Berkowitz on liberal education

Liberal arts colleges and universities can be snooty about the quality of education they provide, but they don’t necessarily do a very good job either.

In my last post, I referred to an article by Peter Berkowitz in the December 2006 & January 2007 issue of Policy Review.  In the article, titled “Liberal Education, Then and Now,”  Berkowitz compares the ideal university education described by John Stuart Mill to today’s typical university education.  He says that contemporary liberal arts colleges and universities don’t agree about the “core knowledge and defining qualities of an educated person.”  Therefore, students do not acquire a “common intellectual foundation.”  He asks

So what if universities, for lack of a standard, are unable to say whether their graduates are well-educated?  A college degree remains a hot commodity, a ticket of entry to valuable social networks, a signal to employers that graduates have achieved a certain proficiency in manipulating concepts, performing computations, and getting along with peers.  If universities continue to offer parents a good return on investment, donors a pleasant place to practice philanthropy, professors good research opportunities, and students a convivial four years in which to get ready for their careers, why not leave well enough alone?

Berkowitz’s answer: “A university that fails to teach students sound mental habits and to acquaint them with enduring ideas handicaps its graduates for both public and private life.”

Berkowitz has his own ideas about what studies would produce an educated person, and his suggestions go beyond the usual general education breadth requirements.  He particularly objects to professors pushing narrow ideological agendas.  He says that “universities that purport to provide a liberal education will be failing in their mission unless their graduates, progressives and conservatives alike, prove capable of sympathetically understanding the positions of the political party to which they do not belong and discerning what is true and enduring in the beliefs of their partisan opponents.”

By this standard, even some of the leading figures in our political life appear not to be very well educated.