One of my favorite memories of the past few months is of playing and performing music with a group of students and researchers in Kunshan. This group, which we dubbed the Jazzy Tuesdays, started out as a trio, when two graduate program researchers and I performed some songs at the opening of our new Student Center in the fall. Soon after that I invited some of our talented undergraduate students to join an informal music ‘workshop’ held every Tuesday evening in my apartment in Kunshan. Over the next two months, we practiced pop, folk, and jazz songs from the American songbook, while having fun sharing our own musical tastes and traditions with each other. With this Uber-talented group of students, who can sing, play instruments, and perform, we managed to pull together a performance of several songs at the annual DKU staff&faculty gala to celebrate Chinese New Year. This was my last memory of DKU before we all headed off on our New Year holiday break. After that, the Pandemic prevented us from returning to campus. I then left China with my daughters and have been in the USA ever since, hoping for word for when we can return to China and to our campus. This band and workshop, which started out informally and casually, are to me a vital if underrated and certainly understated part of what liberal education is all about.

Over the past five years, while working for Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China, I have been closely involved in the unique project of setting up and launching a four-year undergraduate degree program in China in partnership with Duke University. This experience has led me to think more deeply about the value, scope, purpose, and mission of a liberal education. Part of my job over these past five years has been communicating in both English and Chinese with hundreds of prospective students, parents, and college counselors in China and in many other countries in Asia on how liberal education works and why it is important. 

In previous pieces I’ve written on this blogsite, I offer up some of my own thoughts on liberal education and share stories about my own educational experiences. Not that my own college education was an ideal or even typical pathway to learning. There is no singular pathway through a liberal education, and students will have to navigate the experience of a college education in their own individual ways, according to their own interests, values, and personalities. 

Here are some more thoughts and ideas I’d like to share about the value of liberal education. I hope that these are helpful for other educators and for students to consider as they ponder the value and meaning of a liberal education.

The Rudder vs. the Steering Oar

Many books have been published in recent years on the importance of liberal education for our lives and our societies, at a time when liberal education is arguably in peril. What is liberal education and why is it important? I propose the following metaphor: Liberal education is to the modern human being what the rudder is to ships. Rudders, as everybody knows, are used to help steer ships and keep them on course even in rough waters. Without the invention of the rudder, for better or worse, we wouldn’t have the globalized world of today. 

Prior to the adoption of stern-post rudders (arguably a Chinese invention of the Han Dynasty), ancient seafaring civilizations such as the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and even the Vikings used the steering oar. The steering oar was also a great innovation. It allowed sailors to navigate their ships across long distances and through treacherous waters. Steering oars could be attached to the stern of the ship for further stability and power. Yet it was with the advancement of the stern-post rudder that ships were able to circumnavigate the world. The rudder also enabled airplanes to take off and transformed the ways and the means and speed by which humans could transport themselves around the world. 

While the steering oar could carry sailors across long distances over time, it was no match for the rudder. During the Middle Ages, when the Vikings launched their ships to attack the British Isles, conduct trade along the major European rivers, and colonize Iceland, they used steering oars. The nautical term ‘starboard’ comes from the Norse styrbord, or ‘steering board’—the side where the board was located (source). In the 15th and 16th centuries, when the Portuguese conducted their first great expeditions across the Atlantic Ocean and around the African continent to reach the Indian Ocean, their caravels were fitted with rudders. 

Similarly, while a vocational education can provide a grounding for a specific profession, there is no substitute for a liberal education when it comes to producing a whole adult person. While specific trade skills and technical know-how can get somebody ahead in life, much like a steering oar can do for a ship, a liberal education provides the rudder that will ultimately enable a person to navigate our complex world and have an an enriching life in the full sense of the word.

Studies have shown that technical education offers an initial advantage. Nevertheless, over the long term, people with liberal arts degrees tend to outperform people with more technical degrees as they rise up in the social, political, institutional, and economic hierarchies of our world. 

Yet the purpose of a liberal education is far greater than advancing through hierarchies: the ideal purpose of liberal education is to set a course for our adult lives that will continue to make us better people, and to change our world for the better. The rudder is the value system and the tool set that a liberal education confers upon its bearer, which includes the desire and ambition as well as the mindset and skills to be a lifelong learner.

