As the jury still seems to be out concerning the value of Liberal Arts learning, its advocates and exponents remain on the back-foot. They are forced to translate the complex value systems that define Liberal Arts education into terms that have been preordained by various significant others: such as the ‘hard’ sciences, the ‘national’ curriculum, or ‘employability’ metrics. External appreciations of the Liberal Arts hang, therefore, in the balance.
Freedom first
If accusations of these fields’ incoherence and incompatibility are fair, what might future students in the Liberal Arts make of it all? From their inception, the Liberal Arts fields literally and metaphorically put freedom first. Whether this was initially a strategic or else a descriptive manoeuvre, putting ‘freedom first’ certainly has its benefits.
For it demands a response — whether from its proponents, adherents, sceptics, or detractors — that engages the actual qualities of liberal knowledge. For example by unpacking the expectation that learning should have an immediate (and easy to discern) application, worth, or utility.
The freedom that is given pride of place in Liberal Arts fields is open-ended. Ostensibly, it pertains to the individual’s freedom to choose their own path of study, and thus to become empowered with a view to making sense — crucially in their own terms — of a loose matrix of facts, insights, experiences, languages, values, responsibilities, knowledges, understandings, evaluations, soft skills and competences.
It is here, in the open and active mind of the learner as well as in the invisible college of higher learning, that the ethos of ‘freedom first’ acquires an exciting combination of depth and meaning, especially in its capacity to impart social as well as intellectual responsibilities to the individuals and the institutions that are involved.
Resembling something like academic citizenship, Liberal Arts fields encompass an almost infinite configuration of subjects,to enable diverse kinds of transnational exchange and personal development. But their role in sustaining economic development and human flourishing — whether in respect of our knowledge of fundamental rights and freedoms, or our revaluation of constitutional forms of citizenship — seem to be routinely ignored.
Liberal Arts learning is open to Indian and many other student nationalities. The heritage of transnational intellectual cooperation helps us to address another important dimension of the ‘freedom first’ maxim, which can be sharpened in an effort to highlight the significance of liberal values worldwide.
Considered less as a domain of social and intellectual autonomy, which might be presumed or hoped to exist independently of market forces, of vocational strictures, and of political dogmas, Liberal Arts fields actually intimate how and why human freedom, rights, and responsibilities persist at the heart of liberal democracies.
In this light, efforts to redefine India’s Liberal Education in the Arts Fields (LEAF) — not only as a supplement to the knowledge systems and funding priorities associated with STEM, but also as a way to enhance intellectual, cultural, and institutional autonomy and productivity — are hugely significant. Created by Professor Rukmini Bhaya Nair (IIT Delhi), the LEAF agenda anticipates the long-term resolution of the ‘Grand Challenges for the Humanities in India’ and was submitted in a report to the MHRD, in June 2019. LEAF anticipates a fully-fledged and sustained response, from educators, students, and civil society alike, to these challenges.
But will this help tip the scales, in favour of our love and appreciation of knowledge and freedom? Those in favour should acknowledge and amplify India’s historic and current contribution to the Liberal Arts, as has become evident in institutions like Viswabharati University (West Bengal), Ashoka University (near Delhi), and FLAME (Pune; formerly the Foundation for Liberal and Management Education). Then we can invite the jury to reconvene, to appreciate anew the symbiosis of interests and ideas that enable humanity to liberate, communicate, and innovate. If the LEAF agenda is to inspire “a generation of citizens for our democracy” who are not only able to discern their intellectual, social, and global responsibilities, but also willing to express and engage them, we must now delineate the pathways towards these larger freedoms.
The writer is Chair, India Dialogue, University of East Anglia
