Tocqueville and liberal education

Periodically over the past century or so, leading figures in American higher education, often the representatives of elite universities, have become worried about the fate of “liberal education” or “the liberal arts” in American universities. For those not familiar with this peculiarly American approach to higher education, American university students typically do not choose a subject to study when they enter university. Instead they spend their first two (of four) years studying a wide variety of subjects, to some extent of their own choice. In the course of their university career they are usually required to take a certain number of classes in a wide variety of areas, such as literature, history, social sciences, physical sciences, etc. in more or less coherent groups.

The origin of this peculiar habit lies partly in ancient history, when the “liberal arts” were those branches of knowledge appropriate for a free man to know, so that he would be properly equipped for politics, essentially rhetoric, grammar, and philosophy. This tradition endured through the Middle Ages, but it reached America mediated by its English variant, as the education suitable for a gentleman, often but not exclusively a gentleman with a clerical vocation. The Classical and the English notion of the liberal arts differed in content, but in one thing they were identical: a liberal education had nothing to do with teaching someone how to earn a living, and everything to do with forming the characters and sharpening the minds of generalists, not specialists.

Although the origins of liberal education are unquestionably European, liberal education has largely disappeared in Europe. The few exceptions are often recent, sometimes owe their origins to the re-importation of ideas and/or people from America, and are generally directed at a small and elite fraction of the university population. In America, on the other hand, liberal education spread along with higher education, at both public and private universities. With the massive expansion of public higher education in the United States in the decades after WWII, liberal education reached a very considerable portion of the American population. The vast majority of American universities, including almost all the leading research universities, incorporate the liberal arts into their curriculum. Even an elite engineering school such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has departments of History, English, etc., a phenomenon quite bizarre from a European perspective.

Today liberal education in America is under assault from many quarters. The number of students who choose to continue to study liberal arts subjects beyond the minimum required is dropping, due largely to the fact that women are increasingly choosing subjects that appear to lead more directly to jobs, an unintended consequence of greater equality. Legislatures are questioning whether liberal arts education is a worthwhile expenditure of tax dollars. Even more worrying for academics, they are wondering whether research in such subjects should be funded at all. Private donors appear to be following public opinion in this regard.

In this context a little reassurance seems in order from that classic authority on both democracy and America, Alexis de Tocqueville. The sky is not falling. At least, a liberal education restricted to a few is a phenomenon neither unexpected nor necessarily bad from a democratic perspective. And from a Tocquevillean perspective, the only thing to be surprised about in today’s situation is the indisputable fact that America is the world’s leader in liberal education. On the other hand, if liberal education is widely under attack all over the world, including in the United States of America, this on the contrary would not have surprised Tocqueville at all.

If we confine our observations to America, at least for the purpose of developing the argument (a strategy not unknown to Mr. Tocqueville himself), we discover that while liberal arts education is indeed under attack at many American colleges and universities, it is not threatened in the slightest in the Ivy League or other elite institutions. This, I will suggest, would have pleased Tocqueville in both respects – that liberal arts education is threatened and in decline at most American universities, and that it is flourishing...