What is the value of a liberal arts education?

Professor Rebecca Copenhaver is an associate professor of Philosophy and Director of Exploration and Discovery at Lewis & Clark College. Below is her answer to a long-standing (and ever more important) question: "What is the value of a liberal arts education?"

"The primary value of a liberal arts education is its effects on the lives of those who engage in it rather than its more practical uses. At the center of the liberal arts is the conviction that a broad and deep education makes a certain kind of good life possible – one that is embedded in relations that provide life with meaning: relations to the past, the world, and to other persons. In other words, the liberal arts are valuable in and of themselves and they are valuable because they transform those who practice them. How do the liberal arts do this?

The liberal arts free us from our own narrow personal aims and interests. They enlarge our interests beyond ourselves, beyond our subjectivities. The liberal arts tradition does not resolve problems or issues by relating them to oneself – to what one already believes. This gets it exactly backwards. In the liberal arts one is led away from the self. The liberal arts expand our spheres of concern and alter our conceptions of value by focusing the mind on things other than itself. The liberal arts are an antidote to the notion that each person creates his own reality, his own truth, his own value. Rather, the liberal arts allow one to see that reality is not solipsistic, that truth is a common project bound by conventions of reason, and that value is found in relations among people, past and world. The liberal arts free the mind from the tyranny of custom and keep alive a sense of wonder. They teach that the certainties of accepted platitudes, cliché’s, prejudices of common sense, and habitual beliefs rarely withstand critical scrutiny and impede the free play of an active mind.

In short, the liberal arts make one a bigger person, bigger than a person whose values are based on things that immediately satisfy her whims. Such a person understands that other people, and perhaps other creatures, have aims and interests that have as equal a claim as her own. Such a person understands that she lacks complete understanding of the universe and that her beliefs are always revisable in the light of new understanding. Such a person seeks out additional understanding – she wants to grow and change. Such a person knows that she cannot accomplish this by herself – she needs other people to help her see the world from a perspective other than her own.

And so the liberal arts are not valuable because they are useful, or productive, or beautiful, or lucrative, or fun, or pleasing, or prestigious, though they may be all those things too. A liberal arts education is valuable because, as Bertrand Russell put it, “through the greatness of the universe which [it] contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.”

A person transformed by the liberal arts possesses a kind of flexibility, resilience and optimism. The ancients had a term for this – practical wisdom – and it such wisdom that makes it possible to make choices and with character and integrity. "

- Professor Rebecca Copenhaver, Lewis & Clark College.