These days, we often hear parents of prospective undergraduates ask why their children should bother with a liberal education. After all, they say, vocational fields like business and nursing are now a majority of all college majors. These parents want to be sure their children have a job on graduation, and they dismiss liberal learning as an optional extra on the road to being trained for work – not a necessity. We believe they are wrong.
How do we define liberal learning? We mean three modes of thought – analytical thinking, multiple framing, and reflective exploration of meaning– along with the capacity to put them into practice, which we call practical reason. Naturally, college students should also gain knowledge and skills in a range of academic fields in the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities. But here we focus on these key modes of thought and practical reason.
Analytical thinking is the first mode, and it is needed to enable students to function effectively. Most entering college students require considerable help to gain the intellectual skills that analytic thinking entails. These skills play an important part not only in personal, social, and civic realms, but in vocational ones as well. Without clarity of thought and argument, without the ability to think critically and reason logically, people are captive to unexamined biases and unable to evaluate the validity of others’ claims or their own intuitions.
Colleges and universities are particularly fertile territory for learning to think analytically. Many other arenas call primarily for appeals to emotion. Unlike those arenas, analytic thinking demands rational inquiry, without bias or prejudice.
As powerful as is analytical thinking, it is not sufficient for answering every important question. Subjectivity and ambiguity are inherent in dealing with many kinds of questions. Several perspectives may make sense in examining these issues, and these different frames of reference often cannot be reconciled. Helping students see thorny questions through multiple frames enables them to understand the limitations of any particular way of framing. A strong education in the arts and sciences is particularly helpful to learn this skill.
These two – analytical thinking and multiple framing – are necessary, but not sufficient, for a strong liberal education. Taken together, they make students good at arguing all sides of controversial issues, but they provide little help for deciding where they stand. Rather, they may settle for the cynical view that any judgment is as good as any other. That attitude can too often be used to justify self-promotion as life’s overriding goal.
We call the third essential mode of thinking the reflective exploration of meaning. This capacity asks, “What do I really believe in? What kind of person do I want to be? What kind of world do I want? What am I prepared to contribute to that world?” Wisdom in handling these issues is most frequently gained through study in the humanities – especially philosophy, literature, and history – where struggles with such core concerns are often center-stage.
If students are proficient in all three modes of thought, along with a broad range of content, they may still not know how to use what they learned, particularly in situations of uncertainty, when they require both expertise and good judgment. They also need to be able to integrate these modes of thought and apply them to real-world problems. This is what we mean by “practical reason” – the capacity to go beyond thoughtful deliberation and decide on the best course of action or inaction in a particular situation.
As you reflect on the three modes of thought plus practical reason, are they not capacities that you want your children and grandchildren to learn? Vocational majors are often weak in preparing students in multiple framing and especially in the reflective exploration of meaning. Liberal-arts majors are more likely to graduate with these capacities, though we stress that those majors are no guarantee of strong liberal learning and that vocational majors on some campuses succeed in achieving the goal. Colleges and universities need institutional commitment and creativity to ensure that their students graduate well-prepared in the three modes of thought and practical reason as we have summarized them here. Liberal learning can be integrated with vocational preparation, but it should not be short-changed, as is too often the case in campuses across the county.
In the strongest possible terms, we urge those considering a college or university to find out whether strong liberal learning is part of undergraduate education at that campus. Does that campus focus on liberal learning or leave it to chance?
Note: Our argument for a strong liberal education is based on Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession , a book Tom Ehrlich recently wrote with Anne Colby, William Sullivan, and Jon Dolle at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The book makes the case that a liberal education enables “students to make sense of the world and their place in it, preparing them to use knowledge and skills as a means to engage responsibly with the life of their times.”
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