“Can we not devise a system of liberal education which shall find its foundations in the best things of the here and now? Literature and art are all about us; science and faith offer their daily contributions; history is in the making to-day; industry pours forth its wares; and children, no less than adults, are sharing in the dynamic activities of contemporary social life . Not in the things of the past, but in those of the present, should liberal education find its beginnings as well as its results.”
— David Snedden, “What Of Liberal Education?” The Atlantic Monthly, 1912
This book began as a blog. That’s the twenty-first-century way of saying it began as a conversation.
And that conversation started with Jason Kottke, the blogger who coined a phrase, “liberal arts 2.0,” that made us wonder: What might that mean?
Pile on some posts at Snarkmarket by the two of us and our co-blogger Matt Thompson, and threads began to form. Mix in smart, curious commentary from the Snarkmarket community, and an opportunity emerged.
This is the idea, roughly: to collectively identify and explore twenty-first- century ways of doing the liberal arts.
You might be wondering: Why bother? The liberal arts for smart people in the twenty-first century are like ancient myths for astronomers with telescopes. They’re just old ways of talking about problems that were intractable—until we had the right tools. If this is the case, then we don’t need any kind of liberal arts, let alone new liberal arts. We just need new science and technology, and people who know how to use them.
Or, to the extent that our problems can’t be solved by new science and technology, they’re unchanging dilemmas that grapple with the deepest parts of human nature. If this is the case, then we don’t need to update the liberal arts—we just need to renew them. We need liberal arts that are not modified, but purified.
The very name, “liberal arts,” evokes a body of learning that is as durable as it is ancient.
In the classical tradition, formalized in the European Middle Ages, the Artes Liberales consisted of a trivium of arts of reading and composition—logic, grammar, and rhetoric—and a quadrivium of arts of observation and calculation—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
In ancient Rome, bodies of learning like medicine and architecture were excluded from the liberal arts because they were too practical. These were the sort of arguments that got Cicero and Varro all atwitter. In the Renaissance, it was painting and sculpture that troubled that line between ars and techne. The basic idea of the liberal arts, though—the studies most suited for the education of free people—stayed the same.
But by the nineteenth century, the liberal arts had changed drastically, as part of the creation of the modern university, especially in the United States. Exact sciences like chemistry, anatomy, and physics migrated from technical colleges to what had been primarily liberal universities—and technical schools likewise began to get serious about teaching their students how to read, write, and think.
This is how you get schools like Harvard and MIT not just staring at each other across town, but sharing ideas and resources, and later competing for students and professors. This is how you get guys like Charles Eliot and William James—pragmatic scholars training reflective doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, and engineers.
And this is the truth of it: the liberal arts have always been changing just as much as we have.
So here, as we’re still just getting started with a new century, it seems like a good time to focus some bright minds on that change. To take stock of what’s changed already. To flesh out what’s changing right now. And perhaps to nudge those changes onward.
So, now, here are some new liberal arts.
Not the new liberal arts. Our titling is intentional. When we posed the question to the community at Snarkmarket, we were sure to specify:
We don’t want to generate a canonical list, but rather a laundry list. We want pitches for new liberal arts that are smart, provocative, insightful, surprising, and/or funny.
So that’s what you’ll find here. It’s less a definition than a glimpse into the course catalog of an idiosyncratic new school—a liberal arts college 2.0.
Just like any catalog, this isn’t meant to be a book you read front-to-back. The contributions are listed in alphabetical order, and they’re intended for random access. Flip to a page that looks interesting. See what you think. Come over to snarkmarket.com and join the conversation.
Before you start flipping, a few final notes.
Our special thanks to contributor Gavin Craig, who provided the spark of inspiration for the book-ness of this book, and to designer Brandon Kelley, who took bloggy blobs of text and turned them into something elegant and durable. Thanks also to Diana Kimball and Nick Strauss for their work on a special contribution.
If you’re reading this as a PDF: We hope you enjoy it. And we hope you send it to your friends and anyone else you think might enjoy it, too. After all, what’s the point of a free digital copy if you don’t, well, copy it?
If you’re reading this as a physical book: We hope you enjoy it, too. This beautiful object is our way of keeping faith with the past. For all this fuss about new-ness, we know the score: Books are pretty great techne. Also, use your bookmark. It has a secret.
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