“What do you do with a degree in liberal arts?”
It’s a jarring question, and it doesn’t necessarily have a clear-cut answer. In a world where, at the moment, things are uncertain and tenuous, people tend to lean towards the clean cut. The most stable route is to get a job in finance, medicine, or engineering, make good money, and retire happily.
But does this particular education teach us how to live? How to think? How to be good people and to operate successfully in society? That’s what I want to get out of my time in college, not just the opportunity for a six-figure paycheck somewhere down the road. These are our formative years, and I plan to learn as much as I can about everything while I’m here.
When I tell people I’m considering pursuing something in the humanities or social sciences, I hear the same stale jokes and snide comments, asking me what I’m gonna do with that, how I’m never going to get a job, and I’ll be regretting that degree in no time.
But I know deep down that I won’t. Maybe Plato, Shakespeare, Dante, and Rousseau won’t prepare me to practice medicine or build robots, but they create leaders and scholars who are willing to think differently about the world around us. These works encourage us to imagine a better society, all while giving us the tools to create it.
That was the original, more ancient goal of the liberal arts. In classical antiquity, a liberal arts education was considered essential for a person in order to take an active part in civic life and be a productive member society.
In this day and age, we need people who can fulfill this role. We need people who know how to think, who can understand the world in a well rounded, big picture type of way. Addressing global problems like hunger, poverty, war, racism, classism, sexism, and so much more are not going to be solved with an equation or algorithm. There isn’t one solution that will address all these complex problems and fix issues neatly, tied up in a neat little package with a bow on top. The world is complicated and problems are multifaceted, and it’s a well rounded, exploratory education that will teach us how to face these problems head-on.
So sign up for that art history class. Read the classics. Learn about astronomy, chemistry, math, and religion. We could all stand to benefit from an education that teaches us how to live the good life. If we want to leave society better than how we found it, it’s crucial that we recognize the importance of a liberal arts education.