The usage of "liberal" in "liberal science" or "liberal education" predates the modern usage of the word. The "liberal" in those phrases is intended to mean "befitting a free person", as opposed to unfree people, the slaves or servants or serfs, the people who actually had to work.
Okay.
So, the usage of "liberal" to which you're referring doesn't just predate the modern era. It's an idea from classical antiquity, originating literally thousands of years ago and primarily within one Greek city-state. It reflected a particular need on the part of that city state, because Athens was a democracy. The emphasis on "liberal education" and rhetorical training in Athens reflected the need for a citizenship capable of handling political responsibility. Women and free foreigners (metics) were also exempt from the need for a liberal education, because they did not have the same civic responsibilities.
Athenean law explicitly reflected the fact that it was often difficult to tell slaves, metics and citizens apart by their apparent wealth or the job they performed. For example it was forbidden to strike a slave in public in case someone mistook a poor citizen for a slave. Being a slave wasn't a matter of simply being poorer than anyone else or doing all the work, it was a matter of rights and civic responsibilities.
Regardless, trying to broaden this into a general statement of pre-modern education or its role is laughable. If anything, for around a milennium and a half, the concept of higher education was synonymous with a religious education and tightly controlled by whatever religious authorities existed. At the same time, it is non-coincidental that in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries many of the wealthiest people in the world were members of religious minorities who were barred from higher education. Business ownership and investment, the actual path to enormous wealth in a capitalist society, does not require a significant education.
I think you're capable of seeing the continued parallels in the modern system where cushy careers are often filled by nepotism, but if they aren't filled that way, they are gatekept by participation in a higher education system that often has no relevance to the actual job being performed, with extra deference to the schools most filled with generational wealth.
How is that relevant to the value of education itself?
Do you think Harvard or Cambridge are actually offering a better standard of education than other institutions, or are they simply selecting candidates who have been more intensively prepared and who attend these institutions primary to develop contacts among the political and financial elite?
How many Fortune 500 companies do you think are run by people with doctorates? How many major shareholders in those companies have devoted a significant proportion of their lives to studying philosophy? Again, you are fundamentally misunderstanding the relationship between intellectualism and power in order to labour this really asinine assumption that anyone with the slightest personal experience of living within the intellectual class (or the political and business elite) could discredit.
It's not as though you have a better answer to existential questions by, you know, just thinking about it.
If the alternative answer is "I know these things for certain based on my personal feelings and individual experiences" then yes. I do have better answers than that.
Incorrect. I believe that absolute truth cannot be derived through only the mediation of the human intellect.
I believe that absolute truth is a useless concept since it describes something entirely outside of any human experience.
You have fundamentally misunderstood what the intellectual labor here is. It is not divining truth by quoting definitions, it is determining what it is possible to know, to what degree of certainty and under what conditions, and from that qualifying the utility of knowledge produced from experience.
Any asserted truth which nature outside of the human mind has had no opportunity to contradict should be considered with no more confidence than if you hadn't thought it through at all.
How do you know that nature exists outside of the human mind?
Like, this is the most basic, fundamental point of empiricism. Empirical experiences are
not outside the human mind. Whatever is outside the human mind can only be inferred through our senses (not just the physical organs, but the mind which interprets them) and thus our experience of it is necessarily imperfect. Our position as humans determines our perception of the world.
One very obvious example of this would be believing that human life has intrinsic value because you are a human. That awareness of being a human and thus valuing human life as a principle can
only exist within a human mind. It has no basis or bearing on reality and no evidence to suggest that there is any universal truth to the statement that human life is valuable.
