Defending the liberal arts from ourselves
April 2015 | HigherEducationWorks.org
In Defense of the Liberal Arts. By Fareed Zakaria. W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.
By Eric Johnson
At first blush, Fareed Zakaria seems like an odd champion of the ever-beleaguered liberal arts. The foreign policy advisor and national media powerhouse is best known for analyzing American power at home and abroad.
His 2009 best-seller, The Post-American World, chronicled the rise of China, India, Brazil, and other challengers to American dominance. His earlier work, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role, looked at the United States’ emergence as a global force.
So it’s striking that Zakaria’s geostrategic worries are now focused on the state of higher education. With clarity and urgency, In Defense of a Liberal Education portrays the decline of the liberal arts as a threat to America’s exceptional role in the world.
“Around the world, the idea of a broad-based liberal education is closely tied to the United States and its great universities and colleges,” he writes. “But in America itself, a liberal education is out of favor.”
It has yielded to an obsession with practical training and short-term job prospects. Politicians have taken to denouncing the liberal arts as a wasteful luxury; Zakaria cites North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory’s call to end funding for such programs.
For Zakaria, an Indian emigre who came of age in a more rigid educational system, any move away from the United States’ open, opportunity-rich university system would amount to a self-inflicted handicap in the global competition for talent. The obsession with a narrow math and science curriculum is especially worrisome.
“I went through that kind of system, and it’s not conducive to thinking, problem solving, or creativity,” Zakaria writes. It wasn’t until coming to college in the United States that he found the freedom to pursue wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, getting hooked by a freshman-year course — picked on a whim — about the politics of the Cold War. That one course changed his whole trajectory, helping to launch a career he never could have imagined.
And with economic changes coming faster than before, the ability to adapt and innovate has become more valuable than purely vocational training. “I now realize that what I gained from college and graduate school, far more lasting than any specific set of facts of piece of knowledge, has been the understanding of how to acquire knowledge on my own,” Zakaria writes. “Learning and relearning, tooling and retooling are at the heart of the modern economy.”
Though the role of higher education in economic competitiveness suffuses the book, Zakaria is at his best in surveying the broad, civilizational benefits of learning and discovery. Those benefits have been so monumental and so lasting that we often take them for granted.
“Over the last five hundred years, the consequences of knowledge have been positive, and over the last two hundred, staggeringly positive,” Zakaria reminds us. “At the most basic level, people enjoy longer and healthier lives, possess greater material prosperity, and are organized in ways that have reduced cruelty and misery.”
Increases in life expectancy, the emergence of mass-scale prosperity, and the development of basic human rights are all products of advancing knowledge. Education can be used for good and for ill, Zakaria concedes. “But on the whole, there has been a steady and persistent effort to improve human life.”
We owe those achievements to a combination of hard science and humanistic inquiry. Modern medicine has extended life through vaccines and more effective treatments; political science has delivered greater freedom to enjoy it by replacing monarchies with citizen democracies. Astronomy and physics have expanded our understanding of the universe; art and literature have given us new ways of seeking and sharing meaning amid the vastness.
Defending a broad vision of education — what we’ve come to call the liberal arts — has become more important, Zakaria argues, as we’ve become too focused on narrow skill-building and “job-ready” disciplines.
“Those who seek to reorient U.S. higher education into something more focused and technical should keep in mind that they would be abandoning what has been historically distinctive, even unique, in the American approach to higher education,” he writes.
That unique approach values not just economic productivity, but democratic citizenship. Like the country itself, American higher education aimed to create not merely workers, but men and women prepared for the lifelong task of self-direction and self-government.
“We all play many roles, professional and personal, in one lifetime,” Zakaria writes. “A liberal education gives us a greater capacity to be good workers, but it will also give us the capacity to be good partners, friends, parents, and citizens.”
Eric Johnson is a writer in Chapel Hill. He works for the University of North Carolina, but the views expressed here are his own.
Originally published at highereducationworks.org