The future of liberal education and the hegemony of market values: privilege, practicality, and citizenship 

Liberal education should not be defended in terms of market value but should rather been seen as necessary and practical to prepare citizens for a life of responsible and active participation in civil society.  The authors challenge the ideas that liberal education is for the elite and acts as a “temporary sanctuary where a privileged minority can enjoy a hiatus from practical concerns.”  

Information technology extends and transforms the liberal arts experience.  Technologies which provide access to seemingly limitless documents enhance students’ knowledge bases and allow new cross-disciplinary forms of inquiry.  However, the speed and profusion of information threatens to undermine essential dimensions of good critical thinking.  Professors find it difficult to teach students to evaluate sources, not to receive them as authoritative and objective.  A liberal arts education emphasizes the close reading, reflection, careful attention to the logic of arguments, and the ability to discern what information is quality data that are important components in positions of leadership. 

The liberal arts academy should be reconceptualized as an “Ivory Tower,” a social space of free inquiry and criticism.  Rather than the new Ivory Tower being a place for timeless and irrelevant musings on abstract ideas, it should be visualized as a space and time for subjecting experience and practice in the ‘real world ’ to critical analysis and questioning.  In the liberal colleges, experimental learning, internships, study abroad, and cyber research can be “placed in conversation” with creative imagination, theories and analytical skills.  Increasingly, the new Ivory Tower will be interdisciplinary and problem-based in its approach to knowledge because the “blurred lines between virtuality and reality in a world crisscrossed by networks of processes cannot be captured by specialized disciplines defined by nineteenth-century realities.”

Liberal education must include critical reflection on the ethics and politics of participating in a global civil society.  Liberal arts offers a “vocational education” for democratic citizenship, where everyone’s vocation is to participate in governing.  The authors believe that the deepest sense in which liberal education is practical is that it offers the “best means to the desired end of having a citizenry with the knowledge, skills, and wisdom necessary to participate in democratic governance, prepared to engage the problems of globalization, the environment, and social justice.”

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