The Point of a Liberal Arts Education

Liberal arts survey classes stink.

It’s not only that lower-level classes are taught by the semi-qualified and attended by people who’d rather not be there. The true disaster is that many students are fooled into believing that introductory classes accurately represent their respective disciplines.  Because of this, the humanities – among them, philosophy, history, literature, cultural studies, and religious studies – are imagined to be plodding, arcane things concerned with stuffing pupils with facts.  Few things could be further from the truth.

The pursuit of the liberal arts and humanities (to improperly equate the two) is absurdly practical and shockingly important.  Far from being the territory of a few intellectuals content to live forever inside the bars of the University, the liberal arts are an ideal path for every college student.

Though you’d never know it from taking survey classes, the humanities are more about training in useful skills than they are about passing on knowledge.  This only became clear to me recently.  As an underclassman, I experienced pangs of jealousy when I’d see a suit-clad business student going about campus, confidently striding from one important presentation to another.  “There”, I would dismally sigh, “is someone who’s doing something useful with their education.” Staring down at the cement, I would trudge home to write an essay on medieval Russian folk religion.

But my upper-level work, taught me otherwise.  The harrowing process of writing an undergraduate thesis, helped along by copious amounts of caffeine, might be compared to, after sharply criticizing each person in a sea of dancers, suddenly being shoved out onto the dance floor and forced to participate on pain of death.  I had to quickly learn how to grasp others’ arguments – to be my own Sparknotes! – and to sift through their rhetoric to discover holes in their thinking.  And then, as I juggled those understandings, I had to eloquently and competently advance my own theories.

These skills of evaluation and expression have served me well in the “real world” of work.  Though I still don’t own a suit, I now consider the “me” of those essay-writing years to have been a sort of business student in a faded Futurama t-shirt and scuffed Vans.

But a humanities education is more than a job skills coach; it is a spirituality.  It’s a religion for the religionless.  What it lacks in doctrine it makes up in its expansive canon: all good books.

Good writing jars us out of complacency.  Franz Kafka wrote, “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?” Sometimes a book will come from nowhere – Martin Buber’s I and Thou, for instance – and knock you into a foreign world, forcing you to reevaluate your life.  Liberal arts followers know this, and seek it out.

But the humanities’ ultimate focus lies not in books but in the people whom books expose.  Liberal arts holds the affairs of people to be almost sacred and worthy of meditation.  

This devotion leads to the liberal arts student’s ultimate calling: saving the world.  And, surprisingly, their studies equip practitioners to do that through the empathy which naturally arises in their reading.  By curling themselves around books written both by the oppressed and the ruling, by digging into arguments from every ideology, humanities students are trained to consider others through their own perspectives and to understand life from many angles.

To overstate the situation a little, without the humanities, people die.  Genocides happen.  Big, awful situations develop because opposing sides demonize each other.   

Of course, a liberal arts education can be found outside the university.  The study of humanity is open for anyone who can carve out the time to love good books and open themselves to new learning.  But good professors and writing assignments are invaluable.  And, for those committed to other majors, both enrollments in an honors college and minors in the humanities aren’t too difficult to come by.

There is nothing wrong with the sciences or with fine arts. There is nothing wrong with business or communication.  But they are incomplete without the study of humanity perfected in the liberal arts.

Saving the world, finding ultimate significance, and making a few bucks in the process.  What could be a better education than that?