Less than 10% of college degrees are now being awarded in the Humanities, but former Semiotics major Lane Wallace, a writer and editor for Flying magazine, passionately disagrees with those who would deride a liberal arts education as impractical. Writing in The Atlantic, she describes an epiphany that came when she took a leave of absence from Brown to travel, and found herself working in a corrugated cardboard factory in New Zealand.
In a flash, I grasped the true value of a college degree. It didn’t matter what I majored in. It didn’t even matter all that much what my grades were. What mattered was that I got that rectangular piece of paper that said, “Lane Wallace never has to work in a corrugated cardboard factory again.” A piece of paper that was proof to any potential future employer that I could stick with a project and complete it successfully, even if parts of it weren’t all that much fun. A piece of paper that said I had learned how to process an overload of information, prioritize, sort through it intelligently, and distill all that into a coherent end product … all while coping with stress and deadlines without imploding.
In an increasingly global economy, Wallace writes, more than just technical skill is required. “Far more challenging is the ability to work with a multitude of viewpoints and cultures. And the liberal arts are particularly good at teaching how different arguments on the same point can be equally valid, depending on what presumptions or values you bring to the subject,” she concludes.
Wallace’s biggest accomplishment, however, is to have mounted a smart and spirited defense of liberal arts education without once using the words “skills,” “century,” or “21st,” or combining them in the same sentence.
A grateful nation thanks her. Liberally.
One of my husband’s pet peeves is equating “humanities” with “liberal arts” so I’ll fill in for him and note that the seven “classical” liberal arts were: Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Geometry, Arithmetic, Music, and Astronomy.
The liberal arts are beautiful. In my middle school, alas, they are being supplanted by reading skills training and arts and crafts projects.
I’m happy to teach Liberal Arts via 21st Century Methods and 21st Century Skills (especially with regards to participatory media) via Liberal Arts.
Thanks for this full-throated defense of the humanities. Wallace’s arguments are very important to the salvation of the humanities as a legitimate course of study. Employers have begun to believe them, too. Even Tom Friedman offered similar arguments in his (over-long) revision of The World is Flat.
Wallace is essentially mounting the “transferable skills” defense of the humanities. While she may not have used any “21st-century skills” language, her arguments bring her into the same terrain. Skills developed through intense engagement with specific academic content become useful in very different areas. Might some of those skills even outlive some of the content knowledge that helped incubate them?
Hi Claus,
I remain skeptical of the transferable skills argument for reasons we’ve discussed ad nauseum here. Substitute the phrase “habits of mind,” however, and I’m right there with you.
For the most part these “skills” are habits, and habits are trained, but it takes time and repetition, through, as Claus said, “intense engagement with specific academic content.” I truly do not believe that they transfer, which is why I believe that every subject must be taught as subject, and that the various habits that make learning possible must also be demonstrated at the same time.
And again I agree with Claus that the habits can outlive the content. But why, oh why, do we think it is so undesirable to study the information that tells us about the world–which is exactly what “subject matter” is?
I prefer habits of mind too. The classical philologists had to bring sense and order to very intractable material to understand ancient thought; that was the take-away from classical studies not ancient grammar misapplied to English. In any case Chomsky has shown grammar is grammar in whatever language. The real impact of the skills jargon is to devalue manual skills in an effort to disempower working people by transfering their rightful status as skilled people to middle-class white-collar workers who really have less ( physical ie real ) skill. White collar workers may have more knowledge, but they are definitely not more skilled.
I guess I’m a bit perplexed. As for the difference between “skills” and “habits of mind” in this context–is this merely a semantic issue? Is the ability “to process an overload of information, prioritize, sort through it intelligently, and distill all that into a coherent end product” a habit of mind rather than a skill? If so, why? And does the difference really matter?
Susan–isn’t Wallace arguing that the skills, habits of mind–or whatever you want to call them–she acquired in her study of semiotics are transferable to other areas? Isn’t that her point? Do you disagree with her, or am I misunderstanding you?
This topic interests me, because I have a Ph.D. in the humanities and now work in a very different field. I do believe that skills, habits of mind, tendencies (or whatever) I gained in the humanities have been useful in my current field. We acquire those skills/habits of mind through careful, intentional and sustained study of subject matter. And such skills/habits don’t absolve us of the need to acquire a great deal new knowledge when we venture into new areas–But surely we aren’t starting from square one every time we strike out in new directions, are we? If we are, Wallace’s defense of the humanities will fall flat–and we can expect dark days ahead for literature, philosophy and other subjects dear to our hearts.
