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More to that point, liberal arts were practiced by the rich in societies with rigid class structures. If you were the scion of a comfortable fortune, you majore

More to that point, liberal arts were practiced by the rich in societies with rigid class structures. If you were the scion of a comfortable fortune, you majored in the "classics" or the liberal arts because you wanted, more or less, to have the background to enable you to live an exciting and fulfilling life of leisure. To make great conversation at cocktail parties and charity balls. To provide the intellectual background behind gentleman-scholarship and amateur pursuits. To help you toy around with a novel or two. And so forth. This isn't the way our society works anymore, and the liberal arts curricula never really adapted with the times. To some extent, liberal arts is still a valuable major for those wanting to pursue Law, and whose colleges do not have a discrete "pre-law" curriculum. Other than that, however, liberal arts is fairly impractical. Still valuable for intellectual development, but intellectual development of a sort that's not prized or valued or applicable to modern working society.

_delirium 15y ago
That's the typical stereotype of liberal-arts education's history, but I don't think it's that historically accurate, though it probably does describe some of the Victorian era's schooling more specifically. But the traditional liberal arts weren't greatly separated from what we now think of as the sciences, though they were indeed separated from engineering and crafts. "Amateur pursuits" typically included not only "toy[ing] around with a novel or two", but also toying around with a telescope and a beaker or formula or two; most great scientists and mathematicians before the modern era were a product of liberal-arts education. It's also been popular in the American context, which isn't a society that has a rigid class structure. That at least used to be connected with a certain view of democracy and self-government, which held that liberal-arts education was a prerequisite for a working democratic society (e.g. Thomas Jefferson's views).
- true_religion 15y ago
  I'll grant you that---I forgot about the time period where "natural philosophy" was science.

_delirium 15y ago

That's the typical stereotype of liberal-arts education's history, but I don't think it's that historically accurate, though it probably does describe some of the Victorian era's schooling more specifically. But the traditional liberal arts weren't greatly separated from what we now think of as the sciences, though they were indeed separated from engineering and crafts. "Amateur pursuits" typically included not only "toy[ing] around with a novel or two", but also toying around with a telescope and a beaker or formula or two; most great scientists and mathematicians before the modern era were a product of liberal-arts education. It's also been popular in the American context, which isn't a society that has a rigid class structure. That at least used to be connected with a certain view of democracy and self-government, which held that liberal-arts education was a prerequisite for a working democratic society (e.g. Thomas Jefferson's views).

true_religion 15y ago
I'll grant you that---I forgot about the time period where "natural philosophy" was science.