A Liberal Arts Education: Why Bother?

Liberal education is the kind that deals not so much with means as with ends, not so much with the how of things as the why. In one sense this is irrelevant to the everyday pressures of life and especially the hard job of making a living. The doctor must know the body and its workings: does he need to know its purposes? The accountant must know the ways of financial transactions and how to keep track of them; does he need to know the purpose of business, or the best uses of the profits that it generates? The general needs to know how to assemble supply, transport, and deploy his troops so as to defeat the enemy; does he need to know if the cause of his country is superior to the cause of the enemy? Are these people in fact experts in the ultimate questions that are inherent in their activities, and would they be better at these activities if they were?
The answer to this question...is yes. Every self-governing person-every mother and father, every manager of a task or of other people-will find himself involved during his life with important decisions that reach up to the ultimate. Each must account to his Maker. Each must raise his children and answer these questions. Each must choose his field of labor and decide how honestly, diligently, and fairly he will pursue it. Each will face occasions when his own immediate interest conflicts with that of another, and each must decide then how to pursue it or when to surrender that interest. The ability to do so is the product of a liberal, as opposed to simply technical education.
-Larry P. Arnn. Liberty and Learning: The Evolution of American Education. (22-23)

Liberal Arts

In educational matters, as any old hand at curricular debate can attest, the best is frequently made an enemy of the good. And, all too often, it is an ideal and theoretical "best" held up to expose the shabbiness and shortcomings of a known and practical "good." Today as we struggle with the gritty and intractable realities of our own era, we are once again bludgeoned by fashionable memories of an idealized and romanticized past. Let us be sure it is not a past that never truly was. Let us be sure, too, that what is being measured against it is a present that really is.
-Francis Oakley. Community of Learning: The American College and the Liberal Arts Tradition. (72)