3. The Meaning of a Liberal Arts and Sciences Education in the United States: Anachronistic Lessons from a Parochial Past

Although the United States is often heralded as the leader in the liberal arts and sciences model of higher education, the idea of a “liberal education” itself remains both loaded and vague. Do we yet have a consensus on its meaning and application today that does not rely on some appeal to a vaguely defined and putatively historic tradition? In this article, we sketch out the problem and trace its historic origins in the United States to better address one of the enduring and valuable meanings of a US liberal higher education. Our purpose is to illuminate the essential holistic and student-centered dimension of US small liberal arts college (SLAC) education, and why it is worth preserving through the current crises and pandemic. We draw from this dimension of the US liberal education tradition several helpful suggestions about how to escape our confusion surrounding the meaning of the idea: focusing on the character formation of individuals that can serve their communities, shifting curriculum away from mere breadth and depth in disciplinary knowledge and to breadth and depth of character development, supporting teacher tracks in higher education to foster this kind of student-centered learning, exploring the possibilities for liberal holistic learning in other contexts and at distance, and finally being unafraid to defend a robust holistic liberal education even if it demands a lot to carry out well.