Perhaps we’re just arguing over semantics.
It might be a matter of semantics, Claus, but there’s much mischief in the difference. If you say critical thinking and problem solving is a transferable skill, then you’re (to my mind) suggesting that a goal of teaching is to teach the skill, and not the domain expertise that makes the skill possible. A habit of mind is more akin to a system of thought–looking for contrary information, for example, instead of information that confirms your hypothesis. The way you approach a problem — your habits of mind — is transferable. The ability to solve problems in the abstract — asking an astrophysicist to design a car — is not.
I think that semantics is involved here, and I don’t want to dismiss attempts to understand more clearly as arguments. It seems to me that the skills/content issue is vast but that yes, we often do have to begin at square one. However, when we have gone through it a time or several then the process of advancing can go more quickly. The specific skills that help us approach a new topic, such as knowing how to study (and teaching high school I found that this is a rare skill, not unknown but rare, at that level) vary according to the subject. But there is a point that I can’t see clearly now concerning whether the fact that transfer doesn’t exist would invalidate the advantages described by Wallace of studying the humanities. I will need to think more about that!
I think, in not wanting to agree with anyting to 21st-century skills-ish, some of the comments lose sight of the fact that what you learn in college is very different from what you learn in grade school.
Core Knowledge rightly focuses on K-8 — making sure kids get a basic knowledge they need to understand and navigate the world and their culture. There’s a strong argument to be made that there’s a basic core content that every kids should know.
But college isn’t (primarily) about that, and for many students — the ones who don’t end up working in a field directly related to their major — it really is more about skills than about content. No one expects all college graduates to acquire the same information — but you can imagine some organization hiring grad with and English BA and another with a Math BA and expecting them both to be able to tackle a wide variety of problems independently.
Robert–
Perhaps it is a matter of semantics, but the semantics are important. We need compelling and broadly understood language for describing why the study of poetry (for example) is important for more than just poets and professors. Right now, many of us use the words “transferable skills” to justify the broad value of the humanities. Those words were a godsend as I moved from academia into policy. Employers are beginning to believe in them, and that could be good news for the humanities.
You’re right to argue that those words (like most words) leave room for mischief. Those who believe skills or habits of mind are “all-purpose muscles” (to borrow Hirsch’s phrase) that thrive independently of content knowledge do us no favors. We cannot develop such skills without deep and sustained engagement with content knowledge. (And, no, Google will not render memory obsolete.)
But I worry about what happens when people misunderstand–or exaggerate–the claim that skills aren’t transferable. Are career changes impossible? Are English majors in training for unemployment? Will humanities professors merely produce future humanities professors–a necessarily dying breed?
A case in point: I know from my own direct experience that the notion of transferable skills gets no respect in Germany. For most of the German humanities Ph.D.’s I know, a career change would be unthinkable. Many remain unemployed. More generally, the German labor market has only begun to emerge from decades of sclerosis resulting from too much specialization.
By the way, your distinction between “skills” and “habits of mind” makes a lot of sense. Yet few people are as careful in making distinctions. In some of its documents, for example, AAAS includes “skills” among critical “habits of mind.” Other organizations rank “habits of mind” among important “skills.” Still others seem to use the terms almost interchangeably. It seems important to clarify this issue to avoid misunderstanding.
I had a revelation not too long ago re: the liberal arts disciplines (including math, science, philosophy, rhetoric).
The disciplines are the intellectual DNA of the professions.
Law and medicine are called the “liberal professions” because they derive from or descend from the liberal arts disciplines. If you’ve had a liberal education, you’re at a tremendous advantage when it comes to learning a liberal profession.
I’ve believed for some time now – because I think I’ve lived it – that a solid grounding in the liberal arts disciplines turns you into a fast learner in the world of work. Siegfried Engelmann has a terrific new article out on the ways in which teaching to mastery increases the speed of learning. A central reason why disadvantaged children are slower learners when they begin school than advantaged children is that they lack the prior knowledge middle and upper-middle class parents take for granted.
