I meant to include The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education in yesterday’s list but as I was reorganizing my stacks, I set it in a wrong pile and missed it. So, I decided to give it it’s own post—along with a brief review (sort of).
When Jesse Jackson marched with a large group of Stanford students in 1987 to protest a course called, “Western Culture,” we can now see their chant, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go” was much more indicative of the broader culture’s attitude toward the liberal arts and Western civilization than it was about any single course of study at the elite California University.
Of course, it’s no secret the veneration of the liberal arts has been in decline since “the education wars” that marked the end of the nineteenth and turn of the twentieth centuries; but, in the 1960’s that decline made a sharp turn downward inversely proportional to the sharp rise in popularity of critical theories on college campuses.
Thankfully, we have seen a resurgence in esteem for the liberal arts in the margins of education over the past 30 years or so—especially in the realm of Classical Christian Education. New small liberal arts universities are popping up across the country as are classical charter schools and private Christian classical schools. That doesn’t even account for the countless homeschooling families who are turning to classical education models. This is a great thing to see.
Nevertheless, even after all these years, the need to make an apology for or “justify” the liberal arts persists. Old questions like these seem to endure:
“What are the liberal arts, anyway?”
“Aren’t the liberal arts a waste of time?”
“Aren’t the liberal arts elitist?”
“Don’t the liberal arts make people liberal?”
“What are you going to do with a liberal arts degree, anyway?”
“How will you get a job with a liberal arts degree?”
To the end that we must continue to readdress what is persistently forgotten, a quote I recently read by André Gide comes to mind: “You know the story. Yet we will say it again. All things are already said; but since no one is listening, you always have to start over.”
And a book I want to recommend to my list of CCE books is just the kind of book that starts from the beginning and says it all again. It’s not starting from the historical beginning, mind you; but, it starts from the beginning of all the modern inquiries about The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education.
Comprised of 25 contributors, this chain of bright and accessible essays eloquently wrecks the cardinal criticisms of the skeptics of the liberal arts, carefully lays open wide the gates of permission, and signals the call to all who desire the life of the mind and shows us where the road to human flourishing lays.
C. S. Lewis reminded us that we can’t read the books of the future, so in order to see the errors of the present, we must read the old books and they will show us our trajectory. Jeffrey Bilbro posits a similar sentiment in his essay included in the book, explaining that the liberal arts allow us to
engage in the patient, creative work of studying the past. This will involve both judging the errors we find there and learning from the wisdom we encounter…When we internalize the inheritance of the past—laying it down as ballast in our ship—we will be able to chart a steady course toward the right end.
If you’re looking for answers to questions like those above, this book will help. The writers that comprise this little volume carefully “reimagine and rearticulate what a liberal arts education is for, and what it might look like in today’s world.”
[…] previous posts in this series can be read here: first, second, third, fourth, and […]