The Liberal Arts vs. The Humanities: What’s the Difference?

In casual North American speech during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the distinction between “the Humanities” and “the Liberal Arts” is understood poorly if at all, and in common usage, no clear definition is attached to either. Many speakers of American English have the vague impression that the two are synonymous.

In reality, the two are quite different from each other.

The two terms are sometimes used dismissively, to imply that certain curricula lack rigor or real-world practicality; but note carefully that the Liberal Arts Department in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago offers the following courses: Marine Biology, Mathematical Thinking, and The Physics of Motion.

The Liberal Arts Department at Henry Ford College offers Criminal Justice and Introduction to Homeland Security. The College of Liberal Arts at Temple University includes the Department of Economics and the Neuroscience Program.

The College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota offers full programs in Mathematics, Chemistry, and Physics.

These examples show that the term “Liberal Arts” refers, in its true meaning, to academic disciplines including all the natural sciences and mathematics. What is the logic of this definition? The history of the phrase, as given in the Oxford English Dictionary (2009 edition), explains that it was “originally the seven subjects of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) considered collectively.”

To modern readers, grouping rhetoric in the same category as geometry, and grouping music in the same category as astronomy, might seem odd. But in the medieval educational systems, these content areas were seen to have a common thread: they were considered to be “free” topics, because they were not “in the service of” some vocational or professional training: they were unapplied. Because they were “free,” they were called the “liberal” arts — they enjoyed liberty.

Even today, many post-secondary educational institutions distinguish between “pure” mathematics and “applied” mathematics. Likewise, Biology is one of the Liberal Arts, but Medicine is professional training; Physics is one of the Liberal Arts, but Mechanical Engineering is professional training.

The Liberal Arts are, therefore, investigations into different areas of knowledge — investigations with the goal of gaining knowledge. This is in contrast to being trained for specific tasks: engineering, healthcare, legal work, business.

Under the heading of “Liberal Arts,” one finds learning about nearly any conceivable topic, learning for the sake of learning: education, not training.

What is meant by “the Humanities”?

The word itself gives a clue: the academic disciplines grouped together under the label have this in common — they all involve the experience of being human. They are experiential and therefore empirical. Music, painting, sculpture, and architecture studied by means of sense data: using one or more of the five senses.

History is a collection of individual or shared experiences of human beings in the past. Literature is the experience of writing and the experience of reading, and the study of those experiences.

By contrast, mathematics, e.g., is an a priori investigation, and has no need of specific sense data.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains what people are discussing when they’re discussing the Humanities:

The branch of learning concerned with human culture; the academic subjects collectively comprising this branch of learning, as history, literature, ancient and modern languages, law, philosophy, art, and music.

The humanities are typically distinguished from the social sciences in having a significant historical element, in the use of interpretation of texts and artefacts rather than experimental and quantitative methods, and in having an idiographic rather than nomothetic character.

The contrast to the social sciences is helpful: the Humanities tend to deal with concrete and specific examples — texts and artifacts. The social sciences look for patterns and trends which can possibly be formulated as laws — charts and graphs, percentages and equations. The Humanities might study, e.g., the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. The social sciences might study a generic description of the social dynamics which are associated with revolutions.

‘The Humanities’ is sometimes used in second sense, which is slightly narrower, according to the OED:

Literary learning or scholarship; secular letters as opposed to theology; esp. the study of ancient Latin and Greek language, literature, and intellectual culture (as grammar, rhetoric, history, and philosophy); classical scholarship.

It is clear that the Humanities and the Liberal Arts are two different and distinct groups of topics.

Thus the true definitions of the phrases. But common speech rarely honors precise exposition, and thus the current confusion and sloppy usage.

The definition in the OED notes that “in later use more generally,” the Liberal Arts are assumed to be “arts subjects as opposed to science and technology.” It goes on to note that this usage is “now chiefly North American.”

By analyzing how such words are defined and grouped, readers can develop an intellectual apparatus which can organize educational institutions.

