A liberal arts education

by Usvatte-aratchi

There has been an exchange of some notes on ‘a liberal arts education’ and these are further to them. Universities are an output of the society in which they grew, except in countries which were colonies of various imperial powers, where they were implants (a la Ralph Peiris) from metropolitan countries and have been hot house plants in the new hot and humid environments. Universities (universitas generale) started their life in the Middle Ages in Lombardy but institutions of ‘higher education’ have been universal in well settled societies from Japan and China in the East to Egypt and Mali in Africa. (Of education in pre-Columbian Americas, I know nothing).

In the 16th century education was liberated from two bondages: first from bondage to the Roman Catholic Church; second from bondage to scholasticism built on Aristotelean logic and syllogisms. So was born humanism in place of concentration on theology and God. So was born the new method, Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (New Instrument) replacing Aristotle’s Organum coming from the -4th century, as the new paradigm of knowledge (a distinctly Kuhnian revolution). These brought back the pursuit of pagan Greek knowledge and their methods of inquiry, throwing out the trivium and the quadrivium of medieval university. The consequences were the enormous expansion of knowledge which continues to date when the book of nature was read using the language in which it is written: mathematics (Bacon). Hence, humanism and humanist education as well as a liberal arts education. It was a shift from God to man and from the study of texts to the study of man and nature. Education had been liberated from both. Humanism in earlier usages included both arts and sciences but as the 20th progressed, usage has tended to differentiate between the humanities and the sciences, to which now has been added technology, its meaning itself having shifted over time. (A striking instance is the rise of STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] in place of knowledge of languages, especially Greek and Latin.) Liberal Arts Colleges were where this new knowledge was pursued using Bacon’s Novum Organum. Dartmouth in New York, William and Mary in Massachusetts, Swarthmore in Pennsylvania and Pomona in California are outstanding examples. Oxford University was a collection of excellent liberal arts colleges (none of them competent to award degrees but capable of electing its own Fellows) comprising the university (which alone had authority to award degrees), until sciences began to become prominent. It was home of the courses that went to form the literae humaniores, where they studied not only Greek, Latin and Hebrew but also Greek and Roman Civilizations. In Cambridge, the equivalent was the Classical Tripos. In Britain in mid-19th century, after the appointment of the First Royal Commission on Oxford, the case for a liberal arts education was put forward strongly two Oxford scholars: John Henry Newman, a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church and Mark Pattison, rector of Lincoln. They saw the aim of a liberal arts education as that of cultivating the mind, as Mark Pattison put it, from where it could venture into whatever profession it wished. So learning the practice of law, medicine, engineering, architecture was built on a foundation of liberal arts education. A Medical Sciences Tripos was not established in Cambridge until 1966.

Sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) were added to the liberal arts curriculum much later, at the end of the 19th century but beginnings so far back as the 18th century. The first professor of science, appointed in 1758, was John Winthrop at Harvard College in New England, which is now the Liberal Arts College of Harvard University. It was a hard and long battle to establish science as a part of undergraduate education on both sides of the Atlantic. At Harvard, the moving figure for curriculum reform was President Charles Eliot and at Cornell, President Andrew White. There were many who opposed.

The new education was liberal in another sense. The new education liberated people from the craft guild system, where a man was trained to craft or a profession in some instances, in which he stayed for his life. Young men normally started working life as apprentices. A liberal arts education left a young man free to follow any profession he chose. Graduates from these universities learnt law, medicine, architecture and later management and other professions. In the US, a first degree is necessary even now to take up entrance examinations in professional schools. The most marked departure was in the US with the establishment of Land Grant colleges after the passage of the Morrill Acts. The immediate need was to apply scientific knowledge to the development of huge expanses of land opened as people moved west. The Federal Government granted large extents of land which could be used to set Agricultural and Machinery Colleges which formed the basis of many now first-rate State Colleges and universities. (The best known now is perhaps Texas A & M University in College Station.) At the same time the development of large business enterprises required new forms of knowledge to manage them. The two leading businesses were railways and telephones which developed features unknown heretofore. In 1889, Andrew Carnegie bitterly complained ‘While the college student has been learning a little about the barbarous and petty squabbles of a far distant past, … the future captain of industry is hotly engaged in the school of experience, obtaining the very knowledge required for his future triumphs’. Consequently, we have Kellogg Business School in Northwestern, Booth in Chicago and Sloan in MIT. So was born the need for business management schools, which now form a part of many universities. Among first rate universities in the West, only Princeton has withstood pressure to run business schools. Universities in Germany in the 19th century were closer to industry than anywhere else. Many good scholars both in Europe and the US did not fail to study or otherwise make themselves familiar with universities in Germany. After Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 and named after a businessman, the idea of a German university caught on and the teaching of and research in the sciences became more acceptable in US. In ironic contrast, in 2018, a President of a university remarked on the absence of critical thinking because of the decay in education in liberal arts.

