberal Arts and the End of Education Essay -- Philosophy Educatio

The Liberal Arts and the End of EducationABSTRACT An international conference that takes doctrine Educating Humanity as its theme does well to revisit the broad(a) arts tradition. Although the liberal arts are most often assimilated to studies brought together as the Humanities, the hoar usage included the arts which employed artificial languages in mathematics, music, and astronomy, as well as the literature and letters of the various born(p) languages. The current conflation of liberal education with the humanities does violence to the historical tradition in education, reducing it to fluff in the eyes of tough-minded scientists who know that only numbers make objectivity. The liberal arts of the traditional undergraduate curriculum provided the skills to liberate the students linguistic powers so that he or she could read, speak, and understand natural language in on the whole its functions. To educate human persons to master language is to encourage students to take possessi on of their natural powers so that they can express themselves, understand what others say, and reason together. The arts of natural language lead to mastery of the mathematical arts which use a language that is no ones mother tongue. Together, the seven arts rid students of the worst enemies of worldly concern ignorance and prejudice. Since no one can be considered to have received a goodeducation if he accepts uncritically the opinions ofthe educators of his own measures, the student shouldencounter alternatives to these opinions.Samuel S. KutlerThe prehistorical is always difficult to deal with. We are torn between the temptations of remaining within the comfort of a past we have become accustomed to and the evenly dangerous alternative of fleeing an ... ...he arts of mathematical language teach us habits of rigorous, disinterested abstract thought. Post-moderns seem to be engaged in replacing philosophy, perhaps in the guise of logic, with rhetoric so that all becomes conv ersation or narrative, and privilege is problematic. Were we to resuscitate a version of the liberal arts tradition as pedagogy and a goal for our post-modern times, we would not be coaxing a dusty corpse of a bygone tradition back to life. Rather we would be putting our tradition into practice. The liberal arts live only in time, in some historical instantiation or another. Now may be the time to bring this curriculum back into our time. Rather than a person ill-equipped to do anything, the more traditionally educated liberal arts graduate could once more be a person who is equipped by his skills to do anything. And, to evaluate what is worth doing.