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In Defense of a Liberal Education

FAREED ZAKARIA

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY New York • London

For my children, Omar, Lila, and Sofia

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

—E. O. Wilson

Contents

1: Coming to America 2: A Brief History of Liberal Education 3: Learning to Think 4: The Natural Aristocracy 5: Knowledge and Power 6: In Defense of Today’s Youth

Notes

Acknowledgments

In Defense of a Liberal Education

1

Coming to America

IF YOU WANT to live a good life these days, you know what you’re supposed to do. Get into college but then drop out. Spend your days learning computer science and your nights coding. Start a technology company and take it public. That’s the new American dream. If you’re not quite that adventurous, you could major in electrical engineering.

What you are not supposed to do is study the liberal arts. Around the world, the idea of a broad-based “liberal” education is closely tied to the United States and its great universities and colleges. But in America itself, a liberal education is out of favor. In an age defined by technology and globalization, everyone is talking about skills-based learning. Politicians, businesspeople, and even many educators see it as the only way for the nation to stay competitive. They urge students to stop dreaming and start thinking practically about the skills they will need in the workplace. An open-ended exploration of knowledge is seen as a road to nowhere.

A classic liberal education has few defenders. Conservatives fume that it is too, well, liberal (though the term has no partisan meaning). Liberals worry it is too elitist. Students wonder what they would do with a degree in psychology. And parents fear that it will cost them their life savings.

This growing unease is apparent in the numbers. As college enrollment has grown in recent decades, the percentage of students majoring in subjects like English and philosophy has declined sharply. In 1971, for example, 7.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees were awarded in English language and literature. By 2012, that number had fallen to 3.0 percent. During the same period, the

percentage of business majors in the undergraduate population rose from 13.7 to 20.5.

Some believe this pattern makes sense—that new entrants into higher education might simply prefer job training to the liberal arts. Perhaps. But in earlier periods of educational expansion, this was not the case. In the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, students saw college as more than a glorified trade school. Newcomers, often from lower-middle-class backgrounds and immigrant families with little education, enthusiastically embraced the liberal arts. They saw it as a gateway to a career, and also as a way to assimilate into American culture. “I have to speak absolutely perfect English,” says Philip Roth’s character Alex Portnoy, the son of immigrants and hero of the novel Portnoy’s Complaint. Majors like English and history grew in popularity precisely during the decades of mass growth in American higher education.

The great danger facing American higher education is not that too many students are studying the liberal arts. Here are the data. In the 2011–12 academic year, 52 percent of American undergraduates were enrolled in two-year or less- than-two-year colleges, and 48 percent were enrolled in four-year institutions. At two-year colleges, the most popular area of study was health professions and related sciences (23.3 percent). An additional 11.7 percent of students studied business, management, and marketing. At four-year colleges, the pattern was the same. Business led the list of majors, accounting for 18.9 percent of students, and health was second, accounting for 13.4 percent. Another estimate found that only a third of all bachelor’s degree recipients study fields that could be classified as the liberal arts. And only about 1.8 percent of all undergraduates attend classic liberal arts colleges like Amherst, Swarthmore, and Pomona.

As you can see, we do not have an oversupply of students studying history, literature, philosophy, or physics and math for that matter. A majority is specializing in fields because they see them as directly related to the job market. It’s true that more Americans need technical training, and all Americans need greater scientific literacy. But the drumbeat of talk about skills and jobs has not lured people into engineering and biology—not everyone has the aptitude for science—so much as it has made them nervously forsake the humanities and take courses in business and communications. Many of these students might well have been better off taking a richer, deeper set of courses in subjects they found fascinating—and supplementing it, as we all should, with some basic knowledge of computers and math. In any event, what is clear is that the gap in technical training is not being caused by the small percentage of students who choose

four-year degrees in the liberal arts. Whatever the facts, the assaults continue and have moved from the realm of

rhetoric to action. The governors of Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin have announced that they do not intend to keep subsidizing the liberal arts at state-funded universities. “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?” Florida’s Rick Scott asked. “I don’t think so.” Wisconsin is planning to cut money from subjects that don’t train students for a specific job right out of college. “How many PhDs in philosophy do I need to subsidize?” the radio show host William Bennett asked North Carolina’s Patrick McCrory, a sentiment with which McCrory enthusiastically agreed. (Ironically, Bennett himself has a PhD in philosophy, which appears to have trained him well for his multiple careers in government, media, nonprofits, and the private sector.)

