The False Choice between the Liberal Arts and Vocational Training

Anybody who still believes in the liberal arts believes that higher education exists for a higher purpose than putting graduates in jobs. At the same time, even the truest believer has to grapple with the real harm done to graduates who can’t get the jobs they need to pay for that education. In the face of perpetually rising costs and ballooning student debt, it’s hard to keep the faith.

One response is to decouple higher education from the liberal arts tradition and reduce it to professional preparation. Several state legislatures have recently passed bills pushing public universities to cut programs with low enrollments or tying funding to job placement rates. Many faculty are understandably opposed to such moves, and in part, this is a fight about ideology. But in truth, these bills are only a push toward the edge of a cliff that universities have been running towards for some time. General education was already being crowded out by other priorities. Most students matriculate with no understanding of its purpose and a firm sense that it’s a waste of time – a hoop to jump through before they get to their major. Faculty in professional programs often feel the same, and their students have little room in their schedules to explore. Part of the blame lies on humanities professors themselves, who are often so focused on hyperspecialized research that they neither can nor want to spend their time contributing to the broad education of a bunch of 18-year-olds, or so committed to making the humanities “socially useful” that they have made themselves useless as mentors of citizens. 

As one of those true believers in the liberal arts, I lament all this. At the same time, I understand it. Politics aside, students, faculty, and administrators are usually responding to the same financial realities that motivate legislators. Champions of the liberal arts can’t avoid these realities by arguing yet again that the real point of higher education is to learn how to be a person and not how to do a job, even though that is crucially true. If we can’t solve the cost problem, we’ll end up with plenty of truth, but no students. And if we do have any students, it will often be because we’ve convinced them to do something imprudent. 

It’s good to see that people are starting to experiment. Matthew Smith offers an overview of the recent growth in “microcolleges” and other new (or old, in some cases) institutions of higher education, many of which are designed with the affordability problem squarely in mind. I visited one of these new institutions—the  College of St. Joseph the Worker— a few years back, before it had welcomed its first class. The model intrigued me. Students learn a skilled trade while also studying the Great Books, and the program enables them to graduate not only debt-free but also with a good job in hand and a college degree. 

What’s compelling about institutions like this is that they address the financial pressures not by decoupling the liberal arts from professional preparation, but by binding them more tightly together. By combining the liberal arts with the manual arts, St. Joseph the Worker attracts students who explicitly want both. And students ought to want both. Professors like me are sometimes guilty of looking down on petty concerns about money; students should want to learn for its own sake, not for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But a student who isn’t properly concerned about money, when it costs so much to be a student, does not have much of the wisdom we profess to admire. The liberal arts are the liberating arts; they are supposed to liberate us from false notions of necessity. But being a whole person certainly involves taking prudent care of your material circumstances and developing practical skills that serve others. By saddling our students with massive debts, we are imprisoning the same people we are supposed to be liberating.

No doubt it is easier to rejoin the liberal arts to the professions when you are starting from scratch, though starting from scratch has its own difficulties. Counterintuitively, it may also be easier when the professions in question are blue-collar, as in many of the experiments Smith describes. It is often easier to persuade people who work with their hands that the life of the mind is for them than it is to convince “knowledge workers” that they don’t already have a life of the mind, when they have a piece of paper that says otherwise. 

In my experience, it is often faculty and students in majors like education and medicine who are the most resistant to the liberal arts. In other white-collar fields like business, people are not so much resistant as indifferent. But in programs that train people to enter service-oriented professions, faculty and students alike tend to resist the suggestion that they are not already doing what the liberal arts do. After all, they are “thinking critically” about education or health (or whatever it may be), and “critical thinking” is in their minds what the liberal arts are all about. They give their students case studies and make them think through ethical conundrums. They give them facts and statistics about the social problems their institutions are intended to address. They promulgate an ethic of service and good citizenship. What is missing?

What is missing, of course, is a genuinely critical distance from the assumptions on which their professions rest. In my course on vocation, I divide students into small groups according to their majors, and I have them read the most radical critique of their chosen field that I can find. Education majors read Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society, for example, while anybody who wants to work in healthcare reads his Medical Nemesis. These are not books that criticize the lack of “access” to the institutions in which these students will work, or unearth those institutions’ unseemly “history,” which we today would surely never repeat. Illich challenges the whole idea of modern schooling, and he charges modern medicine with doing more harm than good. He does not describe these professions as noble critics of the unjust status quo; he charges them with being the unjust status quo. He thinks we would be better educated without schools and healthier without hospitals.

Despite the constant talk of social justice, students rarely encounter this kind of critique within their programs. Understandably: if they did, some of them might be convinced, and the program would have fewer students, or more troublesome students. By and large, white-collar institutions want “docile subjects,” as philosopher Michel Foucault called them. That is, they want people who think of themselves as critical thinkers, and who are therefore likely to accept “best practices” as the fruit of critical thought. But the critical thinking that goes on in most professional programs is textbook thinking. It is half-critical, in the same sense that the best lie is usually a half-truth. It does not go down to the root. But going to the root—that is what a real liberal arts education is for. 

Legislators’ concerns would be better addressed by encouraging the real marriage of a truly liberal education – one that liberates people from unthinking fealty to existing institutions – to serious professional training that prepares people to do the work that those institutions are supposed to enable. Without a liberal education, you can certainly get a job as a schoolteacher or a doctor. But you will be a functionary of the system. If we have problems with that system, we need fewer people to be its functionaries. Only people who can go down to the root, who can distinguish the work of education or medicine from the institution known as “school” or “hospital” are really capable of teaching in a school or healing in a hospital, because only they have the capacity to notice when school has become an obstacle to teaching, or when the hospital has become an obstacle to healing. Anyone else will have been too well-trained.

Adam Smith is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Dubuque and Associate Editor at Front Porch Republic.