Evolving the Liberal Arts
I’m the product of a liberal arts education, and in fact most of us in the United States are, at least until we finish high school. Still, it’s become common in interviews or small talk over the years to muse on how that line at the bottom of my resume (“A.B., Music and Philosophy,” incidentally) has contributed to my career as a designer, developer, and entrepreneur.
I believe it has had a profound impact. Music is at once aesthetic and technical, and understanding its creation, its impact, and how to bring objectivity into something so seemingly subjective has made me both a better designer and developer. Philosophy attempts to rationally and systematically address fundamental problems, which is something I strive to do each day. The liberal arts emphasizes essays over exams, discussion over lecture, creativity over memorization — all principles which have shaped the way I learn, communicate, and do business.
Today, in the midst of pushes for a focus on STEM education and an emphasis on higher education’s role in vocational and career preparedness, the liberal arts approach is sometimes seen as antiquated. When we are surrounded by such rapid advances in science and technology, the study of fields like literature, art history, and indeed philosophy, can seem to some a waste of our collective time and talent. But a society of narrowly-focused specialists — where a girl’s future is prescribed by the major she chose when she was seventeen, where little common ground exists between the doctor and the designer — paints a bleak picture indeed.
Liberal arts, to work into the future, needs to address a few more priorities. It won’t be the first time it’s had to evolve: fields like physics used to be the domain of the technical college. But as the volume of society’s knowledge and understanding grows more voraciously, and access to both objective and subjective information becomes so facile, I offer several additional focuses to consider as fundamental to a 21st century liberal arts education, from the first days of elementary school through college and beyond.
Systems Thinking
Whether it’s the healthcare system, your computer, or a single tweet, everything we interact with is part of an increasingly complex system. Understanding how things work, and how pieces of systems like these interact, can help us make better decisions, with fewer unintended consequences. Taken a step further, together we can learn how to better construct and change systems to move us all forward.
Information Literacy
Unlike the days where the keys to the world’s libraries were held only by a privileged few, access to information today is immediate and ubiquitous. But this raises challenges as well as opportunities. While the old focus of information literacy was how and where to find an answer, today it’s perhaps more important to understand where that answer came from, what context may have shaped its perspective, and whether or not it is trustworthy. Until everyone has developed their own internal Snopes.com-style fact check mechanism, we’ll remain slaves to chain-letter rumors and the false trust that “the Internet told me so.”
Sustainability
It’s only been a in the last few decades that we’ve come to grips with the notion that our resources are finite, at least on this planet. Whether thinking about global policy, home economics, or growing your business, understanding scarcity and resource efficiency will only get more important.
Marketing
An academic view of marketing studies how ideas are spread and sold. Everyone practices it in some way; those who do it well have a powerful advantage. Understanding what makes an idea stick is crucial to shaping the outcome of a business, the development of a child, and the progress of a nation. If we treat it as a critical component of a successful education, we will even begin to address marketing alongside its too-easily-forgotten counterparts: ethics, accuracy, and privacy.
Problem Solving
Without a real problem to solve, technology and progress subside to gadgets and photo sharing apps. Today, too many students associate problem solving with questions about the speed of oncoming trains. We need people to understand how to choose which problems to solve in a societal context, how to attack them, how to identify the tools and people you’ll need along the way, and ultimately how to execute.
The liberal arts already provides a framework for cultivating the mind and the imagination for learning throughout life, for asking questions and challenging assumptions, for thinking independently, and taking action to promote the common good.
With a little refocusing, these principles can stick with us for a long time yet. We don’t need everyone to be a computer science major to move society forward, or even to move technology forward; with a culture that promotes these principles, we’ll have no trouble getting where we want to go.
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