In this chapter, I address myself to the educational knot of the general and the particular for those who promote, teach on and study the liberal arts. Liberal arts degrees are presented on institutions’ promotional websites as fostering highly generic skills irrespective of the disciplines taken (as we saw in Chapter 2); yet, there is simultaneously a constant stress that liberal arts students are unique by virtue of the specific degree they study.

The desire to forge one's own path through education, work and, more broadly, interests and style can take on a decidedly moral character. As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005: 504) note, there is a growing moral imperative to seek ‘autonomy, spontaneity, authenticity, self-fulfilment, creativity, life’ through work and other means, and one consequence in education is a moral stance against off-the-peg degrees. As Burke and McManus (2011) found in their study of art school admission interviews, some ill-defined ‘quirkiness’ easily becomes prized in this context.

Yet, this individualisation of learning choices happens alongside a homogenisation of the desired outcomes for all learners, irrespective of degree content. Generic personal competences are what should be fostered, such as lateral thinking, communication skills and the universally required capacity to ‘work well alone or as part of a team’. These are industrial values for the well-functioning workplace and quite distinct from inspirational ones about following one's personal passions.

Values that appear at first sight to be in contradiction, however, may in fact relate to similar processes: because the competences are generic and education as a generalised process (learning to learn) is being unmoored from disciplinary specificity, choices about what to learn are considered less important. Thus, they can fairly harmlessly be made by students themselves. This highly individualising approach is learner centred (European Commission, 2008) – part of what Gert Biesta (2010) calls ‘learnification’ – yet, it paradoxically diminishes the importance of the learner's choices. It might be summarised as ‘many routes to one destination’.

This relatively recent notion of generic competences, concerned with an efficient workplace, seems entirely divorced again from a much older set of values about general education: the English educational tradition of breadth, generalism and even suspicion of expertise (Young, 2008).