Does Liberal Education Liberate?

Abstract

The paper is based on the Keynote Lecture entitled “Liberal Arts Liberates?”, delivered at the 1st International and 8th National Conference on “Liberal Arts in the Role of Cultural Capital”, organized by the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Mahidol University, in Bangkok on 6 June 2024. The interrogative aspect of the lecture’s title represents a call to my audience and reader to embark on a collective search for the answer to this rather elusive problem besetting especially higher education of today. Nevertheless, there are two points on which I remain unequivocal: first, that liberal education is a way of thinking and a way of life that transcends any institutional attachment; and second, that it is ubiquitous. Instead of being preoccupied with definitional argumentation, numerous interpretations and analyses provide diverse examples of educational phenomena in the broadest possible sense, drawn from intellectual and cultural developments in the West as well as my home country, Thailand, and also from my own extensive experiences. These are subsumed under broad categories, namely: faith in humanity; the non-utilitarian quest for knowledge; the Humboldtian ideal of “Bildung”; dialogic culture; the evergreen past; learning how to learn; education without borders; mobility; and the upholding of ethics as the ultimate goal of scholarly life. The logical interconnectedness among these diverse phenomena is also presented in the form of a diagram. The urgency to combat the commodification of higher education and the overemphasis on utility-driven research cannot be stressed too strongly. The paper concludes with an optimistic note that there is sufficient cultural capital to support such a noble endeavour.