Liberal Education: Elitist and Irrelevant to Everyday Life?

Liberal Education: Elitist and Irrelevant to Everyday Life? Harold Entwistle, Concordia University Introduction Liberal education is not universally accepted as the proper educational experience for the majority of students in schools. Its critics raise a variety of objections: that liberal education is elitist; that it is irrelevant to the everyday lives of ordinary people; that it is almost exclusively cognitive in orientation, neglecting the emotions and the practical life; that in multicultural societies it is culturally myopic, focusing entirely on the achievements of Western civilisation to the neglect of other contributions to human knowledge; and, from some feminists, that it is an authoritarian imposition of a patriarchal society which deliberately diminishes the contributions which women have made to Western culture. I believe all of these objections to be misconceived, but in this paper one cannot attempt a refutation of all of them. Accordingly I shall concentrate on the related objections that liberal education is elitist and that it fails to meet the needs of ordinary people in the daily conduct of their lives. One other introductory point: recently, there has been some recourse to the term "liberal education" in a sense quite different from its traditional usage in the history of education. Some have taken the adjective "liberal" to refer to the kind of pedagogy built upon the free choices and initiatives of individual learners, such that liberal education becomes indistinguishable from progressive education. However, this is not the historical sense of the term and defence of this more recent usage is not the subject of this paper. Briefly, liberal education is the attempt to make the whole of human knowledge available to the learner, though in schools this encyclopedism re quires selection and different depth and width of coverage according to in dividual interests and capacities. Familiarly, not least in the interests of manageability, the "encyclopedia" of human knowledge has been structured into school subjects: history, literature, language, philosophy, religion, the natural and social sciences, ethics, mathematics and the arts. To adapt Leavis's terminology, applied by him only to literature, the curriculum of liberal educa tion has embraced the "great traditions" of thought about the human condition and the natural and social environments. But, contrary to the assumption of many critics (as, for example, in Freire's dismissal of traditional schooling as educational "banking") liberal education cannot be reduced to the offering, ingestion and regurgitation of mere items of information. The various categorisations of the liberal curriculum as "forms of knowledge," "realms of meaning," "disciplines" or "voices" are a reminder that the assimilation of knowledge must be structured, significant, critical, concerned with understand ing and, even, as in Oakeshott's formulation, the outcome of a conversation.1 Liberal Education as Elitist The word "elite" denotes a group of people who stand apart from their fellows with respect to some human accomplishment or some ascnbed status.2 Thus, excellent actors, chess, soccer or baseball players, academics or politicians and managerial executives, as well as the practitioners of arts and crafts, con stitute different elites, being endowed, respectively, with histrionic or athletic skills, intellectual abilities, political acumen, entrepreneurial flair, aesthetic sen sibility, or manual dexterity. Members of other elites, the wealthy or the so cially privileged, may or may not owe their elite status to personal human qualities. They may, indeed, be rich and famous as a result of their own efforts. On the other hand, they may merely be members of social, political or economic dynasties owing their status to nothing more than having been born or married into particular families. Attitudes towards elites of one kind or another depend partly upon this distinction between elite status which comes from outstanding personal qualities and that which is merely inherited. Our behaviour, if not our rhetoric, suggests an ambivalence towards elites. We may disdain the social elites whose members owe their eminence largely to accidents of birth, inheritance, or a privileged education. But we pay substan tially to applaud first-class baseball or soccer players, gifted entertainers, writers, and artists of various kinds; and despite our scorn for politicians in general, we often admire the skill, intelligence and, sometimes, the courage of gifted political leaders. In short, we recognise and admire the achievements of other people whose gifts exceed our own. As with some sporting figures and popular entertainers, we may think that their outstanding qualities attract dis proportionate monetary rewards, but that their performances outshine our own modest achievements we neither doubt nor resent. Given our different in dividual value systems, we judge the achievements of different performance elites differently but that there are elites in many fields of human endeavour we do not question. However, "elitist" is an adjective which is almost always used pejora tively to denote those values, activities, and institutions which justify, promote, and legitimate an elite, especially those educational arrangements which appear designed to set selected individuals apart from the population at large in order to recruit and train them for social, professional, or political eminence. It should be noted that this process of educational selection and promotion applies mainly to those belonging to the upper social classes, or to those from other social classes who display a high degree of measured intelligence and, hence, seem appropriate candidates for higher education and recruitment to the learned professions. It is this kind of educational provision which is usually dismissed as elitist. Future members of skilled elites (such as in sports and the arts) rise to the top through the sheer evidence of their particular talent and, so far as their competencies need to be trained at all, they are usually nurtured in the lower echelons of the elite organisations themselves (such as farm teams, reserve teams, and youth theatres) or in specialised schools (such as schools of art) which are not normally dismissed as elitist. Hence, to claim that liberal education is elitist is to say that it is only good for the selection and training of those who are destined to be members of the managerial or social elites and of no use to ordinary people. That is, the dis ciplines or forms of knowledge which usually comprise the curriculum of liberal education have only this instrumental, elitist purpose and have no universal educational value. To what extent can this dismissal of liberal education as elitist be sustained? 8 Paideusis Historically, the provision of liberal education, tied as it was to the fact of free citizenship, was elitist in this sense. From its inception in Ancient Greece and down through the centuries of political oligarchy, liberal education was reserved for a relatively privileged few. Free citizens were relatively few in number; the majority were slaves, or serfs, or unenfranchised industrial workers. But with the intellectual, political, technological and economic ferments as sociated with the eighteenth century, popular education increasingly became a reality. Restricted, initially, to little more than the Three Rs, this has progres sively taken on the characteristics of liberal education. The orientation of elementary or primary edu~tion has been the intellectual skills of literacy and numeracy and, beyond that, an introduction to subjects like history, literature, geography and science taught at what Piagetians would call a concrete operational level. Liberal secondary education, focused upon the liberal dis ciplines in a much more speCialised way, was first extended to the middle classes, then to "clever" working class children, and fmally, by the third quarter of this century, made available to all children in advanced industrial societies, in accord with the equalitarianism of the prevailing social philosophy. This last development represents the attempt to universalise liberal education. However, even as this educational reform came to fruition, it began to be called into question from both ends of the political and educational spectrums. Conservatives stress the inevitability of elites (particularly managerial and cul tural elites) and the importance of identifying and nurturing these in educational institutions segregated from the mass of the school population. Hence, though not themselves employing the term "elitist" (since that is usuall~ a term of abuse), political conservatives and some educational conservatives are apt to think the universalisation of liberal education a mistake. In their view, liberal education is not for everyone but only for those children whose social back ground is propitious for an education rooted in language and "literature"4 and (though not all conservatives are agreed upon this) those with high measured intelligence. Educational conservatives are apt to believe that the universalisa tion of liberal education involves the dilution or corruption of culture. 5 Somewhat surprisingly (though for different reasons), a similar view of the unsuitability of liberal education for the great mass of children is taken by some on the political and educational Left. These see the universalisation of liberal education as mistaken since, on their

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