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.