American High Schools and the Liberal Arts Tradition

The term liberal arts usually conjures up one central idea; that is, effective liberal arts education as strong academic achievement. A second, less dominant, and frequently neglected notion regards effective liberal arts education as producing intellectual interests and habits that endure throughout adult life. The two ideas are complementary and not in opposition. But they are different.

The dominant idea associates the liberal arts with a collection of academic subjects or disciplines, most often divided into three broad and overlapping groups. For example, they are labeled by the National Center for Education Statistics as humanities, social and behavioral sciences, and natural sciences. The humanities embrace the imaginative and spiritual life of humankind. The social sciences address human institutions and relations as they have developed over time. The natural sciences cover the world of nature. The number of liberal arts has grown remarkably, in the form of area studies, gender and ethnic studies, other multi- and interdisciplinary fields, and entirely new subjects. The three subject areas are regarded as liberal because the knowledge they contain liberates and deepens understanding of life and because the methods they employ and the cognitive and other skills they teach make greater understanding more likely. ¹

Good performance in the liberal arts seems almost synonymous with good achievement in the study of academic subjects. The crucial indicators of performance are usually examinations—tests created by teachers, tests created and sometimes mandated by government, tests created by private organizations such as the International Baccalaureate or the College Board. Academic performance is usually assessed soon after instruction has occurred—at the end of a unit, project, term, or course. Performance is what you can do shortly after you have been taught to do it. The typical assessment time frame is the close-in present. In addition, performance is what you can do when asked to do it by others. Some external compulsion or pressure is usually involved.

Boosting academic achievement for most high school students, and hence increasing the chances that large numbers of young Americans will acquire the beginnings of what a liberal education promises, has proven a difficult task. Only a century has passed since the goal was even imagined, much less undertaken seriously. The United States is now in the midst of the most sustained effort to foster academic achievement among the largest possible fraction of youth in its history. The genius of the American high school has resided in its capacity to avoid internal conflict by absorbing all conceivable purposes without embracing too strenuously any single one. The present effort, with its unmistakable tone of compulsion, potentially threatens, more than any other earlier school reform movement, the delicate internal balance that offers students endless opportunities but also allows them endless choices to engage or avoid engagement in learning. It is thus unusually ambitious and worthy of sustained public support. ²

The second idea about the liberal arts tradition is that what begins as a required activity assessed just after instruction should become voluntary behavior engaged in for curiosity and pleasure. The ultimate agenda of the liberal arts is how a person lives his or her life—what that person is like as an adult and not merely as a youth at the time school graduation requirements have been met. The ultimate product of an effective liberal arts education is active reflection about serious ideas. Enduring intellectual interests are to be created and pursued long after required courses and examinations are over and done with.

An enduring intellectual interest sometimes involves activity in which doing something is readily visible to others—making a watercolor, writing a letter to the editor, leading a family discussion about an environmental issue, and participating in town or school board meetings. Activity also includes less visible, more private reflection—what people think about, what they read, how they read, what they watch or listen to, and...