The rise of Liberal Arts: then and now
The famed Black Mountain College always finds a moment to reflect on its legacy.
As a travel writer, of course, history and the way it impacts the future is so much a part of jetting all over the world. I am a bonafide nerd and curious by nature…so discovering Asheville and this college had all cylinders firing…
Then
The year is 1933. The Philippines find independence, Mahatma Gandhi is released from prison in India, and in Europe a war is waged with a German at the helm. But over in America, in a small mountain town called Asheville, a whole other world is changing: the Black Mountain College is born.
Courtesy of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
Conceived by John A. Rice, a mercurial scholar who controversially left Florida’s Rollins College, Black Mountain College (BMC) was forged from “a desire to create a new type of college based on John Dewey’s principles of progressive education. Dewey, a philosopher and psychologist, was a firm believer in all forms of democracy. He took his philosophies to literature and wrote various books all arguing, “education and learning are social and interactive processes” which to him meant that the school itself is where social reform can (and should) happen.
Fundamentally he wanted students to thrive in an environment where interaction with the curriculum was encouraged and all students “should have the opportunity to take part in their own learning” as cited in his 1902 book “The Child and the Curriculum.” And so the College was influenced by the utopian ideals of the progressive education movement where the arts are at the center of a liberal arts education and as the College believed “could better educate citizens for participation in a democratic society.” But people, evangelists really, were needed to populate this world – or as the school would say “citizens of the world.”