Teach liberal arts in high school, or students will never learn what they need to know, says John Agresto, author of The Death of Learning.
A book I wrote called “The Death of Learning” has been generating some attention, both good and bad. It catalogs the decline of traditional liberal arts education in America – especially in our colleges and universities – and offers some modest and fairly traditional ways to turn this situation around.
But what most commentators have overlooked is that the book actually begins with my concerns about the decline of the liberal arts in those places where they once flourished – in our public and private high schools and academies.
Let me see if I can review the problem as I see it.
It’s been my experience that many high school teachers truly love some aspect of the liberal arts. Even more than many university professors, who can sometimes be devoted more to their research projects than to the broad sweep of their field, you are in love with History or Literature, French or Science.
Having said that, if your students do not get a liberal education under your tutelage, they almost certainly will never get one. And for the great majority, even after receiving the beginnings of a liberal education from you, they will abandon what you love, and they will go on to other things. In looking over graduation statistics from a recent year, over 300,000 undergraduate degrees were given in business but only 37,000 in Philosophy, English, and History combined.
And even if your students attend an ostensibly liberal arts college, we know how deeply specialization has set down its roots at that level. I worry that they will go to college in search of even greater liberal learning, but their interest will wane until it’s extinguished altogether.
Why so? University professors’ graduate training is the story, not of breadth, but of focus and narrowness. Getting a doctorate is less about understanding the broad sweep of English or History but boring down into a small piece of it – often not a piece worthy of the time, effort, or attention of undergraduates much less high school students.
So, here’s the problem, dear high school teacher: your college-bound students will most likely concentrate in Business, or Computer Science, or Engineering, or Pre-Med. All worthy and laudable areas. But if they decide to major in History, English, Classical Studies, or Philosophy, chances are their knowledge will be narrowed rather than expanded.
They may learn “to think like a historian” rather than to understand the amazing breadth of human history. They may well learn to be “critical,” but will they learn to understand? Will they begin to see the human and natural world in all its complexity and wonder? Will they see the development of civilization with all its achievements and horrors? Will they begin to move more steadily from their and their friends’ opinions toward greater knowledge? I clearly have doubts.
Which leads me to place a great burden on my colleagues in secondary school education: the last chance for our children to see the world in its breadth and complexity rests with you.
This is also why I have grown seriously to dislike the phrase “preparatory school” – as if you were simply preparers for the real world of learning that follows in college. You are not “preparatory”; you are not the table-setters for the feast that follows. You are most often both the sum and the pinnacle of a student’s liberal education. For most students, the last comprehensive, panoramic, freeing education happens with you.
There’s so much more to say. We need to talk about having respect for the past without being slavishly ruled by it. We need to talk about active learning – perhaps going from “instruction” to “conversation” – that is, we need to talk about moving from lectures to seminars (and not the kind where random opinions equally rule). We have to move from learning about books and events to learning from them. Perhaps we need to stop putting all people and events into what we think is their “historical context” and instead see if what was said, thought, and done might be instructive for us today.
This is the great promise of liberal education: that thoughts, ideas, and insights can transcend time and place and can go from the dead to the living for teachers and their students.