Summative notes on three classical models of liberal arts education in the West
Why do we educate our citizens? Is it just to make them job-ready? Or should some forms of education pursue larger, less tangible goals: those of cultivating virtues or strengths of character for instance, or intellectual capabilities to participate in an informed way in public debate, rather than clicking on the most agitating materials? Who should educate whom, teaching what, how, and when?
Like most questions most of us take for granted, these questions have a global history. In the West, from the time of the ‘pedagogical century’, 450BCE-350CE, different models of education, with different pursuits and different purse strings have emerged and competed.
The medieval university had a lower faculty of Arts, where students were to be given a well-rounded education, including in the kinds of intellectual skills they’d need to specialise.
The higher faculties, where you’d go next, involved specialisation somewhat close to our taken-for-granted, utilitarian expectations about specialisations. The student would go into medicine, into law, or into theology; to be a doctor, a lawyer or civil servant, or else a priest or man of the church.
Since around 1800, in most places in the West, this model has been unravelling and unravelled. Why we…