As classes wound down during this last week of the semester, a professor posed the following question to his students: what is the use of a liberal arts education? It is certainly a question worth considering for all of us here at Saint Anselm.
For some of us, including a majority of the editorial staff here at the Crier, that’s because in six months, we will be a part of the ‘real world’. We are constructing resumes, metaphorically climbing to the top of Alumni Hall and shouting at the wider world, “Pay attention to me! I am worth your time!” hoping that for at least some of us, that will prove to be true, and we won’t wind up at home in our parents’ basement for the next several years.
For others, it is the $40,000+ that they and their families have poured into this “Catholic, Benedictine, Liberal Arts institution” each year.
For all of the students here on campus, we here at The Crier don’t doubt that it is a combination of all these things and more.
We are all students in the liberal arts. We have, or will have, dedicated the greater part of four years of our lives to such studies. Whether we like it or not, this fact plays a large role in both our definitions of ourselves and the definitions that others apply to us. Many graduates of liberal arts institutions like ours are notorious for their eternal struggle to find and keep employment in today’s world.
An argument can be made for the practical uselessness, the ‘real-world’ futility, of much of what is considered to constitute the academic backbone of this institution. In this case, the term ‘practical’ refers simply to everyday application and action.
We only have to turn to our, currently contested, core curriculum listings for examples, especially in terms of course content. Take, to start, our institution’s requirement that all students take three theology classes in order to graduate.
For theology and philosophy majors, these three requirements can easily be considered beneficial. However, a Criminal Justice major might question the benefit of being pressed into an upper level class on Old Testament theology when it seems abundantly clear to them that nothing they learn in that class will stay with them beyond the end of the final exam.
Humanities, the much-maligned spine of our academic curriculum, is also an easy target. Cynically summed up, it shows us dry history populated only by old white men, an occasional 18th Century white woman, and Martin Luther King Jr.
The question then becomes, what use is this to many of those among us? Why should English majors spend two weeks learning all about Adam Smith, the absentminded colonial economist? Why press economics majors into reading the morose existential musings of Camus?
Could using a limited curriculum like this even be considered misleading or wrong? Is the attempt of a liberal arts institution to provide a “well rounded” education actually preventing the accomplishment of its own goal? In other words, does a liberal arts education strive to do so much, to cover so much in only four academic years, that it actually manages to impart little or nothing to its students?
We here at The Crier answer these questions with a resounding no. A liberal arts education is inherently extremely beneficial.
Content can, and should, be questioned, changed, and adjusted to meet the needs of learners as the world around them changes as well. Still, the existence of that content, whatever the particulars may be, never lacks value.
What this requires of the students and professors of a liberal-arts institution like Saint Anselm is true, practical engagement. Making a chemistry major take that third theology or philosophy course may not endlessly benefit them in terms of actual content, but it can reap benefits in other ways.
The liberal arts are, essentially, a form of mental strength and endurance training. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with what you hear in the classroom, you will emerge having formed your own opinions on it—provided that you are engaged in the classroom experience itself.
But what about ‘bad’ liberal arts classes, you might ask? Every last one of us has found ourselves in a class so frustrating that we refuse to participate out of pure exasperation with the experience. Truthfully, that may be one of the more valuable skills we acquire for use in the real world after graduation.
In the end, liberal arts students might find themselves co-opting the classic mantra of the web-slinging hero Spiderman. “With great power comes great responsibility—especially in the liberal arts.”