In our view, liberal education requires that students, like rowers, face backward in order to move forward. If they are to become active and reflective individuals, they must learn to regard the past not merely as the crime scene of bygone ages, but as the record of human possibilities—an always unfinished tapestry of admirable and shameful lives, noble and base deeds. . . [they must] allow themselves to be inwardly formed and cultivated by the classics—what the English critic Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.” –Jacob Howland, “What the Freshman Class Needs to Read,” The Atlantic, August 24, 2024

During the past year, I’ve read a bevy of journal articles making much ado about liberal education. Some pronounce the death of it, bestowing last rites to humanities majors; others defend its inclusion in our universities, and still others argue for its renaissance in a culture that has increasingly abandoned it. In light of these diverse views, I read Howland’s Atlantic article, “What the Freshman Class Needs to Read” with guarded interest.

He had me at the claim that students, like rowers, face backward in order to move forward. He’s clearly not performing burial rites for liberal arts, I thought, as he cited Matthew Arnold’s defense of the classics as “the best which has been thought and said.” Howland described a classic work as one “with imperishable cultural vitality,” offering the Hebrew Bible and Homer’s Iliad as examples. He contends that [“a] liberal education must begin at the beginning, where strange, beguiling voices of the distant past speak with authority of what it means to be human.”

As I read on, Howland preached to the choir of liberal arts proponents in passages like this:

Today’s students tend to value social influence more than human excellence. Worse, they pay more heed to antiheroes—people who tear down civilization—than heroes: those who protect, repair, and rebuild it. So, at the outset of their studies, we think undergraduates should encounter not just thinkers and writers but also founders, doers, leaders, and pioneers such as Abraham and Socrates, da Vinci and Mozart, Lincoln and Churchill. They should study the works of great men, to use another unfashionable phrase, but also of great women: Sojourner Truth and Malala Yousafzai, Ada Lovelace and Lise Meitner. It is no small part of a liberal education to show students the broad range of meaningful lives they might aspire to lead.

Like Howland, I believe a liberal arts education is valuable and that much ado should be made about it. I concede my bias, but I also acknowledge my familiarity with opposing arguments, namely that a liberal arts education is impractical, colonialist, exclusive, elitist, and irrelevant. Certainly, good arguments can–and should–be made for including new and diverse voices in the literary canon and for acknowledging centuries of “white-washing.” I’ve heard and read these arguments for years. I’ve seen major textbook companies flush the likes of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner from their anthologies because they were dead, white males who were no longer relevant and represented the worst of our paternalistic practices.

And I’ve witnessed cultural and literary flattening. Turning away from classic works, many postmodernists reject tragic heroes and, instead, embrace antiheroes. My father referred to this as “writing down.” In the introduction to his collection, Greatest Hits: Don Welch 1975-2001, he commented on his poem, “The Unicorn:”

“The Unicorn” is a poem about the loss of belief, especially the nihilism of the second half of the century. Beginning with the 1960’s it became fashionable to talk down, dress down, act down, eat down, and believe down, although there was also a small effort to dream up.

Like Howland, my father valued a liberal arts education because it offers the kind of heroes who protect, repair, and rebuild civilization, who dream up and value the pursuit of human excellence. The last time I taught Hemingway’s classic novel, The Old Man and the Sea, to a group of high school students, I was met with collective groans about its value. What’s the point? they asked. It’s just 128 pages of a pathetic old guy losing his battle with a big fish, they whined. (One student did, however, point out that the book was relatively short, the only marginally positive comment from the group.) In spite of my best efforts, few students embraced Santiago’s heroism. They’d flattened Hemingway’s hero into a loser, failing to honor his efforts to dream up.

At my university alma mater, students currently must enroll in only one 3-hour humanities course to meet the General Studies requirements for graduation. Here, as in other universities, a liberal arts education for many students has been reduced to a single semester course. In some of these institutions, you might not be able to major in philosophy or literature because they’ve cut these majors and have decimated their respective departments. The message seems all too clear: Out with the old, in with the new.

