In our article “What is a Liberal Arts Education,” Mrs. Hall and I defined a liberal arts education as "an education that provides us with the skills that are fitting to the purpose of freedom and human dignity.” When we talk about the liberal arts at MacLaren, we often mention “learning for its own sake” or the goals of “knowing truth, practicing goodness, and creating beauty.” What we don’t emphasize is how this education will lead to college admissions, jobs, money, or the changing demands of our modern world. Because of this, we sometimes hear people express fear that this type of education is “impractical” or is only suitable for a special subset of students.
When I had my first real experience of the liberal arts as a college student, I became convinced that this type of education should not just be an optional offering for some students but is worth pursuing by all humans simply because they are human—because this type of education is one that expands and enriches the human mind. Someone who has helped me to articulate and deepen my own understanding of this is Roosevelt Montás, whose recent book Rescuing Socrates vividly makes the case for something we have always claimed to be true: that the “best education for the best is the best education for all.”
Montás immigrated to America at the age of 15 from a small town in the Dominican Republic and entered the New York City Public School system. A few years later, he entered Columbia University, an Ivy League school with a very elite pedigree (five Founding Fathers graduated from Columbia!). At first, he felt that he had entered a strange new world. But what immediately drew him in and made him feel at home was an invitation into the liberal arts, which Columbia requires all students, regardless of major, to study.
It was through this curriculum, Montás says, that “I began to make sense of the world and my place in it.”
And this dual purpose—to understand both the world and our place in it—is what we aim at here as well. What Montás is talking about is not just a set of courses or a list of books, it’s a whole orientation towards education and what it means to be a human being. It understands humans both as beings that are essentially communal: we need each other, we depend on each other, we grow and learn best in contact with each other—and as beings that have a separate and unique existence and purpose in the world, who can contribute in different ways.
Montás in his book is specifically addressing critics who claim that a liberal arts education is not useful enough for kids from lower income or disadvantaged families. People sometimes assume that this kind of study is elitist because it is not practical enough—it’s just for fancy people in their ivory towers! But this argument is also made in various ways by people who say that the liberal arts are only really for a certain race or gender or class. He insists, to the contrary (and I agree!), that the liberal arts are truly for all.
“To educate means, literally, to “draw out,” to educe from the student something that is already there and whose successful cultivation represents the fulfillment of the highest human good. Education, in this sense, is liberal education—education not for making a living but for living meaningfully.” –Montás, Rescuing Socrates