This book argues that the liberal arts and sciences (LAS) model of education can inspire reform across higher education to help students acquire crucial civic virtues. Based on interviews with 59 students from LAS programmes across Europe, the book posits that LAS education can develop a range of citizenship skills that are central to the democratic process. The interviews provide insight into how studying LAS prepares students for citizenship by asking them to reflect on their education, what it taught them, and how it did so. Building on these insights, seven key democratic competencies are identified and linked to concrete educational practices that foster them, leading to an agenda for higher education reform. Ultimately arguing for making the teaching of civic virtue a more central part of university education in Europe, this book will appeal to researchers, educators, and politicians with an interest in education policy, philosophy of education, and democratic theory, as well as concerned citizens. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The essays in this book reflect on the paradoxical relationship of liberal education and liberal democracy. Liberal education emphasizes knowledge for its own sake, detached from all instrumental purposes. It also aims at liberation from the manifold sources of unfreedom, including political sources. In this sense, liberal education is negative, questioning any and all constraints on the activity of mind. Liberal democracy, devoted to securing individual natural rights, purports to be the regime of liberty par excellence. Since both liberal education and liberal democracy aim to set individuals free, they would seem to be harmonious and mutually reinforcing. But there are reasons to doubt that liberal education can be the civic education liberal democracy needs. If liberal education is in tension with all instrumental purposes, how does it stand toward the goal of preparing the kind of citizens liberal democracy needs? The book’s contributors are critical of the way higher education typically interprets its responsibility for educating citizens, and they link those failures to academia’s neglect of certain founding principles of the American political tradition and of the traditional liberal arts ideal.

In Liberal Education and Democratic Citizenship, Michael H. McCarthy carefully describes the many crises confronting American democracy and identifies their philosophical, cultural, and institutional origins. He argues that a liberal education, properly understood, can address several of these crises effectively. The book’s successive chapters explore the sources, areas, and levels of division in contemporary America, and show how they have created important disagreements about the major challenges we presently face and the credible solutions they require. McCarthy articulates what a liberal education actually is and why it is vitally important for both our personal and civic lives. He also clarifies the critical contrast between effective freedom, the aim of a liberal education, and the concepts of freedom within economic and political liberalism. McCarthy addresses the distinctive educational challenges presented by modernity and post-modernity: their moral aspirations, acute historical consciousness, and passion for radical criticism, as well as the traditional (Tocqueville) and contemporary (William Galston and Charles Taylor) discontents of American democracy. A central part of the book’s unfolding argument is the enduring cultural contrast between the principles and aspirations of civic republicanism and the imperial assumptions of economics. This juxtaposition helps us to understand the power and limitations of the “stories we Americans live by” as well as the civic virtues we commonly need to create a free, just, and multi-racial America. These critical virtues, McCarthy argues, are the specific goal of a liberal and democratic education

CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria argues for a renewed commitment to the world’s most valuable educational tradition. The liberal arts are under attack. The governors of Florida, Texas, and North Carolina have all pledged that they will not spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts, and they seem to have an unlikely ally in President Obama. While at a General Electric plant in early 2014, Obama remarked, "I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree." These messages are hitting home: majors like English and history, once very popular and highly respected, are in steep decline. "I get it," writes Fareed Zakaria, recalling the atmosphere in India where he grew up, which was even more obsessed with getting a skills-based education. However, the CNN host and best-selling author explains why this widely held view is mistaken and shortsighted. Zakaria eloquently expounds on the virtues of a liberal arts education—how to write clearly, how to express yourself convincingly, and how to think analytically. He turns our leaders' vocational argument on its head. American routine manufacturing jobs continue to get automated or outsourced, and specific vocational knowledge is often outdated within a few years. Engineering is a great profession, but key value-added skills you will also need are creativity, lateral thinking, design, communication, storytelling, and, more than anything, the ability to continually learn and enjoy learning—precisely the gifts of a liberal education. Zakaria argues that technology is transforming education, opening up access to the best courses and classes in a vast variety of subjects for millions around the world. We are at the dawn of the greatest expansion of the idea of a liberal education in human history.