I started my inquiry by going to the wikipedia for liberal arts since the thing I hear most is that people pursuing science/engineering/math lack a liberal arts foundation. I read the section on "history" and wanted to follow up on the information presented in those paragraphs, since it seems that the divide between a pure science education and a pure arts education is relatively recent on a historical timeline. And does it have to do with our 'must have a degree to do x specialized job' system, so education itself is inherently different?
This seems like a big question and not as specific as I had hoped, so please feel free to take liberties with my question if you have a better way of answering! Thank you so much!
Hi, not discouraging direct answers here, but while you're waiting, you might enjoy these previous posts
/u/UrAccountabilibuddy in Why don't educated people learn Latin and Ancient Greek as often as they used to?
/u/bfg_foo in Whatever happened to the study of rhetoric?
/u/a4bh3 in When and why did knowledge of the Classics start declining in prominence in Western education?
continued...
Hey! I have an earlier answer on the difference between the medieval (and classical) concept of the liberal arts versus Renaissance humanism that might interest you.
As to the "division" between the humanities and science--this is not a concept that would have made sense to medieval people at all, either in the split or in the idea that they were two different categories. Science comes from scientia, or knowledge. The S and E in today's STEM would be more what we call "natural philosophy" than Science and Math. As to engineering knowledge--we know medieval engineers had a lot of it; the math for siege engines alone when those have to be built on the fly, on location...--that wasn't the province of a university education at all.
As to the unification of knowledge, heck, 13th century Franciscan leader Bonaventure wrote a text called De reductione artium ad theologium--The Reduction of the Arts to Theology, in which he shows how every other body of knowledge gradually leads up to and is subsumed first by philosophy and ultimately by theology.