It isn’t only Republicans on the offensive. Everyone’s eager to promote the type of education that might lead directly to a job. In a speech in January 2014, President Barack Obama said, “I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” He later apologized for what he described as a “glib” comment, but Obama has expressed similar sentiments during his presidency. His concern —that in today’s world, college graduates need to focus on the tools that will get them good jobs—is shared by many liberals, as well as conservatives and independents. The irrelevance of a liberal education is an idea that has achieved that rare status in Washington: bipartisan agreement.

The attacks have an effect. There is today a loss of coherence and purpose surrounding the idea of a liberal education. Its proponents are defensive about its virtues, while its opponents are convinced that it is at best an expensive luxury, at worst actively counterproductive. Does it really make sense to study English in the age of apps?

In a sense, the question is un-American. For much of its history, America was distinctive in providing an education to all that was not skills based. In their comprehensive study of education, the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz note that, historically, Britain, France, and Germany tested children at a young age, educated only a few, and put them through a narrow program designed specifically to impart a set of skills thought to be key to their professions. “The American system,” they write, “can be characterized as open, forgiving, lacking universal standards, and having an academic yet practical curriculum.” America did not embrace the European model of specific training and apprenticeships because Americans moved constantly, to new cities,

counties, and territories in search of new opportunities. They were not rooted in geographic locations with long-established trades and guilds that offered the only path forward. They were also part of an economy that was new and dynamic, so that technology kept changing the nature of work and with it the requirements for jobs. Few wanted to lock themselves into a single industry for life. Finally, Goldin and Katz argue, while a general education was more expensive than specialized training, the cost for the former was not paid by students or their parents. The United States was the first country to publicly fund mass, general education, first at the secondary-school level and then in college. Even now, higher education in America is a much broader and richer universe than anywhere else. Today a high school student can go to one of fourteen hundred institutions in the United States that offer a traditional bachelor’s degree, and another fifteen hundred with a more limited course of study. Goldin and Katz point out that on a per capita basis, Britain has only half as many undergraduate institutions and Germany just one-third. Those who seek to reorient U.S. higher education into something more focused and technical should keep in mind that they would be abandoning what has been historically distinctive, even unique, in the American approach to higher education.

And yet, I get it. I understand America’s current obsession. I grew up in India in the 1960s and 1970s, when a skills-based education was seen as the only path to a good career. Indians in those days had an almost mystical faith in the power of technology. It had been embedded in the country’s DNA since it gained independence in 1947. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, was fervent in his faith in big engineering projects. He believed that India could move out of its economic backwardness only by embracing technology, and he did everything he could during his fourteen years in office to leave that stamp on the nation. A Fabian socialist, Nehru had watched with admiration as the Soviet Union jump-started its economy in just a few decades by following such a path. (Lenin once famously remarked, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”) Nehru described India’s new hydroelectric dams as “temples of the new age.”

I attended a private day school in Bombay (now Mumbai), the Cathedral and John Connon School. When founded by British missionaries in the Victorian era, the school had been imbued with a broad, humanistic approach to education. It still had some of that outlook when I was there, but the country’s mood was feverishly practical. The 1970s was a tough decade everywhere economically, but especially in India. And though it was a private school, the tuition was low,

and Cathedral catered to a broad cross section of the middle class. As a result, all my peers and their parents were anxious about job prospects. The assumption made by almost everyone at school was that engineering and medicine were the two best careers. The real question was, which one would you pursue?

At age sixteen, we had to choose one of three academic streams: science, commerce, or the humanities. We all took a set of board exams that year—a remnant of the British educational model—that helped determine our trajectory. In those days, the choices were obvious. The smart kids would go into science, the rich kids would do commerce, and the girls would take the humanities. (Obviously I’m exaggerating, but not by that much.) Without giving the topic much thought, I streamed into the sciences.

At the end of twelfth grade, we took another set of exams. These were the big ones. They determined our educational future, as we were reminded again and again. Grades in school, class participation, extracurricular projects, and teachers’ recommendations—all were deemed irrelevant compared to the exam scores. Almost all colleges admitted students based solely on these numbers. In fact, engineering colleges asked for scores in only three subjects: physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Similarly, medical schools would ask for results in just physics, chemistry, and biology. No one cared what you got in English literature. The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)—the most prestigious engineering colleges in the country—narrowed the admissions criteria even further. They administered their own entrance test, choosing applicants entirely on the basis of its results.

The increased emphasis on technology and practicality in the 1970s was in part due to domestic factors: inflation had soared, the economy had slumped, and the private sector was crippled by nationalizations and regulations. Another big shift, however, took place far from India’s borders. Until the 1970s, the top British universities offered scholarships to bright Indian students—a legacy of the raj. But as Britain went through its own hellish economic times that decade —placed under formal receivership in 1979 by the International Monetary Fund —money for foreign scholarships dried up. In an earlier era, some of the brightest graduates from India might have gone on to Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of London. Without outside money to pay for that education, they stayed home.

