In Defense of the Liberal Arts Education

The New York Times Magazine's annual "The Year in Ideas: A to Z" issue coincided with a mad dash to grade student papers this weekend.

Under E: The Employable Liberal Arts Major, which describes the recent trend at universities to offer their undergraduate students professional training, linking it to an increasingly competitive job market and increasingly anxious parents and students who wonder what tangible benefits they receive in return for $30,000 a year.

The fundamental-- and distressing-- problem here is that many people believe a liberal arts education to be useless.

A liberal arts education teaches students how to think logically; to express themselves coherently and articulately; to organize their thoughts to effectively communicate their point of view; and to write well. These are all skills that people need in a wide range of fields in the "real world." In addition, based on my experience as a teacher, these are skills that even the brightest students at good secondary schools are not acquiring.

Not to mention a host of other benefits of a liberals arts education that may indeed be useless-- if the sole purpose of life is to be a drone who lives to work, to increase productivity, to acquire wealth, and to consume-- including the appreciation of art, literature, music, history, cultures, the workings of the human mind, and languages.

When the Western university was created in the 12th century, it was believed that a solid foundation in all of the liberal arts was a prerequisite for the highest goal of education: the pursuit of truth (in that context, through the study of theology).

Rather than catering to a demand for more professional training for undergraduates and buying into the "student as consumer, education as commodity" mentality, universities have to reassess and understand the benefits of the education they have been offering for centuries. Then they have to communicate this to their students.

Although I hope that my students' lives will be enriched by an appreciation for classical music, I know that if they never listen to a symphony again they will still have gained practical-- indeed, marketable-- skills in my classroom: to write coherently on any topic, to create an argument with supporting evidence to express their point of view, and to use language more effectively to communicate with those around them.

Forget about professional training: without these abilities, they won't even get past the job interview!