By JOHN HALLWAS

Twenty years ago, I gave a lecture and remarked, “Education in the liberal arts is under siege and in decline.” Since then, our dismal situation regarding broad, life-shaping, and socially committed education has only gotten worse. Among the many books that discuss this problem are Michael S. Roth’s “Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education” (2015) and Fareed Zakaria’s “In Defense of Liberal Education” (2016).

But the general public is still often unaware of this crucial issue.

Our society needs to ponder the continual decline in liberal-arts education – and what it means for American culture. In 1900, for example, more than 70% of American college students attended liberal-arts institutions, devoted to rigorous general-education programs, while today fewer than 5% of our students do. And in virtually all of our colleges and universities, there is enormous pressure to emphasize courses in major fields and de-emphasize, or trivialize, general-education requirements.

Moreover, recent surveys show that most college-bound high school students feel that the goal of higher education is just to get necessary training in order to secure a job. Simply put, today’s students tend to be career-oriented, as well as impatient for material rewards, and they place a premium on acquiring specific skills (in accounting, law enforcement, business management, etc.) that will credential them for particular occupations.

Such students just reflect our culture at large — a culture that often sees liberal-arts education as an expensive extravagance or a waste of time, a diversion from the “real world” of jobs, money, status and power. No wonder many of them dread their college or university’s general education courses and don’t really engage with those subjects.

However, if higher education is simply viewed as having a market function — to provide career-oriented “customers” with educational services so they can obtain promising jobs, and to provide companies or agencies with trained personnel so they can function better — then the whole process is stripped of any moral or cultural influence on the lives of Americans or on the future of humanity.

But that’s not our tradition. In America we have generally believed, until recently, that higher education should cultivate the individual for contributing to our democratic culture. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum points out in a fine book on the liberal arts titled “Cultivating Humanity” (1997), “Unlike all other nations, we have asked higher education to contribute a general preparation for citizenship, not just a specialized preparation for a career.”

By “citizenship,” she means finding common values and purposes, or “drawing citizens toward one another by complex mutual understanding,” in an increasingly pluralistic society. And that crucial effort calls for people with a background in history, literature, philosophy, sociology and other fields that comprise the traditional liberal-arts curriculum.

Moreover, the need for such a background has increased during recent generations. In the modern world — characterized by lingering prejudice, violent social conflict, selfish politics, rampant materialism, impersonal relationships, and a deteriorating environment — a liberal-arts education promotes critical reflection on the implications of participating in a global society. Our military, economic and social ventures into other countries must be as ethically well-grounded and culturally sensitive as our handling of issues within the nation, but that is sometimes not the case. So, if the decline of liberal arts continues, we will surely lack the human resources to comprehend our huge national and international challenges.

What we need to understand is that the fate of liberal-arts education is inseparable from the fate of multi-cultural America, as well as the fate of the world. Teachers, students, parents and others who believe in America’s deepest values and in our nation’s role as a global leader — a model and inspiration for cultural understanding and social progress — must encourage and support our traditional commitment to effective liberal-arts education. That’s the indispensable foundation for national and worldwide social responsibility.

People should always be learning and growing — not celebrating their ignorance, defending their prejudice, protecting an outdated worldview, or simply striving for money. So, we have crucial work to do — in our families, schools, libraries, civic organizations and governmental agencies — to revitalize public awareness of our need for a broad education.

— John Hallwas is president of the Illinois State Historical Society. The author or editor of 30 books and hundreds of articles related to Illinois, he’s retired from teaching at Western Illinois University and heads a movement there that stresses the liberal arts through an annual Liberal Arts Lecture series.