This College Professor Has a Message for Liberal Arts Majors. By Hunter Baker. The Federalist, January 30, 2014.
Baker:
It’s
not a waste of a degree.
As long
as I have been alive (more than four decades), the knock on liberal arts majors
has been in force. I heard it as a
student. I hear it as a professor and
academic administrator. “It’s great that you love history (or English or
philosophy), but what are you going to DO with that?” The answer, based on the results of a study
published in the Wall Street Journal,
may surprise you. It turns that out that
while students who major in a wide variety of professional fields out-earn
their liberal arts peers at the outset, the liberal arts majors tend to pull ahead
in later years.
How can
this be? The liberal arts major doesn’t
learn a market-driven skill such as nursing or business management. On what basis would they earn more money at
any point in their careers? There are a
variety of answers available, but I would like to focus on one in
particular. By doing so, I think I can
also make a case, not only for liberal arts majors, but also for strengthening
(rather than cutting or eliminating) the liberal arts core.
College
is a time of preparation. Thanks to the high cost of tuition, we are looking
for a highly predictable runway to successful and well-compensated
employment. It is easier to envision
that sort of dynamic playing out when your student is a nursing or business
major than it is when the young person wants to major in English. The problem with this view is that it gives
too much credit to the professional fields and not enough to the liberal arts.
If you
really think about learning, there are some master disciplines which unlock all
the others. They are philosophy,
history, mathematics, language (reading/writing), and science (mainly mastery
of the scientific method). These
disciplines form the core of learning and comprise the engine of its
expression. The student who gains
proficiency in these areas will maintain, for virtually the rest of his/her
life, the capacity to learn new things and to organize those new things within
the context of the older things. The
learning that takes place in these areas does not really expire. It does not become dated. It is a fund that maintains its value. The same is not necessarily true of knowledge
gained in professional programs.
The
great management theorist Peter Drucker addressed the matter insightfully in
his 1957 book Landmarks of Tomorrow
(emphasis mine):
Whatever
does not add to the capacity for sustained growth of personality or
contribution is impractical – and may indeed be deleterious. That this or that subject adds to a man’s
ability to get a job, or to do well on his first job, is not irrelevant. But as a measure of the effectiveness of a
long-term advanced investment it may be the most impractical yardstick, may
indeed cost heavily in terms of the really practical results. The practical test of education in educated
society is whether it prepares for the demands of the world fifteen years after
graduation. Since we live in an age of
innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet
exist and cannot yet be clearly defined.
To be able to do this a man must
have learned to learn. He must be
conscious of how much there is still to learn.
He must acquire basic tools of analysis, of expression, of
understanding. Above all he must have
the desire for self-development.
The
person who has mastered a particular market-driven skill of today is in a good
position to profit in the short term, but given that we live in a highly
dynamic society, the better long term investment is an education that equips
the person to learn for the rest of his life.
The liberal arts, if taught well and approached with desire by the
student, have the ability to unlock almost any subject the student wishes to
learn for years to come. If you
understand how to think, how to draw lessons from past experience, how to write
and speak, how to calculate, and how to put information through the kinds of
tests which yield knowledge, then you have the tools you need.
Drucker
was right about the kind of education people require in order to thrive. But if we are to put the liberal arts to work
and get the most out of them that we can, we have to address our cultural
expectations. All the players in the
higher education world – students, parents, colleges, governments – need to
give proper priority to the traditional arts and sciences as the keys to
further learning. In other words, we
have to throw out the self-defeating view that those courses are just hurdles
students must jump because they have in the past. They are not hurdles. The traditional fields are fulcrums, levers,
and pulleys that magnify the strength of subsequent learning. Institutions should stop throwing together
core curricula on the basis of turf battles, faculty preference, and expedience
and instead should come up with principled plans for liberal arts cores that
will make them what they should be.
Various professional majors should stop demanding more and more hours at
the expense of liberal arts core curricula.
Without a solid foundation at the bottom, the education at the top will
be poured into a sieve. At a minimum, it
will not be as effective as it otherwise would have been.
Finally,
to return to the issue of liberal arts majors where we began, it is time we
stopped treating them as though they were merely aesthetic in value. The student who has taken the time to read
and understand Shakespeare’s plays and the novels of Jane Austen and Fyodor
Dostoevsky as part of an English literature major is no one to be taken lightly
or dismissed as some kind of throwback relic.
She is a person who is capable of sustaining attention and learning what
she needs to as her life and career develop.
