Liberal Education and the College Curriculum

Abstract

W ILL the liberal arts, and in particular the humanities, after the war regain their former place in the college curriculum? With many other persons, I believe it to be of the highest importance for the future of this country that liberal education should not only persist, but should be made both more real and more truly liberal than hitherto. By more real, I mean that students should be required really to know the relatively few things which they are asked to learn and really to master the modest intellectual skills which they are supposed to acquire, instead of, as too often now, being allowed to graduate with only the impressionistic knowledge and the half-skills which marks of C represent. Their work in the war courses which they are now taking proves they are quite capable of it. To make a college easy to get in, easy to stay in, and easy to graduate from not only debases the educational currency, but is both morally and psychologically obtuse morally, because it tacitly assumes that it is important that a college should keep going even if the education it gives is not worth getting; and psychologically, because the love of the strenuous, the difficult, the risky is in man, especially when young and vigorous, a spring of action as natural and effective as the love of pleasure. But if postwar college education is to be adequate to the responsibilities which will rest upon it, it must become more truly liberal as well as more real. Any attempt, however, to make it so must, if it is to bear fruit, be based on a more definite philosophy of liberal education than has commonly shaped such attempts. Only