But culture follows power. As Britain’s economic decline made its universities less attractive, colleges in the United States were rising in wealth and ambition. At my school, people started to notice that American universities

had begun offering generous scholarships to foreign students. And we soon began to hear from early trailblazers about the distinctly American approach to learning. A friend from my neighborhood who had gone to Cornell came back in the summers bursting with enthusiasm about his time there. He told us of the incredible variety of courses that students could take no matter what their major. He also told tales of the richness of college life. I remember listening to him describe a film society at Cornell that held screenings and discussions of classics by Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. I had never heard of Bergman or Fellini, but I was amazed that watching movies was considered an integral part of higher education. Could college really be that much fun?

My parents did not push me to specialize. My father had been deeply interested in history and politics ever since he was a young boy. He had been orphaned at a young age but managed to get financial assistance that put him through high school and college. In 1944, he received a scholarship to attend the University of London. He arrived during the worst of the blitzkrieg, with German V-2 rockets raining down on the city. On the long boat ride to England, the crew told him he was crazy. One member even asked, “Haven’t you read the newspapers? People are leaving London by the thousands right now. Why would you go there?” But my father was determined to get an education. History was his passion, and he worked toward a PhD in that subject. But he needed a clearer path to a profession. So, in addition, he obtained a law degree that would allow him to become a barrister upon his return to Bombay.

Though my mother was raised in better circumstances, she also faced a setback at a young age—her father died when she was eight. She briefly attended a college unusual for India at the time—a liberal arts school in the northern part of the country called the Isabella Thoburn College, founded in 1870 by an American Methodist missionary of that name. Though her education was cut short when she returned home to look after her widowed mother, my mother never forgot the place. She often fondly reminisced about its broad and engaging curriculum.

My parents’ careers were varied and diverse. My father started out as a lawyer before moving into politics and later founding a variety of colleges. He also created a small manufacturing company (to pay the bills) and always wrote books and essays. My mother began as a social worker and then became a journalist, working for newspapers and magazines. (She resigned from her last position in journalism last year, 2014, at the age of seventy-eight.) Neither of them insisted on early specialization. In retrospect, my parents must have

worried about our future prospects—everyone else was worried. But to our good fortune, they did not project that particular anxiety on us.

My brother, Arshad, took the first big step. He was two years older than I and fantastically accomplished academically. (He was also a very good athlete, which made following in his footsteps challenging.) He had the kind of scores on his board exams that would have easily placed him in the top engineering programs in the country. Or he could have taken the IIT exam, which he certainly would have aced. In fact, he decided not to do any of that and instead applied to American universities. A couple of his friends considered doing the same, but no one quite knew how the process worked. We learned, for example, that applicants had to take something called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, but we didn’t know much about it. (Remember, this is 1980 in India. There was no Google. In fact, there was no color television.) We found a pamphlet about the test at the United States Information Service, the cultural branch of the U.S. embassy. It said that because the SAT was an aptitude test, there was no need to study for it. So, my brother didn’t. On the day the test was scheduled, he walked into the makeshift exam center in Bombay, an almost empty room in one of the local colleges, and took the test.

It’s difficult to convince people today how novel and risky an idea it was at the time to apply to schools in the United States. The system was still foreign and distant. People didn’t really know what it meant to get into a good American university or how that would translate into a career in India. The Harvard alumni in Bombay in the 1970s were by no means a “Who’s Who” of the influential and wealthy. Rather, they were an eclectic mix of people who either had spent time abroad (because their parents had foreign postings) or had some connection to America. A few friends of ours had ventured to the United States already, but because they hadn’t yet graduated or looked for jobs, their experiences were of little guidance.

My brother had no idea if the admissions departments at American colleges would understand the Indian system or know how to interpret his report cards and recommendations. He also had no real Plan B. If he didn’t take the slot offered by engineering schools, he wouldn’t be able to get back in line the next year. In fact, things were so unclear to us that we didn’t even realize American colleges required applications a full year in advance. As a result, he involuntarily took a gap year between school and college, waiting around to find out whether he got in anywhere.

As it happened, Arshad got in everywhere. He picked the top of the heap—

accepting a scholarship offer from Harvard. While we were all thrilled and impressed, many friends remained apprehensive when told the news. It sounded prestigious to say you were going to attend Harvard, but would the education actually translate into a career?