Creating the Perfect Transcript: World Language Classes and the Admissions Process

Although it’s usually not until the beginning of a student’s senior year in high school that the application process takes center stage in a student’s activities, the transcript which is a major part of that process begins with the freshman year. If a student learns only in twelfth grade that the gold standard is four consecutive years of a World Language, it may be too late.

It is important for ninth-graders to be aware that they must start their high school career with a World Language class, and take that language each year until graduation. Other variables being equal, the student with four years will be admitted over the student with three.

Sara Harberson is the author of Soundbite, a book about the college application process, and the founder of Application Nation, a community for people navigating the admissions process. She has also worked as an admissions officer at several colleges and universities. When advising future applicants, she writes:

The most asked question I get from students is if they really need to take language through senior year — especially if they took it starting in middle school. My answer never changes, though. It's always “yes.” Because almost every college has a language requirement, admissions officers are looking for the student to have the most exposure to one single language. Language proficiency will help students when they get to college. Before that, it will help them stay competitive in the admissions process.

It’s worth noting that AP and DP test scores play little or no role in the admissions process, while enrollment in the AP or DP class can be a significant factor. So it’s important to take those classes, even if you don’t take the test. The test results often are published so late that most admissions departments have made all their decisions by then.

Allen Grove has over 20 years of experience as a professor and an admissions officer. He writes:

When a college recommends “two or more” years of a language, they are clearly signaling that language study beyond two years would strengthen your application. Indeed, no matter where you apply for college, a demonstrated proficiency in a second language will improve your chances of being admitted. Life during college and afterward is becoming increasingly globalized, so strength in a second language carries a lot of weight with admissions counselors.

“Highly selective schools such as the Ivies,” adds Grove, are clearly looking for “four years of a language.” Students sometimes receive rejection letters indicating that they were not admitted because they did not have four consecutive years of a World Language on their transcripts.

The default World Language for many high school students is Spanish. If a high school offers another language — e.g., German, Latin, Russian, Greek, etc. — then a student has an opportunity to assemble a transcript which will stand out.

Of the students who enroll in a foreign language program during their four years of high school, roughly 70% take Spanish. Admissions officers who skim through hundreds and even thousands of transcripts. A language like German or Latin will catch the eye.

The popular website Ingenius Prep is a source of guidance for the college application process. The site states:

Many schools recommend that you actually commit to the component for all four years of high school.

To compile a transcript which has a good chance of succeeding, a student should avoid taking a default language and find a more interesting language, take it all four years, and if possible, take a AP or DP class during the fourth and final year.

Too Much Conformity — Or Not Enough?

Starting sometime around the middle of the twentieth century, American society has been bombarded with comments demanding less conformity. Certainly, it is possible that a society can be too conformist. Not only is it possible, but world history offers concrete examples of cookie-cutter behavior being imposed on individuals on a mass scale.

Whether any given society is too conformist, as opposed being merely somewhat conformist, is of course to a certain extent a matter of opinion.

Less subjective is the task of identifying and quantifying the specific results and effects of both conformity and nonconformity.

Since the horrifying killings at Columbine High School in 1999, examination of social dynamics in high schools has taken on a certain urgency. What can we learn about the individuals and the motives which lie behind such killings? Can we detect social factors proactively to prevent such crimes?

Columbine was not the first high school killing spree, but it seems to have captured the attention of the mass media and the imagination of the public more than any of the previous incidents.

Efforts have been made to mine high school students for their awareness of potential warning signs that such violence may be in the offing: Students are urged to report potential perpetrators. Signs and posters tell students, “If You See Something, Say Something.” Similar slogans remind students that “It’s OK to Say” if they know of some inclination toward mass violence, and other posters tell students to “See It. Report It. Stop It!”

Such well-intentioned encouragements have not succeeded in reducing violent sprees.

These efforts to encourage students to report potential perpetrators are swimming against the current. For three-quarters of a century, a coordinated effort has been underway to make American society in general, and high schools in particular, less conformist. This effort has been by some metrics — by many metrics? — successful.

In an environment shaped by nonconformism and anti-conformism, it is difficult to persuade students to identify among their peers those who might be likely to plan mass violence.