Liberty, to which liberal arts education contributed mightily, has been the central driving force in political and political thought in modern times. Of the three battle cry words of the French Revolution, none has persistently driven thought and action in politics as liberty. Equality among citizens is essential that everyone is at liberty. The abolition of slavery made all men (and women) free, though not equally. 800 or so millions of Chinese enjoyed greater liberty as they arose above abject poverty. Even casual observation would demonstrate the large mass of Chinese who travel overseas compared to the very few who did before 2000 and that is another signification of the greater liberty (opportunity to make choices) enjoyed by people of that country. The effort by successive governments in India to raise levels of living constitutes a massive contribution to liberty of individuals. In 2019 (2018?), Prime Minister Modi opened his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations with ‘We have built 112 million latrines in India’. In that achievement 112 households were liberated from the high risk of infectious bowel diseases. The trade union movement, a magnificent embodiment of fraternity that gave employees much desired greater power in bargaining with their employers won for them liberties that they never had enjoyed earlier.

The recent decline in their power in capitalist economies and their total impotence in communist economies has reduced the degree of liberty they enjoyed for about a century. Rising inequality in incomes and the ownership of wealth in all societies, including those in Russia and China is a march away from liberty. In university education, it is, among other things, a retreat from greater liberty. These features are best documented in the US and the UK. An American academic remarked recently that those educated and are in high income brackets have ‘stolen the dreams’ of young bright but poor students to go to elite schools and colleges, from where they could learn their way in the income and social ladder.

A most interesting experience in these matters is that of India. Under strict caste rules, untouchables, now called dalits had no access to conditions conducive to liberty. They were born into a caste and there was no escape from it. They had no access to education and were prescribed to do no other work than that of their parents. By tradition a chamar remained a chamar; and a mahar a mahar. Growth and industrialisation and access to education have liberated many in these castes to participate in the larger society as equals. Some who belong in lowest untouchable castes have achieved high success in many fields, but only too few. Perhaps, the best known is a mahar B. R. Ambedkar, who went on to write the constitution of the Republic of India. The present President of India is another. Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies of industrialisation and state education contributed to bring about these changes. They are continuing, though not without huge setbacks. The spread of the knowledge of English has helped these processes very much, though that knowledge has become a marker of a ‘new caste’, though not prescriptive. In contrast, some knowledge of Samskrt which was a prescriptive privilege of Brahmins set apart other castes beyond the pale of higher learning. Learning English has been way forward to liberty for people in scheduled castes.

Universities, the world over, have been avenues through which poor but talented students have sought education that led to higher paid professions and higher income and better social recognition. We read often about sizars in medieval Cambridge where a boy could become sizar to a Fellow and perform menial work in the college and over the years graduate and even be elected a Fellow. Thomas Nash (1567-1601) was a sizar at St. John’s. The land-owning gentry in 17th century England (e. g. Thockmortons of Gloucester), not infrequently, paid for bright boys to be educated at university. Several of the brightest Puritan preachers were boys who came to Cambridge in this fashion. A variant of this that one reads of is in Nigeria, where a whole village would put together their resources for a young man to go to Ibadan. There are poignant stories about poor Chinese students who became scholars living hand to mouth and even entered imperial service, after competing successfully in examinations. The gurukula system in India exhibits similar features. But in general university education has been a privilege enjoyed by the rich until the 20th century. Government policies to support education at all levels and the development of capital markets to finance higher education have all changed the picture totally.

In the 20th Century despite widespread education in liberal arts in Western Europe there did spring up terrible tyrannical despotisms: in Spain, in Italy, in Germany and in the USSR. Later in the century, there was Pol Pot in Cambodia, Sargent Idi Amin in Uganda, Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, Emperor Bokassa of CAR and several more West Asia and in other countries. It is not unlikely that Covid-19 will not be the only persistent pestilence that will plague us in the 21st century.