New Education Post from Allen Meadors
Recent college graduates are not doing so well. Well to be specific, it’s recent college graduates with liberal art degrees. Majoring in engineering or accounting can get you a job relatively easily; but a degree in literature or gender studies might end up with you starving and in debt.
Students and parents are now questioning if there is any value at all to having a liberal arts degree. The number of liberal-art majors in ivy league colleges are dropping. Many liberal art programs make students spiteful toward the status quo, unwilling to work with the current system. And liberal art degrees haven’t exactly been known to get people jobs and create a productive workforce, even though they’re sometimes funded through taxpayer money.
This current shift however may be due to how liberal arts are no longer how they used to be. Before, liberal art programs were about coming up with ideas of goodness, understanding truth and characterizing beauty. Now it’s more about hegemony, i.e. race, class and gender. There isn’t anything wrong with the latter per se; but as the former goals are de-emphasized, a liberal arts education loses the value it once had for society.
Before, a liberal arts education would bring students a tradition they could use as an anchor. Internalizing classics from Shakespeare or Homer allowed students to explore these worlds at a deeper level, and ask questions about morality or merit. For example, they can argue over Achilles and Odysseus, two great heroes who exemplify the classic tension between body and mind respectively. Having a common story allowed people to make arguments with a shared understanding. It allowed them to discuss goodness, truth and beauty, things you wouldn’t learn about in an engineering program.
Source: Allen Meadors UNCP
via Allen Meadors http://allenmeadors.org/the-truth-about-liberal-arts-degrees/
Allen Meadors 