To begin, here’s a personal story.
Having somewhat underachieved in high school, I had the sense that university academics would not be terribly far removed from the mental coasting for a B average I had come to associate with education.
But Dr. Gray's Biology 101 class shattered this perception.
His lectures and his tests were, well, different from anything I had ever experienced. He asked questions that required me to master content in such a way so as to use my knowledge to make logical connections and build new ideas. He had absolutely precluded the possibility of me using my savvy powers of multiple-choice answer deduction to determine the most sensible answers to the question.
That class was possibly the first true rhetoric-stage course I ever took. I was not merely supposed to master facts and processes. I was, instead, required to be able to synthesize, create, and argue based upon the facts that it was presumed I had mastered. So I missed a whole lot of questions on his tests.
The consolation I gave myself when I wasn't able to pull up my grade above C-level was that I just lacked the habits and self-disciplines of good study. Somehow this was cathartic to me: I wasn't unintelligent, I thought; I just didn't study well because this class content was harder to apprehend than others. But in retrospect (and with the context I presently have, now that I've taught high school and college biology a few times), I realize that it was not an issue of content or of discipline. My problem was that I had not yet grown to have a dexterity with the powers of human logic and rhetoric. I had trouble analyzing an argument or a system, and so then I had even more trouble building my own lines of reasoning in relation to a problem. That was the real issue.
I was able to retain facts. And I was interested in the subject. But I wasn’t free to really learn and grow.
So. Who or what is to blame for this deficiency?
Well. No one, really. I had been exposed in high school to elements of logic and rhetoric. And I wasn't bad at doing logic-y and rhetoric-y things. I was in the top cut of my class in math, and I was on the forensics team, specializing in the laziest event I could find: impromptu speaking.
So if there's any "blame" to be found for my deficiency in being able to at-will use the tools of logic and rhetoric, it's simply in the fact that I wasn't ever really asked to deliberately use logic and rhetoric in any inter-disciplinary context. Analyzing literature was just a thing for literature. Geometric proof logic was good only for math things. Creating a speech was only good for making sure I didn't look dumb when I competed at the meet. I regarded logic as a tool for one subject, and a different kind of logic as a different tool for another subject. But it never really occurred to me that the tools of analysis (logic) and creation (rhetoric) were over-arching and inter-related.
And I don’t think that my experience is unique; not by a long shot.
Here’s the quick application:
It’s entirely possible to have a solid Liberal Arts education (that's what I had), but not really understand the fundamental skills which underlay the Liberal Arts. We tend to think of Liberal Arts as subjects to know, but they actually are skills to master. They are the free-ing (liberal = liberating) skills (arts = from Latin word for technique) which students acquire through an education which emphasizes them. And it is incumbent upon Liberal Arts educators to realize that they are not merely teaching content for the sake of stuffing kids' minds with facts; they are, rather, training students in the freeing skills that will enable them to learn truth, discern goodness, and create beauty for the rest of their lives.