You know how people deride the STEM master race? There’s also a humanities master race. You’ll find people (often on the internet) who strongly imply that studying the humanities is the only way to build critical thinking or creativity. Woe are those who study anything other than the humanities, for they are doomed to a life of ignorance and rote labor.
^a life of reasonably well-paid ignorance and rote labor.
I think this is a bit of an oversimplification. Yes, the early U.S. colleges were set up primarily to train clergy, but they had a very narrow curriculum, nothing like the broad “liberal arts curriculum” we know today. At Harvard, for example, students studied Greek and Latin language and literature, philosophy, rhetoric, divinity, and the arts. Exposure to the sciences was minimal, math was rudimentary (arithmetic and geometry in the final year), and there was nothing resembling a social science curriculum. The emphasis was on training clergy well grounded in Puritan orthodoxy; the curriculum was presumed to be fixed and unchanging, and there was no interest a spirit of free intellectual inquiry or expanding the frontiers of knowledge. Yet it was democratizing in the sense that almost every denomination had its own college and was able to train its own clergy who also became important community leaders, and these were not selected out of a narrow upper-class pool; there was usually a meritocratic element to it.
Many historians of American higher education say it was the Yale Report of 1828 that first articulated the ideals of the liberal arts college as we know it today. Faced with a rising tide of science and calls from some quarters to abandon a curriculum that was increasingly seen as irrelevant out outmoded, the Yale faculty issued a document that called for simultaneously broadening the curriculum to include subjects like “chemistry, mineralogy, geology, political economy, &c.” while still staunchly defending the role of Greek and Latin at the core of the curriculum. Most of all, the Yale Report emphasized that a college education must be simultaneously “broad, and deep, and solid,” “laying a solid foundation in science and literature,” while cultivating the well-roundedness of the individual and the “discipline” and resourcefulness of the mind. And instruction was to be stoutly non-vocational: “Our object is not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions; but to lay the foundation which is common to them all.” The document recognized and embraced the role of specialized instruction in medicine, law, and theology, but it warned that early specialization without first acquiring a broad liberal arts foundation would lead to “a narrowness in [one’s] habits of thinking, a peculiarity of character, which will be sure to mark him as a man of limited views and attainments,” and also limit his capacity to serve his family, his fellow citizens, and his country to his fullest capacity.
Democratizing? Not particularly, but the Yale ideal of the educated, well-rounded, cultivated man as civic leader and capable citizen spread quickly to other colleges which by that time were popping up all across the country, in every fledgling state. And the Yale Report itself acknowledged and welcomed this proliferation of colleges because “[o]ur Republican form of government renders it highly important that great numbers should enjoy the advantages of a thorough education.” So the ideal of linking a liberal arts education to democratic participation on a large scale was there, even if in practice higher education was limited to a fortunate few.
At about the same time, some of the nation’s great public universities were being founded—long before the Morrill Land Grant Act, and not necessarily with an “emphasis on practical education.” The University of North Carolina was founded in 1789; the University of Michigan in 1817; and the University of Virginia in 1819, all offering a broad curriculum in the arts and sciences, including modern as well as classical languages. Thomas Jefferson founded UVA as a secular institution, educating its students in the learned professions (except theology) and the arts and sciences, “based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind,” where “we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead.” Jefferson thought a well-rounded university education would prepare students to become leaders not only in the professions but also in public affairs. Under the leadership of President Henry Tappan, Michigan became one of the first American universities to explicitly embrace the German (or Humboldtian) “research model,” emphasizing the importance of freedom of academic inquiry, research, laboratory study, the seminar method, and an enhanced role for science and engineering in the curriculum. Michigan became the second university in the country (after Harvard) to award Bachelor of Science degrees, and one of the first to embrace German-style graduate education. Although Johns Hopkins is often credited with being the first modern research university, Michigan was well down that path a good 20 years before JHU’s founding, and Tappan has been called the “John the Baptist” of the modern American research university.
I think the truth lies somewhere in between but most bases are covered by the typical liberal arts - math, the sciences, the humanities. Learning to analyze, to write and read critically, “higher” more abstract math.