Why a Liberal Arts Education Is Still Valuable

One of the most important investments in life is a solid education. This axiom is so often touted that it has become cliché, but much truth still resides in the idea. Even in today’s highly technical, specialized society, the best route is still a broad-based liberal arts education, which can then be followed by specialized technical study, if one so desires.

Liberal arts, or “humanities,” hearken back to the questions Socrates posed to the ancient Athenians. His questions pertain to definitions of “humanness” and the age-old conflict between good and evil. A liberal arts education that is strong, for instance, in the study of such general areas as logic, grammar, rhetoric, literature, mathematics, the arts, social sciences, and philosophy offer a background not explicitly for making a living but in learning how to live well.

Making a living is important, no doubt. However, acquiring the technical skill or craft knowledge sans the ethical background is not a viable approach. Every technical skill, or techne, as the Greeks called it, may be used in the service of good or detriment to society. To churn out technically-skilled graduates, or technocrats, without the foundational liberal arts knowledge seems Machiavellian: looking, in other words, toward the end without due consideration of the means. A computer programmer, lawyer, doctor, or business manager needs to possess a broad-based knowledge of the humanities.

History bears out the argument. Consider Nazi Germany, where skilled, technically advanced citizens—including doctors, nurses, psychologists, engineers, and scientists—were devoted in using their skills to exterminate a race of people at the rate of approximately 12,000 a day at Auschwitz , among other death camps. Winston Churchill is quoted in a biography as having called this episode of genocide “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilized men.”

While the Holocaust remains the most prominent example of scientific savagery, other instances abound in the name of political progress and scientific human experimentation, ranging from the Cambodian “killing fields” to a host of chemical warfare testing and disease infliction in the United States dating back to the early 19^th century. As one of many examples, in 1943, University of Cincinnati researchers placed 16 mentally disabled patients in refrigerated compartments at 30 degrees Fahrenheit for 120 hours, in order to “study the effect of frigid temperature on mental disorders.” 

Beyond virtue and ethics, post secondary education should also be a time devoted to discovery, a seeking of knowledge to help one discern what it is exactly that he or she wishes to do in life. In turn, the array of knowledge gained should be of service over the course of a lifetime.

Devoting too much, after all, to the acquisition of specific skills also seems a bit obsolete, considering the rapidly evolving pace of technological and social change. Those bent, for instance, on mastering one particular programming language today may tomorrow have to adapt and learn a new language as technological advancements occur daily.

While competition in the marketplace may be fierce and lead us to believe that a specialized, technical path is best, a liberal arts education does not mutually exclude a specialized career, and, according to research, employers are not necessarily looking at majors as a primary criterion. A recent National Association of Colleges and Employers bears out the rationale for broader education. In the survey, employers overwhelmingly stated that they look for “the right skills,” not necessarily “the right major.” In other words, the major is not actually as important as the candidate’s ability. Further, skills can be easily learned, even self-taught, while good thinking, on the other hand, cannot. A liberal arts education affords the ability for transformation, for self-expression, for that moral compass the Greeks so highly valued.

Albert Einstein, who may be deemed as having been highly technically specialized, once said, “The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks." Indeed, whether we read Shakespeare, decipher a poem, look into the mysteries of the human body, consider psychological theories throughout history, or gaze into a microscope at a sample of bacteria, we are doing much more than merely learning facts: we are expanding horizons and learning how to think independently. Those valuable facets of learning have changed the lives of individuals and the world.