The New Disciplines of Liberal Education

ABSTRACT

Much of recent literature on general education, common learning, or liberal education tends to stress the uniqueness of our circumstances and the discontinuities with tradition, and many of the suggested plans eschew any reflexive consideration of the ways that a particular program embodies or derives from a theory of the disciplines. I want to encourage reexamination of tradition as well as self-examination of theory and practice in order to make better sense of the successes and failures of suggested programs. A program of common study must derive from some analysis of the context of education, and it must suggest a criterion of success or failure if we are going to be able to judge it adequately. The context is broader than the new circumstances of the present: we can only discriminate the new by referring to traditions, and we benefit from understanding the ways in which past shifts and innovations in education have occurred. Standards for evaluation should be sought in the abilities we create to adjust to present problems and to transform the present state of learning into the kind of knowledge appropriate for the future. The work of Richard McKeon is an invaluable tool for uncovering the complex relations of theory and practice, and his writing on the disciplines of the liberal arts can help us state and evaluate innovations in common learning. On the one hand, McKeon's schema of the liberal arts helps identify programs that are too restricted in theory or practice; on the other hand, McKeon can show us how the variety of successes and even failures participates in the tradition of the liberal arts. The patterns of a liberal education are always concerned with content, skills, the creation of a whole person, and that person's action in the community. Using McKeon's schema for the disciplines, I examine the opportunities for common learning within and among the disciplines. The disciplines are fields or subject matters as well as methods or arts of inquiry. The new disciplines of a liberal arts education must prepare students to take their place in technological society and free them to enjoy and to direct their lives. Interdisciplinary learning, while frequently misunderstood as the mere conjoining or overlapping of subjects, provides opportunities for teachers and students to cooperate in the discovery and ordering of knowledge that will produce a sense of wholeness and participation in the greater community. The relationship between character and discipline that McKeon suggests provides criteria for judging interdisciplinary suggestions based on skills as well as subject matters.