My mother traveled to the United States to drop my brother off in the fall of 1981, an uneasy time in American history. The mood was still more 1970s malaise than 1980s boom. The country was in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Vietnam and Watergate had shattered the nation’s confidence. The Soviet Union was seen as ascendant in our minds. Riots, protests, and urban violence had turned American cities into places of genuine danger. Our images of New York came from Charles Bronson movies and news reports of crack and crime.

All of this was especially alarming to Indians. The country’s traditional society had interpreted the 1960s and 1970s as a period of decay in American culture, as young people became morally lax, self-indulgent, permissive, and, perhaps most worrisome, rebellious. The idea that American youth had become disrespectful toward their elders was utterly unnerving to Indian parents. Most believed that any child who traveled to the United States would quickly cast aside family, faith, and tradition for sex, drugs, and rock and roll. If you sent your kids to America, you had to brace yourselves for the prospect that you might “lose” them.

In his first few weeks abroad, Arshad was, probably like all newcomers to Harvard, a bit nervous. My mother, on the other hand, returned from her trip clear of any anxiety. She was enchanted with the United States, its college campuses, and the undergraduate experience. She turned her observations into an article for the Times of India titled “The Other America.” In it, she described how concerned she had been before the trip about permissiveness, drugs, and rebellion at American colleges. She then went on to explain how impressed she was after actually spending time on a campus to find that the place focused on education, hard work, and extracurricular activities. The students she met were bright, motivated, and, to her surprise, quite respectful. She met parents who were tearfully bidding their children good-bye, talking about their next visit, or planning a Thanksgiving reunion. “I feel I am in India,” she wrote. “Could this be the heartless America where family ties have lost their hold?”

Indians had it all wrong about the United States, my mother continued. She tried to explain why they read so much bad news about the country. “America is an open society as no other. So they expose their ‘failings’ too as no other,” she

wrote. “[Americans] cheerfully join in the talk of their own decline. But the decline is relative to America’s own previous strength. It remains the world’s largest economy; it still disposes of the greatest military might the world has known; refugees from terror still continue to seek shelter in this land of immigrants. It spends millions of dollars in the hope that someone, somewhere may make a valuable contribution to knowledge. America remains the yardstick by which we judge America.” As you can see, she was hooked.

In those years, it was fashionable in elite Indian circles to denounce the United States for its imperialism and hegemony. During the Cold War, the Indian government routinely sided with the Soviet Union. Indira Gandhi, the populist prime minister, would often blame India’s troubles on the “foreign hand,” a reference to the CIA. But my mother has always been stubbornly pro-American. When my father was alive, he would sometimes criticize America for its crimes and blunders, partly to needle my brother and me and partly because, as one who had struggled for India’s independence, he had absorbed the worldview of his closest allies, who were all on the left. Yet my mother remained unmoved, completely convinced that the United States was a land of amazing vitality and virtue. (I suspect it’s what has helped her accept the fact that her sons chose the country as their home.)

Along with photographs and information brochures from her trip, my mother also brought back Harvard’s course book. For me, it was an astonishing document. Instead of a thin pamphlet containing a dry list of subjects, as one would find at Indian universities, it was a bulging volume overflowing with ideas. It listed hundreds of classes in all kinds of fields. And the course descriptions were written like advertisements—as if the teachers wanted you to join them on an intellectual adventure. I read through the book, amazed that students didn’t have to choose a major in advance and that they could take poetry and physics and history and economics. From eight thousand miles away, with little knowledge and no experience, I was falling in love with the idea of a liberal education.

I decided to follow in my brother’s footsteps and didn’t pursue the Indian options available to me. I took the SAT and wrote the required essays and applications. If you had asked me why I was so determined to go to the United States, I couldn’t have given you a coherent response. Indian universities seemed limiting and limited. I thought about applying to British universities, but I would have needed a scholarship and few existed. The idea of “reading” just one subject at Oxford or a narrow set of subjects at Cambridge seemed less

interesting when compared with the dazzling array of opportunities at the Ivy League schools. And, of course, there was the allure of America.

I had always been fascinated by America. I had visited once as a teenager, but most of my knowledge about the country came from Hollywood. While the Indian market was too poor and distant to get any newly released movies, we watched the ones we would get, a few years delayed—anything from The Poseidon Adventure to Kramer vs. Kramer—as well as old classics, like the Laurel and Hardy comedies, which I loved. Television arrived in the country in the mid-1970s, initially with just one government-run black-and-white channel that mostly aired documentaries on the glories of Indian agriculture. Every Sunday night, my family would gather around the television set to watch the one unadulterated piece of entertainment it would air, a Bollywood movie. Preceding that was a single episode of I Love Lucy, presumably all that Indian television could afford to import from the United States. Everyone watched it with pleasure, laughing along with Lucy and her crazy family. To this day, I have a soft spot for that show.

