Slaves to Specificity

The very definition of a liberal arts education is a contrast of educations, rather than a concrete methodology. In ancient Rome, liberal education distinguished between the vocations taught to a slave,and the education imparted upon a freeman.Liberal arts were the foundation of the medieval Western university, a form requiring all students to master grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. Above all, liberal arts education is used to describe a curriculum that aims to broaden one’s general knowledge and develop intellectual capacities rather than teach a specific technical skill or vocation.

Today on university campuses, we see a push towards science as the highest form of knowledge. Where funding for the life sciences, including new faculty and facilities, has skyrocketed in recent years, the humanities and arts have suffered. Increasing numbers of students choose to study biology without ever considering a philosophy or literature course. Philosophy teaches the origins of scientific thought, method, and theory, and literature teaches the importance of communication, but increasingly students of science disregard these attributes as less than, or unnecessary to, their pursuits.When did being learned in only one area of knowledge become a value?

Becoming proficient in most areas of knowledge during the university years has defined the great intellects of the past.Galileo supported Copernicus’theory of the solar system as heliocentric, but he was also one of the first to document some of the founding tenets of physics, and above all, conveyed his message to the masses. Galileo was not merely a scientist; he was a poet, a philosopher, a logician, and a writer. His ideas threatened the Roman Catholic Church not because of their truthfulness,but because of his ability to convey their beauty and absorb the populace in the wonder of discovery.

Before Galileo were the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. We use the world philosopher today because we cannot compare their breadth and depth of knowledge across all subject areas to any scholar of the modern world. Pythagoras is most well known for his work in geometry, but he was also a great religious theorist. Socrates is remembered as an ethicist, but he was also a great logician, who taught his pupils to examine every answer to a question, a form of thinking that has remained highly valued throughout time. Aristotle may be one of the most varied philosopher of all, writing on physics, biology, zoology, government, ethics, and logic, and producing celebrated poetry.

As much as scientists today would love to believe that their ideas will resonate in and of themselves, too much evidence exists to the contrary.Where Galileo wrote in beautiful metaphor,painting a picture of Saturn’s rings for his audience, scientists today write in passive tense, observing instead of interacting with their discoveries and through them,the readers.The previously championed liberal arts education has been replaced with schooling that forces students to pick between the sciences and the humanities early on so that our great scientists cannot write of their discoveries in a way that captivates the mind of someone not familiar with the subject area.

Not only has the demise of well-rounded education led to a generation of illiterate scientists, it may have prevented further discovery and innovation. Watson and Crick, the discoverers of DNA’s double helix, understood the microfilms no one else could interpret. Where the ‘X’ formation confused biologists, Crick, who was also trained in physics, understood the pattern as that of a double helix.Within the scientific discipline,we have segmented and drawn arbitrary lines that divide the “life” sciences (biology) from the “hard sciences”(physics).This seems hard to justify as physics begins to solve some of the riddles to the origin of our universe, and therefore life.

While it seems ridiculous that scientists are increasingly left in the dark on areas of the humanities, it seems equally absurd that social scientists and artists ignore the sciences. Too often will humanities students complain of the difficulty of the sciences, or voice their skepticism that the sciences have any impact on their lives as scholars and thinkers. Insufficient knowledge of the sciences has led to their distortion, and that misinformation has been all too often fatal. Where a scientist knows the fallacy of eugenics and the danger of its application to social Darwinism, thousands fell victim to the application of “racial purity”during the 20th century.This was not only the fault of propaganda, but also a population who did not recognize illogical and irrational science.

The value of a liberal arts education is not any specific scientific or social science theory,nor a doctrine of aesthetics,but rather the value of liberal arts is that liberal arts education provides us with a uniquely rounded body of knowledge that informs how we as individuals interact with the people that surround us, and the world at large. If nothing else, it may prevent two people from meeting and being unable to utter a word that is comprehensible to the other because each is so narrow in his thinking and knowledge that they cannot find a shared topic of interest.

The liberal arts teach a love of learning and of inquiry. They teach us to be unsatisfied with mediocre thinking, to think logically and with an open mind. They teach us to think broadly, to reason our way to solutions, and how to communicate our findings. Most importantly, the liberal arts expand our minds so as to be able to reach the heights of creative thinking most of us cannot yet dream of.