Liberal Arts and Civics

In Parker Palmer’s latest book he refers to Medieval curriculum which included: trivium –grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. This was the original basis of a liberal arts education. In a more modern time when we had a new form of politics, democracy this also included political science, economics and history other social sciences. These were part of all school systems, elementary, secondary and higher education. Today I find as I talk to folk, college graduates or not they seem unaware of and lacking in liberal arts and we have become much more technological in our education, especially when it comes to economics and political science. Most folk seem to understand microeconomics ~ how to make a buck and keep it; well maybe not considering our personal debt equals the national debt. But few seem to understand macroeconomics, how national and international economics work. In particular a lot of folk seem totally ignorant of the role of government and macroeconomics to keep us from wild economic swings we had in the 1800’s. Keynesian economics should be a working part of every citizens understanding. I think this lays behind a lot of today’s extreme political economics such as is exhibited in the Tea Party rhetoric.

There was an article in a recent Christian Century titled: I love to tell the story, but I don’t know it. It is true in the church where many if not most members are biblically and theologically illiterate but it is also true in our understanding of politics and economics. We are doing a poor job of educating our citizens to be intelligent voters. We just know we don’t like what is going on but come up with absurd ideas as to how to fix things. We talk about kids being smarter today than ever before, which I think is untrue. Kids have a lot more data to deal with today but that does not imply they know how to organize it. Knowing how to text on your phone does not make you more literate, perhaps the opposite. We have become overly pragmatic in the sense of how to earn a living and how to play, but less able to be good citizens and morally aware and responsible.

To play with the old children’s story, it seems like the emperor is running around in no clothes again, but the general population this time thinks he wearing something.

Our citizens especially need to start looking around at the rest of the world and see where things are working and where things are not and have an understanding of why this is so. One of the benefits of retirement is I now have the time to study a lot of these things and have learned a lot about politics and economics and others things in my dotage. Others don’t have that advantage, but we do need to a better job of educating our citizens to be informed citizens so they can make intelligent decisions. If not, the Post-American age will come much sooner than we want.