Okay, Well How About Applied Liberal Education? Making a Case for the Humanities Through Medical Education

THE CRISIS OF THE HUMANITIES Once upon a time, a solid grounding in the humanities was considered to be an essential component of what it means to be educated. This perspective once benefited from a rare consensus between the philosophy of higher education and the public’s sense of the role and purpose of the university. This might sound like revisionist history, but I use the term “consensus” in a relative sense. No doubt the humanities have always faced some kind of scrutiny from those inside and out of the academy. In fact, liberal education has been subject to ongoing debates about the influence of the marketplace and its role in preparing future generations. 1 However, it seems clear that the humanities, and the liberal education that served it, was generally thought to deserve a special place in a person’s educational life. So long as the humanities were granted this special place, universities were largely free to offer a liberal education on the terms that they saw fit. This arrangement is clearly over. On the one hand, the situation of the humanities in higher education has had a particularly rough time over the past few decades. We’ve seen a number of admirable defenses of liberal education in response. 2 But the trend has crossed a threshold. An entrenched economic crisis seems to have been the final straw for a Western culture that has written the vision of education in primarily economic terms. For the humanities, this serves as a kind of double humiliation. First, education’s agenda was “broadly” defined as an engine to economic growth and social mobility. Liberal education is not well-suited to such aims. But as long as governments were able to provide funding, and universities were able to maintain a sustainable level of enrollment, the humanities could be supported as a kind of luxury or perhaps as a signifier of tradition and prestige. However, recent developments in higher education in the U.K., Canada, and the United States all seem to indicate that the humanities cannot be supported even as an indulgence. Government shortfalls in university funding have so far shown that the humanities, and the model of liberal education that relies on them, will be the first to go. For those working in the humanities, the short-sightedness of this approach is obvious. But this only seems obvious because they have already been initiated into those values and forms of thought that make the reasons for preserving humanistic liberal education, both academic and educational, self-evident. These reasons are not so evident for policy makers struggling to keep shrinking budgets in check, nor are they compelling for those charged with making difficult decisions as the austerity process continues. This poses certain justificatory challenges in trying to defend the existence of the humanities in the university.

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