What Champions of Liberal Arts Education Don't Want to Admit

I am personally mindful of the value of a "liberal arts education"--an education which in one way or another stresses languages, the humanities, the social sciences, the arts. I even see them as having a "practical" value. There is no field where individuals do not benefit from enhanced reading, writing, critical thinking skills--and these courses are all well-known to offer a stronger training in that than any alternative would, all while conferring more specific benefits, with the sciences exemplary. After all, as Carroll Quigley remarked, science is nothing but a method--and the method ultimately derived from epistemological, philosophical, inquiry--with recent examination of the problems of medical research, for example, turning up the difficulty trained scientists have designing experiments properly simply because of the shortcomings of their grasp of the method, and the philosophy underlying it, in a reminder that while some sneer at the subject, scientists have a very practical need for philosophical training in order to do their jobs as well as they might.

Yet at the same time we have to acknowledge the hard facts that:

1. Students in college are, understandably, less eager for years of (very expensive) schooling than to get on in the world, and when push comes to shove see such subjects being required to spend four years or even a decade after the twelfth grade in school before they can properly begin their careers as an unfortunate necessity. It is bad enough that they have to bother with the material directly related to their own field before they can even begin to start in a profession--and the value of the liberal arts an especially tough sell, the more in as their elders have been so relentless about putting them down (with the STEM fetishists second to none here).

2. Students arrive in even selective colleges from relatively strong K-12 educational institutions inadequately prepared for serious liberal arts study (again, in part because their elders thought other things more important).

3. The quality of the liberal arts education imparted to even the able and willing is far from what it ought to be, unhelped by shortchanging of the relevant departments in the allotment of resources, the contradictions between the imperatives of research and of teaching, by the shortcomings of their instructors' training (alas, expected to "retail" what more highly placed personnel produce in C. Wright Mills' discussion of the matter), and it must be admitted, by the morass created by postmodernism-cum-kulturkampf in this section of higher education.

4. The holder of a degree of a non-vocational kind, and especially a few particularly in-demand kinds of vocational degree (nursing, engineering and similarly applicable technical fields, and the more mathematical sorts of business training) have an especially tough time in a job market that, in spite of the media's relentless "You've never had it so good" gaslighting of the public (and the old hypocrisy of employers about wanting to hire "well-rounded individuals"), is frankly lousy for college graduates, with liberal arts majors far from exclusive but still significant sufferers, and looking like it will only get worse. Especially when combined with the realities of what students pay for college, and what the debt burdens mean afterward regardless of the strong likelihood that they will be underemployed, any degree can seem an asset speculation in a market that looks as if it is heading for a crash with no one likely to bail them out.

Few of those who champion liberal arts education are willing to acknowledge any of this, precisely because they have little answer for it.

Instead they fall back on platitudes about education's adding "enrichment to personal lives," only affirming how out of touch they are even when earnestly trying to prove the opposite to the public.