In Defense Of A Liberal Education

In contemporary usage, the term “liberal arts” usually refers to the subjects that comprise the humanities and social sciences in today’s institutions of higher education. These include subjects like English, history, sociology, anthropology, and art history, among others. The tradition of the liberal arts originated with the ancient Greek philosophical tradition and the Romans during their republican period, with the Romans coining the term liberales artes (“free arts”) to refer to a specific set of subjects that free men studied in preparation for public, civic life. A liberal education, Zakaria argues, thus developed to support the democratic tradition.

MOOCs became popular in the 2010s as a format for making higher education accessible to thousands of people across the globe. Companies like Coursera and edX provide courses that can be taken at low cost and for which students receive certificates, while some may be taken for free without certification. Courses have no caps on enrollment and can thus serve an infinite number. Zakaria, writing in 2014 at the height of MOOC interest, views them as an equitable alternative to traditional colleges and universities, especially for those in the Global South, where educational access may be limited. Millions of learners have enrolled in MOOCs; however, completion rates are low. Doug Lederman showed in a 2019 article for Inside Higher Ed that attrition rates for MOOCs only increased over time, even though developers had spent years working on course development (Lederman, Doug. “Why MOOCs Didn’t Work, in 3 Data Points.” Inside Higher Ed, 15 Jan. 2019). His data also show that most MOOC learners come from the developed world, countering Zakaria’s point that MOOCs are an accessible form of education for underserved populations from developing nations.

The “seven liberal arts” refers to the ancient Greco-Roman classification of main educational subjects. The seven liberal arts included the trivium and quadrivium. The former included rhetoric, logic, and grammar. The ancients considered these the lower arts. The quadrivium, or “higher arts,” included astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music. Students studied the trivium before their education in the higher arts. The seven liberal arts remained the core curriculum at the monastic and cathedral schools that emerged during the European Middle Ages (500-1500 CE), and they were the basis for the first Western universities that evolved from the cathedral schools during the 11th and 12th centuries. This liberal education included science, as Zakaria notes, because it evolved from the philosophical tradition, with science only becoming distinguished from the liberal arts recently. He calls for a reunification of the two, with the Yale-NUS partnership and curriculum offering a model for a new liberal education suited to the modern, globalized world.