The Liberal Arts: Why knowing about Shakespeare and Beethoven is vital for a lifetime of success

Liberal arts are vanishing in education. That is dangerous. Here’s why

Do 19th century novels, 18th century music and 17th century paintings really have anything to teach students today?

Our modern society doesn’t seem to think so. In an attempt to level up our children in standardized educational testing, which is widely seen now as the ultimate marker of scholastic achievement, we’ve made a quiet pact with the devil: We have accepted the notion that fact-based multiple choice curricula are the gold standard, and that we have no place or time for that luxury that is often disparagingly called “the humanities.” We have to catch up! To what? To other countries! To our high standards of the past! To…

…Federal mandates for funding.

In those other countries we are trying to achieve parity with, they are not forgoing art, music, literature, and other “luxuries” of education. Just as other countries can offer their citizens universal healthcare while in the U.S. “it’s impossible,” they can offer children a balanced diet of learning.

“Life is not multiple choice”

Some years ago I was in an art gallery in Carmel, California, engaged in a conversation with one of its employees, a woman who had a Eastern Europeanish accent. At some point our wide-ranging conversation turned to education in the United States. She had three children enrolled in the local school system. Her husband was an architect.

She was well read in four languages (Russian, Hungarian, English and French), could converse on topic ranging from war and peace to War and Peace. And when we got to the subject of test-taking in American schools, I’ll always remember one thing she said:

“Life is not multiple choice.”

Indeed. The world, which school is supposed to prepare us for, is richer, murkier, more complex.

“Everything is in shades of gray,” she sad. “Not simply A, B, C, or D.” She meant that students (and adults) have to learn to see false correlations, detect faulty syllogisms, and—most importantly—understand life from other points of view, both in geography and in history.

America has always had an ethic of practicality—and they're not alone

It’s not only the U.S.A. that has become doubtful about the benefits of studying humanities. In the UK, as Steven M. Oberhelman, Professor of Greek and Latin at Texas A&M University, points out. “In the United Kingdom, STEM programs are emphasized, with extra government funding allocated to them at the expense of humanities programs, which are deemed ‘less essential’; this has led, in turn, to universities cutting humanities courses due to lack of monetary support and students. The government of China has outlined a strategy to turn 42 universities into top-ranked institutions dedicated to science and technology.”

So the battle for humanities is not a uniquely American phenomenon, although from my personal observations many liberal arts curricula in other countries are better funded, even if there are complaints. (When aren't there complaints?) Everyone seems to look to the past as the "good old days."

Aside from America’s utilitarian ethos, which writers from Tocqueville to Richard Hofstadter have observed, another reason for a stronger humanities showing in other cultures may be more unity in those cultures. As Allan Bloom observed in his controversial best-seller The Closing of the America Mind, “It is a complex set of experiences that enables one to say so simply, ‘He is a Scrooge.’” We in the West once shared a cultural shorthand that has vanished in the last generation or so. These references are no longer widely shared or viewed as important, and in some circles are even seen as dog whistles for racism and ethnic superiority.

So studying artifacts of a bygone era can seem pointless. Naysayers love to point out how liberal arts majors spend their lives pulling espresso shots. There’s no shortage of articles and videos online about how humanities degrees are the most regretted. But analyses of liberal arts graduates reveal this to be more myth than truth. Yes, if you look at the employees in coffee houses you will indeed find the stereotype, similarly to how if you look inside a hospital you will find sick people and if you look inside a church will find the religious. That doesn’t mean everyone in the rest of the city is ill or religious. What the “coffee shop test” does not reveal is all the liberal arts students who then went on to careers in science, teaching, law and other areas.

You won’t find them in coffee shops.

Long-term, their earnings can rival, and even top, STEM grads

Long-term studies of those who majored in the arts and humanities reveals their earnings power eventually catches up to those of the more “practical” math, science and business degrees. The Strada Education Foundation is just one organization to report the the overall earning power of such degrees is roughly comparable. Among other things, it found:

• Liberal arts grads fare well in the job market, earning at least $20,000 more than the average high school graduate; the top 25 percent earn as much as their math, science and business counterparts.

  
  

• Liberal arts grads peak later in their careers, becoming higher income earners in the 30s and 40s and beyond. Most studies only look at salaries right after graduation. The data indicates they indeed often change jobs or careers more often before they find their ideal place, as a liberal arts degree gives you a wider field to look into (and that’s probably why many students take it). But find their place they eventually do.

  
  

• Liberal arts majors transition from entry-level, low-paying jobs to high-skill, high-demand careers in marketing, public relations, management and HR. Following up the liberal arts degree with a graduate degree often facilitates this.

Employers today say they are increasingly frustrated by the poor communication skills, short attention spans and narrow knowledge base of their newer hires. They complain that these hires don’t even try to think; they just look for everything they need on their phones. Humanities foster exactly the cognitive-broadening and problem-solving abilities so many modern jobs require: Teamwork. Having a broad perspective. Know about how things worked in the past, what did and what didn’t. Understanding other cultures. Being able to detect faulty or unsound reasoning. You want to sharpen your analytical skills? Read some Dostoevsky or Fitzgerald or Austin or David Foster Wallace.

