Demystifying liberal arts education

What good is a liberal arts degree? Will it lead to better career opportunities? How is it different from the conventional education in humanities and social sciences?

These questions are usually on the top of the minds of parents who want to enrol their wards in liberal arts programmes, which educators can no longer ignore or dismiss. 

Liberal arts education is a distinct, demanding, and unique form of education in contemporary times. The transformative power of unique teaching and learning practices distinguishes it from others. The pedagogies of liberal arts, for the most part, are directed at preparing the students to face the fundamental complexities, uncertainties, and ambiguities with skill, creativity, and confidence.

Despite the presence of the term ‘arts’ in the ‘liberal arts’, the educational experience of the liberal arts student is directed to attain skills valuable for practical life. It strikes the right balance between seeing education as the transfer of the most advanced knowledge in specialisation and the development of generic skills helpful in excelling in work and life.

A liberal arts education prepares students to become masterful artists in their life and work. The idea that arts are removed from life is among the oldest and most persistent misunderstandings. This misunderstanding stems from higher-order goals far removed from everyday realities.

To be artistic in the liberal arts sense is to be artful, that is, to be able to skilfully and creatively negotiate work and life situations that are complex and uncertain. It is this transformative power of liberal arts education that is increasingly attracting business corporate interest.

This developing story — the practical impact of liberal arts education —is the subject that the three recent books: Randall Stross’, A Practical Education: Why Liberal Arts Majors Make Great Employees (2017), Scott Hartley’s, Fuzzy and Techie: Why Liberal Arts Rule the Digital World (2018), and Richard Detweiler’s,  The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry, and Accomplishment (2021). 

Collectively, these authors, based on solid evidence, argue that liberal arts education will provide the best basis for successful careers in industry and professions, and employers will increasingly privilege liberal arts graduates for managerial and leadership roles. Starting with various concerns and premises, they authors suggest that liberal arts education offers distinct advantages for career advancement and human flourishing. 

Faced with the dynamic complexity and uncertainty of local and global social, cultural, political, and technological environments, corporations are looking for employees with developed facilities for critical thinking, cross-cultural communication, the capacity to appreciate difference, respect diversity, creativity,  adaptation to changing circumstances, embrace uncertainty, able to learn while doing and ethical orientation—skills and attributes that liberal arts education richly fosters.

These are also the skills that professions, from medicine to law, find useful in practice. That is why the best universities in the world insist their graduates complete a certain number of core courses irrespective of what discipline the students have chosen to specialize in. It is not a stretch to say the United States' ability to dominate the world for over 70 years is partly enabled by its university system that takes a broader and liberal form of education seriously, producing excellence and leadership in various fields.

The difference

Liberal arts education is different from conventional arts programmes. The modern notion of liberal arts education has evolved far from its origins. While the ancient models were focused on training political leaders and jurists, contemporary liberal arts institutions mostly see themselves as preparing students for excellence in wide-ranging professions and disciplines.

The critical pedagogical orientation of the liberal arts programmes is to explore the unity of knowledge across disciplines. Liberal arts students are encouraged to develop not only an awareness of knowledge intrinsic to their primary area of specialisation but also come to acknowledge that discipline’s position within the architecture of knowledge systems. The liberal arts educational process is not merely focused on instructing on specialised knowledge but also on connecting diverse parts of knowledge systems.

In this light, mathematics, for example, helps us see the basic structures and complex patterns of the universe. In contrast, the sciences help us understand and analyze the causal laws that animate the natural and social world. Similarly, history opens a window into the development processes of the natural and human worlds, opening learners’ imaginations of change and continuities.

The contributions of art and literature, the wisdom of religions, and the big questions that are the focus of philosophy illuminate for us the world as it should be, what it could become, and what it takes to flourish. Together, the arts and sciences explore the world as it is, could be, and should be.

The ideal liberal arts classroom addresses not only specialised questions and teaches theoretical knowledge; it relates those specific pursuits to the overarching purpose of a discipline and intellectual query in general. Ideal liberal arts experience also ensures students are familiar with the questions raised in fields beyond their major or concentration.

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein often remarked that the difficulty of life is often not the difficulty of intellect but one of orientation. Traditional higher education primarily focuses on intellectual development at the expense of transforming the learners to orient themselves for the life of learning.

Learning to learn is the critical task of liberal arts training. It will be the key distinguishing marker of what separates individuals who flourish and rest who end up doing what late anthropologist David Graeber termed ‘Bullshit Jobs’--high paying and meaningless. The foundational aspiration of liberal arts learning is to develop learners' capacity to nurture their unique talents to make work and life meaningful.  

(The author is a professor and executive director of Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Contemporary Ethics at RV University, Bengaluru. Views expressed are personal)