The Four Quarters: A Different Way of Viewing Liberal Education

People often think of a liberal education as consisting primarily of a variety of courses and subjects in different disciplines and areas. Students major in specific subject areas, but they must take courses in other disciplines and subjects, thus developing a well-rounded education overall. This is true of course, but it is only part of the picture, and in my view, it is a misleading way to think about liberal education.

We are often misled to think of a liberal education as something that transpires primarily in the classroom. This takes us closer to the idea of the steering oar. We tend to think of professors as people who possess valuable knowledge or skills, which they transmit to students, much in the way that a pitcher might pass liquid into a cup. Professors and courses are of course vital to a liberal education, but they are only a part of the equation. What they pass on to their students, if they’ve done their jobs properly, isn’t simply knowledge, but rather, their values, outlooks, and habits.

It is the holistic experience of attending a liberal arts college or university program and engaging fully in what it has to offer both inside and outside the classroom that ultimately generates a liberal education.  This includes the conversations that a student has with his or her professors and, even more importantly, with one’s peers outside the classroom. I would argue that these informal conversations can be even more crucial than formal classroom learning and studying in generating a liberal education. In addition, all of the extra-curricular activities that are available to a student, such as interest groups, associations and societies, sports, music, theater, and myriad others, are also integral to a liberal education.

There is also the learning that a student undergoes when he or she steps out of the campus and into the bigger world. Whether undertaken through summer internships, study abroad programs, group activities, or individual travels, all of these off-campus experiences form another key component to the learning and growth experience. By providing the time and space for a student to grow, learn, and mature off campus, a liberal education helps to integrate the student into the bigger world that he or she will be a part of following graduation.

In sum, a student’s education consists of far more than classroom learning and the homework and other assignments and activities that a student completes as part of their coursework. Nevertheless, many educational programs are designed to maximize the amount of time students spend working on completing their courses. This is a mistake in my opinion, since a proper liberal education must allow for a significant amount of free time for a student to explore learning on his or her own, with or without the guidance of courses and professors. 

Far from being empty or wasted time, this extra time helps a student to develop the skills, mindset, and habits of a self-actuated learner, which is the ultimate goal of a liberal education. College usually only lasts four years, at least in the US system. The student will be spending the rest of his or her life learning new skills and absorbing new knowledge and integrating those with what he or she already knows. Even if one goes on to attend a graduate program or professional school, one will spend a great deal of one’s career learning important subjects and expanding one’s knowledge. This will happen in many different fields of inquiry and usually without the aid of professors or syllabi.

A good heuristic for the division of time and activities during a liberal arts program is to think of liberal education ideally as a pie divided equally into four parts. The first quarter of a liberal education consists of the coursework that a student has to complete in order to earn the degree. The second quarter consists of social group activities and casual conversations that a student engages with others in the learning community outside the classroom, whether through formal associations and clubs or through informal play and ‘down-time’. The third quarter is made up of the off-campus experiences that a student has during his or her four years in college. The fourth quarter is the amount of learning that a student undertakes on his or her own, sometimes with the aid of professors or fellow students, or other times just by pursuing one’s own interests. 

While the reality of a four-year college education isn’t nearly quite so neat and tidy as this chart would suggest, I believe that dividing liberal education into these four quarters is a useful heuristic for professors, administrators, students, and advisors to think about when contemplating liberal education in a more holistic way.

Striking a Balance by Putting Coursework into Perspective

Many people are inclined to emphasize the first quarter—coursework--over all the others. There are many reasons for this. First of all, curricula, majors, and courses are designed by professors, who have a vested interest in maximizing their students’ workloads. Professors--and I should know, since I’m one of them--often think erroneously that they and the courses and majors they offer are the most important aspects of a student’s college education.

This applies especially, although not exclusively, to majors in STEM fields. For STEM students, it is often very difficult to attend study abroad programs, or to find spare time to learn other subjects on their own, or even to pursue sports or other extra-curricular social activities during a regular semester. Part of this has to do with the way STEM majors are structured. In my opinion, there are many flaws in how we do STEM education. 

Of course, this does not mean that liberal arts shouldn’t include STEM components. Far from it. STEM fields and subjects are vital to a liberal education, and all students should emerge with at least some understanding of math and sciences. Yet there ought to be better ways to integrate STEM subjects and majors into the overall framework of a liberal education, so that they don’t overshadow all other aspects of a student’s education.