Higher education in Utah has a branding problem.
State lawmakers have amused themselves this year by cutting state spending for public colleges and universities by some $60 million and putting those dollars back into an account for which they want university presidents to sit up and beg.
Getting funds from that account will require the schools to demonstrate that they are providing “efficient” or “high-performing” majors and programs. And, presumably, not whizzing it away on literature, art and philosophy.
Hostility to higher levels of education has always been common in the United States. Some of it probably comes from the clumsy argument — particularly clumsy when it comes from people who are supposedly highly educated — that people with a college degree are smarter, even somehow better, than people who have taken a different path in life.
They aren’t.
But the core of this anti-education thought may well be the label that both adherents and doubters of higher education use to refer to it.
It’s called a “liberal arts education.” Some colleges refer to themselves as liberal arts institutions. And that can’t help but be a red flag for many folks, especially Republican politicians.
And that is because the American academy has not done a proper job of explaining what the term means. In this context, it does not mean “liberal” in the sense of favoring high taxes on the rich, universal health care and outreach to minorities and women.
It means “liberal” in the ancient and medieval sense of “liberty,” from the Latin “liberalis.”
True conservative thinkers — not those who stand with Vladimir Putin — unflinchingly sing the praises of “liberal democracy.” That means free nations that live under the rule of law, not necessarily those with free health care and progressive taxation.
In education, it means equipping students with the kind of knowledge that will allow them to think for themselves, teach themselves, evaluate what they read and hear, make persuasive cases for what they think, and be at liberty to live a good, self-directed life.
Scholars of the Middle Ages and Renaissance picked up the ancient idea of the Seven Liberal Arts, touted at least as far back as Plato, as the basic components of an education worthy of the name. Necessary for leaders and, in democratic communities, everyone.
They are grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music.
The first three, dealing with words, are called the trivium, meaning the “threefold way” and the root of our modern, often dismissive, term “trivia”. It goes beyond knowing how to read and write and into being skilled in evaluating the arguments of others and making your own arguments for what you believe. Anything but trivial.
The other four, the quadrivium, are the basis of math and science. And, yes, music goes there because it is based on mathematical progressions and interplay.
There is some understanding today of how math and music go together in the concept of changing the idea of a STEM education — science, technology, engineering and math — to STEAM — the “A” being arts.
So maybe, instead of forever floundering to make the case that a liberal education based in the humanities is good for everyone, engineers and accountants as well as poets and philosophers, we should just change what we call it.
The Seven Conservative Arts. A conservative arts education, or institution. It might make politicians feel better, and keep their mitts off of university funding, but those really involved in our institutions of higher learning really wouldn’t have to change anything other than the stationery.
The seven ancient roots of education should just as easily be thought of as conservative as liberal. Grammar, logic and rhetoric, geometry, mathematics, astronomy and music should widely be accepted as basic and respectful of our heritage and institutions. Which is what conservative thought used to value, at least, before the age of MAGA.
If universities started proclaiming the benefits of their conservative arts programs, and politicians still opposed funding for higher education, it might become more obvious to more people that Republican politics in the Age of Trump is not conservative in the least.
It would be clear that the hostility to education, from pre-K to your med school residency, is hostility to the kind of education that would allow people to figure things out for themselves.
That our Trumpian leaders really want people who don’t think, don’t evaluate, don’t challenge, but mindlessly accept the bunk they are told by Faux News and the unhinged podcaster who somehow got himself appointed deputy director of the FBI.
That they’ve sided with Putin rather than Plato.
George Pyle, reading The New York Times at The Rose Establishment.
George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, didn’t learn what the Seven Liberal Arts were in high school or college. But from James Burke on PBS.
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