By the late 1970s, technology had begun to bring more of the West to India. A few of my friends had video recorders, and after a while, so did we. It was impossible to acquire actual copies of American movies and shows, but we did get many bootlegged versions. Somewhere in the United States, a relative would tape the latest television shows and send them to the family back home. These bootlegged Betamax tapes would be passed around in Bombay like samizdat publications in the Soviet Union.

The hottest show at the time was Dallas, which we all devoured. The scenes during the opening credits were my window into the American dream: shining shots of gleaming skyscrapers, helicopters landing in office parks, men in ten- gallon hats getting in and out of cavernous Cadillacs. And Victoria Principal— she was certainly part of my American dream. Whatever the newspapers said about problems in the United States, who could believe it with these images flashing across the screen? America seemed vast, energetic, and wealthy. Everything happened in Technicolor there.

The U.S. Information Service, set up to promote American culture and ideas during the Cold War, would hold screenings of older American classics. A friend and I would often attend these showings. There, in a small room in Bombay, sitting amid aging expats, I was introduced to Hollywood’s golden age. I kept a scrapbook on these movies, from It Happened One Night to Adam and Eve to How the West Was Won. In a sense, they were my first real introduction to

American history. And they added to my sense of the country as the world’s most exciting place.

Let me be honest, though: while the soft attraction was great, so was the cold cash. My parents were well-paid professionals, but India was one of the poorest countries in the world. Their annual salaries combined would have equaled just half of one year’s tuition abroad. At the time, American colleges did not offer need-blind admissions to foreign students like me—the schools all had much smaller endowments in those days—but they did distribute merit scholarships. And if you were admitted, they worked out a combination of grants, loans, and on-campus jobs that would allow you to attend. My brother’s reports from Harvard were that between his scholarship and a campus job, he was making do quite well. He even had enough money for books and incidental expenses. Yet realizing that I needed not only admission but also a scholarship added to my anxiety.

I got very lucky and ended up going to Yale. I have no idea why they let me in or why I chose to go there. I marvel today at college-bound American kids who take two or three trips to campuses, sit in on classes, have long discussions with counselors, and watch student theater productions—all to decide where to go to college. In comparison, I made an utterly uninformed choice from halfway around the world. I didn’t get into Harvard, but I was fortunate to be able to choose between Princeton and Yale and couldn’t really decide. I knew little about either. If I made a list of each university’s objective merits, which I did, Princeton usually came out on top. It was smaller and richer and had offered me a bigger scholarship. Everyone had heard of it in India because of Albert Einstein. Very few knew of Yale. This seems hard to believe, but Yale really was quite obscure in India. My father, like many Indians, couldn’t pronounce the name, and to his dying day he called it “Ale.” In general, American universities that have great name recognition in India—and in Asia more generally—are those with strong engineering programs, science departments, and business schools. These were not Yale’s strengths.

Eventually, I decided to use the only mechanism I could think of: a coin toss. Heads, I would go to Yale; tails, I would go to Princeton. I flipped the coin. It was tails. So I decided to make it a “best of three” and tossed again. I don’t remember if Yale won the coin toss at that point or if I kept going until it did. But in doing the exercise, I realized that I wanted to go to Yale. I don’t quite know why. It is an example of the power of intuition. Though obviously both are great institutions, Yale was the perfect place for me. I knew something at the

time that I couldn’t explain or even understand. Yale offered then, and still does now, a rigorous first-year academic program

called Directed Studies. It is a sweeping survey of the Western literary and philosophical tradition from ancient Greece to modernity. This seemed like a wonderful opportunity for a kid from India. It would have introduced me to a number of great Western classics that I had heard about but never read. You had to apply to be able to take the courses, which I did. Some months later, I was thrilled to get a note informing me that I had been accepted into the program.

I chickened out. When I got to Yale, it was time for me to finalize my choices. I tallied up the subjects that I believed I had to take—courses like math, computer programming, and physics—and realized that if I were going to enroll in Directed Studies, it would fill up most of my schedule. I panicked at the idea of committing so completely to something that seemed so impractical. I remember thinking to myself, “When people ask me in India over the summer about my courses, I could talk about computers and math. How would I explain this?” So I dropped Directed Studies and signed up for courses that seemed more sensible.

In my first year, however, I allowed myself to pick one class simply out of sheer interest. The course was a popular lecture on the history of the Cold War, taught by a political science professor named H. Bradford Westerfield. His lectures were packed with vivid details and delivered with gusto. I was hooked.