In hindsight, many of the perpetrators of large-scale school violence were identifiable. But students have been conditioned to ignore or overlook nonconformity. Students have been conditioned not even to perceive bizarre appearances or behaviors.

Historians and sociologists can debate whether or not American society was too conformist in the 1940s and 1950s. It is ultimately a question of opinion.

At the beginning of the second quarter of the twenty-first century, however, there are measurable and observable effects arising from a steady barrage of nonconformist and anti-conformist messages.

Americans in general, and American high school students in particular, have been taught or persuaded not to notice what can only be described as weird: strange actions, speech, or appearances. Some might even consider it uncomfortable or inappropriate to be aware of another’s oddity.

Society has compromised the safety of high school students in the name of rebelling against conformism. Certainly, it is a democratic instinct to protect an individual’s right to express herself or himself. But it is also a democratic instinct to protect the population at large; doing so entails an effort to identify potential threats — those whose words and behaviors mark them as outliers.

The Other Kind of Gender Equity: Why Are Men Not Thriving at Universities?

The evidence is conclusive: At colleges and universities in the United States, fewer boys than girls are applying for admission, being accepted for admission, matriculating, or graduating. In all of those activities, girls form a clear and growing majority. Among the boys who do matriculate, average grades are lower.

This trend is increasing.

In 2021, Douglas Belkin wrote:

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.

Belkin described the situation in that year:

No reversal is in sight. Women increased their lead over men in college applications for the 2021-22 school year — 3,805,978 to 2,815,810 — by nearly a percentage point compared with the previous academic year, according to Common Application, a nonprofit that transmits applications to more than 900 schools. Women make up 49% of the college-age population in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.

Since then, the trend has indeed continued. In 2024, the gender gap is larger than it was in 2021.

The statistical skew cuts across all the usual demographic variables: religion, income level, race, ethnicity, etc. The gender gap exists in a wide range of institutions: community colleges, four-year colleges, large universities.

Already in 2021, the female enrollment majority was nearly two-thirds of the student body, as Belkin writes:

The gender enrollment disparity among nonprofit colleges is widest at private four-year schools, where the proportion of women during the 2020-21 school year grew to an average of 61%, a record high, Clearinghouse data show. Some of the schools extend offers to a higher percentage of male applicants, trying to get a closer balance of men and women.

Some universities have made intentional efforts to recruit more boys and to lower admission standards slightly for boys. Despite such initiatives, the gender gap continues to increase. In 2024, the skew had indeed crossed the two-thirds mark on some campuses.

What’s to be done?

The causes of this inequity are several, and so the repair will involve more than one action. Social and cultural attitudes about masculinity will need to change. Secondary educational institutions will need to change: high school.

Educational institutions are resistant to meaningful change, and quick to embrace superficial gestures which look like change. What is needed in American high schools in order to fix the gender gap?

• Rigor
• Physicality
• Competition
• Structure
• Discipline

Male students respond positively to rigor, as do female students. But in the absence of rigor, male students disengage quickly, while female students will stay engaged longer. Why? The reason isn’t important; the observable, measurable, and quantifiable outcomes are. Rigor is when students receive curricular content, and their learning is measured by their abilities to demonstrate skills (“know how”) and comprehension (“know that”).

All students benefit from engaging in physical exercise, but boys show a bigger statistical bump when they have regular movement. This can be as simple as taking a walk, a bicycle ride, or a swim most days. Outside the United States, some schools devote 15 or 30 minutes to calisthenics each morning before instruction starts. The prevalence of high school athletics in the United States blurs the concept a bit: For students who aren’t interested in team sports, they need to understand that physical fitness can be obtained by simple daily routines like walking, and needn’t involve teams, games, coaches, and officials; for students who are on a school team, they need to remain active in their off seasons, and their coaches need to ensure that practice times regularly include cardiovascular workouts and aren’t merely strategy sessions in the locker room.

Boys are more likely to invest time, energy, and attention to content area learning when there is an element of competition. Best practices include acknowledging top performers (often in an “honor roll”); celebrating valedictorians; and publishing “rank in class” statistics at the end of the school year.

