Anthony Seldon

Liberal arts education has been under attack – we need to rediscover its profound wisdom

England did so deplorably in the Ashes in part because of an obsession with data, including minutely detailed plans on diet and exercise. Excessive bureaucracy can squeeze the lifeblood out of sport, the arts, and indeed education. Bureaucracy gone mad.

Michael Gove, aided by Michael Wilshaw, has massively improved the standards of schooling in Britain. Their insistence on top quality teaching for all, and a will to smash the mediocre, lies at the heart of all they have achieved. They will go down in history as great education secretaries and chief inspectors respectively.

But for all that, they do not sit comfortably in the same railway carriage as the principle of a liberal education. They are on a crusade, relentlessly driving our schools forward. Perhaps it has been inevitable that the subtler manifestations of schooling have been subordinated under their watch. So too has any clear vision of what an educated young person is. In a recent speech on character to Birmingham University, I compared them to the great figures behind Italian unification. Michael G was Cavour, the supreme politician, while Michael W was Garibaldi, the forceful general. What they lack is a Mazzini, the philosopher. It was he who provided a vision of a modern Italy in a united Europe.

The concept of the liberal arts education emerged in the medieval era and was developed in the Enlightenment as a way of nurturing young minds to be educated across the fields of human knowledge, to realise their human potential, and to build societies based on liberty and respect. It embraces not just the humanities but science and technology, and deems it fundamental to nurture ethics, good character and civic engagement.

Liberal arts education came under attack in Britain in the twentieth century.

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