International politics and economics had always appealed to me. As a teenager in India, I would avidly read the major international newspapers and magazines, which sometimes arrived weeks after they were published. The great global drama of the times was the clash of the superpowers, and it echoed in India, a country that was torn between the two camps. I remember devouring the excerpts of Henry Kissinger’s memoirs when they came out, though I’m sure I didn’t understand them. (I was fifteen at the time.) Yet I never thought that one studied these kinds of subjects in college. I had assumed that I would major in something that was practical, technical, and job oriented. I could always read newspapers on the side. Westerfield’s course, however, made me realize that I should take my passion seriously, even without being sure what it might lead to in terms of a profession. That spring, I declared my major in history. I was going to get a liberal education.

But still, I couldn’t have answered the question, what is a liberal education?

2

A Brief History of Liberal Education

FOR MOST OF human history, education was job training. Hunters, farmers, and warriors taught the young to hunt, farm, and fight. Children of the ruling class received instruction in the arts of war and governance, but this too was intended first and foremost as preparation for the roles they would assume later in society, not for any broader purpose. All that began to change twenty-five hundred years ago in ancient Greece.

Prior to the change, education in Greece had centered on the development of arête, roughly meaning excellence or virtue. The scholar Bruce Kimball notes that the course of study largely involved the memorization and recitation of Homeric epic poetry.* Through immersion in the world of gods and goddesses, kings and warriors, children would master the Greek language and imbibe the lessons, codes, and values considered important by the ruling elite. Physical training was a crucial element of Greek education. In the city-state of Sparta, the most extreme example of this focus, young boys considered weak at birth were abandoned to die. The rest were sent to grueling boot camps, where they were toughened into Spartan soldiers from an early age.

Around the fifth century BC, some Greek city-states, most notably Athens, began to experiment with a new form of government. “Our constitution is called a democracy,” the Athenian statesman Pericles noted in his funeral oration, “because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people.” This innovation in government required a simultaneous innovation in education. Basic skills for sustenance were no longer sufficient—citizens also had to be properly trained to run their own society. The link between a broad education

and liberty became important to the Greeks. Describing this approach to instruction centuries later, the Romans coined a term for it: a “liberal” education, using the word liberal in its original Latin sense, “of or pertaining to free men.” More than two thousand years later, Frederick Douglass saw the same connection. When his master heard that young Frederick was reading well, he was furious, saying, “Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world. If he learns to read the Bible it will forever unfit him to be a slave.” Douglass recalled that he “instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.”

From the beginning, people disagreed over the purpose of a liberal education. (Perhaps intellectual disagreement is inherent in the idea itself.) The first great divide took place in ancient Greece, between Plato, the philosopher, and Isocrates, the orator. Plato and his followers, including Aristotle, considered education a search for truth. Inspired by Socrates, they used the dialectic mode of reasoning and discourse to pursue knowledge in its purest form. Isocrates, on the other hand, hearkened back to the tradition of arête. He and his followers believed a person could best arrive at virtue and make a good living by studying the arts of rhetoric, language, and morality. This debate—between those who understand liberal education in instrumental terms and those who see it as an end in and of itself—has continued to the present day.

In general, the more practical rationale for liberal education gained the upper hand in the ancient world. Yet the two traditions have never been mutually exclusive. The Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, one of the earliest writers on record to use the term artes liberales, wanted to combine the search for truth with rhetoric, which was seen as a more useful skill. “For it is from knowledge that oratory must derive its beauty and fullness,” the philosopher- statesman wrote around 55 AD. While debate continues, the reality is that liberal education has always combined a mixture of both approaches—practical and philosophical.

Science was central to liberal education from the start. Except that in those days, the reason to study it was the precise opposite of what is argued today. In the ancient world, and for many centuries thereafter, science was seen as a path to abstract knowledge. It had no practical purpose. Humanistic subjects, like language and history, on the other hand, equipped the young to function well in the world as politicians, courtiers, lawyers, and merchants. And yet the Greeks and Romans studied geometry and astronomy alongside rhetoric and grammar. In the first century BC, this dualistic approach to education was “finally and

definitively formalized” into a system described as “the seven liberal arts.” The curriculum was split between science and humanities, the theoretical and the practical. Centuries later, it was often divided into two subgroups: the trivium— grammar, logic, and rhetoric—was taught first; the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—came next.

