Liberal arts education
Liberal arts education is a traditional academic course in Western higher education, which traditionally covers the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Liberal arts takes the term art in the sense of a learned skill rather than specifically the fine arts. Liberal arts education can refer to studies in a liberal arts degree course or to a university education more generally. Such a course of study contrasts with those that are principally vocational, professional, or technical, as well as religiously based courses.
The term liberal arts for an educational curriculum dates back to classical antiquity in the West, but has changed in meaning considerably, mostly expanding it. The seven subjects in the ancient and medieval meaning came to be divided into the trivium of rhetoric, grammar, and logic, and the quadrivium of astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music. However, there are hundreds of modern disciplines of study that now support modern professions and are traditionally recognised as liberal arts throughout academia. Some of the most popular liberal arts disciplines include: Anthropology, English, Literature, Fine arts, Foreign languages, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Music, Journalism, Economics, Law, Communications, Architecture, Creative arts, Art, and History, and the Formal and Natural Sciences. Degrees in Liberal studies are often confused with those in a liberal arts discipline. Liberal studies refers to degrees with a broad curriculum, across multiple liberal arts disciplines and/or sciences and technologies.
Apart from the sciences, enrollment in liberal arts degree programs has been declining in the 2010s and 2020s in the United States, in part because of a perception of worse job prospects. As of 2023, liberal arts degrees holders in the United States had a median wage of US$60,000, as opposed to $70,000 for all degree holders. As a result, liberal arts colleges and schools are popularly rebranding themselves as more vague and encompassing areas of study, such as arts and social sciences, arts and sciences and humanities.
History
Before they became known by their Latin variations, the liberal arts were the continuation of Ancient Greek methods of inquiry that began with a "desire for a universal understanding." Pythagoras argued that there was a mathematical harmony to the cosmos or the universe; his followers linked the four arts of astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music into one area of study to form the "disciplines of the mediaeval quadrivium". In the 4th-century-BC Athens, the government of the polis, or city-state, respected the ability of rhetoric or public speaking above almost everything else. Eventually rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic became the educational programme of the trivium. Together they came to be known as the seven liberal arts. Originally these subjects or skills were held by classical antiquity to be essential for a free person to acquire in order to take an active part in civic life, something that included among other things participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and participating in military service. While the arts of the quadrivium might have appeared prior to the arts of the trivium, by the Middle Ages educational programmes taught the trivium first while the quadrivium were the following stage of education.Rooted in the basic curriculum – the or "well-rounded education" – of late Classical and Hellenistic Greece, the "liberal arts" or "liberal pursuits" were already called so in formal education during the Roman Empire. The first recorded use of the term "liberal arts" occurs in De Inventione by Marcus Tullius Cicero, but it is unclear if he created the term. Seneca the Younger discusses liberal arts in education from a critical Stoic point of view in Moral Epistles. The exact classification of the liberal arts varied however in Roman times, and it was only after Martianus Capella in the 5th century influentially brought the seven liberal arts as bridesmaids to the Marriage of Mercury and Philology, that they took on canonical form.
The four "scientific" artes – music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy – were known from the time of Boethius onwards as the quadrivium. After the 9th century, the remaining three arts of the "humanities" – grammar, logic, and rhetoric – were grouped as the trivium. It was in that two-fold form that the seven liberal arts were studied in the medieval Western university. During the Middle Ages, logic gradually came to take predominance over the other parts of the trivium.
In the 12th century the iconic image – Philosophia et septem artes liberales – was produced by an Alsatian nun and abbess Herrad of Landsberg with her community of women as part of the Hortus deliciarum. Their encyclopedia compiled ideas drawn from philosophy, theology, literature, music, arts, and sciences and was intended as a teaching tool for women of the abbey. The image Philosophy and seven liberal arts represents the circle of philosophy, and is presented as a rosette of a cathedral: a central circle and a series of semicircles arranged all around. It shows learning and knowledge organised into seven relations, the Septem Artes Liberales or Seven Liberal Arts. Each of these arts find their source in the Greek φιλοσοφία, philosophia, literally "love of wisdom". St. Albert the Great, a doctor of the Catholic Church, asserted that the seven liberal arts were referred to in Sacred Scripture, saying: "It is written, 'Wisdom hath built herself a house, she hath hewn her out seven pillars'. This house is the Blessed Virgin; the seven pillars are the seven liberal arts."
In the Renaissance, the Italian humanists and their Northern counterparts, despite in many respects continuing the traditions of the Middle Ages, reversed that process. Re-christening the old trivium with a new and more ambitious name: Humanitas, and also increasing its scope, they downplayed logic as opposed to the traditional Latin grammar and rhetoric, and added to them history, Greek, and moral philosophy, with a new emphasis on poetry as well. The educational curriculum of humanism spread throughout Europe during the sixteenth century and became the educational foundation for the schooling of European elites, the functionaries of political administration, the clergy of the various legally recognized churches, and the learned professions of law and medicine. The ideal of a liberal arts, or humanistic education grounded in classical languages and literature, persisted in Europe until the middle of the twentieth century; in the United States, it had come under increasingly successful attack in the late 19th century by academics interested in reshaping American higher education around the natural and social sciences.
Similarly, Wilhelm von Humboldt's educational model in Prussia, which later became the role model for higher education also in North America, went beyond vocational training. In a letter to the Prussian king, he wrote:
The philosopher Julian Nida-Rümelin has criticized discrepancies between Humboldt's ideals and the contemporary European education policy, which narrowly understands education as a preparation for the labor market, arguing that we need to decide between "McKinsey and Humboldt".
Modern usage
The modern use of the term liberal arts consists of four areas: the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Academic areas that are associated with the term liberal arts include:- Life science
- Physical science
- Formal science
- Humanities
- Social science
Secondary school
Liberal arts education at the secondary school level prepares students for higher education at a university.Curricula differ from school to school, but generally include language, chemistry, biology, geography, art, mathematics, music, history, philosophy, civics, social sciences, and foreign languages.
In the United States
In the United States, liberal arts colleges are schools emphasizing undergraduate study in the liberal arts. The teaching at liberal arts colleges is often Socratic, typically with small classes; professors are often allowed to concentrate more on their teaching responsibilities than are professors at research universities.Science and mathematics are integral to four-year liberal arts colleges, and indeed their graduates have been demonstrated to be more likely to apply to graduate school in science and mathematics than their peers and make up a higher proportion of National Academy of Science members than would usually be expected for the number of science and mathematics graduates produced by an institution.
Traditionally, a bachelor's degree in one particular area within liberal arts, with substantial study outside that main area, is earned over four years of full-time study. However, some universities such as Saint Leo University, Pennsylvania State University, Florida Institute of Technology, and New England College have begun to offer an associate degree in liberal arts. Colleges like the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts offer a unique program with only one degree offering, a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies, while the Harvard Extension School offers both a Bachelor of Liberal Arts and a Master of Liberal Arts. Additionally, colleges like the University of Oklahoma College of Liberal Studies and the Harvard Extension School offer an online, part-time option for adult and nontraditional students.
Most students earn either a Bachelor of Arts degree or a Bachelor of Science degree.