Liberal Arts Education and Professionalism: A New Perspective

This is an academic paper I presented at an educational conference in 1988, that talks about how I think audio can actually work in a Liberal Arts curriculum. I think it stands up pretty well.

The Debate

For more than a decade, college undergraduates have favored enrollment in professional studies such as business, professional school preparation and other specialty programs. The training of professionals – individuals who work in specialized and ostensibly self-regulated fields – plays an increasing role in the general academic mission. At the same time, the post-secondary education community has perceived the need for a return to fundamentals: multiple languages, math/science requirements and the attempt to provide all students with breadth of knowledge through what has come to be known as General Education.

The debate among educators is ages old. Many call for a rigorous classical approach: an education that teaches people to think and gives them a broad and comprehensive appreciation of their culture and its history. These educators say this is far more important than the study of a specialized occupational or social topic that leads to a degree that constitutes a certificate of competency for a specific profession. Others say that we have an obligation to prepare students for the workplace: to teach them to quickly and effectively move into their chosen fields. Liberal Arts, like Motherhood, must be respected, they note, but we have to be practical: these kids are going to need jobs and we have to teach them what they need to know to get those jobs. The current discussion about “outcomes” testing and the optimal model for teacher education spring from this larger academic concern.

Two personal experiences illustrate this polarization in thinking: in one case, I proposed my curricular specialty to the faculty executive committee of a college for possible inclusion within their highly regarded artistic curriculum. I was asked if students studying this specialty would be able to get jobs using the skills that I taught. When I said yes, my questioner replied, “Well, you see, there is a problem. If you can get a job with it, it isn’t Liberal Arts.” In the second instance, a colleague listened politely to my description of the Great Books curriculum at St. John’s College and then responded, “Yes, but what will they do when they graduate?”

Liberal Arts and Sciences are usually thought of as knowledge and learning that provide the literature, the first principles, the historical perspectives and the scholarly methods of thought that are universally useful and enlightening. Professional training tends to be specific. It addresses problems and techniques tailored to specific careers and occupations, sometimes at the expense of first principles and perspective. For years, within the university, there has been a gap between these training modalities: the scientist vs. the technician; the generalist vs. the specialist.

Two predispositions are apparent: the first is a belief that the study of Liberal Arts is by definition neither practical nor applicable to professional contexts; the second is a belief that the study of Liberal Arts comprises a study of an established and traditional body of knowledge. In my experience, neither belief is accurate.

I think there is an increasing overlap between the two educational positions upon which this dichotomy is based. As a teacher (educated in a Liberal Arts context) involved in a professional degree program (a Bachelor of Music in “Music Production and Engineering”), I have become increasingly caught up in the development of an integrated approach to the teaching of those who would become professional artists. I have begun to think of Liberal Arts as professional studies. For a variety of reasons, the interdisciplinary skills usually acquired through Liberal Arts education are now becoming the professional skills needed for survival in the workplace.

At one time, professional and vocational skills were specific to given professions and jobs. To operate specialized equipment, to solve standardized problems and to understand known processes were the primary goals of such training. It was important to function in the desired professional context quickly as well as effectively. A great deal of specialized knowledge had to be absorbed, memorized and applied. Traditional operations and methods had to be learned, and the emerging professional had to learn these in breadth and depth.

Liberal Arts education has a different goal, which is to teach the individual how to understand, to articulate and to adapt to change, to solve problems, to maintain perspective and to work and live independently and effectively in the broader context of society and culture, intellectually self-reliant and self-sufficient.

The skills of Liberal Arts education are the skills of the scholar and scientist: the ability to read, write and speak effectively, the ability to study and conduct research (in both laboratory and library), the ability to move freely from holistic pattern to quantification and back again, and most importantly, the ability to adapt to changing conditions needs and information. Traditionally, the knowledge associated with such an education involves our society and civilization. It is this knowledge that has become the rallying point for the adherents to “classicism”, who vigorously argue that the individual who has not read Shakespeare, Virgil and Plato for example, can lay no claim to being an educated person within Western civilization. Without such acculturation, they say, the individual cannot fully appreciate and understand the true nature and meaning of our society and culture.

The presentation of this knowledge presents a problem. Students tend to be pragmatic, and wish to learn things of immediate interest and value. They seek, particularly as they begin their post-secondary studies, to acquire the information that will permit them to be immediate masters of knowledge and truth – within whatever discipline they have chosen – and they are both eager and determined to make use of such knowledge and truth for their own edification and advancement. When the application and relevance of such knowledge is not immediately clear, they challenge its importance.

All teachers are familiar with this impatience; the challenges of the uninitiated are invigorating, frustrating and universal. The query: “Why are we learning this stuff?” is the signal to immediately launch into a digression on the values of perspective, of universal skills as opposed to trade secrets, of taking the long view, of the joys of learning.

At the same time, things have changed. The nature of higher education has changed significantly over the past century. Central to these changes is the amount of information we contend with, as well as the tools we have at our disposal.

There is an apocryphal story that in the 1920’s, Thomas Wolfe set out to read the contents of the entire Harvard Library and nearly succeeded. By implication, the amount of knowledge available to Wolfe in 1920 was conceivably acquirable. With diligence, Wolfe could, possibly, learn all there was to know. In 1988 however, a glance at the size of the card catalog would lead us to the inescapable conclusion that it is no longer possible for a single individual to even begin to acquire the knowledge in a university library, or even a subset of that library. Further examination regarding the rate of acquisitions would indicate that the amount of information growth in the library exceeds our capacity to even keep up with the changes. We are reduced to falling further and further behind in our quest for knowledge, with no possible remedy.

At the same time, computers have dramatically altered the way we deal with problem solving and data manipulation. Much, if not all, of the donkey work associated with professional activities can be alleviated using computers, from billing and financial management to circuit board design, from preliminary diagnosis to case-law research. The implication is that with such computerized resources at hand, the challenge facing the working professional is now more than ever before, to correctly articulate the problem to be solved and to articulate acceptable solutions in the broadest possible contexts. This is a primary goal of Liberal Arts education as well. Traditional Liberal Arts education, expressed as a set of principles of learning, may be evolving into the most practical professional and engineering training, as our computer-tools themselves take over the routine data-gathering and data-synthesis roles that used to be a major part of our professional activities.

Professional training must change. There is an increasing demand for individuals who can reason through problems, work with others and adapt to change. The market is increasing for individuals with the skills best acquired through a Liberal Arts education.

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