The Liberal Arts in School and College

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By STANLEY N. KATZ

The debates that dominate the discussion of the transition from high school to college today assume that the sole function of high school is to prepare graduates to succeed in college courses. If we look at secondary education from the point of view of the liberal arts, however, we can discover a fundamentally different concept of its purpose — and of the capabilities of adolescents. A liberal-arts focus shows how different American assumptions are from those of the other industrialized nations with whom we compete globally today.

Let me start with two points. First, liberal education (by which I mean an engagement with the major aspects of human knowledge and values) is not a throwaway, a bauble for rich kids in select institutions who are going to get good jobs no matter what they study. Liberal education is, or should be, at the core of training our youth to serve themselves, their country, and the world. Second, liberal education is a process laden with content that stretches over an extended period of schooling — at the very least from the third year of high school through the second year of college — and arguably over the entire eight years for those who attend the two institutions.

The question I want to raise is whether we, in the United States, assume that the majority of students aren't ready to take on a challenging liberal-arts curriculum until they get to college. Have we implicitly taken for granted that adolescents are not capable of tackling the liberal arts? And must we assume, as I think we do, that college students need to get through studying them as quickly as possible, in order to go on to more-professional studies?

According to Harvard University's Charles William Eliot, the most influential higher-education leader of his time in the United States, writing about liberal education more than a century ago: "For 20 years past signs have not been wanting that the American college was not keeping pace with the growth of the country in population and wealth. I believe that a chief cause of this relative decline is the narrowness of the course of study in both school and college."

It sounds to me as though there are disturbing similarities in the challenges to liberal education at the turn of the 21st century. What seems different is the failure of today's educational leaders to take a broad and historical view of what is wrong, for the underlying problem of how to provide liberal education to American youth has not changed much.

Eliot began his diagnosis by asserting that the issue was developmental, not institutional — a problem of students' intellectual development rather than of particular educational institutions. He noted that "the course of study which terminates in the degree of bachelor of arts ordinarily covers from seven to 10 years, of which four are spent in college and three to six at school." Eliot, that is, saw the B.A. as a rite of passage of the adolescent and postadolescent years, which he defined as "somewhere between the ages of 12 and 23."

Of course the content issues were different, since Eliot wanted to modernize what was left of the 19th-century classical curriculum based in philosophy, ancient languages, mathematics, and ethics by adding to it the study of modern languages, history, political economy, and the natural sciences. The reason was that the classical definition no longer served the material needs of the country.

Today we need to remodernize, both to bring the curriculum into contact with the myriad new fields of knowledge that have emerged over the past half-century and to provide students the intellectual wherewithal to cope with the global challenges of the postindustrial age.

But the interesting thing about Eliot's assertion is that it placed the American approach to liberal education in a context similar to that of most of the postindustrial world. The French lycée and its baccalauréat, the German (Swiss, Swedish, Austrian, etc.) gymnasium and its abitur (or some cognate certificate), the English Sixth Form, the Polish matura, and so forth are all examples of the extent to which liberal education is institutionalized before university entrance.

The idea of what one might call the liberal-education continuum was discussed many times over the course of the last century. John Dewey saw reforming elementary and secondary education as necessary to instituting a more-pragmatic curriculum in higher education.

In the middle of the 20th century, an innovative collaboration of Ivy League colleges and elite prep schools revisited the notion in an attempt to revitalize liberal education. They were spurred by the words of John M. Kemper, headmaster of Andover, who argued in 1951 that "it appears obvious that school and college programs, especially during the important years from the 11th through the 14th grade, have not been planned as coherent wholes. Boys from the best independent schools often report that their early courses in college are repetitious and dull." Kemper decried "the waste involved in the transition from school to college, especially for gifted and well-trained boys." The focus on "boys" may not be the same, but the question of waste still concerns us.

