Liberal Arts in An Age of Anxiety

by emma henson, prose reader

My top twenty liberal arts college doesn’t have a literary magazine. While the administration has

been bureaucratically receptive to the notion of starting one, this particular battle has further disillusioned me to the state of liberal arts education in America. Increasingly our institutions are changing their general education requirements and programs to not only remove the arts, but implement more requirements that make it less possible in our academic schedules and daily lives to surround ourselves with artistic thought. It’s understandable why this has happened; when faced with a globalized world and tech-based international economy, our schools think the best job they can do for us is to make sure we’re solidly educated in STEM and its offshoots of economics and international affairs. While this will inevitably lead to higher post-graduate employment rates and increased average yearly earnings for students, it undermines the entire nature and aim of a broad education.

I will argue for the rest of my life that the value of liberal arts isn’t nearly so vague as an increased ability to think critically and express those new thoughts clearly and persuasively. I will argue that a liberal arts education prepares us for the vagaries of a well-lived life. At some point in the course of our years something horrific will happen to every single one of us, and the more you have read and learned at that point, the more likely you will be not only to recover but to learn something about yourself in the process. The arts don’t take us closer to an end goal of enlightenment or even enjoyment. The arts are a one-way train ride deeper into ourselves. To read and to learn is to expand a mirror that allows you to see yourself, others, and the world, in its purest light.

Our only duty as people is to learn and pay thanks to the universe by working hard at our passions and putting positive energy into the heart of things. Our educations are meant to set us free, give us the empathy and the knowledge to remove institutional perceptions, accepted notions, and societal perceptions of a what a life should encompass. The nature of existence tends to reign people in, and it is our job to refuse this. If we are no longer being set free at our colleges, but rather forced into this crisis of practicality, it is our calling to reinvest our time and our passion into artistic pursuits. Science, engineering, physics, and math all quantify the physical world, and there is value in this. But art is the study of quantifying human emotion, and nothing has ever been more noble or powerful than explaining the mystery of life back to ourselves. Our art can’t be taken from us if we refuse to stop living our questioning lives, if we revolt against the notion of applicability, if we reinvest ourselves in making commentaries on the state of things in the form of literature, essays, paintings, and music.

#emmahenson #misc