College’s Seven Liberal Arts…some couldn’t count that high between bong hitz...
There are cyclical media stories over decades about business and medical graduate school programs wanting student recruits who have had a liberal education. WTF do they mean?
There are of course many reasons for that call, ranging from cultural literacy to critical thinking skills. They appear as cyclical (actually often decanal) calls for attempts to make management leadership roles making design (as management control of styling as marketing) more important than engineering in business when developing capitalist products.
And yet those same graduate programs try to make a demand for broader undergraduate education as well as some pre-professional internship experience. As though theory and practice were so easy to dichotomize like Mind and Body.
The United States built its educational system around the oldest and deepest stratum of the liberal arts, giving the liberal arts a place in higher education that European universities had not emphasized for centuries.
A reference for this observation is the American Council of Learned Societies report on “Liberal Arts in American Higher Education.”
The philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, of the University of Chicago, writes: “Unlike virtually every nation in the world, we have a liberal arts model of university education.”
In this line, the three major United States military academies have defined liberal education as “essential to ethical responsibility.” The Air Force Academy has ninety hours of general education. West Point is essentially a liberal arts college www.ramapo.edu/...
There has unfortunately been a steady decline in rationalizing the need for such curricula in higher education. This may actually get worse as the public community college and its more vocational degree offerings becomes the standard for undergraduate education.
Is that breadth of necessary humanistic knowledge met by the cafeteria menu-selection of college courses in general education? Does that grouping of courses sometimes called a core curriculum in undergraduate education and accompanied by some departmental or divisional major make a good undergraduate degree even when a student is forced to take the courses? Are they sufficient in the 21st Century to address the critical thinking about the serious divisions between the 1% and the 99%?
Or does it really create an undergraduate culture of passive-aggressive attendees of “boring courses”. And then there are the “Mickey Mouse” or “gut” courses often part of that seemingly random liberal arts requirement.
The problem of course is to actually address the interdisciplinary goals and objectives of a Western philosophical approach to the Liberal Arts. Unfortunately, the mania of testing and k-12 factory-banking models of education are often challenged by the material realities of race and class as well as the absurdities of cultural micro-aggression in the violence of education. Recent events at Yale and U of Missouri are interesting examples of this. Thankfully there is no such thing (yet) as conservative(sic) arts even if there are conservative colleges that might cynically do their best to kill the liberal arts.
Ultimately the timing and programming of courses taken as credit-hours and the menu-driven cafeteria curriculum makes an integrating and synthesized education process that meets the objectives of the Liberal Arts largely tokenistic and haphazard and makes a college experience seem mechanical and rote.
Often students enter college with the course menu configured as a prix fixe, and any “elective” course remotely unrelated to the major is superfluous and wasteful or an inconvenience brought on by scheduling or the lottery of classes closed by sometimes arbitrary prerequisites or credit-hour seniority.
It’s time yet again to revisit those notions and to remind ourselves or perhaps our children and grandchildren of the foundational terms of a lifelong learning for which college education is designed to facilitate a communitarian discourse constructed on reproducible and reflective sets of critical practices.
The Unexpected Schools Championing the Liberal Arts
Military academies and chef schools say the humanities are essential to their graduates’ success.
As mainstream universities and colleges cut liberal-arts courses and programs in favor of more vocational disciplines, and the number of students majoring in the humanities continues to decline, unexpected types of institutions are expanding their requirements in the liberal arts with the conviction that these courses teach the kinds of skills employers say they want, and leaders need: critical thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, and communication.
Community Links below and even ...
Another Kossack coincidentally touched on the gross quantity of college courses taken; note the use of the term “General” often synonymous with “survey” and “Introduction to...”:
Rather, an ideal college curriculum would integrate more fully all kinds of global knowledge, more synthesized rather than hierarchical or sequential.
This diagram relates to theatre construction (v.3–9) where a brief summary of Aritoxenian harmonic theory provides the background for a discussion of vases designed to resonate to various musical notes. Vitruvius explained that such vases had served as acoustical enhancements in many theatres in Greece and Italy.
One of my oldest friends is one of the few non-Asians trained in the 1970s to play this South Indian classical instrument and it remains an important memory if only because of how it relates to a “liberal education” that signifies all music as “world music”. More importantly for the Virtuvian connection, pitch is also altered by the open drum mouth placed against the musicians stomach during play. In that sense the bodily sense of proportion and harmony comes together in performance and not as some Eurocentric meta-theory. When I was in college, anything not in the classical western music canon (like jazz) was referred to as “ethnic”.
The Ghatam (Sanskrit: घटः ghatah, Tamil: கடம் ghatam, is a percussion instrument used in the Carnatic music of South India. Its variant is played in Punjab and is known as gharha as is a part of Punjabi folk traditions. Its analogue in Rajasthan is known as the madga and pani mataqa ("water jug").
The ghatam is one of the most ancient percussion instruments of South India. It is a clay pot with narrow mouth. From the mouth, it slants outwards to form a ridge. Made mainly of clay backed with brass or copper filings with a small amount of iron filings, the size of the ghatam varies according to its pitch. The pitch can be slightly altered by the application of plasticize clay or water. Although the ghatam is the same shape as an ordinary Indian domestic clay pot, it is made specifically to be played as an instrument. The tone of the pot must be good and the walls should be of even thickness to produce an even tone.
More interesting is that the wooden double-ended drum called Mridangam has complex multi-tone music that also has “Pioneering work on the mathematics of these harmonics was done by Nobel Prize–winning physicist C. V. Raman” Appreciation may seem too superficial a term but it is that liberal education that allows for greater appreciation of the integration of interdisciplinary knowledge.
It would play havoc with the division of higher education into schools, disciplines departments and courses, upper-division, lower-division, first year, senior thesis, etc. But then again higher learning should not be about simple addition. College shouldn’t be eight semesters or 120 weeks of drudgery. A few colleges have decided to break it down differently where a single course is taken alone for something like four weeks rather than taking four or five concurrently, but they are in the minority.
Vitruvius explained that such vases had served as acoustical enhancements in many theatres in Greece and Italy. Vitruvius's belief that the proportions of the human body provided a universal model of beauty applicable to architecture was adapted by renaissance architects who proposed a corresponding universal model based on Pythagorean ratios.
Some media is a lot more fun when one can appreciate the context.
There is of course numerology as well as number theory and cognitive theory involved with sevens
If you went to college, did you think you got a “liberal education” from your “required” core curriculum or general education courses? Did such requirements sour you on continuing in college? If you didn’t go to college, did high school perhaps gyp you in terms of preparation?