Today the landscape has changed. We in the United States, while not unique, are surely unusual in the extent to which we have bifurcated liberal education, ordinarily deferring it at least until the junior and senior years of high school and "completing" it in the freshman and sophomore years of college. For too long, the focus of high-school education in this country has been on basic skills and the acquisition of information, with little attention either to higher-order skills or more abstract and comprehensive knowledge.

What passes for liberal education in the schools is largely cordoned off in Advanced Placement courses, which have lost their vitality by restricting their ambition to an unimaginative testing regime. In the colleges, we have not been able to reimagine approaches to general education for incoming students, both because faculty members have too often lost confidence in the challenge and because we do not know how to cope with the fantastic range of knowledge we have created.

How did we get to this point? One reason is clearly the democratization of American education. Unlike in Eliot's day, nearly 70 percent of high-school graduates go on to postsecondary education within two years of graduation. Not only are there more students, but they include nearly the full range of the American population, drawn from an enormous range of secondary schools, rather than just elite "boys" from prep schools. Our effort to educate everyone is laudable and central to a democracy, but we have, mostly unconsciously, dumbed down our approach to liberal education in order to not leave anyone out.

We are also increasingly uncertain about what counts as liberal education. On the one hand, we seem to have too much to teach; on the other, we worry about offending some students (and their parents) by speaking openly and honestly about controversial matters. And, although this is hard to substantiate, it seems to me that we Americans have a fear of asking too much of our adolescent children (at least academically, if not in terms of all the other demands we make on their time and energy that sap their focus), and so we have deferred to college the kinds of aggressive and searching education that our youngsters need for their full intellectual development.

Further, while there is a long history of attempts by higher-education leaders to influence what is taught in the schools, the mainstream of those attempts has focused on the appropriate preparation of high-school students to succeed in college. The College Board, after all, was established with the facilitation of the transition from the 12th grade to the college-freshman year as its principal objective. Today the board, which has become an increasingly commercial organization, does little more than administer tests to assist colleges in the admissions process — rather than trying to mediate between schools and colleges to facilitate the intellectual development of students.

The emerging disciplines and their professional societies also had an impact on the shape of high-school education. In the early 20th century, several commissions of professors worked to define what high-school students could and should learn before going to college. Their motives were chauvinistic and idealistic — they believed that history or math or geography was inherently entitled to a major place in every child's education — and also practical — as university teachers they wanted to ensure that they would attract undergraduates sufficiently well prepared to take their courses.

In more recent years, those efforts have often concentrated on adding subjects and competing for additional teaching hours in the school's curriculum. We do not seem to have the will or the institutional mechanisms to think through how the parts relate to the whole. But we could be helped by a recommitment of the professional disciplinary associations to engage in dialogue with their school counterparts on reconstituting liberal education in their fields.

Finally, testing, not curriculum, has come to dominate our discussions of the transition to college. The issue was at the top of the agenda of elite prep-school and college reformers, who issued a report, General Education in School and College: A Committee Report, in 1952. They emphasized a liberal-studies, seven-year program for high school and college and, in an appendix, almost as an afterthought, suggested "an experiment in advanced placement." But their intention was to set up examinations to "be used, not for admission to college, but for placement after admission."

Today the full report has been forgotten, the Advanced Placement course has taken on an unintended life of its own, and the AP examination has become little more than yet another testing hurdle to college admissions.

I think the answer is to revisit the earliest ideas about liberal education for young people. That would mean recommitting ourselves to fostering intellectual development across the years of the late teens and strengthening liberal education in the schools. That does not mean expanding test-driven AP courses, but developing courses in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences that challenge young people to think synthetically and to understand that the essence of education is the courage and ability to make value judgments. Moving in that direction would permit us to reinvigorate general-education courses during the first two years of college, giving upperclassmen the deep understanding to think better and do more in their disciplinary majors and, more important, to contextualize those majors.

The barriers are enormous to making those changes. But I do believe that clearly naming the problem is a start. We desperately need to move the conversation forward.

Stanley N. Katz is chairman of the undergraduate program at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies.