Lately I have been working on an essay for a scholarship contest about the value of the liberal arts. I have invested more time on it than I thought I would, learning the history of liberal arts, how it traces back to Ancient Greece when Plato outlined the basics of the liberal arts curriculum and how it's purpose was to make democracy plausible. I've read last year's winning essays to see what they are looking for. As a writer, I need to find balance between what I want to say and what people what to hear. I also read my best friend's essay on the value of the liberal arts, which he is not going to submit because he is not going to a liberal arts school (and his essay is ten pages--the word limit is five hundred--but that's Mikaele for you). I also read an essay by Todd Gitlin that he referenced heavily in Mikaele's essay, and it was so inspirational I read the entire thing. But more on that later. I've also emailed my Grandma for help, who, before she retired, was a college professor of the classics and Greek language. I emailed her the rough draft today so she can review it. And I made an appointment at Peninsula College with the Writing Lab so it can be reviewed there by a professor. I spent approximately three hours working on it today, as the deadline is two days from now. Here is my draft as of now:
There are three potential purposes for education: preparation for professional life, civic life, and personal life. The former increasingly takes precedence in our society over the two latter; most students are conditioned to believe that the single object of matriculating is to eventually secure decent employment. However, until climbing the socioeconomic ladder became the ultimate goal, education meant much more. In the case of liberal arts, the purpose of education is to allow a free person to actively participate in government; produce a well-rounded, cultured citizen capable of complex thinking; and live a meaningful and productive life.
Our current education system contrasts that of the Ancient Greeks, where the liberal arts originated—not surprising considering Ancient Greece produced the greatest thinkers of all time and is the only society with a government comparable to the great American democracy. Plato outlined this curriculum: the seven liberal arts, in classical antiquity, worked together to create a basis for education. Essentially, one learns how to learn.
The original intent of a liberal arts education is to create a population that would make democracy plausible. Each individual shall to be an informed, virtuous citizen capable of actively participating in public debate, serving on juries, defending oneself in court, and electing qualified representatives. We, as members of a free nation, are obligated to contribute to our country through public forum. Intelligence is worthless without the ability to exercise it. Without articulation and rhetoric, ideas remain quiescent. Society is propelled by the minds who communicate effectively. Moreover, not only do the leaders of society require the ability to think on a higher plane of thought, but—perhaps even more importantly—a free person needs to effectively govern himself. Otherwise, power may be corrupted when individuals cannot keep their politicians in check.
With this in mind, the liberal arts are now perhaps more relevant than ever. The world today is, in the words of Todd Gitlin, a glut of saturated information and images, much of it meaningless and redundant in the form of cheap culture from television or other media. American lifestyle is high-velocity, constantly in flux when the human condition prescribes a more stationary existence.
This is where the liberal arts come in: productive citizens needn’t be fed even more information only so they can merely regurgitate it back to their successors; they need the tools with which to process this information. Even if a student has a superior ability to recall facts, the need to do so becomes obsolete when the phenomenon “The Google Effect” lets the internet do that with far greater speed and accuracy. In a culture concentrated with information, the ability to think critically is threatened because an unhealthy reliance on outside thinking is imposed. Knowledge is only the first tier of Bloom’s Taxonomy: information alone does not make us more intelligent as intelligence is not measured by the amount known but rather the extent to which we are able to comprehend, apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate this information.
A liberal arts education can even—contrary to popular belief—be the right choice in regard to the assumed main purpose of higher education: to get a good job. Indeed, employers now look for communication, analytical, management, and problem solving skills—all of which are found in a liberal arts degree. The average American has six to ten jobs in her life; a liberal arts education is the most adaptable. In addition—though we seem to somehow place seriousness on the STEM subjects and careers in those areas, deeming them “real” jobs—we don’t know what kind of jobs will be the highest paying or in the highest demand in the future; the job market is constantly adapting to new inventions, technologies and lifestyles.
Finally, politics and careers aside, on a personal level, education can help one achieve a better sense of self. A liberal arts degree is the most effective in this regard because it teaches the student to find the material’s relevance to their own life, and by exposing her to different subjects and points of view, makes her a more well-rounded being. Many people with a degree don’t end up applying it to a job, but it helped them in the long run because it exposed them to new environments and challenged them.
So yeah, I hate word limits. The word limit is five hundred and mine is over seven hundred. This essay is comparable to my personal statement. That was the most challenging piece of writing I've ever been faced with, as I have seventeen years of content to condense into a little over a single-spaced page.