Structure helps all students, but especially boys. A school which emphasizes organizational habits, promptness, and routines builds a predictable environment. There can be exceptions, but they need to be few in number, and clearly announced as such. Even the arrangement of chairs and tables and desks in a classroom can communicate order or disorder; the former inspires achievement, while the latter encourages sloth.

Boys seek a clear understanding of discipline. Rules should be few, clear, and consistently enforced. Most boys, upon hearing or reading an instruction or a rule, ask silently, “and what happens if I don’t?” They will test the boundary to see if there is a prompt consequence for violation.

The gender gap poses a serious threat to America and to the credibility of America’s educational institutions. The statistics which reveal this gap are more significant than racial and income-related gaps. If the gap is not reduced or eliminated, society and the economy will pay a bitter price.

What We Know, and What We Fail to Do with That Knowledge: Marijuana in Schools

In many areas across the United States, the possession and use of THC and related substances for recreational purposes has been decriminalized, meaning that it is still a violation of federal law, but not a violation of local law, and that local law enforcement will not act on it, and local prosecutors will not prosecute it.

In most — all? — such places, it is stipulated that marijuana and related products will be sold only to those over the age of 21.

While the imposition of this age limit is well-intentioned, it is largely ineffective. Any sufficiently motivated high school student can find a way to obtain THC products, and the use of such products by underage individuals has increased both in high schools and in other locations.

The availability of “gummies” and baked goods and other edible products containing THC has changed how THC might be detected. In the past, marijuana most frequently smoked, and detection was based on odor and the presence of smoke, as well as paper, matches, and the marijuana itself.

The switch to edibles means that detection must pivot to devices which are able to detect THC, and perhaps also to animals trained to detect marijuana-related products.

There is no doubt, however, that documentation is growing, via research reports from universities and medical institutions, about the damage done by THC to young people.

THC has a different effect on people aged 25 and younger than it has on older people. Brain formation is still taking place up to the age of 25 or 26 — individuals vary slightly — and the introduction of various marijuana products into the bloodstream and into the brain steer that development away from its optimal trajectory. Numerous studies have shown not only correlation, but also causation, for outcomes like psychosis when THC is consumed by young people.

All of this is well known. Yet significant measures among high-school age students has yet to be taken. Parents, schools, and local law enforcement should be empowered to do more and encouraged to take meaningful action to reduce marijuana consumption among teenagers.

Now is not the time for timidity.

Educational Reform: When Everyone Knows What to Do, but Nobody Does It – Remove Smartphones from Schools

Often, changing an educational system is a contentious process, filled with passionate debate. Often, such changes require the commissioning of mountains of new research to inform any decision.

But sometimes, it’s simple and obvious.

Phrases like “settled science” and “professional consensus” are often overused, misused, and abused. But sometimes those phrases are accurate. Sometimes there really is a universal agreement — or one so statistically near universal that it counts as such.

Such is the case with electronics and young people. We don’t need one more research report on this. It is clear that smartphones, social media, and electronic gaming are harmful to young people: to their mental and physical health, as well as to their academic achievement.

The consensus is amazing: liberals and conservatives, progressives and libertarians, North and South, men and women, rich and poor, Republicans and Democrats, old and young; all religions, all races; all cultures; all ethnic groups. Everyone knows this.

But nobody does anything about it.

It would be a simple act: require students to turn in their smartphones at the beginning of the school day. They would receive them back on their way home at the end of the school day.

Yes, there would be a very small number of parents who’d make a very large amount of noise, protesting this. But the law is clear, and a school system could fend off any number of lawsuits about the topic.

And more than a few schools around the United States have already done this — public schools, private schools, charter schools — and done it successfully. The benefits among the student body are measurable and observable.

Yet the vast majority of schools have not yet done this. Why?

There is no doubt that confiscating the smartphones is good for the students. At some point in the future, questions will be asked about schools who failed to quickly adopt this most obvious of policies.

