I Come to Bury the Liberal Arts . . .
. . . Not to Praise Them
A recent letter to the editor in the Strib regarding the looming - and apparently, welcome - decline of the liberal arts education (You know, the education most of us got when we went to colleges like the Harvard of the North, UMD!) struck a chord with me. It reminded me that I had been thinking about the passing of the good old BA and the Humanities some time ago. Allow me to meander to my point.
I started college back when dinosaurs roamed the earth - 1966.
Like most wide-eyed freshman, i.e. without a clue, I took all the required
liberal arts undergrad courses while assiduously (a word I must have learned in
one of those classes) avoiding math and science to the greatest extent
possible. (Thankfully, one geology and one biology class filled the requirement.) I admit that when I took classes like World Lit, Intro to Art and Philosophy 101
I simply suffered through them as the price I had to pay to get to declare a major.
And declare I did. I ended up with a BA degree with a major
in political science and minor in world history - ha ha ha, not a STEM class in
sight! Hot damn, that REALLY prepared me for the world of work. Of course, I was
also in the Air Force ROTC and knew I had a job when I graduated for at least the next five
years so I had that going for me.
Now fast forward over 50 years. I have been fortunate to
stumble through life with a long career in the military doing a number of
different jobs (including as a navigator – take that, STEM!) After retiring I
followed it with stints of several years each in the health care industry and as
an adjunct college instructor. (And stumble is the correct word, I never had a
clue about what I wanted to be when I grew up. Still don’t.) I readily admit
that my undergrad degree itself was of virtually no value to anything I did in
the real world. However, GETTING that degree meant everything.
You know there’s an old joke that asks how often do you really
need to know how many Circles there are in Dante’s Inferno (9) or need algebra (more often than you think.) I would have said the same thing in my youthful exuberance but as I
reflect on my life now I know how often I have dredged up some piece of
information long buried in my few remaining brain cells. For example, you would
be surprised how often that knowing a little about Descarte (I thought therefore I was?) or what
Socrates had to say about youth could help me to at least not sound like a
total idiot in a conversation with people I respected. Then, of course, I would
occasionally bump into a conversation about Mozart (or Rod McKuen, look him up) and be able to impress attractive, young women. Ah, the
humanities!
In the end, though, it’s not even the individual nuggets of
information that are the most important thing from a liberal art education at
least for me, it’s the skills I developed from it. I think that being
exposed to all those totally new ideas and concepts and being challenged to
agree or disagree with them greatly helped me in life. That also seems like a pretty good definition of critical thinking too. (As proof that there is a god of irony, I stumbled into
teaching Critical Thinking.) I can’t speak for others but it also
fostered in me a great curiosity about life and brought at least some ability to learn new
things.
That was then and this is now. Now students are asked to focus on skills that employers want rather than taking the time to explore new ideas and wasting time on “unnecessary” subjects and I get it. (Although I think there is something sinister about turning our entire education system into an assembly line for corporations.) There was a time when any kid who graduated and could fog a mirror could get a good job. That is no longer true and also a college degree isn’t really necessary for many of the new jobs - although everyone needs a skill. Besides, not everyone can or should go to college.
And I have to admit that if I had to
pay $100,000 or even $50,000 for a BA degree it would give me pause too – my degree
cost $6,000, every penny of which was paid by me. I guess you can add that to the
long list of benefits heaped on my generation, the baby boomers, the luckiest one
in the history of the world. (Although we haven’t done much to justify that good
fortune.)
But this is about those that who do go to college - or are interested in learning new things. While there is no point to lamenting the decline of liberal arts, I do think that we will find the country poorer for its loss and the skills that type education brings us. In fact, I hope we aren’t already seeing this with the turmoil enveloping our country politically, socially and economically.
Sadly, the distrust of science, loss of belief in democracy and increase in "mystical thinking" and dysfunction this causes in many of our most important institutions does not bode well for our country.
Obviously there's no rule that a college education is required to explore new ideas and learn to think critically but even so perhaps we can find a worthy replacement for the liberal arts anyway.
And to make it more palatable to some perhaps we could name it the “conservative arts?”
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