By: Jess Rose ‘02, Waring Trustee
This piece recently appeared as a featured article in “Waring Notecards,” the Waring Alumni Magazine, and has been edited for website and length purposes.
The liberal arts provide a foundation from which we can experience the breadth and depth of our world and compose meaningful, flourishing lives. In my experience as a learner and a teacher, the purpose of a liberal arts education is to help us understand our history, our own dynamic selves, and how we might build a better future. At their very best, the liberal arts can bring us closer to our humanity.
Historically and colloquially, the liberal arts are described in distinction to vocational training and, sometimes, though not at Waring, the hard sciences. They encompass an umbrella of disciplines that include History, English, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Languages, to name a few. This approach to viewing the liberal arts views them as defined by specific content areas. In this vein, the “content” of more career-oriented studies is viewed as more valuable than the content of liberal arts.
This orientation puts pressure on students to specialize in career-focused (and potentially higher-paying) fields: medicine, law, business, engineering, etc. With a heavy emphasis on coursework’s direct connection to future employment, specific disciplines are valued over those deemed frivolous. The trope is well known: parents worrying about what their child is going to do with a $ 75,000-per-year degree in philosophy. In a nation that increasingly questions the value of an undergraduate degree in general, and in a country becoming further stratified economically, there is absolutely cause for families and young people to discern the cost-benefit of specific careers, and thus majors and coursework. To argue that any young person should be able to study any field of their choosing, earnings-consequences-be-damned, is naive and privileged. However, to view education in high school and college solely as workforce development would ultimately diminish our society and ourselves.
Like other defenders of the liberal arts, I believe that studying Nikki Giovanni’s poetry is as important as studying human anatomy (both teach us how the heart works), and that learning about the history of indigenous boarding schools in the U.S., taking a photography class, learning sign language, or reading the works of American transcendentalists, are just as valuable as—and interconnected with—economics, engineering, or organic chemistry.
Though, I am less interested in equalizing the value of all disciplines as a way to make a case for the value of the liberal arts. Instead, I’m inclined to think along the lines of Mark Taylor’s 2009 Op Ed End the University as We Know It. Taylor describes higher education (and I would argue increasingly high schools) as propagating a siloed approach to learning that results in overly narrow, highly specialized, and disconnected thinking. He proposes doing away with content areas and instead focusing studies on complex and vexing problems that require interdisciplinary, cross-curricular approaches and that cannot be solved by using scientific, political, economic, philosophical, historical, or artistic methodologies in isolation from one another.
While Taylor’s proposal is radical, I think there is something profoundly moving in the act of cross-disciplinary study, and intentionally moving between lenses and practices to deepen our understanding of any question we pursue or problem we aim to solve. Rather than defending each liberal arts content area as singularly worthy, I think the stronger case for the liberal arts is to highlight how they push students to pursue an education that is broad and interconnected. Rather than silos, this approach believes deep understanding derives from identifying connections and moving between disciplines, across the interconnected web of learning, with intentionality. This folds the sciences, technical, and career-focused learning into a more expansive liberal arts education.
Approaching learning in this way allows us to “play the whole game,” as David Perkins describes in his book Making Learning Whole. Perkins draws the metaphor that in baseball, players attend practices where they focus on honing some discrete skills (hitting, fielding, catching, throwing), but the entire point of those practices is to prepare them for the application of all those small things in an actual game, of which they have many. They constantly disassemble a complex task like baseball into parts and then build it all back together into a whole. Perkins argues that learning in school should be the same.
By merging Perkins’ and Taylor’s points, one sees that studying a single thing (such as French medieval troubadours, brain surgery, or constitutional law) in a siloed manner is akin to working on bunting ad nauseam, or never connecting it to other areas of knowledge or experience. If everyone were to specialize so narrowly, baseball–and frankly everything–would be significantly worse than it already is. In an era marked by severe and concerning trends in technology, the economy, oppression, and the health of our planet and its people, we must continue to strive to become better individuals. A meaningful liberal arts education — one that includes a broad web of rigorous, purposeful, and connected learning — is our best shot at becoming people who can understand ourselves and others, and shape the world we need.
When done well, engaging in a liberal arts education forms us into people who see a world of infinite meaning-making potential and who explore with curiosity and empathy. While the liberal arts, as I’ve described it, is a gloriously wide tent, the goal is not to know it all. It is not possible to study everything, to do or be everything. Still, it is possible to learn how to adopt different perspectives, to move across disciplines, and to apply learning from one area to another. The liberal arts enable us not only to know things but also to experience moments of awe in our humanity, to be lost for a moment in imagination and romantic hope in ways that lead to self-transformation and, potentially, world-transformation. As we construct and pursue our lives, it seems to me that the liberal arts must be a bedrock for us, so that we can dream audaciously. The world–especially now–needs us to do so.
