A Time for Liberal Arts

A study prepared at the request of the U.S. Congress has shown that negligence on the part of the education system to teach social sciences and other liberal arts subjects can have significant detrimental effects on the future of the United States.

The conclusions that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences study, entitled “The Heart of the Matter,” suggests might seem counterintuitive to a Polish audience. While in Poland there has been a trend to discourage the “unproductive” disciplines, many sociologists in the U.S. have criticized the American system for limiting itself exclusively to “practical” knowledge.

According to them, it is necessary to teach young people disciplines that encourage them to think critically, which is of paramount importance to a democracy. Meanwhile, the “professional” model makes a priority of practical jobs skills. As a result, there are many graduates who finish school as great specialists in their fields but are not aware of basic historical facts about their own country.

The Result of Ignorance

The authors of the report emphasize the danger facing American society, with 55 percent of U.S. high school graduates not knowing basic facts about their country’s history and major historical events being simplified to the point of fiction, a la Hollywood. The fact that only 30 percent of American history teachers actually studied history in college can explain this.

The high level of education provided by universities, such as the ones belonging to the Ivy League, does not spill over to the majority of U.S. high schools. The backbone of the university system, community colleges, has long had a quality problem.

A college education is the main pathway for immigrants in the U.S. to climb the social ladder. As a result, many of these students graduate without having gained anything in the way of civics.

The report also included a warning of the effects of the state of the education system on national security. The authors emphasized that for a nation so involved in international events, it is critical to have American students learn about other cultures and foreign languages.

The American public’s ignorance of world events is well-known. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in the deployment of young men who had no idea where they were sent, causing needless tensions with the local populations out of ignorance. This ignorance was not only reserved to front-line troops, but extended all the way to business executives, who often put themselves into problematic and easily avoidable situations while pursuing business in those countries.

The teaching of liberal arts suffered after the onset of the financial crisis. As a result of financial difficulties, many school districts cut subjects that were seen as optional, which often included humanities and liberal arts.

It should be noted that the Obama administration has taken steps to boost American ratings, which are embarrassingly low, in worldwide rankings. However, most of these efforts have been aimed at STEM education (science, technology, engineering and mathematics); without humanities, it will be hard to keep America competitive and its citizens engaged.

Taking Philosophers to the Assembly Lines

The conclusions reached by these American experts are important, especially in light of the recent efforts by Polish education reformers to push professional education and force children to pick their career path basically by the time they graduate high school.

The argument is always the same: The job market has a need for it and little appetite for subjects like philosophy, sociology, psychology, etc. The problem is that the Polish job market also has too many specialized workers, such as lawyers or managers. A diploma cannot guarantee a job these days. The emphasis is on “elastic” abilities, which are easy to fit into any job category.

“Today’s managers are increasingly focusing on the overall abilities of college graduates, not just their technical abilities. For example, finance people look for innate skills such as building trust, empathy and critical thinking. It’s not about just being good at Excel, but being able to convince a client. The best people for that job are ones with a humanities background,” says Roger Ferguson Jr., former manager of Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association — College Retirement Equities Fund and a contributor to the report.*

Ferguson’s ideas have been put to use in places like France, where companies managing merchandise distribution chains hired philosophy students. Though they could not analyze marketing plans, they did bring a way of thinking that was very different from the standard orthodoxy prevailing at companies and were found to be able to relate to clients more easily. In the U.K., history majors were invited to collaborate on urban planning projects; in Germany, automotive companies hired them.

There are no guarantees lawmakers will actualize the solutions the authors of “The Heart of the Matter” prescribe. They may simply ignore them. The Obama administration has shown a willingness to work on education, especially on fixing the abysmal dropout rate and boosting the U.S. in international education rankings.

The problem is that so far, most of these efforts have been directed at STEM subjects. The members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences argue that even the best physicist cannot be a fully productive citizen without a humanities background.

Avoiding Mistakes

Reflecting on Poland, can we expect our current high school students to be good citizens 20 years from now, if they finish learning history at the age of 12 and their reading list gets reduced to the bare minimum?

The ideal model, that of the interwar [the period between the two world wars] high school, is probably confined to history, but we do not have to repeat the mistakes that the Americans have made, especially if they now admit to having made them.

However, the “professional” model is ideal if we want to create a reserve of cheap labor, adept at performing monotonous work.

*Editor’s Note: Although correctly translated, this quote could not be verified.