CHAPTER 3

THE VALUE OF A LIBERAL ARTS EDUCTION

We have good reason to fear for young people today. I cannot imagine the employment uncertainties attendant upon increasing job scarcities, layoffs, organizational downsizing, and the incredible competitiveness that awaits them. The implications of burgeoning technology and the global economy yield further uncertainties. Both parents and potential students are not oblivious to these uncertainties.

A liberal arts education can enable an individual to apprehend more choices and exercise more cognitive skills in dealing with these realities. A liberal arts education, as opposed to a college education that seeks to "vocationalize" the liberal arts, can be likened to the difference between going to a highly rated law school and a poorly rated law school. In the latter, the emphasis is placed upon passing the bar exam; many of its students do pass the bar, but can't do much else. In the former, the emphasis is upon critical thinking, good lawyering, assimilation of case and other types of law and as a byproduct the students pass the bar exam; can do a great deal more.

The purpose of a liberal arts education is to enable the student to enrich his or her interior life, and thereby live a truly examined life. A rich interior life, garnered through such activities as reading great novels and poetry, learning philosophy and social thought, history, social sciences and the arts, and pursuing one's areas of interest is priceless. As Alfred North Whitehead said in The Aims of Education, "We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self-development...."

The continuing desire for self-development should be the sole purpose of a liberal arts education; its application is manifold. One's career success will therefore be a byproduct or outgrowth of such an education. A liberal arts education is nothing less than an investment m oneself as a person. Therefore, one can be empowered to appreciate the many choices and articulate the many intellectual skills available in earning a living, relating with people, and cultivating a rich interior life until the grave.

What constitutes a liberal arts education in the U.S is to be largely steeped in the thought and literature of the major thinkers in western civilization. One example is Plato, who dealt with such issues, still burning ones, of what constitutes a just and good state; the necessary virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. The relevance of Plato can certainly be applied to something as contemporary as what dialog exists attendant upon the 1996 presidential election. Some other great thinkers, who are also applicable to current events are Aristotle, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Karl Marx.

We can convince parents and their college-bound children that a truly liberal arts education is applicable in far many more ways than they may think. The liberal arts should not be restricted to what we call General Studies, but must be integrated in the disciplines that we offer. For example, upon being awarded a B.A. degree in a given discipline, it is doubtful that the person will be able to get a job directly related to that discipline. However, he or she can get a job and use the intellectual skills obtained in his or her major to offer others the enrichment obtained in understanding and incorporating logical and methodological rigor and the thoughts of the great thinkers of the past and present in that discipline.

I am convinced that colleges and universities can convince people that we excel in two dimensions. They are 1.The devotion of faculty to teaching and their accessibility to students; 2.Excellence and commitment to cultivating and transmitting the liberal arts which will benefit students in all aspects of their work, relational, and interior lives.

I do not seek to discount areas of the university that are vocationally oriented. However, the bulwark of a university has traditionally been the liberal arts. If we are merely reactive to our perceptions of changes in fads, fashions, and fortunes in society, rather than being proactive in articulating our clear commitment to what constitutes a college or university education, we may very well have short-term gains but very grave long-term losses.

Specifically, being steeped in the liberal arts enables the student to incorporate "shame" and "guilt" in his or her lexicon of feelings. These qualities are necessary, particularly in an increasingly sociopathic culture, where civility and decorum are at a premium. Comparing Dostoyevsky's character Raskolnikov with Camus' protagonist in The Stranger enables the student to better understand the human condition and the many gray areas of conscience and of life. He or she comes to learn that values can and do frequently transcend situations and that there are certain things decent people don't do, regardless of their situation in time and place.

For example, my little girl graduated from a university in 1996, and nothing could detract from the joy my wife and I had on that day. However, something happened at that ceremony that I had never seen before, although I have attended very many commencement ceremonies. Beyond the childishness of blowing bubbles, releasing balloons, and throwing beach balls around, many of the students shouted down the commencement speaker. They were yelling at him to stop and applauded in the middle of his excellent speech to drive him off the stage. He did manage to finish his speech, but I was mortified. Such students apparently did not get exposed to, or understand, the higher learning that helps lead to the optimum levels of guilt, shame, and civility necessary for a meaningful community.