It seems likely to me that, for adults, a liberal education is the equivalent of the “prior knowledge” advantaged children bring to Kindergarten. A student who graduates college with a “survey” knowledge of the liberal arts disciplines combined with a major in one discipline brings a vast store of prior knowledge to the world of work (and family & politics & religion — )
I have a knee-jerk reaction to the term “habits of mind” primarily because the way that term is used in ed school (which I’ve attended recently) is pretty much as Chester Finn describes it in his “conversation” with Deborah Meier in the Sprin 09 Education Next. Specifically, he says:
“Let me note, finally, that I’m unimpressed by Meier’s “habits of mind” alternative to content (see below). It’s wonderfully seductive, but the serious psychologists with whose work I’m acquainted (see, for example, “Reframing the Mind,” check the facts, Summer 2004) don’t put much stock in this Howard Gardner–originated proposition that youngsters can learn skills devoid of content. It’s the absence of essential core content from her view of schooling that lies at the heart of our curricular disagreement.”
His reference to “Reframining the Mind” is an article by Dan Willingham.
I recently took a math teaching methods course in which one of the textbooks we had to read talked about “habits of mind”. I believe habits of mind develop by working with the material (like algebra) and developing algorithmic and analytic habits that are appropriate in the context of what is being taught. The textbook, however, advised learning certain “algebraic” ways of thinking in 6th or 7th pre-algebra classes, before students actually are given the symbolic manipulation tools that would make development of such habits of mind do-able. Kind of like learning German by speaking English using German constructions; e.g., “I know that he the book not read has.” All you need then is the vocabulary since the habits are already in place.
In other words, no habits of mind before their time.
My college is a Liberal Arts school. I graduated about 28 years ago and my degree has never been worthless because it is balanced between academics and skills. My major was in a broad base Management course that balanced theory with application. The bulk was about the education core; Humanities – two years covering the entire discourse of civilization, Science/Math, psychology and sociology. Education is bigger than vocational skills and college/universities should be more about life than living. If teaching a man to fish feeds him for a lifetime, educating him on which fish to eat saves his life to use that skill.
I don’t think her paper is a good argument for the liberal arts.
For a start, I have an engineering degree, and I think it mattered what I engaged in. Not only did I get a piece of paper that had all the merits that she talks about, it was also a peice of paper that said I’ve studied a lot of maths. If someone only has a liberal arts degree you don’t know if they can process an overload of numerical information. Oh, and I nearly quit the degree several times during it, so I only obtained it by pro forma dedication.
As for her second point, she just asserts it, she provides no supporting evidence. If the liberal arts are so good at teaching how different arguments on the same point can be equally valid, how come so many people with Oxbridge or Ivy League educations were so fooled by Communism and convinced that capitalism was a failure in the 1920s and 1930s? And, assuming that the liberal arts do teach those skills, are the liberal arts any better at teaching these skills than a more specialised degree? The engineering courses I took dealing with writing requirements and team working covered this area. I am not qualified to comment as to whether they covered this area better than a liberal arts degree, but I see no sign that she’s qualified to comment from the engineers’ viewpoint.
Has she studied the relative performance of people with liberal educations and people with specialised education to measure how well they cope with the ambiguities and differing viewpoints in a complex global world?
How about how engineering teaches its students about the necessity of making trade-offs, for example that you can expand the bandwidth but only at the expense of losing gain? The engineering world strikes me as being painted in maddening shades of grey, is the liberal arts world more painted? I don’t know, but she doesn’t supply me any reason to believe that she’s even considered the question.
Thirdly, she says she’d argue that the most important trait in a pioneering entrepreneur is the confidence to buck convention. Well I wish she’d do that arguing here. Instead she just copies Klapmeier statement (where, one notes, he doesn’t even say himself that that was the most important trait). She applies no skepticism to it. She doesn’t investigate how many entrepreneurs had the confidence to buck convention and failed utterly. There are a hell of a lot of people out there apparently convinced that they can buck convention and develop a perpetual motion machine, but we still have no perpetual motion machines. She doesn’t discuss any alternative traits that could be contenders for “most important”, such as persistence, sales-skills, or diligent financial management. She doesn’t consider that the concept of “most important” might be meaningless if there is more than one skill that is vital for success (in other words, “most important” might be like demanding to know which blade of the scissors is the one that really cuts the paper). Where is this vaunted ability to consider how different arguments on the same point can be equally valid? Where are the maddening shades of gray. Nope, she wrote those words and then they went right out of her head on the next point.
And also did anyone else notice she never expresses any doubts about her own arguments?
Once you look at this article from a critical viewpoint, it implies that a liberal education actually sucks at teaching critical thinking. Wallace apparently learnt cliches about “maddening shades of gray” and facing ambiguities, but not to actually apply them to her own thought processes.
Of course Wallace may actually be an outlier, possibly there are hordes of liberal arts graduates who can think critically, or possibly other forms of education do even worse at teaching critical thinking than the liberal arts. Just well, it does make me wonder.