Zakaria:
It’s graduation season in the United States, which means the season of commencements speeches – a time for canned jokes and wise words. This year I was asked to do the honors at Sarah Lawrence in New York, a quintessential liberal arts college. So I thought it was worth talking about the idea of a liberal arts education – which is under serious attack these days.
The
governors of Texas, Florida and North Carolina have all announced that they do
not intended to spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts. Florida’s
Governor, Rick Scott, asks, “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more
anthropologists? I don’t think so.” Even President Obama recently urged
students to keep in mind that a technical training could be more valuable than
a degree in art history.
I can
well understand the concerns about liberal arts because I grew up in India in
the 1960s and ’70s. A technical training was seen as the key to a good career.
If you were bright, you studied science, so that’s what I did.
But
when I got to America for college, I quickly saw the immense power of a liberal
education. For me, the most important use of it is that it teaches you how to
write. In my first year in college, I took an English composition course. My
teacher, an elderly Englishman with a sharp wit and an even sharper red pencil,
was tough.
I
realized coming from India, I was pretty good at taking tests, at regurgitating
stuff I had memorized, but not so good at expressing my own ideas. Now I know I’m
supposed to say that a liberal education teaches you to think but thinking and
writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my “thoughts”
are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with
gaping logical holes between them.
Whether
you’re a novelist, a businessman, a marketing consultant or a historian, writing
forces you to make choices and it brings clarity and order to your ideas. If
you think this has no use, ask Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.
Bezos
insists that his senior executives write memos – often as long as six printed
pages. And he begins senior management meetings with a period of quiet time –
sometimes as long as 30 minutes – while everyone reads the memos and makes
notes on them.
Whatever
you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly and, I would add,
quickly, will prove to be an invaluable skill.
The
second great advantage of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to
speak and speak your mind. One of the other contrasts that struck me between
school in India and college in America was that an important part of my grade
was talking. My professors were going to judge me on the process of thinking
through the subject matter and presenting my analysis and conclusions – out
loud. Speaking clearly and concisely is a big advantage in life.
The
final strength of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to learn – to
read in a variety of subjects, find data, analyze information. Whatever job you
take, I guarantee that the specific stuff you will have learned at college,
whatever it is, will prove mostly irrelevant or quickly irrelevant. Even if you
learned to code but did it a few years ago, before the world of apps, you would
have to learn to code anew. And given the pace of change that is transforming
industries and professions these days, you will need that skill of learning and
retooling all the time.
These
are liberal education’s strengths and they will help you as you move through
your working life. Of course, if you want professional success, you will have
to put in the hours, be focused and disciplined, work well with others, and get
lucky. But that would be true for anyone, even engineers.
Anyway,
that is a piece of the graduation talk I gave at Sarah Lawrence College on
Friday. You can watch the whole thing – which has much more – online here.
