What if students actually learn the liberal arts well in high school?
Today in colleges, the number of liberal arts majors and programs are in decline. At the same time more students are enrolled in high schools that take the liberal arts seriously than at any time in a generation. This paradox offers high schools and colleges real opportunities to rethink their approach to the liberal arts together.
There are at least three movements deepening the liberal arts knowledge and orientation of high school students. The spread of STEM education has expanded high school students’ access to and understanding of science and mathematics–core liberal arts disciplines. The classical education movement–growing in independent, charter, and magnet schools–helps more students than ever before understand core texts in the liberal arts and also develop the skills of classical learning. And, top independent schools and public schools provide a learning experience modeled on that of liberal arts colleges, so that their graduates will have engaged in service-learning, traveled abroad, written theses, and done faculty-mentored research before arriving at college.
There are, of course, all sorts of reasons to not overestimate the importance of these trends. While high schools may have good science equipment, their STEM curricula are sometimes poor. The liberal arts of classical schools is not the liberal arts of the higher education mainstream. The liberal arts experience offered by independent schools and elite public schools is not available to most high school students. The power of these movements is outweighed by the deadening power of social media, pandemic-era education practices, and high school ennui such that upon entering college, students may still benefit from a basic liberal arts education.
Still, a re-emergence of the liberal arts in high school while they decline in higher education raises interesting questions for educators. Here are a few:
Does understanding the liberal arts depend on student maturity, or do the liberal arts help mature students? If the latter, then colleges should encourage deeper engagement with the liberal arts in high school in order to ensure that students who come to college are ready to do deeper, more mature work across the disciplines.
How do colleges translate STEM learning in high school into liberal arts outcomes? It isn’t a given that high school STEM curricula advance critical thinking, teamwork, moral reasoning, creativity, and other liberal arts outcomes. But STEM courses are more likely to advance those outcomes than a curriculum without them. Colleges, then, would be wise to build their curricula assuming the presence of these outcomes, not their absence.
How can the different political tendencies of high school and college liberal arts lead to liberal learning? If a student graduated from a classical high school, their framework for the liberal arts is likely to be traditional. The liberal arts courses they will encounter in college will likely come from a progressive frame. This tension can be used for learning, if it is acknowledged publicly and addressed directly.
If students engage the liberal arts in high school, when should they engage them in college? The liberal arts are front-loaded in most college curricula. Students take the bulk of their courses in the first and second year. But if high school graduates have a rigorous exposure to the liberal arts, then it may be that they are ready for courses in the major upon matriculating in college. This provides colleges with the opportunity to put the liberal arts at the end of their curricula, as a capstone to learning not an introduction.
How can the liberal arts help high schools and colleges work together? In American education, high schools and colleges tend to move independently of each other, even in state education systems. But the flowering of the liberal arts in some high schools offers an opportunity for real collaboration between institutions–in curriculum, learning outcomes, faculty sharing, and admissions. Colleges would be foolish to miss this opportunity to build bridges with the high schools whose dedication to the liberal arts is as intense as their own.