Did government kill liberal education?

As I noted in an opinion piece a few weeks ago:

Education, for the longest time, was not about credentialing for the trades. As one looks back to the days of gurukula in India or Plato's academy, it becomes clear that education was simply about knowing. Preparations for the trades and professions happened elsewhere.

The broadening of higher education opportunities, through state involvement, for a lot more in society--not merely to the affluent--was, of course, the right thing to do.  Not for the instrumental and utilitarian logic that it delivered economic benefits, but because having a population that thinks a lot more is better than otherwise.

However, did this cause, or at least hasten, the death of liberal education?

A few decades ago, when higher education was not linked to explicit training for the professions, As John Armstrong notes, one might have studied:

the classics at Oxford and Cambridge and go on to be a merchant banker because the institutions have such prestige that being educated there is seen as a sign of high calibre; also, the guy hiring at the bank went to Oxford.

In this approach to higher education, academics didn't have to worry about the liberal education they lived and breathed.

The involvement of the state, however, means that taxpayer subsidies have to be justified.  It does not take a doctorate in logic to figure out how quickly then we descended into a utilitarian framework on the worth of higher education, resulting in colleges and universities becoming centers for job skills.

The net result is that we seem to be less interested in developing thinkers and creative people, and more "invested" in producing worker bees.

It has been an unfortunate unintended consequence.

Martha Nussbaum provides a succinct response in this context:

The world needs commerce, science and technology more than the humanities. Right or wrong?
Wrong! Even for commerce and technology to succeed, they need the humanistic imagination and the ability to think critically and rigorously.
Science at its best is closely allied to the humanities because it is creative, highly rigorous and critical. So what the world needs is an alliance between the humanities and creative basic science to foster the skills that produce good citizenship and healthy business cultures.

Armstrong seems to believe that there is a way out of this increasing marginalization of liberal education:

I am suggesting a change to well-entrenched systems; I say we have a shortfall in speaking to the public

More from Armstrong:

"If you believe something is important you should try to take it to everyone," he argues. "The humanities don't belong to the elite."
And this means presenting ideas and arguments in ways people who aren't academic experts can grasp, of ideas-merchants selling the ideas they stand for, not just talking to each other.
"The marketplace of ideas is a marketplace," he says.

Indeed!