| In an effort to understand the conflict and confusion in American writings on "liberal education" or "liberal arts" in recent decades, I conduct a historical investigation into when, how and by whom the words "liberal education" or "liberal arts" were used; and I build a simple typology to explain the development.;The origins of the term lie in the Latin artes liberales, a curriculum known to the Middle Ages as the normative program that an educated person ought to have studied. However, the formulation of this program can best be attributed to Roman antiquity despite the popular appeal to Greek antiquity, and that Roman program owed more to the rhetorical tradition than the philosophical tradition.;Having gathered characteristics of the Roman orators' liberal arts into a frame labeled "artes liberales ideal," I maintain that this ideal was modified but essentially carried forward in the Middle Ages. Despite the challenge of scholasticism with its appreciation of the philosophical tradition in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the artes liberales ideal persevered and was reinvigorated in the Renaissance and subsequently passed to the American colonies.;Meanwhile, characteristics that would come to be associated with a different ideal of liberal education arose among leaders of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution and eighteenth-century Enlightenment who looked back reverently to the Socratic philosophical tradition. Gathered into a frame labeled "liberal-free ideal," those characteristics entered discussion about "liberal education" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.;Over the nineteenth century, those holding to the traditional ideal adapted their arguments to the more modern one, producing a position that I denote as "artes liberales accommodated." Conversely, as the liberal-free ideal entered the mainstream of definitions for liberal education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it necessarily adapted to the traditional ethos and to institutional constraints, yielding what I call the "liberal-free accommodation.".;When these four approaches are included together in a simple typology, I demonstrate that much of the conflict, confusion and ambiguity in contemporary American discussion about "liberal education" can be comprehended and explained. |
