“I deplore the tendency, in some institutions, to go directly toward training for a trade or profession or something and ignoring the liberal arts. It is the foundation of education.”
—Ronald Reagan
As college tuitions continue to rise, an increasing number of people question whether college is worth the expense, and universities close or consolidate humanities departments, some people may wonder about the ultimate purpose of higher education.
In particular, does a liberal arts education even make sense in today’s world? You might be surprised that a successful investor and executive argues that a broad education is more important than ever. Frank Holmes, Executive Chairman of Hive Digital Technologies Ltd., the first Bitcoin miner to go public in 2017 on the TSX.V, and CEO and Chief Investment Officer at U.S. Global Investors, Inc., spoke to the Upper School Finance Club recently and shared the need to study fields like biology, chemistry, and physics to understand the market and various types of entrepreneurs. Frank, who’s also a Cobra parent, captivated us with the way he applied teachings from science to the world of investing.
One note – although many people think that “liberal arts” is synonymous with the humanities, the liberal arts have always included the sciences and mathematics.
A fascinating episode of the “Harvard Thinking” podcast focused on the value of a liberal arts education. It brought together three academics: philosophy professor Susanna Siegel, economics professorDavid Deming, who co-leads the College-to-Jobs Initiative at the Kennedy School, and Nancy Hill, an education professor and developmental psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The three professors provided a variety of reasons why a liberal arts education may be more important than ever, particularly in this era of technology and high-paced change.
Overall, the three agreed that a broad-based education prepares future generations to think for themselves, contribute to a democratic society, and sets students up for success in a constantly evolving workplace. “Precisely because it is general, when it’s well-executed, [a liberal arts education] is teaching you not a set of specific competencies in some specific thing, but rather giving you a set of tools to teach you how to think about the next problem over the horizon,” Deming said.
On a pragmatic level, the liberal arts teach the basic skills of communication. Professor Siegel shares the ways “we talk about the communication skills that you get from being able to analyze arguments and rehearse them and put your own reactions in parentheses while you consider opposite and opposing reactions and then be able to become articulate on the page in writing about the relationship between those perspectives. The general communication skills are extremely useful.”
Siegel also argues for the civic benefits of a liberal arts education. As we witness authoritarian governments gaining more and more power around the world and democracy seemingly on the run, Siegel points to the debate between two formative thinkers in the early 20th Century. “I think that W.E.B. Du Bois said in his debate with Booker T. Washington, you know, education is a training for democratic citizenship and one thing we would lose if we lost liberal arts education is we’d become far more susceptible to politics of domination, to systems of governance that really rely on a very tight control over the horizon of ideas.”
In this age when cognitive malleability may be key to a long and productive career, Prof. Hill argues that the liberal arts could provide the recipe for success.
“We’ve long since passed the stage where people start a job and stay in that job and work their way up and retire with the gold watch,” he said. “We have to really think about preparing young people and preparing a workforce to really navigate a very creative and innovative career where they’re needed to reinvent themselves in relation to society, their interests, and their goals. And I think a liberal arts education provides that kind of intellectual flexibility and cognitive flexibility that society really needs.”
On an individual level, a liberal arts education helps people throughout their lives by teaching them how to evaluate information and think critically about arguments.
“The argument for a liberal arts education is the argument that precisely because it is general, when it’s well-executed, it is teaching you not a set of specific competencies in some specific thing, but rather giving you a set of tools to teach you how to think about the next problem over the horizon that we don’t have an answer to now because it hasn’t come around yet,” Deming said. “They’re really teaching you how to weigh evidence and how to think critically about other people’s perspectives and to adopt other people’s perspectives. And that’s a kind of teaching you how to think, teaching you how to learn tool kit that I think when done well, liberal arts education can do better than much more specific training for a specific job.”
So contrary to the trope that liberal arts majors are only qualified for unemployment, Deming argues that liberal arts grads actually often outearn tech majors in the longer run, because their skills adapt and they can catch up over the course of a career.
“It suggests that the penalty you think you’re paying for majoring in liberal arts is much less over your lifespan than it appears when you first graduate,” he said.
Those of us who work in schools teach children how to have three types of relationships: how to relate to their peers, to the adults who work in schools, and with the content they are learning in class. This type of relational thinking is a core component of a liberal arts education. “Because the habits of interaction you develop in the classroom or meeting people who are coming from who knows where, those skills, those habits, that openness, that will serve you extremely well in organizations,” Siegel said. “And you could call that a kind of individual skill of critical thinking, but I actually think it’s more than that. I actually think it’s far more relational. That’s the value of liberal arts education, and that’s why it should really matter to society.”
Beyond navigating the job market, studying liberal arts can help people live a more fulfilling life.
“When I think about just the rise in mental health disorders, loneliness, depression, anxiety, and all of these things that come from the difficulties we have in connecting with each other and building community with each other, engaging people whose views are different from our own, and being willing to change our mind,” Hill said. “The kind of broad liberal arts education is going to enable us to connect to people across cultures, societies, backgrounds. It’s going to give us skills to deconstruct our identities and reinvent ourselves in new ways…We see how youth come to college. They leave their home communities and they take a germ of themselves with them from those home communities and they let a lot of it go and then they reinvent themselves. We used to think people find themselves in college. They don’t find themselves in college. They learn how to reinvent themselves and rediscover themselves. And I think that is quintessential to the liberal arts education.”
Unlike some high schools that have become specialized so that students are deciding on a career path in ninth grade, we still believe in the purpose and value of a liberal arts education that stresses the importance of the STEM related fields and the humanities. For more than 70 years, we have matriculated graduates to the finest colleges and universities with the knowledge and skills to excel in whatever field they choose and enjoy full and meaningful lives.
