Liberal Arts RDB

I find myself beginning to pity whomever suggested that vocational schools possess greater social utility and worth than liberal education, for they obviously did not take into account that all the great literary minds of the world would rise up against them with such terrible wrath. Perhaps it is their own fault for not realized that they criticized the source of all great argument and literature, neh?

And that is how I feel about liberal arts, there is no question in my mind that a liberal education is deeply necessary in creating a well-rounded member of any society and culture. Human beings who learn how to do specific tasks, and spend their life doing said tasks, without ever wondering why, or what for, are no longer human beings at all, they have become something altogether different;

robots.

To clarify, I'll use myself and my ambitions as an example. I hope to become a lawyer, hopefully a successful and well-paid one. But imagine I went about this without concern for a liberal education. I could skip straight to law school, learn the dry intricacies of our judicial system, and spend the next thirty years of my life going to a court, arguing a soulless point of law, achieving my goal, or my client's, going home with my check, and never know why!! What is the point of a career where you accomplish a goal, but don't know why you accomplish it? What will you do with money if you have never wondered at the true value of everything around you?! To live a life accomplishing set goals again and again with no depth to my thoughts would be nightmare eternal, of that I have no doubt. Liberal teaching gives depth, it gives meaning, and and yet leaves you wanting more of both. What you learn about communication and the world around you enables you to have conversations worth having. Speaking to pass along what you know, there is no joy in that, there is no life. But speaking to pass along what you feel, to share what matters to you, what confounds you, what terrifies you, that is what creates dialogue that has value in and of itself.

And oh the joy of having worthwhile dialogue with others, to share in their lives, in their thoughts, that joy is what gives worth to life, not green felt paper. Yet perhaps that is not enough for some, some concrete worth must be assigned to all things, and if it cannot be, then that thing is inherently worthless. Very well then, liberal training provides the concrete foundation of morality, it provides the ability to understand what is right and wrong, most especially in terms of our interactions with other human beings.

Smith is absolutely correct in his assertion that "it is by imagination only that we place ourselves in [another's] situation"(339). And of course, it is in the school of liberal arts that such dilly-dally skills as "imagination" are cultivated, and trained, for what self-respecting "Proffesional" would ever waste his time with such childish pursuits? Bate's asserts that "moral judgement...involves sympathetic participation with those, other than the agent himself" (339). It is in the schools of liberal arts that one is taught how to think like a person other than themself, it is in the halls of literature and rhetoric that students are shown how to become another person, to feel another's pain or joy or confusion. Nowhere in learning to build a car does one encounter a narrative of the horror of living in slavery. At no point in a dentist's training is he taught the sadness of falling in love and having it denied. It is through a liberal education that we are taught to understand narratives that are not our own, and shown how to extend our imagination into these narratives, in so doing making them part of ourselves.



So a final time I assert, as much as on the surface it seems that vocational and proffesional training are the more necessary lines of learning, if you create in yourself or another a human being incapable of understanding the value of the life they lead,