Soldiers and statesmen, naturally, placed greater emphasis on subjects they thought of as practical—what today we would call the humanities. But even so, the idea of a broader education always persisted. In the eighth century, Charlemagne, king of the Franks (a Germanic tribe that inhabited large chunks of present-day Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg), consolidated his empire. Bruce Kimball notes that Charlemagne then established a palace school and named as its master Alcuin, an English scholar (even then Englishmen were the ideal headmasters). Alcuin and his followers concentrated on grammar and textual analysis and demoted mathematics, but they continued to teach some version of the liberal arts. And the deeper quest for understanding never disappeared. Even during the Dark Ages, medieval monasteries kept alive a tradition of learning and inquiry.

Why did European learning move beyond monasteries? One influence might have been Islam, the most advanced civilization in the Middle Ages—something difficult to imagine today. Within the world of Islam there were dozens of madrasas—schools where history, politics, science, music, and many other subjects were studied and where research was pursued (though not all Islamic educational institutions were called madrasas). Islamic learning produced innovations, especially in the study of mathematics. Algebra comes from the Arab phrase al-jabr, meaning “the reunion of broken parts.” The name of the Persian scholar al-Khwārizm ī was translated into Latin as algoritmi, which became “algorithm.” By the eleventh century, Cairo’s al-Azhar and Baghdad’s Nizamiyah were famous across the world for their academic accomplishments, as were many other centers of learning in the Arab world. This Islamic influence found a home in the Muslim regions of continental Europe as well, in the madrasas of Moorish Spain, in Granada, Córdoba, Seville, and elsewhere.

By the late Middle Ages, Europe’s stagnation was ending. The expansion in global trade and travel meant that its leaders needed greater knowledge and expertise in areas like geography, law, and science. As city-states competed with one another economically, they sought out individuals with better skills and education. Because of its long coastline, Italy became a place where commerce, trade, and capitalism were beginning to stir. Groups of scholars started coming

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together in various Italian cities to study theology, canon and civil law, and other subjects. These scholars came from great distances and were often grouped by their geographical origins, each one being called a “nation,” an early use of the word. Some of these “nations” hired local scholars, administered exams, and joined together into groups that came to be called universitas. These organizations sought and were granted special protections from local laws, thus allowing them necessary freedoms and autonomy.

In 1088, Europe’s first university was founded in Bologna. Over the next century, similar institutions sprouted up in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and Padua. By 1300, western Europe was home to between fifteen and twenty universities. These schools were initially not bastions of free inquiry, but they did become places where scholars discussed some taboo subjects, recovered, translated, and studied Aristotle’s writings, and subjected laws to close scrutiny. Yet most research took place outside of universities in those days because of their religious influence. It was heretical, for instance, for scientists to speculate on earth’s place amid the stars. In most cities, while students were accorded some of the same freedoms and exemptions as the clergy, they desired even more. The University of Padua’s motto was Universa universis patavina libertas—“Paduan freedom is universal for everyone.”

In the fourteenth century, the balance between practical and philosophical knowledge shifted again. Some Italian scholars and writers believed that universities had become too specialized. They looked to return European education to its Greek and Roman roots. These humanists rejected the highly detailed, scholastic approach to learning and theology that was pervasive in medieval universities. Instead, as the late scholar Paul Oskar Kristeller notes, they encouraged a “revival of arts and of letters, of eloquence and of learning” that “led to a new and intensified study of ancient literature and history.” Over the next two centuries, what has been called Renaissance humanism spread to the rest of Europe.

These traditions of scholarship, however, did not create the experience we now think of as a liberal education. That modern tradition had less to do with universities and more with colleges. And “college as we know it,” writes Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco, “is a fundamentally English idea.”† The earliest English colleges were founded in the thirteenth century for scholars of divinity whose duties, Delbanco notes, “included celebrating mass for the soul of the benefactor who had endowed the college and thereby spared them from menial work.” Religious influences were strong—the public lecture,

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for instance, was a secular outgrowth of the Sunday sermon—though the curriculum was varied and included non-theological subjects.

Colleges grew more secular by the nineteenth century as seminaries assumed responsibility for training ministers. They also began to develop a character distinct from European universities, which were becoming increasingly focused on research, especially in Germany. Unlike universities, which often lacked a clear physical embodiment, colleges were defined by their architecture. An imposing stone building was usually constructed with an open courtyard in the center and student dormitories arrayed around it. The “common” room was where students could meet, the chapel where they could pray, and the library where they could read. This model of a residential college originated in England and spread to the Anglo-American world, where it remains the distinctive form for undergraduates.