But HR managers and particularly tech people in HR often aren’t aware of this. They think humanities grads spent their college years writing fluff papers about camera angles in Citizen Kane. And yes there is some truth to this. But such a verdict is like viewing the immensity of the humanities through a keyhole.

A surprising number of tech chiefs have arts backgrounds

Probably the most famous individual in all of tech, one Steven Paul Jobs, studied calligraphy at Reed College. Years later he would say, “If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.” He also claims to have found inspiration in everything from Beethoven to the Beatles to Dylan Thomas.

Flickr’s co-founder, Stewart Butterfield, and hedge fund manager George Soros both studied philosophy, while Flickr’s other co-founder, Caterina Fake, majored in English, as did Disney’s Michael Eisner. Hewlett Packard’s Carly Fiorina chose the combined worthless degrees of medieval history and philosophy, while Sherwin Williams’ CEO Christopher Connor studied sociology. Ex-IBM CEO Sam Palmisano has a history sheepskin on his wall. YouTube’s creator, Chad Hurley majored in Fine Art.

Chipotle founder Steve Ells studied art history, as did GOOP founder Gwyneth Paltrow. (Of course, she did start out in the arts.) Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says liberal arts was one of the focuses in college that made him a valuable fit for the C-suite. “Learning all of the… really important basics of engineering, but then marrying that with liberal arts, that really taught me to communicate in a compelling way, which is an absolute necessity when you’re in a leadership position.”

And that’s just scratching the surface. You could argue that I’m just cherry-picking, but that’s not the point. The point is these “worthless” degrees were and are useful because they give students the “big picture,” help them find a passion in this diverse world and allow them to articulate their visions and analyze their options clearly—skills and qualities no courses in full stack development or cybersecurity can give.

Which is perhaps why so many of today's tech heads prefer to spend their millions on digital images attached to an NFT.

The arts and sciences were once joined at the hip

Once upon a time, science had a very close relationship to the humanities and arts. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was inspired by philosopher David Hume. Einstein also played the violin and said that the music of Mozart helped him unravel the cosmos. His son Hans Albert noted that whenever he faced intellectual roadblocks, he would retreat to music, which invariably helped him resolve difficulties. He described his creative process as beginning with improvisation, followed by seeking inspiration from Mozart’s compositions, and finally relying on Bach’s clear structures to refine his ideas. Today this view would seem hippie-kooky in Silicon Valley. Oh, and because of Einstein’s considerable body of knowledge outside of physics, he was asked to be the first president of Israel (and politely declined). Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

Earlier scientists, like Isaac Newton, were deemed “natural philosophers.” Their creativity came from their understanding of the humanities. Medicine was influenced by a Greek philosopher, Hippocrates. Maria Sibylla Merian was a pioneering naturalist and entomologist who combined her artistic skills with scientific observation. Her detailed illustrations documented insect life cycles and the process of pollination, significantly advancing entomology. Charles Darwin explored the connection between art and nature in his writings, and was greatly inspired and influenced by the visual arts.

However, as Neil Mahto, a student at Johns Hopkins University, states:

“…sometime in the latter half of the19th century, around the same time capitalism became the predominant global economic system, science and philosophy began to split and at the beginning of the 21st century, the humanities and STEM had an ocean between them.”

He then makes this interesting observation:

“…Physics, the most fundamental science, has remained largely stagnant since Einstein and has had no serious developments in the last 40 years. [He's being kind; it's closer to 50 years.] No disease has been fully eradicated except for smallpox, whose vaccine was discovered by Edward Jenner in 1796. Edward Jenner and Einstein’s influences can both be traced back to early philosophers, and they themselves employed philosophy in their discoveries.”

Coincidence? It would be difficult to draw a straight line from the absence of humanities studies to the lack of science successes in the last half-century. At the same time, the clinical approach to physics, a latter 20th century phenomenon that worships “beautiful math” and aesthetic symmetries in highly abstract theories, has been spectacularly unsuccessful in producing testable results.

Gimme data!

And that raises another reason humanities are struggling: our modern obsession with quantification. Everything today that can be quantified—no matter how abstract or obtuse the system—is instantly accepted over empirical evidence. We have evolved a blind belief in “big data” without seeming to acknowledge how easily it can be manipulated, as well not knowing much about how it was collected. The belief today is you can’t create any worthwhile body of knowledge without vast pools of big data. But Alexis de Tocqueville wrote what is perhaps the greatest study of America in history without massive troves of data. He simply observed. Today that method would be ridiculed. Yet has any modern scholar surpassed Democracy in America for its insight? Look by contrast at today’s social critiques with their tables and charts and graphs. Note that in five years that thinking is out of fashion, and someone else has come along with new data and new predictions.

The humanities teach us that the data that was going to revolutionize us in everything we do, every purchase we make, every thought we have, cannot compare to intense scrutiny of history and humanity—qualities found in great literature, art, and music. We’re still waiting for big data’s equivalent of a Kafkaesque moment or a Kantian revelation. Because while you can fudge data, you can’t fudge experienced truths that have stood the test of time (unlike Fukuyama’s The End of History and The Last Man). Students unversed in the liberal arts have at best only a partial education.