Liberal arts education serves as students' gateway to world

"A liberal arts education?" you may laugh to yourself. "That's all that stuff like poetry, philosophy and history." But in fact, this is not the case.

In medieval Europe, there were the "servile arts" (the arts of slaves), the "mechanical arts" (the arts of craftsmen) and the "liberal arts" (the arts of free, landowning men). In 15th century England these were defined as, "free sciences, as grammar, art, physics, astronomy, and others."

In the 18th century, the economist Adam Smith -- a hero of our own History 002 (Western Heritage II) class -- said the liberal arts were, "the ingenious arts and liberal professions," mathematics, history, grammar, astronomy and so forth. The liberal arts are and were the arts of free men.

We are all invited to be free and responsible citizens.

One of the greatest examples of the power of education can be found in the story of a 10-year-old African-American slave boy named Frederick Bailey. In 1828, Frederick had watched one of his masters reading aloud and came to the conclusion that the symbols on the page corresponded to sounds made by the mouth.

Although slaves were banned from reading, Frederick wanted to learn. He persuaded his master's daughter to teach him the alphabet and how to read small words. From there he taught himself to read better, eventually escaped the plantation, fled to New England and the rest is history.

There would be another little boy, many years later, who after attending the 1939 World's Fair would fall in love with science. After seeing the exhibits there, he -- like all boys and girls -- had a million questions for his parents. They couldn't answer many of them, so he went and read about whatever came to mind. He would eventually go on to chase after all of those questions through a liberal arts education that focused on astronomy and astrophysics.

The late Carl Sagan was a great American who owed his life to his education. If it had not been for him, many of our parents would be even more clueless about what is happening way out there in space. In all of his work from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Dragons of Eden to the TV special, "Cosmos," he presented science to the population in a way that was both detailed and accessible. From the example of his life and his writings, he showed us the value of a liberal arts education so that we can make good, and informed decisions.

Let's assume that one day you have a kid, and he or she asks you one of the following questions:

Who was George Washington Carver? How do I calculate a parabola? Who wrote "The Rite of Spring"? Who was St. Paul? How were we able to get the Voyager 2 to go from Earth to Jupiter to Saturn to Uranus to Neptune? What is the pilgrimage to Mecca? Who was Susan B. Anthony? Why don't antibiotics kill viruses? Why do I have to read Shakespeare? What is an Ornithilestes? What is evolution and how does it work? Why does my history book say that Cleopatra was Greek?

These are questions that many of us have asked. How many can you answer? Then ask yourself how many can you explain to the child who needs the answer?

We will not expect everyone to become Carl Sagan or Frederick Douglass. But I do hope that the students at this University and all universities across the country will become informed and responsible people. That is the goal of a liberal arts education. That IS our education.

We owe it to ourselves and to our children to become a nation of informed people who are able to learn from the mistakes of the past and look to the future with a great deal of optimism -- optimism that comes with the excitement of knowing the wisdom of the past and going beyond its ignorance so that we won't be enslaved by the many lies that feed on our ignorance.

If Frederick Douglass began his road to freedom by learning to read, just imagine what we can do with the promise our education offers us.