My favorite concept in this subject is the theory Gitlin proposes about the liberal arts being increasingly important in an age of "info glut." In writing this essay, I noticed myself looking around more at the world around me as I did normal day-to-day things. I recalled that I am living in a upon watching television and questioned this practice; likewise, I realized that some of my research I did on this topic led me to petty entertainment-based magazine-style websites. "As a student of the liberal arts," I declared, "I have the ability to process information and distinguish between reliable sources and otherwise." Then I promptly went to Peninsula College's research database to look for more credible, scholarly articles. I haven't even started my liberal arts post-secondary education and I'm already benefiting from it!
One thing that may be a stretch is my analysis of the relevance and worth of recipes. Yes, cooking recipes, like from cookbooks and pinterest. In essence, recipes are a ready-made formula for preparing food that is supposed to make the lives of cooks easier. I venture to argue that recipes do not make life easier, and even hamper the process of truly learning how to cook. Following a recipe does not mean you know how to cook; it means you know how to follow a list of directions. First of all, most "recipes" are just a combination of different foods arranged in a certain way, and anyone could have thought to put avocados and tomatoes on a slab of bread or to put cabbage and carrots on some greens in a salad. Also, many recipes include ingredients that are not in season at the same times of the year, and often times will contain ingredients that either the cook does not like to eat or currently have in the kitchen. Often, the cook will have to go to the grocery store and buy ingredients for something they saw in a magazine instead of creating something of her own out of the ingredients already in her fridge. Recipes, in fact, are inconvenient and irrelevant. They ignore the enormous complexity of the question "what do I eat?" The true process of cooking involves chemistry to some extent: learning what makes the bread rise, or what combination of ingredients make a cake qualify as a cake, or how to boil something without burning it are examples of the kinds of things cooks need to know but aren't included in recipes. If they know these basic essentials, though, they can make all their own "recipes." Same could be said for DIY projects: they rely on outside thinking instead of being creative and resourceful with what one already has. I looked up vegan cake the other day and found a normal cake recipe only with vegan butter, presented by The Minimalist Baker. I could have thought of that! What I was really looking for was a different definition of cake: how to imitate the texture, taste and chemistry in a completely alternative way. After all, what makes a cake, a cake? You know, after going through a baking phase when I was thirteen where I made a different cake every weekend, I still don't know the answer to that. A lot of the ingredients and processes are a blur in my mind because I was blindly following a recipe, not completely engaged and aware of the process.
This phenomenon is new to our generation: when my dad taught me how to make oatmeal, I would insist on writing down the "recipe" because I wanted to be completely organized. He said there was no recipe; he throws in the spices and sweeteners he has on hand and adjusts the amounts to how many servings he's making. He seldom uses measuring cups. My mother says using measuring tools is imperative only when baking because amounts need to be exact lest they disrupt the chemistry of the product. That's the information I need to know.
Likewise, older cookbooks have a different approach than newer ones. My grandmother's cookbook has a simple lay out of all the recipes: the dry ingredients are grouped together and the wet ingredients are grouped together, and then you add the two groups. This is essentially what baking is, finding that out after weeks of experience with a more modern, unnecessarily complicated cookbook that contains long lists of ingredients and blurbs of instructions that occupy large amounts of space on the page. In addition, this cookbook includes pages on different ways to make cake (the Double-Quick Method or the Simplified Creaming Method?) which truly teaches HOW to cook. It also has a different way of presenting recipes: for some, there is a "Key" recipe that serves as the basic version, and then there are instructions for modifying it for variations on that recipe. For example, there is a basic Chiffon cake, and then a chocolate chip, maple pecan, butterscotch, spice, orange, holiday fruit, peppermint chip, cherry-nut, bit o' walnut, mahogany, and banana variation that uses the same recipe using added special ingredients, and changing certain things like omitting or decreasing certain other ingredients, using a different pan, adjusting bake time or temperature, etc. The older way takes into account the big picture of the process, and newer doesn't distinguish between the main ingredients like pasta and the minuscule ones like salt. The reader doesn't understand that what she is making is essentially pasta with spices, until she makes it: what she sees is several ingredients that include pasta and spices listed on a page in front of her. Now if only she had a liberal arts education, she could make sense of it....
A truth I've learned through this process of writing my essay about the liberal arts is that much of the information we receive is not asked for. We didn't know we needed it until it was glittered in our faces. I looked up vegan lunch ideas today and some of them were things like an avocado on toast. I've already been doing that! But it looks so glamorous in the photo in the "Oh She Glows" blog article... and yet so simple and normal in real life. This stirs two responses in me: one, condemnation of the media and disdain for its deceitfulness; and two, a newly awoken appreciation for how beautiful real life is.