What are the prerequisites for an Arts degree? A young year 12 student asked this question, and his friends gave him various and sundry answers, some of the highlights being ‘a coffee machine’, ‘a poster for protesting’ and ‘a pulse’ (let it be our secret, this author added that last one at his own discretion).
Aside from making the engineers feel a little better about themselves, which we understand doesn’t happen often, and convincing the med students that spending a third decade of their life at school is a good idea, this reflects to us a harrowing reality about the way our culture sees the Arts.
The Arts are seen as trivia, a waste of time, and certainly not the stuff careers are made of. ‘What are you planning on doing with that?’ and ‘What does that get you?’ are questions for which I dare say every Arts students has a prewritten and well-rehearsed answer.
However, inlaid in those questions are the first part of the problem. Since when was Higher Education seen as simply a job funnel? When was the academy reduced to a machine that let you get jobs? Did your school ever remind you that many meaningful, serious and important careers do not require a Bachelor’s?
Some years ago, this author first heard the term ‘liberal arts education’ and was rather confused. Was there a conversative arts education down the road, where the dresses were longer, alcohol was not sold and eyebrows were raised at borderline swear words like ‘damn it’ and ‘hell no’?
Surprisingly, this was not the case. Nor was it the case that education has always functioned as little more than technical and vocational training for one’s career. Many a year 12 has complained, ‘I can solve an equation with Dijkstra’s algorithm and I know the formula for compounding interest off the top of my head, but I have no idea how to build a resume or do my taxes’. Well, ok. Maybe that was a little specific.
A liberal arts education in the West was the grandchild of the Greek trivium (Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric) and the Medieval quadrivium (music, maths, geometry, astronomy). These seven fields of study, but particularly those first three, were seen as basic equipment that one needed to be a mature and properly functioning member of society. An arts education used to be a badge of honour, a proud inheritance of a rich history of learning, passed on and refined over the generations. A young man or woman would go to university to expand their mind, to be challenged, to grow both in knowledge and maturity, to be able to defend themselves in court and speak clearly and with sound argument, to appreciate the wonder of the night sky and the harmony of music and maths.
The way that an Arts degree is esteemed in a society tells you how much of an emphasis that society places on the importance of producing well-rounded human beings who have a deep understanding and appreciation for their culture and its history. A culture that believes it has preserved something precious will see to it that its young people are encouraged and rewarded for pursuing that lineage. This author proposes that the Arts are like the Soul of the society, like the barometer of its health.
The devaluing of Arts in our culture is obviously partially due to an overemphasis on tertiary education as necessary for good jobs, but it is also because the meaningless drivel that has passed for academics in the last many decades (I’m looking at you, Frankfurt school, and your pillars; Freud, Marx and Hegel) has rotted Western civilisation from the inside out.
Today, with the advent of postmodernism, our young people are being taught that the history of their civilisation is ‘problematic’, that the classics must be silenced and deplatformed, that maths is racist, and that men can compete in women’s weightlifting and you have to like it. It turns out that believing a lie has consequences. For more on that, read The Lobster King, and the hierarchy of value among narratives.
The Arts degree has crumbled because it has been running on fumes for decades. It stands as a great sequoia, surrounded by tourists and emblazoned on postcards, though rotting from the inside. Ask Yeonmi Park what she thought about Columbia U.
Our educators would do well to remember Jesus’ words in Matthew 6, that we should seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all the other things in life that we need (like food, clothes, and a place to sleep) will be given to us also. May our universities again be captured by the brilliance of the wisdom that has been passed down through the classical education of old. May our old and our young people alike seek first the kingdom of God, seek to be a full and robust and mature person, and then think about the workforce, because there is so much more to live than living, and there is so much more to learning than degrees.
Distilled Orthopraxy 