Liberal Education

When the Kentucky governor, Matt Bevin, suggested last month that students majoring in French literature should not receive state funding for their college educa­tion, he joined a growing number of elected officials who want to nudge students away from the humanities and toward more job-friendly subjects like electri­cal engineering.

   [New York Times, “Rising Call to Cut Funding for Liberal Arts Degrees,” 2/22/2016]

Isn’t that interesting? The majority rules. And the values of the majority—and the quality of its thought—will invariably come to be mirrored at every level of a society, not least its governing circles. Here is democracy’s Achilles’ heel. It is a laudable structure of governance, but its quality will reflect the people.

“Liberal” means free. It was the province, long ago, of those who could both fund the costs and take the time to get educated. “Liberal Education” has never meant  “cost free.” It was the education of the leadership class: wide, general, and elevated—over against vocational education which was for the lower elite of the laboring masses, the craftsmen. And the laborers got none at all.

He who funds also calls the shots. State funding, sooner or later, also means direction of the curriculum. State education is, therefore, regardless of its content, never liberal: the student isn’t “free” of State interference.

Interesting, isn’t it. The more we laud freedom, the less of it is actually available. I used to ponder that when I was young and came to the conclusion that, so long as I wasn’t independently wealthy, I was only “free” to seek a job. And to vote—if that even mattered when far outnumbered by those who do not think. And to drive—provided I bought some insurance.

Someday some few will again have liberal education—but democracy must first decay and its pieces must slowly be absorbed back into the soil of history.

Liberal Footnote

On June 6 of this year Harvard issued three reports addressing the fact that enrollments in its humanities programs are declining. This page provides links to those reports. The term, humanities, is a latter-day broadening of what used to be called the liberal arts. The current agitation at Harvard—which is matched, per Wall Street Journal, at many other colleges and universities (“Humanities Fall From Favor,” also June 6, 2013)—is that education has gradually been accepted as entirely and absolutely linked to future employment. What with the enormous cost of education, the burdensome loans that they demand, any curriculum that does not lead arrow-straight to a well-compensated job must be avoided. And the humanities seem useless—unless your career-choice is to teach them.

Now for the footnote portion of this post. It is well to remember that the liberal arts once represented the education of free individuals; that’s what that word “liberal” means. The Online Etymology Dictionary helpfully notes that once that word was contrasted to “servile” or “mechanical” education—thus to the education of people who had to work to survive. This means that the humanities are suitable only for the independently wealthy—whose contributions to society would take the form of public service of one sort or another.

As those with real experience understand full well, all higher level work—I don’t care whether it is done in business, non-profit, military, government, or academic positions—needs above all well-developed powers of insight, judgement, communications skills, and intellectual discipline—not mechanical skills. One tends to learn such of those latter skills as may be needed on the job. The significant exception is the medical profession—typically acquired as a higher degree after the foundations are already laid. I have one daughter who became a midwife—after acquiring a liberal arts degree.

The real solution for the preparation of a genuine leadership class, it seems to me, is to absolutely demand a liberal arts education as a foundation—say three years. After that, chase the pragmatic, by all means. Unless your lottery ticket scores.

Résumé v. Job Description

A column in the New York Times this morning by Thomas L. Friedman (“How to Get a Job”) once more recalled for me the old, call it hoary, subject of the value of a liberal arts education (link on this blog). That education included such “useless” subjects as logic, grammar, and rhetoric (at the core) and then, added to it, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. I can just feel the mouth of a personnel administrator water reading such word’s on an applicant’s resume. Now the words that actually did cause employers to feel appetites were Stanford, Harvard, and, especially, Harvard MBA. I know of a case where a company wished to hire a marketing manager and put out a single qualification: Harvard MBA. It was a certain kind of, alas, very conventional company. Offering them a black Harvard MBA would not have had a point; such, in the view of that outfit, would not have “fit” with the distribution channel. Offering them an Asian Harvard MBA would have failed as well; it would have introduced a certain threatening superiority that might not have “fit” the management. But enough said. Friedman’s theme is that, these days, it’s not the diploma or what you know, but the skills you have acquired. He thinks that a sea-change is underway: from now on, the successful applicant will have to pass the gauntlet of some online startup that creates tests for the job in question. If you pass it, you’ll be hired. And as for whether or not you are actually human, that is a minor detail.

Believe it—or better, Not. Right now the only hiring, evidently, is for jobs with a thick connection to social networks and the Internet generally. Personnel managers have nothing to do. When, eventually, the economy picks up again, it’ll be back to mass hirings and—the usual profiling.

Friedman’s column, however, does show that the shades of the old liberal arts curriculum are still virtually, if not actually, alive. Friedman quotes a comment by one of the doers and shakers of the New Hiring Model. The man, commenting on the skills of today’s applicants, says: “What surprises me most about people’s skills is how poor their writing and grammar are, even for college graduates. If we can’t get the basics right, there is a real problem.”

Now as for that hoary traditional way of preparing leaders for life, current applicants probably don’t know the word “hoary” at all. The meaning is “grey, white-haired,” therefore old and wise. Not, of course, old, very old, like humanity’s first formal profession.

St. John’s College

The college has two campuses located in Annapolis, MD and in Santa Fe, NM. Few things are rooted so deeply in time, but this college grew out of King William’s School in Maryland founded in the colonial year 1696. The school’s curriculum is grounded in the great books and is unified, meaning that all students take the same courses and all courses are required—no majors, minors and all of that machinery. Paradoxically, this very elite program was the consequence of failure—the curriculum adopted in 1937 when the college, organized along conventional lines, was facing a desperate financial crisis. The “new program” miraculously saved it. To get a feel for what such a program means, here is a link to the reading list divided by year.

Long observation teaches that virtually any conceivable good (or evil) will have its place somewhere on this plane of existence. A place like St. John’s is a little unbelievable—and two campuses yet. We learned of the existence of this school in a curious way, through a letter that one of Brigitte’s swim-exercise friends shared with her, a letter written by the friend’s grandniece. The letter-writer, a young woman in her sophomore year, casually describes some of her studies—along with lots of other things. The contents of the letter and its stunningly good English almost shocked. A forgery? A little joke? No. For real. Both of us observed a minute of reverent silence after having read it—not quite trusting our eyes, as it were.