Liberal Arts, Fine Arts, and Educational Freedom
by Nick Roux
Co-Chair, Chicago Academy for the Arts Humanities Department
While perusing the “What We’re Reading” post in The Academy’s Weekly Notes a couple of weeks ago, three books caught my eye: Richard Wright’s Native Son in Chicago Literature, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening in Women’s Literature, and John Gardner’s Grendel in AP Literature. Each pits its protagonist against different personal, cultural, and historical headwinds: Native Son adopts a naturalistic perspective to probe issues of racial and socio-economic determinism. The Awakening traces a woman’s search for identity and expression in a repressive world. And Grendel retells “Beowulf” from the monster’s perspective while critiquing major movements in human value, thought, and philosophy.
At first glance these texts couldn’t seem more different. Yet, like so much of great literature and human study, they couldn't be more alike. What does a young African American man striving to find his place in 1930’s Chicago, a well-to-do woman seeking selfhood in 1890’s New Orleans, and a nihilistic hell spawn from 700 AD Scandinavia have in common? Freedom. Rather, the search for freedom in the face of inward and outward constrictions.
All of us have a close and complicated relationship with freedom. We live in a country that deifies the concept of freedom, and yet we often feel hemmed in by societal pressures. We believe in free will (or the illusion of it), but know there are choices we simply can’t imagine making.
This struggle is most acute during high school. As adolescents strive to define themselves and have glimpses of adult freedom, they are told “read this,” “study that,” “apply there,” and so on ad infinitum. It can feel like a purgatory of purpose. Gone are the days of the child who gets lost in play, and the days of getting lost in adult work are yet to come. The adolescent senses a will, but to what end? To what purpose? What are they free to pursue?
Students at The Academy find themselves in an even trickier situation: they have freely elected to pursue artistic training, but lack the total freedom of adult artists. Artistic pursuit is their purpose. And it is, without a doubt, a noble pursuit. But despite this self possession and purpose, something gets in the way. Something impedes the freedom to realize their purpose: the Academic Curriculum.
At least that’s what it can seem like for the students.
We can all sympathize. Every year is busy. Every year is stressful. Students’ planners hold an endless list of homework, due dates, commitments, and performances. Academic work can mutate into a blockade, a wall between the artist and their art. However, with some reframing, I think we can understand the Academic Curriculum in The Academy’s co-curricular model more clearly and, I hope, more meaningfully.
I described artistic purpose earlier as “a noble pursuit,” a description few would take issue with. The capital-’A’-arts are vital to human expression and experience. As such, the The Academy’s artistic training sustains this vitally human and noble pursuit. Academic study, on the other hand, is often considered less noble and more pragmatic: a necessary series of essays and exams to get you into college so you can take yet another series of essays and exams to learn skills that will help secure a job later.
Simply: the Arts are valuable in and of themselves, and academic study is a means to an end.
This is a misunderstanding, a misapplication of terms, and a misconstruing of what freedom — in the context of education — really means.
The terminology that needs clarifying here is the difference between “fine arts” and “liberal arts.” Overtime, the latter has subsumed the former in common thinking. Attending a “liberal arts” college allows someone to study sociology as easily as modern dance. Because of this we often think that the “arts” in “liberal arts” is synonymous with the “arts” in “fine arts.” Or that there are the “hard sciences” and the “liberal arts,” and that the latter contains everything from Philosophy to piano performance. Properly speaking, however, this is not the case.
“Fine arts” didn’t become a category or coherent field of study until the 18th Century, and was used to contrast higher aesthetic activities from lower ones like applied arts (making tools) and decorative arts (making pretty tools). The “liberal arts” predate the creation of “fine arts” by many centuries, and was outlined by thinkers as early as Plato. “Liberal art” refers to two curriculums: the trivium (“arts of the word”) and quadrivium (“arts of the number”). The trivium allows people to engage with other people, while the quadrivium allows people to understand the natural world. Many modern curriculums — The Academy’s included — reflect this: Humanities = the trivium and S.T.E.M. = the quadrivium.
The areas of study embedded in the “liberal arts” are considered “liberal” or “free” in two ways. First, they enable people to function effectively as free citizens in a free society. Skills like critical thinking, clear communication, analytical problem solving, and so forth create a highly functional citizenry. Second, these skills are free from the purpose of production. They are not means to a specific end. Analytical thinking is valuable for its own sake, it is an end in and of itself.
With this in mind, the earlier summation requires adjusting: the Arts are valuable in and of themselves, and so is academic study. It too is an end in and of itself.
The intention here isn’t to lobby on behalf of the academic curriculum or to pit one curriculum against another via historical development. Rather, to recognize the true origins and aims of the “liberal arts”. Clarifying this sharpens our collective understanding of The Academy’s co-curricular model. To quote “The Academy Method”: “Academic study and arts training are co-curricular. Neither is more, or less, important than the other, but the authentic, disciplined immersion in each (separately) creates a powerful reciprocal relationship between the two.”
So what does all of this have to do with freedom in the immediate sense? Unfortunately, little. What I’m describing is a normative understanding of freedom’s relationship to academic study — how we ought to think of it. A descriptive understanding — what it’s actually like — is the inverse: algebra homework, the literature essay’s deadline, the oral presentation is Spanish, and so on. How it feels when described appears constrictive. In the immediate academic study feels like it takes away freedom, not bestows it, but it is the very source of the freedoms most central to a meaningful life: understanding ourselves, those around us, and the world at large.
As the first quarter’s end nears and the daily grind of the school year sets in, I encourage all of us to remember the deeper meaning embedded in both curriculums. To look past the day-to-day and aspire to a normative understanding of learning. Neither curriculum is a means to an immediate end. Both are intrinsically valuable in and of themselves. Both aspire to free us so as to understand and interact with the dynamism and uncertainty of life.
The search for freedom is elusive. At least Native Son, The Awakening, and Grendel would suggest as much. Each ends in uncertainty after a dynamic transformation of the protagonist. Native Son closes with an image of Bigger Thomas clutching the bars of a jail cell physically confined, but psychically free. Edna Pontillier, The Awakening’s heroine, spots “a bird with a broken wing” symbolizing ascendent freedom and descendent inevitability as she wades into the unknown depths of the ocean. Grendel finds himself on the edge of a literal and metaphorical cliff, mortally wounded reconciling the confines of the physical world with the freedom of expressive consciousness.
None of the protagonists find total freedom. Likely none of us do. But the desire and ability to explore these concerns is its own kind of freedom, a freedom born at the nexus of the liberal and fine arts: free thinking conveyed through artistic expression.