In the early twentieth century, among the major universities, Harvard and Yale adopted the full-fledged residential college model for student housing, partly in an effort to retain the intimate setting of liberal arts colleges while pursuing their ambitions to become great research universities. The residential college has come to be seen as possessing certain qualities that enhance the experience of liberal education beyond the curriculum. The advantages of such an arrangement are often described today in terms like “living-learning experiences,” “peer-to-peer education,” and “lateral learning.” Samuel Eliot Morison, the legendary historian of Harvard, best described the distinctive benefits of the residential setting: “Book learning alone might be got by lectures and reading; but it was only by studying and disputing, eating and drinking, playing and praying as members of the same collegiate community, in close and constant association with each other and with their tutors, that the priceless gift of character could be imparted.” An emphasis on building character, stemming from the religious origins of colleges, remains an aim of liberal arts colleges almost everywhere, at least in theory.

America’s earliest colleges were modeled on their English predecessors. Many of the founders of Harvard College, for example, were graduates of Emmanuel College at Cambridge University. Perhaps because, in America, they did not start out strictly as seminaries, colonial colleges often incorporated into their curricula a variety of disciplines, including the sciences, humanities, and law. Students were expected to take all these subjects and relate them to one another because it was assumed there was a single, divine intelligence behind all of them. In Cardinal John Newman’s nineteenth-century formulation of this

approach to education, “The subject-matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself, as being the acts and the work of the Creator.” It was a theological version of what physicists today call the unified field theory.

America’s first colleges stuck to curricula that could be described as God and Greeks—theology and classics. But a great debate over this approach emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century. People wondered why students should be required to study ancient Greek and Latin. They suggested that colleges should begin to incorporate modern languages and subjects into their instruction. After all, the country was growing rapidly and developing economically and technologically, making the college course of study seem antiquated in comparison. After much deliberation, the Yale faculty issued a report in 1828 defending the classical curriculum. It powerfully influenced American colleges for half a century—delaying, some might say, their inevitable evolution. It also, however, outlined a central tension in liberal education that persists till now.

The Yale report explained that the essence of liberal education was “not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions; but to lay the foundation which is common to them all.” It described its two goals in terms that still resonate: training the mind to think and filling the mind with specific content.

The two great points to be gained in intellectual culture, are the discipline and the furniture of the mind; expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge. The former of these is, perhaps, the more important of the two. A commanding object, therefore, in a collegiate course, should be, to call into daily and vigorous exercise the faculties of the student. Those branches of study should be prescribed, and those modes of instruction adopted, which are best calculated to teach the art of fixing the attention, directing the train of thought, analyzing a subject proposed for investigation; following, with accurate discrimination, the course of argument; balancing nicely the evidence presented to the judgment; awakening, elevating, and controlling the imagination; arranging, with skill, the treasures which memory gathers; rousing and guiding the powers of genius.

Though its particular aim historically was to defend the classical curriculum, the Yale report’s broader argument was that learning to think is more important than the specific topics and books that are taught. A Harvard man revived the argument fifty years later, as he battled to undo the report’s recommendations.

Charles Eliot was an unlikely candidate for the presidency of Harvard. He was a scientist at a time when the heads of schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were still generally ministers. After graduating from Harvard in 1853, Eliot was appointed to be a tutor and later an assistant professor of mathematics and chemistry at the school. But he was not made a full professor as he had hoped, and at about the same time, his bad luck compounded as his father’s

fortune collapsed. Eliot decided to travel to Europe, where he saw firsthand the rapidly changing state of higher education on the Continent and the rise of the great research universities in Germany. He then returned to the United States to take up a professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1865. At the time, like many other colleges, Harvard was in the midst of a tumultuous period in its history. It faced calls for more vocational education in order to prepare Americans for the workforce in the rapidly industrializing economy just emerging from the Civil War.

To address these concerns, Eliot penned a two-part essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled “The New Education.” It began with words that could be uttered by any parent today, adjusted for gender: “What can I do with my boy? I can afford, and am glad, to give him the best training to be had. I should be proud to have him turn out a preacher or a learned man; but I don’t think he has the making of that in him. I want to give him a practical education; one that will prepare him, better than I was prepared, to follow my business or any other active calling.” Eliot’s answer was that Americans needed to combine the best developments of the emerging European research university with the best traditions of the classic American college.

Eliot proposed that America’s great universities embrace the research function, but that they do so at the graduate level, leaving undergraduates free to explore their interests more broadly. He showed a strong understanding and mastery of the emerging trends in education, like the difference between scientific and humanistic fields and the rise in technical training. He wanted colleges to distinguish carefully between a skills-based and a liberal education, the latter of which he considered more important. Months after his essays were published, at the age of thirty-five, Charles Eliot was offered the presidency of Harvard, a post that he held for four decades—exactly—and from which he reshaped the university and the country.