College Debt: When Student Loans Don’t Make Sense

There are many reasons to seek a college or university education: to become trained for a profession, to become intellectually well-rounded, to become a reflective voting citizen, to have an active social life on campus, to seek a spouse, and many other goals.

For none of these reasons is it wise to take on a massive amount of debt. Yet many students are doing precisely that in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

Education is often called an investment. Any investment is judged by the returns it yields, the “return on investment” (ROI).

The clear trend is that, over the last half-century, students have been making larger and larger investments, and much of those investments have been funded by larger and larger debt. Yet the growth rate for salaries is much lower than the growth rate for tuition, and for the loans needed to pay that tuition.

If education is conceptualized as professional training, then it fails to demonstrate a reasonable ROI. If the cost of earning a degree in a profession — engineering, law, medicine, etc. — has increased much more and much faster than the salaries of those professions, then it makes little sense to burden one’s self with debt to pay for such tuition.

It is even more illogical to assume debt if one is studying, not to be trained for a profession, but rather for any of the other reasons mentioned above.

Not only is accruing debt to pay for college unwise, it is also unnecessary: the price of university education is artificially high. A restructuring of America’s colleges and universities can maintain, or even increase, the quality of such education while reducing its price. The modern American university is marvelously inefficient in regard to its use of money, as Carol Roth writes:

However, in certain arenas, debt is being pushed and utilized in a way that is decoupled with achieving ROI. The biggest arena in which this is happening is college debt. In the US, college attendees, whether they had graduated or not, owed $1.6 trillion in college debt principal, aggregately, as of mid-2022.

Why haven’t the universities been reformed to offer better educations at lower prices? Because one powerful entity has a vested interest in keep the universities in their present condition: the government.

By maintaining the status quo in regard to the financing of college education, the government simultaneously achieves several objectives: First, because the government, and not private-sector lenders, does the majority of the lending, it thereby obtains a degree of control over those who are in debt. Second, because the universities rely on students paying large sums of borrowed money as tuition, the government has influence on postsecondary education.

In many cases, the size of an individual’s debt, and the degree on which universities rely on students obtaining large sums of borrowed money, justify the use of the phrase “debt trap” — alumni are held in effective servitude if they are still paying students loans several decades after graduation; colleges and universities understand that if student loan programs were to be reduced in size and scope, then they would be forced to become efficient at delivering quality education.

If these lending practices were used for home mortgages or car loans, the lenders would be prosecuted under the RICO statutes. But in this case, the lender is the federal government, as Carol Roth explains:

To put it bluntly, college and university degrees have become the biggest legal financial scam in the country, and the US government has morphed into the largest predatory lender in support of it.

To continue tricking students into taking out college loans, a barrage of propaganda is necessary to convince the public that a college education is the only path to personal or professional success. A side-effect of such propaganda is the neglect into which the non-collegiate skilled trades in the United States have fallen.

While the colleges indoctrinate America’s youth to believe that they must attend higher education at all costs, and especially at the higher costs which comfort the university’s administrators, the colleges themselves are being indoctrinated by the government to be or to do in such ways as will incline the government to maintain a given college’s status as eligible for student loans.

Each college or university — including the private ones, which are therefore less and less “private” — must comply with government protocols in order for its students to qualify for student loans.

If a college doesn’t comply, then its students will not be permitted to take out student loans, and the college won’t get the money. The students will move on to another college, one which complies with government ideas.

Neither the government nor the university has any motive to encourage students to reflect on whether the cost of the education is reasonable. Who will warn students away from taking on debts which will burden them for decades to come?

Carol Roth explains:

The profiteering college education structure is having a major impact on economic freedom and wealth creation for young individuals, as it does not enable a good financial return, or any return on investment in some cases, for too many of those buying education. Individuals aren’t contextualizing their choices about what they want to do and what they may need to do to fulfill their future objectives.

It is quite possible to restructure America’s colleges and universities so that students get educations which are as good, or better, than they are currently getting, but at a lower price — a price which would make massive college debt unnecessary. What is required is someone with the political will to encourage such restructuring.