An Introduction to the Liberal Arts
The term “liberal arts” has lost much of its original meaning, and we need to recapture that meaning. Today, the phrase often is used to describe any small college regardless of its curriculum or, alternatively, to indicate any general education or “core” courses required of all students. Outside of higher education, “liberal” has come to have chiefly political connotations, and “arts” nowadays usually means the fine and performing arts. Neither word seems to suggest the kind of intellectually rigorous but practical education many students hope to pursue at the college level.
Originally the phrase “liberal arts” denoted “the skills that belong to a free person.” These skills were the intellectual abilities one needed to live well. The liberal arts included what we would today call the arts and sciences, because both were considered essential to any well-informed person. And while living well meant achieving intellectual freedom—the liberating ability to think independently—it also meant contributing to one’s own culture through civic leadership.
It is a strange irony that liberal education was once profoundly conservative. Training in the liberal arts enabled a social elite, who could afford such education, to assume and maintain civic leadership. Liberal education effectively kept the wealthy and aristocratic in power. American education, however, added a new, egalitarian element to this conservative tradition, for the first time giving a much greater portion of society access to the benefits of liberal education.
At Centenary, we promote the American tradition in liberal education because it can provide any dedicated student the intellectual tools he or she needs to live well and to succeed in a complex and changing world. When we say that we cultivate the liberal arts, we are not naming a set of courses. Instead, we are identifying our aspirations for our students. We expect to produce graduates who embody the liberal arts—graduates who are intellectually versatile, liberated, and committed to participating in civic culture.