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CLASSICAL-LIBERAL EDUCATION: MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER

In today’s world, there is a growing need for creative individuals who can think critically about knowledge and use it in new and innovative ways. Most modern schools only create technical workers. A liberal education is designed to produce scholars who have the ability to think independently no matter the topic. A student trained in the liberal arts can draw upon divergent ideas to solve complex problems, participate effectively in decision-making, and provide inspired leadership in an ever-changing world. While classical-liberal education traditionally provided the analytical and creative minds that changed the world, it has never been more needed to prepare students for the challenges of the future. Here are six important tools that liberal education provides.

Understanding of Human Nature – Oneself and Others

SELF-AWARENESS
“The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded…Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master’.”
-David Foster Wallace, Commencement speech, Kenyon College, 2005

SOCIAL AWARENESS
“An open and alert mind, which understands human nature and its possibilities, which can judge and sympathize, which because of its wide survey and outlook on the world creates new opportunities and developments, prospers in commerce or in any work; but it is the child of a varied education, not of narrow technical training.”
-R.W. Livingstone, A Defense of Classical Education

“Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior:
economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy….

But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.

It’s probably dangerous to enter exclusively into this realm and risk being caught in a cloister, removed from the market and its accountability. But doesn’t it make sense to spend some time in the company of these languages — learning to feel different emotions, rehearsing different passions, experiencing different sacred rituals and learning to see in different ways?

Few of us are hewers of wood. We navigate social environments. If you’re dumb about The Big Shaggy, you’ll probably get eaten by it.
-David Brooks, The New York Times, June 7, 2010

Understanding the World
“…we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects…”
-Dorothy Sayers, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning

“A small but dedicated and growing community in (at least) the U.S. is working to enhance opportunities for philosophical exploration in the pre-college curriculum. Our hope is to find more ways to make students fall in love with learning; to provide a long-term investment in the humanities by enabling more students to enter college with an appreciation for philosophy that may then spur them to study it further; and perhaps to do a tiny bit to increase the level of public discourse in the U.S. by equipping more people (college-bound or otherwise) with the ability to tell good arguments from fallacies, and clear-headed reasoning from the mushy and vague This in turn provides the challenge: how do we prevent students from circling their intellectual wagons around their cherished philosophical opinions now that they’ve realized that they are, in fact, opinions they are probably in no position to establish beyond a reasonable doubt? Waking students from their dogmatic slumber is not as easy as asking them how they know.” -Mitchell Green, Metaphysics in the High School Classroom, University of Virginia

Analytical Thinking
“The rapid changes in information technology in recent years have rendered current high school curricula unable to cope with student needs. In consequence, students do not possess the proper skills required in today’s information era. Specifically, many students lack the skills to search efficiently for information. Moreover, even when abundant information is available to them, students are unable to critically read, analyze, and evaluate it.”
-Journal of Technology Education, 2009

Students need “the capacity for critical examination of oneself and one’s traditions — for living what, following Socrates, we may call “the examined life.” This means a life that accepts no belief as authoritative simply because it has been handed down by tradition or become familiar through habit, a life that questions all beliefs and accepts only those that survive reason’s demand for consistency and for justification. Training this capacity requires developing the capacity to reason logically, to test what one reads or says for consistency of reasoning, correctness of fact, and accuracy of judgment. Testing of this sort frequently produces challenges to tradition, as Socrates knew well when he defended himself against the charge of “corrupting the young.” But he defended his activity on the grounds that democracy needs citizens who can think for themselves rather than simply deferring to authority, who can reason together about their choices rather than just trading claims and counter-claims. Like a gadfly on the back of a noble but sluggish horse, he said, he was waking democracy up so that it could conduct its business in a more reflective and reasonable way.”
-Martha Nussbaum,Commencement Address at Colgate University, 2010

Innovative Thinking
“The knowledge I use as CEO can be acquired in two weeks…The main thing a student needs to be taught is how to study and analyze things (including) history and philosophy. People trained in the humanities who study Shakespeare’s poetry, or Cezanne’s paintings, say, have learned to play with big concepts, and to apply new ways of thinking to difficult problems that can’t be analyzed in conventional ways.”
-Amos Shapira, CEO of Cellcom

Meeting Civic Responsibilities
“Only an educated and informed people will be a free people…the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all…”
-John F. Kennedy

Ability to Communicate Effectively
“It took Latin to thrust me into bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin…fed my love for words upon words, words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful accretion of a sentence…”
-Eudora Welty

“In purely literary excellence-in perfection of form-the preeminence of the ancients is not disputed.”
-John Stuart Mill

“[O]wing to the emphasis placed on scientific and technical training at the expense of the humanities, very few people have been taught to understand and handle language as an instrument of power…The defense against the misuse of words is not flight…but the wary determination to understand the potentialities of language and to use it with resolution and skill…The language of the imagination can never be inert; as with every other living force, you must learn to handle it or it will handle you.”
-Dorothy Sayers

“Latin…has been of indirect use every day of my career. If you work with words, Latin is the Pilates session that stays with you for life: it strengthens the core. It teaches you grammar and syntax, better than your own language, whose structure you will have absorbed before you are capable of noticing it. Latin offers no hiding place, no refuge for the wooly. Each piece of the sentence has to slot in with the rest, every ending has to be the right one. To learn Latin is to learn rigor.”
-Tim de Lisle “Latin Is the Best Language” Intelligent Life magazine, March/April 2012

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