Historically, an American undergraduate liberal education is sharply distinguished from that of other nations by four factors:
- Multi-disciplinary approach: exposure to a variety of academic subjects rather than what a student thinks is the subject of interest. This is often difficult for non-Americans and even some Americans to appreciate. The reasoning is not only that a well-educated person should be versed in various areas of knowledge before concentrating, but also, that innovation in life and profession comes from the interaction of disparate fields of study. A narrow course of study can become redundant as life and professional demands change over the decades.
- Experiential learning: emphasis on out-of-class experience as a critical component of undergraduate study. It is thought that life and professional skills—such as leadership and teamwork–are also obtained beyond academic in-class study –in clubs, athletics, and student government.
- Bridging of Arts-Sciences Divide: a liberal education in the United a States and internationally includes not merely the humanities and arts but also some of the sciences and social sciences.
- Skills Development: skills embedded throughout the curriculum are as important as the course of study–the academic content. These skills are critical to navigating life and are deemed highly valuable–and sought after– by employers in all sectors of the global economy–especially for leadership. These skills are often incorrectly identified as “soft skills,” but it is more appropriate to label them “operative skills” because of their concrete impact upon achievement. They include: deductive thinking, inductive thinking, critical thinking, creativity, thinking across subject areas (associative thinking), listening skills, writing skills, public speaking skills and teamwork.
However, there is another factor that has historically been overlooked as a distinguishing feature of U.S. university education. Although arguably never fully realised, its legacy shapes how a number of contemporary university leaders are rethinking the curriculum.
“Education in our country stands in need of revolution. It should be accommodated to our government and state of society.”
To understand this legacy, we need to go back to the founders of the United States of America in the eighteenth century, who called for not just a political revolution, but also an education revolution. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a physician, signer of the Declaration of Independence and founder of three universities stated, “Education in our country stands in need of revolution. It should be accommodated to our government and state of society.”
Clearly it was not so accommodated at the time. Dr. Rush and others such as Thomas Jefferson, the drafter and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Noah Webster, another signer and the author of an American dictionary, noted that the university curriculum America inherited from Europe was inappropriate to a people who urgently needed to build both a nation and a society. They had work to do in the world and they needed an education to advance them in knowledge and practice fitting that demand.
Again, Dr. Rush is most pointed on the subject, “It is equally a matter of regret that no accommodation has been made in the system of education in our seminaries [schools and colleges] to the new form of our government and the many national duties, and objects of knowledge, that have been imposed upon us by the American Revolution. Instead of instructing…in the Arts most essential to their [students] existence, and in the means of acquiring that kind of knowledge which is connected with the time, the country and government in which they live, they are compelled…in learning two languages which no longer exist, and are rarely spoken, which have ceased to be the vehicles of the Science and literature, and which contain no knowledge but what is to be met with in a more improved and perfect state in modern languages.”
“…in the Arts most essential to their [students] existence, and in the means of acquiring that kind of knowledge which is connected with the time…”
Of course, Dr. Rush was negatively targeting instruction in the writing and speaking of Latin and Greek (he still thought reading Greek was useful as it provided moral lessons–therefore, he did not totally reject the inherited notion of liberal education as informing a good life. He just had additional expectations of a liberal education distinctive to America). Instead of what he considered “useless” study for American students as part of a liberal education, he went against centuries of tradition and suggested modern languages—German and French—as he thought Americans in life and profession would need these languages for contemporary exchange of ideas and practices with others so that the U.S. could learn, adopt, and grow. He even advocated the introduction of chemistry into liberal education believing that this subject was to be in the future the most “useful” to connect to new areas of knowledge and, therefore, provide material progress for the nation and its people.
Rush and numerous of his fellow signers of the Declaration of Independence were determined, as Rush again stated, “To abolish customs of studies in the College of wonkish origin and which have nothing but antiquity to recommend them.” With rejection of a curriculum unrelated to current demands and to the material and spiritual building of a community, according to Rush, “A wide field of usefulness will now be opened…”
For the founders of America, it was usefulness and a relevance to current challenges and opportunities that were to define a distinctive American liberal education.
It was an education that responded to the needs of community and was to take place in part within community. In a letter written in 1780, Dr. Rush, for example, urged a young American preparing to study abroad to use his time there not just in the classroom, but to talk to everybody in the broader community regardless of status, to inquire of manufacture, to observe emerging knowledge and practice and to bring what he thought useful back to his home country to improve it. As Thomas Jefferson put it in his notes on the founding of the University of Virginia, “Education generates habits of application.”
As Chair of the Board of Trustees at Richmond American University London I must declare an interest in this – possibly overlooked but hugely relevant – approach to American liberal education.
Richmond American University London is underscoring its ambition to reclaim a distinctively ‘useful’ American liberal education in and out of the classroom by emphasizing those “operative skills” mentioned above that are at once necessary for a good life and so desired by employers. They are embedded in all courses and are, therefore, inescapable. Students also take part in service learning (working in the community), take credited internships and study abroad for a semester or year, all of which contributes towards a very ‘useful’ or ‘applied’ liberal education.
There is much merit in boldly redefining liberal education by reaching into a forgotten past, and in so doing, offering students an education most appropriate for the times in which they will live and work–a world in which the increasing presence and dominance of artificial intelligence questions what knowledge and skill remain human. Ironically, the past is often the source of innovation and what, in fact, remains human–its creativity and ability to apply knowledge and skill in ever-changing circumstances. When the past becomes useful to how we understand and shape the world around us, it is a privilege to pass this legacy on to the next generations.
By William G. Durden, Ph.D., Chair, Board of Directors, Richmond American University London; President emeritus, Dickinson College’ Visiting Scholar, Johns Hopkins University; Contributing Scholar, Dickinson College
