Liberal Arts for a New Millenium by Joyce Baldwin In an era when technology is changing everything, does the definition of “an educated person” still include a background in the liberal arts?

In 1947 Americans were relishing the peace of the postwar years, enjoying All My Sons on Broadway, listening to the radio show Lassie and humming the hit song “Almost Like Being in Love.” That same year is also remembered as a time when over one million veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill of Rights to seek a college education, swelling the enrollment to record-high levels of more than two million students.

Prior to passage of the G.I. Bill in 1944, higher education was the province of the elite, the privilege of those with the financial resources to spend four or more years in college, savoring the luxury of time to read the classics and to ponder history, philosophy and the sciences. But the G.I. Bill made a college degree much more accessible, prompting broad changes in the nature of higher education in the United States. During the latter decades of the 20th century, many other factors also helped reshape colleges and universities, remodeling curricula to be more responsive to a changing society and economy.

A Shift

Today, at the dawn of a new millennium, 65 percent of high school graduates go to college. Yet even as college enrollment figures have reached record-high levels, the SAT and ACT scores indicate that the average level of academic achievement of college applicants has declined. In the 1940s, only 20 percent of high school graduates went to college, and most of them sought advanced learning at a liberal arts institution. But an analysis of the demographics of the college population indicates that a shift has occurred in the type of education students seek. Thirty years ago, half of all baccalaureate degrees were granted in a liberal arts discipline including science. By contrast, a profile of today’s college students reveals that nearly 60 percent of the degrees granted are in a pre-professional or technical field, and the largest number of baccalaureate degrees granted in the 1990s were in business, with business majors alone representing 15 percent of the total. The number of students attending community colleges and similar institutions increased greatly from 1970 to the mid-1990s, so that now two-year associate-degree-granting schools account for more than 40 percent of the college population.

These changes have prompted Carnegie Corporation of New York to focus on the questions and challenges that we are confronted with at the start of the 21st century. In New Directions for Carnegie Corporation of New York: A Report to the Board, Vartan Gregorian, president of the Corporation, poses the following questions: “What will define an educated person in the new age? Will we educate individuals who are able to bring knowledge of their own and other cultures and histories, as well as literacy in language and science, that will allow them to understand and interpret the mass of information they will encounter as they make judgments about public issues? Is liberal arts a costly and ‘elitist’ program or the best preparation for the flexible knowledge-based economy of the future? How can students best be prepared to manage the information explosion in an era of minute specialization and knowledge fragmentation? In short, how must our institutions of higher education prepare our students for life, work and citizenship, safeguard our democratic society, and meet our obligations in the world?”

Pressures on Students

In answering these questions, we must take into consideration other changes in the college population that have been occurring concomitantly with a sharp rise in tuition and living costs. The demands on students go beyond those of their studies, with many students juggling work, family and school responsibilities. As data from a 1999 survey show, by and large students today view their undergraduate education as a means of developing skills that will enable them to land lucrative jobs in a technologically oriented marketplace. These students—and their parents—are increasingly concerned about the costs associated with attending institutions of higher learning and what the “payoff” will be in good jobs after graduation. Educational costs and the pressures to get a good job give meaning to the phrase that students today might be “more interested in learning to earn than in learning to learn.”

“With the increase in the price of higher education, many families are worried about the relationship between that price and the graduate’s capacity to enter the job market successfully, and consequently professional education of one sort or another—business, engineering and sometimes education—has become much more prominent,” says Neil Grabois, vice president and director for strategic planning and program coordination of Carnegie Corporation. He continues, “A number of institutions have also become much more wide-ranging in an effort to capture the market and in particular to capture the market by inculcating skills that would be immediately bought by the society. I think it very important that we not focus exclusively on those skills and needs for remuneration after graduation.”

Grabois further notes the importance of all members of our society having a sense of ethical perspective as well as an understanding of history, the economy, the world of imagination and the esthetic experience. This is important, he says, not only for people to fulfill themselves professionally, but because they are not merely professionals, but human beings who raise families, participate in society and learn from and enjoy music, art and theater, all the province of liberal learning.

Signs of Dissatisfaction

There have been instances in which students themselves have vented their feelings about the need to integrate liberal learning into the curriculum, and there are signs that they are beginning to protest against an educational system that might be evolving in a way that does not emphasize a general education.

In Massachusetts, high school students balked at having to take a series of standardized tests that stretched over 11 days. To vent his frustrations, one boy wrote an essay about how a standardized exam “could never measure the breadth of his abilities.” The Mass-achusetts effort followed similar boycotts in other states by parents, teachers and students against standardized tests, indicating a growing discontent with these tests, which have or soon will be mandated in 26 states.

Parents have also rebelled against innovations that they believe are undermining their children’s education. An article in The New York Times in April of this year reported on a new math curriculum that relies on children making estimates and participating in other discovery processes to solve math problems rather than using textbooks and an approach to mathematics that hinges on memorization. Parents argue that the new math does not teach their children basic math skills but rather confuses the youngsters. The parents contend that the new math is a “dumbing down” of mathematics teaching and will produce math illiterates.

Next page: A Florida high school formed a freshman class in which all teaching and learning will be done online.

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