The number of students taking humanities courses is
plummeting, and financing for liberal arts education is being tea-partied to
death.
By Donald
Kaul
As many of you already
have intuited, I don’t know everything. Nobody does, I suppose. More
importantly, I don’t know everything about anything.
I’m what used to be
called “a generalist,” someone whose knowledge in any direction is a mile wide
and a quarter-inch deep.
Sad to say, we
generalists are an endangered species.
Everywhere, the
pressure is on young people to specialize. They’re also being urged to
concentrate on the so-called STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering,
and math. Why? These are disciplines that can predictably get you a job upon
graduating from college.
This idea has the
humanities people up in arms.
Duke University
President Richard Brodhead headed a study group of educators, business leaders,
artists, and politicians that recently delivered a report to Congress decrying
the attitude that studying the humanities and social sciences is a waste of
time.
“This facile
negativism forgets that many of the country’s most successful and creative
people had exactly this kind of education,” he said.
The report comes at a
time not when hordes of students are crowding into “wasteful” humanities
classes, but rather when attendance in them is plummeting and financing for
liberal arts education is being tea-partied to death.
Our higher education
system is forgetting what education is supposed to do in the first place.
I entered college as
an engineering student — a mistake on the order of Napoleon’s decision to
invade Russia. I was lucky though. I made a last-minute escape to the English
department where I was not only allowed to read novels for fun but also find
out about things I was actually interested in — history, psychology,
architecture, and the arts.
I hasten to add that I
had no idea what I was going to do with this information. Neither did my
father, a tool and die maker who wanted me to join one of the more practical
professions — preferably dentistry. He wanted me to make a living without being
in danger of killing someone.
That didn’t appeal to
me either. Like many students (particularly English majors) of the 1950s, I
wasn’t going to school merely to learn a trade. I was out to become an educated
person — well-read, witty, sophisticated — like someone in a Noel Coward play.
Unfortunately, Coward
never tells you how his people earn a living. When I graduated with my English
degree firmly in hand I had no answer for my father’s question: “What now,
bigshot?”
Thus, I drifted into
journalism. It wasn’t an unfamiliar story in the newspaper business of the
time. Back then, it served as a refuge for failed novelists, playwrights, and
other flotsam bearing a liberal education.
The thing is, it
worked out fine for me. I led an interesting life, had a lot of fun, and earned
enough to raise a family in modest comfort. Moreover, at one time or another, I
pretty much put to use everything I had learned in college.
And that’s my point —
a point these STEM people miss — there’s nothing wrong with learning for its
own sake. Knowledge doesn’t go to waste. It comes in handy somewhere along the
line, sometimes in the most unlikely places.
I realize that the
world now is a very different place from the one I grew up in. Back then, you
didn’t have to be a hedge fund manager to work your way through school for one
thing. But another difference is that workers today change jobs, even
professions, four, five, or six times during their working lives.
Specialists who know
only one thing might be left out in the cold when circumstances change.
Generalists have the intellectual tools to adapt.
Actually, we’d be
better off if more of our politicians had read a few more good novels. Or if
perhaps they’d written a poem or two.
Knowing something is
always better than knowing nothing.
OtherWords columnist
Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org