The term studia humanitatis may be
unfamiliar to most people. What about artes
liberalis, the mediaeval name for liberal arts? At least it ‘looks’ familiar. It means the arts (i.e. learning) that were
appropriate for a free man (in the classical Greek sense: a man who is not a
slave). That is the opposite of artes
mechanicae, a vocational training that prepared young men to become
weavers, blacksmiths, nevigators, etc.
At the time, the liberal arts were not aiming at gaining a livelihood
but for further study of law, theology, and medicine.
If that is not modern enough, we
may go to Webster’s Third. Under
the heading of Liberal Arts, it says ‘of, belonging to, or befitting a man of
free birth, also, of, belonging to, or befitting one that is a gentleman in
social rank.’ If that did not suffice,
try another entry: ‘the studies especially in a college or a university, that
are presumed to provide chiefly general knowledge and to develop the general intellectual
capacities…as opposed to professional, vocational or technical studies.’ That should give any common-sense person a
general idea on what liberal arts education is and what it is not.
Perhaps the staunchest advocate
for liberal education in America before the mid-20th century was
Robert M. Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago. The world got to know about the ‘Great Books
Project’ under his leadership as well as that of Mortimer Adler, an editor of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica. For
Hutchins, liberal, from liberalis (from which the English word liberty
is derived), means free; so liberal education is a ‘free education’, or ‘an
education that can set you free.’ If the
question is: Free from what? His reply
is: Free from ignorance. So the most
succinct statement of liberal education is:
it is an education that sets you free from ignorance. How can we achieve that? We learn from the past experience and wisdom
of the great minds of over 2,000 years in history. Hence the ‘Great Books’.
Why is liberal education not
widely publicized, if it is such a good thing?
Very little has been written about those institutions and their
programmes, especially in this part of the world. Perhaps it is because they are small in size
and number; perhaps their commitment to college (i.e. undergraduate) teaching
is not in the main stream; perhaps research laboratories, prestigious
professional and graduate schools, famous scholars are all at well-known
universities; perhaps most of us only care for the big names: Harvard,
Princeton, Berkeley, and know little if at all about Williams, Swarthmore,
Pomona. Given our exposure or the lack
thereof, and our faith in the marketability of ‘big-name graduates’, no wonder
we do not know what we have missed.
So what is a liberal arts
college like? In one stroke Hugh
Hawkins, retired professor from Amherst—one of the best colleges in that
category—describes thus, ‘a four-year institution of higher education, focusing
its attention on candidates for the B. A. degree who are generally between the
ages of eighteen and twenty-one, an institution resistant to highly specific
vocational preparation and insisting on a considerable breadth of studies…[that
hopes to develop] interests and capabilities that will enrich both the
individual learner and future communities.’
From this brief introduction, we
may gather a few common characteristics among liberal education
institutions. They are small,
residential, not located in urban area for the most part. They devote themselves primarily to the
education of the undergraduates. They
usually have a small student body; as a result, students get to know each other
and faculty members inside as well as outside of the classroom. Because classes are small, and because
instruction is mostly provided by professors themselves, and not by teaching
assistants, frequent interaction between students, between students and
teachers, is a normal state of affairs.
That environment, and the
learning atmosphere it creates, can hardly be found in big universities with
huge campuses.
If we understand what
liberal arts education really is, and are honest with ourselves, then we have
to say there is nothing like that in our higher education today. The fact
that everybody uses the phrase 'liberal education' all the time does not mean
we have it. All nations on earth claim they have a rule of law in their
legal systems. Do they? Not only do we not have that kind of
training, our universities have shown no sign of any aspiration towards that
lofty goal. Lingnan was set up to be one. It did not make
it. Ask her former vice chancellor, who has just retired.
