Applied Liberal Education: Making the Case or Muddying the Waters?

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Chris Martin’s defense of liberal education, particularly in the context of preparation for the “moral professions,” adds a valuable rationale for the importance of the humanities and liberal arts to the overall project of a university education. Martin carries out his defense by elucidating the value of a liberal approach to medical education that reveals and “More fully realizes the humanistic dimensions of more specialist professions such as medicine.” In what follows I take a fairly contrarian line, so I want to emphasize that I sympathize with and find compelling Martin’s argument for reconfiguring medical education to emphasize the centrality of humanistic concerns to the lives of medical professionals, rather than dabbling with a “quarantined” liberal education detached from practical or pedagogical issues. My concern is that, in framing his specific case for liberal medical education, Martin has conceded a particular conception of the nature and purpose of the university, which cripples the larger project of justifying liberal education. In particular, I argue that accepting and extending a set of distinctions regarding the value of liberal education undermines efforts to justify authentic liberal education, either within or outside medical education.