To develop a meaningful community encourages a sense of place for a person where there is an explicit connectedness one with the other. In such a community, the possibility of feeling shame and guilt is optimized because we feel answerable to each other. Moreover, we become aware of our heritage and respect the differences among us. Being exposed to the liberal arts centers us on what is "good" and what is "right," rather than on pragmatism's encroachment on virtually every institution in our society, including that of education, which asks, "what works?".

In an article I wrote in The Sacramento Valley Mirror (6/7/96) entitled, "Why Do People Lie, Cheat, And Steal?" I dealt with our increasingly sociopathic society that is largely due to our extolling of pragmatism as a supreme value that being steeped in the liberal arts would be likely to correct Part of the article reads," ...we are living in an increasingly sociopathic culture, where immediate gratification is extolled as a virtue. We see this sociopathy manifested in such ways as 'downsizing' in corporations, where loyal, long-term, faithful employees are laid off so that corporate profits can be increased. Other manifestations are our callousness toward the 'least among us,' such as the poor and the homeless. Our health care system provides another example, where one's ability to pay determines the quality of his or her care. If you cannot afford the care and medication, the cost of which is based on one's desperation and 'all that the traffic will bear,' you may literally suffer and drop dead.. In a sociopathic society, not only is immediate gratification held in high esteem, but we don't feel responsible to each other; little or no value is placed on 'loyalty,' 'commitment,' and 'fidelity.' We feel free to make a commitment to a person to love, honor and obey him or her; in sickness and in health; for better or for worse, until death. Yet about 50 percent of these covenants are broken in our country; many to be transferred to another person to whom the same empty promises are made; promises that were previously broken for such shallow reasons as 'irreconcilable differences'."

The liberal arts enable us to learn from historical mistakes and acquire the values that enable a civilization to endure. Much insight can be gotten by comparing the tradition of Social Darwinism, as epitomized by William Graham Sumner, who extolled as virtues "survival of the fittest," "struggle for existence," "conflict," and "laissez faire," with "'The New Deal" and "The Great Society." We can learn from history, from literature, from the social sciences, from music.

For example, the foreboding tone in Tschiakovski's 6th Symphony is mirrored in the story of Willy Loman who, it seems to me, represents every man, in Arthur Miller's play "Death of a Salesman." This play poignantly displays the down-side of the American Dream, a healthy corrective to uncritically extolling the virtues of fierce competition and a free market run amok, without the needed safety nets that should bespeak the ineffable worth of every human being.

The work of such social scientists as C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff also display such a corrective. The impact that the economy and the vagaries of life have in our "little deaths" also resonate well with the philosophy of Karl Marx, who saw our institutions and people as being warped and half-crazed. Social scientists such as Machiavelli, Alvin Gouldner, Georg Simmel, Max Weber and RaIf Dahrendorf teach us about the use of power and authority in a variety of situations. The impact of the organizational climate on one's very personality can be seen by reading the sociologist Robert Merton, as well as by reading such novelists as Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller.

Poets such as John Berryman, Theodore Roethke and Allen Ginsberg show us, with biting incisiveness, the tension between societal expectations and individual desires, as does Sigmund Freud in his book, Civilization and its Discontents. The "dark night of the soul" is elucidated by St John of the Cross as well as by the poet Sylvia Plath. Her poem "Daddy," for example, dares to express the true feelings of many children to their cold, distant, perhaps abusive fathers. We're not supposed to hate our fathers; she did and said so. The tension between demands placed upon us and our true selves frequently results in "ennui," an inner void of emptiness, no better expressed than in the burgeoning use of drugs among our young, yet also expressed in the works of Samuel Beckett and John Paul Sartre.

Clearly, being steeped in the liberal arts enhances our critical thinking skills, so that we are not likely to jump on the bandwagon of any fad or fashion that comes down the pike. By better understanding the human condition, the institutions of society, as well as our own feelings and aspirations, we are more likely to develop a sense of connectedness or "community" whereby we feel more responsible to and for each other. Moreover, we are likely to become more rational in our public policy, and not succumb to simplistic sound bites, hate-mongering, and the sleaze that fill our air waves to determine our political orientation and preferences, nor use them as means of entertainment. We thereby are more likely to look for substance rather than style, character rather than grooming, to determine whom we elect to office.

