This graduation season, we’d like to offer a little advice to students preparing for college. As you pick a major, remember the humanities matter, perhaps more now than ever.
Yes, we know we’re at the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or 4IR, when technology is replacing millions of jobs and everything from big data to biotechnology is changing the way we think about work and education. We also know the response to these changes often is to prune humanities courses in favor of technical training programs.
But we think this is a mistake.
In a time of great disruption, the humanities, and the perspective and analytical skills they provide, will become more important.
Technical and vocational schools are crucial, as is job training for 4IR. But that should not come at the expense of a liberal arts education. Classes in literature, philosophy, history, religion, political science, languages and the arts are essential. The very notion of what it is to be a free citizen in a republic was first formed then expanded by the works of Plato, Shakespeare, Smith, Jefferson, de Tocqueville, Whitman, Dickenson, Du Bois and Baldwin.
As philosophy professor Scott Samuelson wrote in a 2014 article, “Why I Teach Plato to Plumbers,” for The Atlantic, “We should strive to be a society of free people, not simply one of well-compensated managers and employees.” When considered in this light, the liberal arts are essential to any functioning liberal democracy and the American experiment as a whole.
Furthermore, the assumption that “pragmatic” fields are better for students is questionable at best. A 2014 study by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems found that, by their mid-50s, liberal arts majors with advanced or undergraduate degrees on average earn higher salaries than those who studied in professional and pre-professional fields.
While the value of a reliable livelihood cannot be overstated, perhaps the greater value is the overall benefit of a liberal arts education to our society, culture and politics. Dallas is lucky to be home to the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, which strives to “enrich and deepen the practical life of the city with the wisdom and imagination of the humanities.”
As part of this mission, the institute awards the Hiett Prize in the Humanities each year to an individual “whose work shows extraordinary promise to have a significant impact on contemporary culture.” Samuelson was the 2015 recipient, and last year the prize went to James Matthew Wilson, a poet, critic and scholar of philosophical-theology and literature at Villanova University.
In his acceptance speech, Wilson spoke of literature as “moral instruction” about events. “To know the truth,” he continued, “we have to know what things are good for. To know the truth about ourselves, we have to know what we’re good for. And that entails knowing our story.”
This — telling stories and knowing the truth — is what the humanities offers. And it is, perhaps, the key ingredient to the continued success of our American experiment. Now is not the time to retreat on this front.
Surely, the demands of 4IR and our ever-accelerating society will be enriched by what we rightly call the “humanities.”
— The Dallas Morning News
