(11/2005) - The liberal arts comprise the foundation of our college-preparatory curriculum at Westminster School and the curricula of many outstanding colleges. The seminal thinkers for the liberal arts, like Cardinal Newman, the 19^th-century English thinker and writer, saw all fields of knowledge as connected and argued that the pure pursuit of knowledge in a community of learning constituted the one true purpose of education. In their view, any practical application of education represented a corruption of the process because education should teach people how to live a life, not to make a living. Put another way, educated men and women should be broadly gauged - learned and skilled in a wide variety of subjects.

Yet this notion of pursuing knowledge for its own sake and as its own reward seems quite antiquated and impractical to many families today. With wary eyes on the astonishingly rapid rates of societal change and the fragility of job security in an age of corporate downsizing and economic uncertainty, many parents understandably worry for their children’s futures. It is not difficult to fathom why they believe an education that engenders specialization and professionalism to be more important than an education premised solely on the pursuit of knowledge.

At the same time, our modern age, with its pervasive technology, overwhelms us with data and facts, and fails to provide us with a larger sense of meaning or purpose. Consequently, education flounders, caught between imparting information and developing knowledge, and, thus, caught between teaching students how to make a living and how to live a life.

For many people, the prestige of so many of this nation’s lustrous liberal arts colleges rests less on their educational philosophy and more on their reputation for career-building. Although these colleges loudly extol the virtues of the liberal arts, I believe that the bulk and best of the training students receive in the liberal arts takes place on our independent, secondary school campuses. Such schools provide a superb introduction to the core disciplines while developing the fundamental skills and habits of mind that make for academic success and intellectual growth.

Most champions of the liberal arts education speak to its role in shaping character while simultaneously forging wisdom. As students read literature, study history, master a foreign language, and grapple with science and mathematics, young people are inculcated with the principles and qualities of character-tolerance, responsibility, humility, compassion, courage, to name a few. In fact, a major part of learning how to live a life involves learning to be a good person.

It remains the great strength of boarding schools that extracurricular and residential programs provide the opportunity for youngsters to pursue multiple interests, to try new things, and to live at close quarters with other people.  At Westminster, for example, our full menu of inter-personal experiences and extracurricular activities further expands on what is gained in the classroom. With our academic and athletic requirements and even our mandatory voice auditions, we stretch our youngsters, we spur them to seek experiences and challenges beyond their talents and interests, and we make the lessons of the liberal arts curriculum come alive in a community.

There will be time enough later for students to dive more deeply into narrower realms of learning and experience. We must do our part to ensure that the future doctors in our midst understand suffering and pain, that future lawyers understand justice, that future investment bankers understand responsibility and integrity, that future artists grasp the implications of modern science and technology.

I hasten to add that we do not discourage the pursuit of excellence. The liberal arts do not comprise a formula for fostering mediocrity. Rather, I argue that those blessed with particular skills and strengths need leavening of other exposures, of other experiences that push them beyond their talents. The ablest, most accomplished and highly regarded people of our time, of any time for that matter, have usually been multi-dimensional.

In this age of specialization and professionalism, well-rounded people, grounded in the liberal arts and exposed to a range of different activities, might seem to operate at a disadvantage. Yet we adults know from our own life experiences that we each arrived at our accomplishments in a long, often circuitous, fashion, and that the landscape changed around us with dazzling speed, and that on each of our journeys, we needed a full quiver of experiences, skills, and habits of mind to respond to the variety of challenges we encountered. Let us, therefore, provide our students with opportunities to sample widely, to explore, to be broadly gauged, so that they may learn how to live a life. This is what the liberal arts and Westminster provide so well.