So much for looking backward in order to move forward. Too often we seem hellbent to move forward without giving much thought to the past. For years, I heard educational experts tout the benefits of technology in the classroom. Just teach students how to use it, they argued, and watch the progress we’ll make with student achievement. But consider the research on how this technology affects brain chemistry, how we’re losing the ability to memorize, to perform basic math, to read critically, and–this is the big one–to think for ourselves. And consider the schools who are now going “old school” with print materials and no-cell phone policies. They’re looking backwards to the days before the proliferation of technology in order to move forward. Their answer to progress seems clear: Out with the new, and back in with the old.

A day after I’d read Howland’s article, I discovered Ezekial Emmanuel’s article, “The Worst Advice Parents Can Give First-Year Students” (The Atlantic, August 25, 2024). He opens by featuring Ben Franklin’s curiosity and desire to improve the world and argues that parents should promote such values:

When parents send their children off to college, they need to encourage them not to focus on narrow careers but to acquire the sort of all-purpose intellectual skills that allowed Franklin to thrive: the ability to ask deep questions and wrestle with big issues like human equality, the limits of individual freedom, and justice. Students need to learn how to reason critically; to distinguish bad, baseless ideas from deep and eternal insights; to justify their views; and to express those views lucidly enough for others to grasp. These skills have proved essential for thousands of years and will never become obsolete.

Of course, he knows that “[m]ost universities are no longer set up to impart such skills, having deemphasized their core curricula in favor of offering more and more specialized majors and courses.” He understands that it’s become increasingly difficult to find the kind of liberal arts education in which students wrestle with big issues, learn to reason, read, listen, and communicate critically.

Emmanuel concedes that higher tuition costs have driven students, parents, and society to “adopt a narrow investment approach to higher education,” with hopes for “tangible returns denoted in postgraduate salaries.” Still, he argues for the benefits a liberal arts education–as opposed to “career training”–may provide:

Despite this, college students should take a wide range of courses and resist being pushed into majoring in business, economics, or computer science by default. Who knows what transformative insights and ideas they might gain from courses in art history, or the great American plays, or ancient political philosophy, or Russian novels? Serendipity is what makes college a truly educational experience, not just career training.

Whether or not to preserve and promote a liberal arts education may be more than an ideological battle, though. We may be forced to limit or abandon liberal arts courses simply because we can’t find the people to teach them. I recently learned of some high schools in the Nebraska Sandhills who’ve hired their English teachers from the Phillipines. For years, we’ve outsourced physicians from around the world to serve our rural areas, but English teachers? Students enrolled in high school English courses do much more than learn to speak and write the language well. Traditionally, they learn to read and think critically, to speak and write effectively, and to discover “the best which has been thought and said.” In the years to come, will we be tasked with finding American literature teachers from outside of America? Or will we choose to abandon such courses altogether as we narrow our curriculum and shift our priorities to career training?

Let me be clear: I’m a proponent of career training–just not at the expense of the liberal arts. We can, and should, embrace both. In light of this, we should be alarmed by the cuts to K-12 and postsecondary liberal arts programs. We should consider the efficacy of moving forward without looking back. And we should make much ado about this, for it is something worthy of serious consideration.

Photo by Michal Mancewicz, Unsplash

The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark… Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas – a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak. –Jodi Picoult, My Sisters’ Keeper

It’s 10:38, and I’ve just opened my Kindle to read in bed when my phone buzzes. It’s a FaceTime call from my grandson, Griffin. When I answer, he says, “Oh sorry, Grandma, I didn’t know you’d be in bed yet.” I assure him that I’ve just started to read when, a bit breathless, he blurts, “Do you want to come over on the deck and watch for meteors with me?”

I throw on some clothes, grab a blanket and flashlight, and make my way over to his house where he’s lying on a yoga mat, eyes fixed on the night sky. His dogs announce my arrival as I make my way up the deck stairs. He pats the mat to his right, inviting me to take my assigned position beside him. And we lie there, a whole grammar made of light above us, the night is falling down around us. For a few perfect moments, we take it all in: the silence, the starlit sky, the companionship.

And then his bright words percolate through the dark. He’s teaching me all he knows about the Milky Way, the speed of light, the night sky. With the patience of a good teacher, he warns me not to be fooled by the flashing lights of planes. You might think it’s a meteor, he cautions, but look closely for the three blinking lights. As he spots small meteors, he turns to me, hopeful. Did you see it, Grandma? Chastened, I admit that I didn’t. How can he see these small flashes? How can he, a boy who struggles to sit still for more than 60 seconds, remain so vigilant? Still, he continues his narration of interesting celestial facts as he encourages me to keep moving my eyes around the sky.

