This HEPI blog was kindly authored by Annabelle Hutchinson…is a second-year student at Harvard Law School. She has a BA in Classics and Economics from Brown University and an MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy from the University of Oxford. Here, she writes about US liberal arts degrees.
What is the purpose of a university education? Perhaps it is to get a fine job that will pay the bills without causing too much consternation. Upon graduation, newly credentialed students can join the modern workforce. Computer Science and Engineering are the most highly recommended courses of study.
If nothing else, the common wisdom is clear about what a student should avoid: a course in the liberal arts. What job could a person possibly get with an Art History degree, for instance? Perhaps a museum docent, but that is not the sort of economically productive work that society rewards. Do we really need another despondent DPhil pondering the dull conventionality of Rembrandt and Rodin in an ivory tower?
Yet, this picture is a sham. It disregards the true value of a liberal arts degree. It dismisses the extent to which the study of Art History (or another subject in the humanities, social sciences, or physical sciences) within a liberal arts framework can profoundly enrich an individual and society. A liberal arts education is what a society — a civilisation — ought to champion.
The primary purpose of a university is to prepare students to think, act, write and speak with competence, integrity, intellect and courage. The secondary purpose is to store knowledge in the minds of students. Only a liberal arts education can properly perform these functions.
Generally, liberal arts students declare a ‘major’ or ‘concentration’ in one or two subjects after studying a broad range of topics during their first two years. A major is an area of expertise, but the term ‘expertise’ is used lightly. Undergraduates are not expected to perform groundbreaking, innovative research, although they are certainly encouraged to take on responsibility and risk. Groundbreaking discoveries can be left to researchers and professors. It is a fool’s errand to try to turn every undergraduate, who often has neither the intellectual maturity nor professional aspirations, into a mini-PhD student. Instead, a liberal arts student is prompted to explore a range of disciplines to form his or her own mind and spirit. Since most of these students will not pursue further education, this will be their final chance to undertake such academic exploration with institutional support.
Most undergraduates enter the university without a developed intellectual outlook. Their prior schooling may have provided a solid foundation, but they are newly independent and often hungry for deeper learning. The university has an important role to play in their formation, which is not merely academic. By taking a broad course of study and learning the ‘greats’ in many disciplines, students are introduced to different ways of living and different value systems. Indeed, all education is value-laden, and a professor’s role is to inculcate virtue as well as knowledge, although this may be less obvious (not less important) in scientific fields.
Compare the American system of education, which remains broadly generalist until graduate studies, with the British system. At age sixteen, many British students choose an academic track with massive ramifications for their future qualifications and outcomes. Are they prepared to do so, with a full understanding of what such choices entail? It is doubtful. This upper school selection is followed by an undergraduate education that privileges specialisation. At an American university, an ordinary first-year course load might include Biology, Calculus, Philosophy and English. At a British university (except perhaps in Scotland), the first-year course load will often focus on one subject.
This is a disservice done to British students, especially those pressured to specialise early in technical fields, where skills that are state-of-the-art today may be obsolete tomorrow. True technical innovation always requires the marriage of humanities and technology, anyway. Design and aesthetic decisions abound and ethical questions are never long absent. Thus, the purpose of the university need not be technical job training, which is often better learned once the student is in the workforce. Apprenticeship training is better left to practitioners, not professors.
Professors, on the other hand, should teach the appropriate methods for solving different types of problems. Upon graduation, undergraduates should have a firm grounding in the scientific method and in the various ways to read and analyse a text. They should be able to cogently put their thoughts to paper and they should have the skills necessary to execute tasks with independence and integrity.
David Shribman recently wrote an article in the Atlantic about an American naval officer who penned a letter to his brother while underway in the Pacific. It was 1942, and Philip Shribman—the author’s uncle—was going to fight in a war that would cost him his life at the hands of a Japanese gunner. Shribman was a recent graduate of Dartmouth College, a prestigious Ivy League college where he received a liberal arts education.
‘If you went to a trade school you’d have one thing you could do & know — & you’d miss the whole world of beauty,’ Shribman wrote. ‘In a liberal school you know “nothing” — & are “fitted for nothing” when you get out. Yet you’ll have a fortune of broad outlook — of appreciation for people & beauty that money won’t buy — You can always learn to be a mechanic or a pill mixer etc.,’ but it was with a liberal arts education ‘that you can learn that life has beauty & fineness.’ The ‘idea and ideals of a liberal school’ are ‘too precious — too rare — too important’ to give up on.
Young adults in their mid-teens through early twenties are in a period of personal and intellectual development. Spending that time focused narrowly on very few subjects, or even one subject, is a wasted opportunity. Not every young person is destined for a university education, but those who are should not be shortchanged with an expensive job training program branded with a university seal. Job training of that sort can happen in the office or lab. A liberal education passes down a cultural, intellectual and even spiritual inheritance to a new generation. We neglect that inheritance at our own peril.
Misses the point that ANY subject can and should teach critical-thinking which is another term for a liberal education. The key is the pedagogy and not the disciplinary/subject content. A liberal education is not the same as studying ‘the liberal arts’ – and certainly need not include art history, just as there is no need for ‘physics for poets’ nor ‘poetry for chemists’. See ‘The Oxford Tutorial’ (Amazon, 2019 edition) for a collection of essays by Oxford dondom on teaching their various subjects as a liberal education engendering critical-thinking.