“The Liberal Arts:  A Necessary Foundation” by Jacquelyn Belcher

Community College Journal, June/July 1999, Vol. 69, No. 6

In a world where global economy, workforce preparation, and technology have become the buzzwords, what is the importance of liberal arts?  In my opinion, an important connectivity exists among all four concepts.

The history of comprehensive community colleges includes multipurpose missions.  Currently, most contain reference to the liberal arts and workforce preparation.  Such missions bridge the artificial chasm between a liberal arts education and the reality of workforce preparation.

I recently interviewed two faculty members at Georgia Perimeter College for their views about the value of liberal arts when the emphasis today seems to be on workforce preparation.  Assistant professors Lawrence Hetrick, of the humanities faculty, and editor of the international publication The Chattahoochee Review, and Jack Riggs, of the humanities faculty, were the interviewees.  They were chosen for their candor and intellectual integrity.

They agreed at the beginning of the interviews that the liberal arts made a crucial contribution to the workforce and technology needs of our students.  They focused their comments in two major areas—thinking skills and understanding culture, its values and ideas.

Thinking Skills

Query:  Discuss how the liberal arts teach students to develop thinking skills.

Hetrick:  Liberal arts courses focus on methods of critical analysis, including ‘thinking outside of the box.’  Content-based subject areas often concentrate on the mastery of subject matter to the exclusion of method. Liberal arts, in contract, are generally taught as though content is only as relevant and as important as the methods of study make it.  For example, an accounting course generally will not ask students, ‘How else can one do accounting?’ or ‘What is the best way to do accounting?’  But a philosophy class will ask these kinds of questions and many others.  A student may forget the details of Plato’s philosophy but will not forget the habits of mind and critical methods picked up in a lively introductory course in philosophy. 

Hetrick provided tow illustrations of thinking skills used in the workplace:

1. Students will be asked to think in the workforce through writing.  Liberal arts courses ask students to write essays that support their proposals about issues and their interpretations of problems.  This is what workers (especially in the computer-based technologies) actually will be expected to do on the job.  Successful professionals have reported that the further they advanced, the more they depended upon writing.  Through e-mail and other technologies, we are becoming a nation of writers.

2. Students in their liberal arts courses learn to read difficult, unfamiliar material.  This is exactly what people in the workforce will have to do.  No one will guide them through reading that financial proposal for buying out their limited partnership, that wire-transfer technical documentation, or even that 120 page corporate annual report.  Their success in understanding such things will depend to a great extent upon methods of critical reading they have learned from liberal arts like literature, history and philosophy.

Query:  Despite the obvious value of the liberal arts, many educators, in my opinion, perceive technology and workforce preparation to be the greatest threats to their existence.  What are your thoughts on this perspective?

Riggs:  The threat has existed since the industrial revolution.  As suggested by Robert Richardson in his book, Henry Thoreau, A life of the Mind, even Thoreau, in early writings, disapproved of the technology of his times.  Thoreau said of the railroad, “To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the plant.”  Yet, as Richardson points out, it was our man of Walden Pond who also recognized technology and could sometimes see the interesting addition to the geography of land that the sounds of a train or its smoke drifting across the landscape could create.  He appreciated the potential of technology and saw it, though with trepidation, as part of the greater fabric of man.

Thoreau knew where the soul of humanity lay when, in The Journal of Henry Thoreau, he said, “the arts teach us a thousand lessons.  Not a yard of cloth can be woven without the most thorough fidelity in the weaver.”  Here, technology and the arts are joined as one.  The obligation to a faithful obedience, a trait shared by both, is the key.  Technology and the arts, for our purposes, the liberal arts, become undeniably connected.

Understanding Culture, Its Values and Ideas

Query:  The liberal arts are about culture and its values and ideas.  How do you see these applications in this global, technological society?

Hetrick:  Success in the world of business and technology depends upon understanding the key cultural and social issues of our North American society, which includes, increasingly, cultures from other parts of the world.  People who understand how such issues as freedom vs. restrictions, individuality vs. conformity, and tolerance vs. intolerance have influenced our society will be capable of dealing with such issues constructively as they emerge in the workplace.  Those who do not will flounder.  A banker, a small businessperson, an accountant, a chemist, a teacher, a nurse, a construction foreman, a computer programmer—all will have to deal with the key issues and values of our culture on the job.

Riggs:  A liberal arts education requires that we interact with society, sometimes one on one, at other times within groups of like minds, and then, most provocatively and creatively, in groups of diverse thought and opinion.  Can we accomplish such interaction with technology and not become even more isolated?  I believe we can, but I am not sure we are there yet. 

We seem to be stuck on accomplishing a goal, whereby we establish an information delivery system rather than look at the information first and then establish the technology best suited for its delivery.  Technology can quickly become the engine driving education rather than education driving technology.  And when this happens, human beings are lost in a cacophony of all the bells and whistles.

Riggs believes a global economy requiring preparation of a technologically adept, competitive workforce requires the appropriate linking of technology to a liberal arts education.  He says:  “One is there to assist the other.  Technology should always be seen as a tool to assist in learning.  It is a means to the same end, an educated person.  The person with a foundation in the liberal arts will have a knowledge of self with an understanding and appreciation of others.  This is invaluable to today’s multicultural workplace.”

Jacquelyn Belcher is president of Georgia Perimeter College in Decatur, Georgia.