I feel him put his hand on my forearm and turn to see him pointing toward the northern sky. There, he motions, did you see it? I’m disappointing him. I’m disappointing myself. After 10 minutes of sky-watching, I haven’t seen a single meteor. But just as I’m ready to confess my failure, we both gasp as a meteor streaks across the west. I saw it! I say, That was awesome! He’s smiling as he admits that this was an even bigger one than he’d seen the night before. I’m smiling because I can see how happy he is that his tutelage has been successful.

We lie there in a post-game reverie, recounting the moment we both saw the meteor, declaring its beauty, and sharing our great joy. Above, the Milky Way stretches a filmy trail, a plane bisects our view, and pair of bats swoops perilously low. Bats! Griffin says. We giggle and pull our blankets over our heads. Emerging to find more bats flitting above us, he announces that he’s ready to call it a night.

As I walk the 100 yards home to my house, I navigate the familiar terrain with my face turned to the sky. But I don’t see another meteor. And it doesn’t matter. I shared one with Griffin, and this was more than enough.

Days later, I’ve been thinking about the shared moments my grandson and I’ve had. Earlier this summer as we were feeding the fish in our pond, we witnessed our favorite Koi swimming so closely to the edge that we might’ve reached out to touch them. They’ve been notoriously coy (forgive the bad pun!), hiding out in the shadowy eastern corner where it’s almost impossible to see them. On this night, however, flashing their fan tails and brilliant colors, they swam leisurely back and forth along the bank. Having just thrown the last handfuls of food into the pond, we turned to each other, smiling. That was awesome! he exclaimed. We could see them so clearly! It was Diesel and Angel-–oh, and Pumpkin swam by once, too! I nodded. Griffin has named all the Koi, and only we can identify them by name. I hope we see Camo next time, he said. He’s old and might not be around for long. In the June twilight, we walked back from the pond together without talking. I wondered if he was thinking what I was thinking, that, at 69, I might not be around for long.

I hoped he wasn’t, but I remembered a stormy night months before when we’d lost power. I called my daughter to see if they needed extra flashlights, volunteering to bring some over. In the background, I heard Griffin say, Don’t let her come over, Mom. She’s old, and we need her to survive. I chuckled and remarked, I don’t think my survival is at stake! But at 10, he did.

Recently, I’ve recognized how he’s assumed the role of caretaker. Last night he asked if I was o.k. to drive our sport utility vehicle home. I can back it up for you, he offered. When I assured him that I’d be fine, he watched me back out of his driveway and head for home. Like an anxious parent, he watched until he could no longer see me before he turned to go inside.

Lately, when I pitch the whiffle ball to him, he’s taken to walking into the outfield with me as I retrieve his balls. Sometimes he stoops to pick up the ball and hand it to me; other times, he just accompanies me as I retrieve it. In part, he does this out of gratitude that I’m willing to pitch and retrieve his balls. But in part, I fear he does this because he sees that I’m walking–not running–to field balls, that he knows I’m no spring chicken. Sometimes as we walk together, we talk about baseball; most often, however, we just walk in companionable silence, content just to be together. Between us, there is a whole grammar made of light where no words are necessary.

Last night, he wanted to drive me around in our sport utility vehicle. There is one particular stretch of gravel drive that invites speed. Instructing me to watch the speedometer as he sped up the hill, he pushed the accelerator. As he slowed at the top of the drive (he’s actually a really good–and safe–driver), he turned to me expectantly. 22 mph, I said. Grinning, he said, I just love this, don’t you? When I hit the gas, you’ll always see a smile that comes so eagerly to my face. I smiled and thought: What 11-year-old says uses adverbs like “eagerly”? He’s amazing, truly amazing.

At the risk of sounding corny and cliched, these moments are priceless. I’m painfully aware that Griffin is at the cusp of adolescence, a period during which he’ll undoubtedly want to spend time most of his time with peers–not his grandma. Perhaps it’s this awareness that sweetens our shared moments. These moments are meteors which flash brightly–and quickly. They are the exclamation points that punctuate my life.