This is a question that requires thought on many levels, including asking what a liberal arts education is and thinking about the particular society and its needs and shapes. I want to start at root by quoting Pieper and move to branch later.

The medievals distinguished between the intellect as ratio and the intellect as intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive thought, or searching and researching, abstracting, refining, and concluding [cf. Latin dis-currere, “to run to and fro”], whereas intellectus refers to the ability of “simply looking” (simplex intuitus) to which the truth presents itself as a landscape presents itself to the eye. The spiritual knowing power of the human mind, as the ancients understood it, is really two things in one: ratio and intellectus: all knowing involved both. The path of discursive reasoning is accompanied and penetrated by the intellectus’ untiring vision, which is not active but passive, or better, receptive—a receptively operating power of the intellect. (Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture)

How was your education in intellectus—that gazing, receptive faculty—whether looking at art, nature, handwork, or listening to music and poetry? If we insisted that this was fundamental to liberal arts education, would we be asking whether this education was for all? But we have lost the basic notion of what education is in its fundament and, naturally, we are very confused about who it is for. If elementary school were entirely to learn numbers and reading and had a large dose of intellectus—naming and loving flora and fauna, studying art, memorizing poems, listening to music so that you could identify it and feel its movements within you, learning to dance with each other so that your body understood harmony with others, sketching the natural world so that you could really see it, and love it, and belong to it and it to you—would we be asking this question? I don’t think we would. But intrinsic to the question is a lack of agreement on whether intellectus is even a part of education. Stratford Caldecott says, “We have been educating ourselves for doing rather than being.” Of course, we would expect and want this for all people regardless of ethnicity, historical period, culture, intellectual capacity, and professional calling. And if we could give it, we would solve so many of the problems we encounter more broadly in our society.

However, we must think about the society we are in and its needs and shapes. If we are asking about k-12 education and leaving aside higher education, it is easy to see that some ability to think (in both ratio and intellectus), read, use numbers, and know the basic outline of history, is essential for civic society and a flourishing life. This doesn’t mean we all should go to college. If our k-12 education is sound, we have options for what people do afterward—college is not necessarily an essential part of being liberally educated because k-12 has done its job, and the student can continue learning liberally (and wants to) beyond his or her formal education (the percentage of people who read a book after college is dismal). Then higher education has the freedom to be practical (coding, nursing, engineering), common arts oriented (the trades and other forms of making), artistic (music performance, fine arts), or rigorously intellectual (higher-education liberal arts). Currently, we are encouraging everyone to attain an expensive and mediocre “liberal arts” education and this has done great damage to education as well as to individuals who’ve mortgaged their futures and learned little.

The scene for that liberal arts education is not only ludicrously wealthy but mostly devoid of a call to moral wholeness. Hence, the question is a thorny one in its application and, here, I have argued that we must be very clear on what we mean in terms of practice and we cannot ask this question abstracted from the terms of the society we live in. We could add to this the need for an anthropology and clarity about our telos but that is probably already the ground situation of this discussion. The Awakening of Miss Prim is a wonderful contemporary novel that explores this question beautifully and simply.

Christine Perrin has taught at Messiah University and in classical schools since 1999. She and her husband, Christopher, currently teach the course Architecture of Virtue to seniors. She has published two books: Bright Mirror (poems) and The Art of Poetry.

 

Christine Perrin, MFA Professor, Author

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