<P> While liberal education was stifled during the barbarism of the Early Middle Ages, it rose to prominence once again in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, especially with the re-emergence of Aristotelian philosophy . The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw a revolt against narrow spirituality and educators started to focus on the human, rather than God . This humanist approach favored reason, nature and aesthetics . </P> <P> Study of the Classics and humanities slowly returned in the fourteenth century, which led to increased study of both Ancient Greek and Latin . In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, liberal education focused mostly on the classics . Commoners, however, were not too keen on studying the classics, so they instead took up vernacular languages and literature, and also the sciences . Until at least the twentieth century, both humanist and classicist influences remained in the liberal education, and proponents of a progressive education also embraced the humanist philosophy . Study of the classics continued in the form of the Great Books program . Robert Maynard Hutchins brought this program to the University of Chicago . Upon Hutchins' resignation, the university got rid of the program, but an adapted version still exists at Shimer College . </P> <P> While liberal education is a Western movement, it has been influential in other regions as well . For example, in Japan during the general liberalism of the Taishō period, there was a liberal education movement that saw the establishment of a number of schools based on liberal education in the 1920s--see 大正 自由 教育 運動 . </P> <P> Liberal education and professional education have often been seen as divergent . German universities moved towards more professional teaching in the nineteenth century, and unlike American students, who still pursued a liberal education, students elsewhere started to take professional courses in the first or second year of study . In the early twentieth century, American liberal arts colleges still required students to pursue a common curriculum, whereas public universities allowed a student to move on to more pragmatic courses after having taken general education courses for the first two years of study . As an emphasis on specialized knowledge grew in the middle of the century, colleges began to adjust the proportion of required general education courses to those required for a particular major . </P>

Liberal arts philosophy and vocational philosophy of higher education