The liberal arts let us know that it's not what you do that's particularly important; it's who you are. Each person is unique, and the liberal arts help us give ourselves permission to be who we are and fulfill our purpose in life. As Viktor Frankl points out in Man's Search for Meaning, one of the ways we detect our purpose or meaning in life is through suffering. None of us want to suffer, but suffering, and our ensuing feeling of brokenness, can give us insight into our uniqueness, our humanity, our purpose, so that we can better understand ourselves and also be of greater help to other people. Who you are is frequently best discerned by your failures. In my case, I've learned much more from my failures than from my successes. Charles de Bos was one of the major, yet unrecognized, French intellectuals. On his death-bed he said, "The mark of every great life is failure." Only someone steeped in the liberal arts, it seems to me, could realize this fact.

The liberal arts tell us, "Don't let other people define your reality or put you into bondage to their view of the world." Use your critical faculties, respect reliable data, use the knowledge base you have and upon which you are building to make informed decisions regarding personal and public policy.

For example, take the issue of "love. "Most people think that you fall in love and then get married It seems to me that what happens is that you get married and then fall in love. How is this possible? English is quite imprecise in regard to the concept of "love," which has only one word to denote it. Many people get their ideas of love from soap operas and other sundry sources. However, by studying the Bible, we see that in the Greek there are three words for the concept of "love."

The first one is "eros," which is erotic and pleasurable; the second one is "phileo," which is love based upon reciprocity ("I'll love you if you love me; I'll do good things for you if you do good things for me.). Most of the world operates on these two types of love; when people get married, it is usually these two types of love that predominate. However, although these types of love have their place, the type of love that enables a marriage to be fulfilling and enduring is "agapao'" love.

Agapao has nothing to do with how you feel; it has solely to do with what you do, regardless of how you feel. It means putting the other person's feelings and interests ahead of your own, regardless of how you feel at that given moment. However, many of our children don't learn about this type of love, the only type of love that will sustain a marriage or any long-term relationship. Clearly, this is the most important type of love. However, when was the last time we taught our children about agapao; when was the last time we heard about agapao? Eros and phileo may come and go, but agapao must be nurtured every day of one's marriage. It is noteworthy that whenever Jesus commanded His disciples to love others, the term "agapao" was always used, never eros or phileo.

In the not too distant past the Bible was considered a significant part of a liberal arts education. A proper understanding of "love" is just one reason why it is still important. Moreover, by reading the Bible, there was thereby at least a collective nodding acquaintance among people with values conducive to character and community building to which they should aspire. In addition, it encouraged students to explore the spiritual dimension of their lives, which is every bit as important as the intellectual and emotional dimensions. As seen by the shouting down of a commencement speaker, we have abrogated our responsibility of encouraging our students to nurture the spiritual dimension of their lives to both their, our, and society's detriment.

In conclusion, the selling of a liberal arts education embodies the communication of the following possible outcomes: self-development; understanding and thereby enhancing one's relationships; understanding the working and influence of power, prestige and wealth in our society and in a global economy; enhancing critical thinking, and thereby reducing gullibility in personal and social matters; understanding the institutions of society as well as the dynamics of organizations with which most will be associated; accepting and even embracing diversity among people; encouraging civility and a sense of community; encouraging more rational public policies and personal choices; encouraging a greater tolerance for ambiguity in the "gray areas" of life; having one not be as likely to suffer from "trained incapacity," where one cannot easily adapt to change; developing an appreciation of over-arching values, independent of situation, that gives one a sense of community and a sense of place; learning from past individual and collective mistakes; knowing ourselves, our uniqueness, and discerning our purpose in life; helping to foster "agapao," which is necessary for long term relationships, and the consequent enhancement of the family, which is the basic institution of society.

Ultimately, the basic question to the student is, "Do you only want to invest in a career that is outside of yourself and that may be downsized or in some other way be disappointing, or primarily invest in your 'self’ that lasts as long as you live, and that will be of benefit to you in your career and in all other aspects of your life?" Basically a liberal arts education, when rightly understood, is very pragmatic and sells itself.

Pardon my irreverence, but in this respect it's a lot like selling sex. It doesn't take much of a sales pitch.