Is there ROI on Milton and Shakespeare? Jon Meacham argues a traditional liberal arts education may be the key to producing economic innovation and competitiveness. “The next chapter of the nation’s economic life could well be written not only by engineers but by entrepreneurs who, as products of an apparently disparate education, have formed a habit of mind that enables them to connect ideas that might otherwise have gone unconnected,” writes the Newsweek editor-in-chief, who sees small liberal arts colleges as “a crucial element in the creation of wealth, jobs, and, one hopes, a fairer and more just nation.”
Barack Obama started out at such a school (Occidental in Los Angeles) before moving to Columbia, where the core curriculum requires undergraduates to be grounded in canonical literature, philosophy, and history. Steve Jobs, who dropped out of Oregon’s Reed College, nevertheless credits a calligraphy class he attended there with providing part of the inspiration for the Macintosh. Employers say all the time that they value clarity of writing and verbal expression, and that they often find liberal-arts graduates expert in both.
Meacham winningly describes small liberal arts colleges like his alma mater, the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, as places that prepare people for a good life, not just the good life. “If the country is to prosper—economically, culturally, morally—we have to trust in the institutions, old and new, that nurture creativity, and then hope for the best,” he concludes.
What a pathetic defence of the liberal arts.
“It is just possible, though, that the traditional understanding of the liberal arts may help us in our search for new innovation and new competitiveness. ”
Is there any area of hunman knowledge that could not be described as something that might just possibly help us in our search for new innovation and new competitiveness? Could we not equally say that a non-traditional understanding of the liberal arts, or a fine arts degree or a technical mechanic’s qualification just possibly might help us in our search for new innovation and new competitiveness? (I’m not arguing that they are, just that they might just possibly, after all I understand that calligraphy, to which Steve Jobs apparently attributed part of the inspiration for the Apple, is a fine art subject, not a humanities one).
Furthermore, I did an engineering degree, and that teaches you to make connections between disparate subjects. On the one hand my engineering degree was quite narrow relative to the number of fields my friends in the sciences and humanities were studying, but on the other it was quite broad, for example along with the physics and maths we studied project management, risk assessment, quality assurance and arc welding.
I used to believe that a liberal arts degrees had a lot of merit in them, but the more defences I hear of them the more inclined I am to the opposite view. Let’s face it, if all you can say is that something “just possibly may help us” all that means is that you haven’t come across a definitive proof that it won’t.
Comment by Tracy W — January 14, 2010 @ 2:05 pm
Your blog was very informative and interesting.
Comment by College of Liberal Arts – Grand Canyon University — January 15, 2010 @ 8:34 pm