The Liberal Arts and the End of Education Essay -- Philosophy Educatio

The Liberal Arts and the End of EducationABSTRACT An international crowd that takes Philosophy Educating Humanity as its theme does well to revisit the crowing arts customs. Although the liberal arts are most often assimilated to studies brought unitedly as the Humanities, the old usage included the arts which employed synthetic lectures in mathematics, music, and astronomy, as well as the literature and letters of the several(a) natural terminologys. The current conflation of liberal education with the gayities does violence to the historic tradition in education, reducing it to fluff in the eyes of unsentimental scientists who know that only numbers deliver objectivity. The liberal arts of the handed-down undergraduate curriculum provided the skills to liberate the students linguistic powers so that he or she could read, speak, and understand natural language in all its functions. To educate human persons to master language is to encourage students to take possession of their natural powers so that they can express themselves, understand what others say, and reason together. The arts of natural language lead to mastery of the mathematical arts which use a language that is no ones mother tongue. Together, the seven arts rid students of the worst enemies of worldly concern ignorance and prejudice. Since no one can be considered to have received a goodeducation if he accepts uncritically the opinions ofthe educators of his own times, the student should come across alternatives to these opinions.Samuel S. KutlerThe past is always difficult to deal with. We are torn amongst the temptations of remaining within the comfort of a past we have start out accustomed to and the equally dangerous alternative of fleeing an ... ...he arts of mathematical language teach us habits of rigorous, disinterested abstract thought. Post-moderns seem to be booked in replacing philosophy, perhaps in the guise of logic, with rhetoric so that all becomes conversation or n arrative, and privilege is problematic. Were we to resuscitate a variate of the liberal arts tradition as pedagogy and a aim for our post-modern times, we would not be coaxing a dusty corpse of a bygone tradition back to life. Rather we would be putting our tradition into practice. The liberal arts live only in time, in more or less historical instantiation or another. Now may be the time to beat this curriculum back into our time. Rather than a person ill-equipped to do anything, the more traditionally educated liberal arts graduate could again be a person who is equipped by his skills to do anything. And, to respect what is worth doing.