In today’s day and age, the liberal arts have been pushed further and further to the edge of modern education, and determined to be useless, as it isn’t where the “action is.” (Pg. 4, Misconceptions) While it is true that our current world is certainly building up the fields that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) contain, only knowing that area leaves one with an incomplete view of the world, one lopsided towards the analytical field, and if one has little to no education in the liberal arts then they’re liable to not have a complete understanding of the world around them. What the liberal arts provides is a key skill: the ability to think critically. Critical thinking is considered to be the “the set of mental practices that lends breadth, depth, clarity, and consistency to public discourse.” (Pg.2, Scheuer) What critical thinking provides is the skill to apply learnings in a way that has meaning and value. But that is not all that an education in the liberal arts provides. It provides adaptability, creativity, as well as a greater understanding of the reason why things are done the ways they are.
In my life, the liberal arts have been intertwined with the way I see the world. Since both of my parents were English majors, I already had a predisposition towards being the English major I plan to be. But even before that, I had the unique opportunity to spend my earliest years in Boston, a metropolitan city that does have strong roots in both the liberal arts and the fields of STEM. Throughout my childhood, I regularly went to the various museums in Boston, but the two that stuck out to me the most were the Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Science, one firmly rooted in the liberal arts, and one firmly rooted in STEM. Both were fascinating in their own right, and both provided answers to their own respective questions and fields. But I always found the idea that STEM was the answer to be, quite simply, limiting. What was the point of the human experience then? Is there nothing more than numbers? Now, I am hardly suggesting that one is superior to the other. Both fields are very important to pure understanding of the world around one, and both work together to solve the greatest questions in our world. They are the ingredients to the way we comprehend the world around us. But to take one without the other is unbalanced, and is the way our world has been trending. In my experience, the emphasis behind STEM is, indeed, an emphasis on immediate and quantifiable success. But, that is a destructive way of looking at the world, as well as a way of judging not just success but humanity as well. As Carol Dweck points out, a success-versus-failure mindset, also known as a “Fixed mindset”, is one that doesn’t promote true growth, simply trying to remodify one’s way of gaming the system, such as, after failing a test, choosing to “cheat the next time instead of studying more” (Dweck).
So if that is the fixed mindset, what is the converse? Well, Dweck puts forward the idea of the Growth Mindset. It’s an understanding that growth can develop, not simply that it occurs all at once or something that has a natural, immovable limit. As opposed to simply praising intelligence or talent, it is more important to build a bridge to the idea of “yet”, that it’s not about that you can or can’t, it’s that you can’t yet, that anyone is capable of anything. Now what does that have to do with the liberal arts? Well, the liberal arts help bring in the idea of yet, that there’s more to being good or bad, that it’s more about being ready or not, as that adaptability comes with the liberal arts education. It helps better round or expand the learner and helps them with situations and concepts that they don’t know. As opposed to “I can’t do that”, it’s providing that ability to say “I can’t do that yet”. This is valued in our own education system at the University of New England, as stated in the core curriculum, it states that education here is designed to “prepare students for living informed, thoughtful, and active lives in a complex and changing society.” (Core Curriculum) Even more than one specific field, which each student will be specifically educated in, there is a general mission of having at least a little learning and education in just about all fields when one has graduated. That is the idea behind liberal arts. That is the idea of there being more than STEM.
The liberal arts is an eternal work in progress, meaning that not only is it constantly being worked on and built upon, it is also working to progress the world we live in as a whole, thus the work of the liberal arts is never, ever done. That is not to say that all other areas grow, they absolutely do. Without the ideas behind STEM, we would not have the vast advances in technology and science that we have experienced in the matter of the last century. We have gained the power of flight through the concepts and ideas behind STEM. Without STEM, it would simply be impossible for me to type these words even! But to say that is where learning ends is to neglect the fact that we are humans. We are not machines who live and die only to calculate advanced math problems, to simply figure out the stress weights on the bridges we create, or the top speed of the vehicles we operate. We are more complex, diverse and frankly too erratic for that. Humans are imperfect. We need liberal arts to function, to process, analyze, and comprehend the world around us in creative ways like painting, writing, singing, dancing, or even speaking. STEM is the language of the brain. Liberal arts is the language of not only the brain, but the spiritual, unquantifiable realm of ourselves that one can only describe as the heart or the soul. In the liberal arts, there is unquantifiable beauty.
