Author: Dr. Justin Kuhn, Director of the General Honors Program and Assistant Professor of English
The General Honors program at St. Andrews University is designed to enhance the liberal arts education of our most promising students. But what, exactly, is a liberal arts education? And what does it offer students in the twenty-first century?
The phrase “liberal arts” comes from the Latin expression artes liberales, which translates to “the knowledge befitting a free people.” A liberal arts education, in other words, provides students with a set of values, intellectual frameworks, and habits of mind that will help them to lead meaningful lives within a democratic society. This kind of well-rounded education is not only one of the responsibilities of citizenship—it’s an important means through which the freedoms of citizenship can be realized in the first place.
With these ideals in mind, I’ve worked to update the seminar course that is required of all Junior-level Honors students. After a process of curricular revision, I am excited to announce that the course will now focus on social responsibility. In it, students will explore an issue of social or political import to better understand the ethical considerations and civic obligations of their membership within broader communities.
Our topic for Spring 2024, the first time I’ll be teaching the course, is Utopia. My junior Honors students and I will examine utopian communities both real and imagined in order to probe the limits and possibilities of how we might restructure our own society for the better. Course material will range from the original Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More to more recent works such as The Dispossessed (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin. By studying utopian thinking, Honors students will clarify their own social and political values, refine their sense of civic responsibility, and consider how they themselves relate to the communities of which they are a part.
Courses like the Junior Honors seminar in social responsibility are designed in accordance with liberal arts principles to prepare students not just for a job but for a lifetime of thoughtful and informed engagement with the world around them. In future blog posts, I will continue to outline how the Honors program takes these liberal arts principles, which are at the core of SAU’s educational mission, and expands on them to help our highest-achieving students reach their full potential.
