There’s a trade-off between practicality and timelessness. Knowledge at the top of the chart, such as fashion and commerce, is immediately actionable, but decays the fastest. They’re relevant in everyday life for social and earning an income, but their specifics have a short half-life. Meanwhile, culture and nature are deeper on the chart. They offer fundamental knowledge. Their lessons apply everywhere, even if they’re beyond the scope of conscious thought in most people’s day-to-day lives. The further down the layers you travel, the longer it will take for the knowledge to pay off, but the longer that information will stay relevant and the more widely applicable it will be.
by pushing students to pursue what is immediately profitable instead of what’s ultimately meaningful, they will devalue fundamental knowledge. That’s because the business models for income share agreements and student debt insurance only work if the students make a lot of money after college.
In a study conducted during her time there, three quarters of freshmen said college was essential to developing a meaningful philosophy of life. By contrast, only a third said that it was essential to financial well-being. Today, those fractions have flipped.
You shouldn’t need to attend four years of college to earn a living. Instead, we should make it cheap and expedient for young people to receive a professional education and develop practical skills. After a year of training in the classroom, they can do an apprenticeship where they can get paid to learn instead of paying to learn.
These changes will help young adults achieve financial stability, build economically rewarded skills, and break free from parental dependence. They should study the Liberal Arts when they’re older. Rather than forcing students to slog through Dostoevsky when they are 18 — when they’re all wondering, rightly, how this is going to help them find a job — we should create schools for amateurs of all ages so they can read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov later, when they have the life experience to appreciate it.
Today, most students are only able to formally study the Liberal Arts between the ages of 18 and 30. They only have four years during their undergraduate degree, and only the most academically ambitious of them continue their studies into graduate school. Of those who pursue a master’s degree, most stay in academia.
But if students could take Liberal Arts classes later in life, a much greater percentage would learn for the joy of it. Once again, the religious metaphor holds. No Church expects its congregants to only study the Bible for four years, with an option to keep studying as long as you plan to become a priest. But that’s what we do with the Liberal Arts.
Plato would have criticized today’s Westerners who compromise an erudite life and salivate over wealth instead, even when they’re swimming in riches.49 In a criticism of his contemporaries, he observed that their love of wealth “leaves them no respite to concern themselves with anything other than their private property. The soul of the citizen today is entirely taken up with getting rich and with making sure that every day brings its share of profit. The citizen is ready to learn any technique, to engage in any kind of activity, so long as it is profitable. He thumbs his nose at the rest.”
To prevent these failure modes, there are three guidelines Liberal Arts schools should follow: Don’t focus on practical skills, prize free thinking over ideology, and target an older audience of professionally established people.
A market-driven curriculum will create McDegree programs where students study the kinds of self-help books you find in the philosophy section of an airport bookstore. Think of already-popular books like Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, which reduces the great Greek philosopher into a self-help guru.
People who are employed struggle to pursue a Liberal Arts education not just because they have busy schedules, but because the material can feel so disconnected from daily reality.
With the extended focus on Professional Education at the early stage of a career, we should create opportunities for students to receive a Civilized Education throughout their life where they can appreciate life beyond the almighty Dollar.
Wesleyan President Michael Roth, the author of the best book I’ve read on the Liberal Arts, once wrote: “Education is for human development, human freedom, not the molding of an individual into a being who can perform a particular task. That would be slavery.” Up until now, our colleges have followed a philosophy of giving young people freedom early and waiting until the postgraduate years to focus on a profession. Only toward the end of the 20th century did a bachelor’s degree become a prerequisite for most jobs and professional academic study such as a master’s or a PhD. We should return to a world where Civilized Education is not mandatory. Where students can postpone the Liberal Arts to acquire technical skills that are rewarded in the economic marketplace. Students are already asking for the changes, as shown by the changing composition of majors.
College was once a place to explore the True, the Good, and the Beautiful without regard for utility. But today, it’s seen as a means toward the end of finding a job. Ideas that aren’t economically valuable are belittled as useless knowledge. Materialism has become our North Star. As a society, we measure progress in changes to the material world, where we prioritize what we can see and measure. We evaluate ourselves by productivity, our economy by the availability of cheap goods, and our civilization by the rate of technological progress. We’ve forgotten about our human need for wonder, beauty, and contemplation. Today, we worship the Factual, the Useful, and the Monetizable.
Don’t get me wrong. The fruits of clean water and modern medicine are miraculous. But what good is a materialistic utopia if it comes at the cost of a spiritual one? We are more indebted, depressed, and suicidal than ever before. And yet, we continue to worship technological progress and material abundance as if they will elevate the soul. As so, we run and run and run — hoping that all that effort will save us. But if people feel too constrained to pursue wonder and beauty as ends in themselves, are we really making progress?
Mistaking money for cultural well-being is like mistaking a roof for a home. ROI-brain only speaks in the language of materialism, and we should be skeptical of it. Otherwise, our lives will follow the leash of cheap pleasures and distracting dopamine hits. Corporations, too, will continue to sell instant improvements without regard for their long-term effects.
Taken all together, the Liberal Arts is the meta-recognition of our world.
If we cannot question the systems that guide our lives, we will be enslaved to them. Nor will we be saved by comfort, pleasure, or a respectable job that impresses our family at the Thanksgiving table. Only with a Liberal Arts education will we develop the capacity to thrive as conscious adults. By studying the foundations of how we think, who we are, and how we got here, we’ll gain control over our minds and create a more flourishing civilization.
Niche Internet