“What Does a Liberal Arts Education Mean?”

      Thomas Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons contains, in just a few short pages, one of the best answers I’ve encountered to the question: What does a liberal arts education mean? Wolfe takes us back to ancient Rome to explain the content and the underlying rationale of a liberal arts education.

      The Romans had slaves from all over the world, and some of the slaves were very bright, like the Greeks. The Romans would let these slaves be educated in all sorts of practical skills, like math, engineering, so they could build things, and in music, so they could be entertainers.

      But only Roman citizens, the FREE people studied subjects like rhetoric, literature, history, theology, and philosophy because they were the arts of persuasion. They did not want slaves to learn how to present arguments that might inspire them to unite and rise against the empire.

      Although in today’s educational vocabularies the arts of persuasion have been shortened to critical thinking, the original meaning of rhetoric is the ability to understand who you are and the number of perspectives you can bring to a problematic situation. No problem today can be understood using a grand theory, nor the mining of data points. Problems are solved in conversations between theories and facts on the ground that are played out in highly fluid environments that resist the status quo. The liberal arts, at a minimum, equip politicians and policymakers with the tools needed to move between grand theories and facts on the ground, and to use that conversation to address difficult societal problems. The knowledge and skills to participate in a conversation between grand theories and facts on the ground allow societies to solve their most difficult societal problems.