The liberal arts curriculum is the product of the intellectual, political, and social climate of its age. The "traditional" curriculum of the mid-nineteenth century derived from Victorian religious attitudes and beliefs about character development. As the century progressed and state power gradually displaced clerical power in the universities, the ideal of a balanced, unified arts program in which all students learned to place their knowledge in a Christian context gave way to a variety of specialized programs and an emphasis on job-training rather than than character development. The scientific method became an accepted mode of inquiry, and arts disciplines multiplied as new methodologies (such as those used in the social sciences) were created and as society discovered a need for new kinds of expertise.
From the late nineteenth century onwards, there were a number of competing theories regarding the nature of the university and the proper content and structure of the arts course. The sciences and social sciences benefited from the utilitarian emphasis in some respects, but professors in the humanities felt their prestige diminishing. Many of them embraced a theory about the importance of culture which was based on the teachings of Matthew Arnold, and they also took the lead in campaigns to reintroduce the kind of order and certainty which the traditional arts course had possessed by attempting to create a "common learning" or "core" of general education. This thesis analyzes the development of the arts curriculum over a period of one hundred and fifty years, and examines the reasons why the quest for unifying principles in liberal education remained unfulfilled in the secular university of the twentieth century.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MANITOBA/oai:mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca:1993/24235 |
| Date | January 1987 |
| Creators | Jasen, Patricia Jane |
| Source Sets | University of Manitoba Canada |
| Detected Language | English |
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