Liberal-arts learning between school and the road

In this article, I observe that the current practice of liberal-arts learning has entered into a historical crisis in which its central, defining convention—that this learning, unlike grammar learning and vocational learning, promotes freedom—no longer holds much meaning. To overcome this crisis, I suggest that liberal-arts learning should base its mission on a different, hitherto taken-for-granted convention: that it concerns the experience of being led out, an experience stressed by one of the etymological roots of education, ēdūcere. Wim Wenders's road movies give dramatic form to this experience by raising and responding to the question of destiny. They accordingly have much to teach educators who are interested in revitalising liberal-arts learning.