Lessons From The Other Side

A former secondary schoolmate of mine, Lynda Ward, and current facebook friend, has continued a discussion about training in the art/craft of writing. At the end of one her discussions, she stated, "Liberal Arts undergraduate degrees are for studying things that you'll never actually use. Terminal degrees are for careers, for learning things that you'll use the rest of your life!"

In this current economic slowdown, when ~10% of the U.S. working populace, and give or take about the same in other countries, is not actively employed in sustainable, "fulltime" working conditions, Lynda's comments ring true.

Or do they?

I watched a program about the world economy and how the order/distribution/manufacturing cycle impacts people at the local level (wasn't it Tip O'Neill who said, "all politics is local"?). The program followed the process whereby revelers on the streets of New Orleans, Lousiana, USA, buy Mardi Gras beads to wear around their necks but where do the beads come from? Well, the name and location of the manufacturer was stamped on the bead packaging so the videography team followed the beads backwards from distributors in the U.S. to a factory in China. The head of the bead factory in China told a great story about his dedication to the workers and his need to make enough profit to support the factory. The narrative of the video changed from that of the factory owner/manager to that of the worker, where we got to see workers tightly housed in a factory dormitory so that workers could be close to the work and take turns sharing beds during the changeout of three factory shifts. Workers earned their money based on the number of completed beads they produced. Most workers went on to more highly-trained jobs at the same factory or other factories but some returned to their family farms ("farm" seeming to be a term for a tiny patch of land on the side of a road), disillusioned by the "hard" factory work compared to the simple farm life, even if their parents didn't want them to return.

Back on this side of the Pacific Ocean, I see a story about the head of a company being The CEO As Storyteller In Chief and about those who "talk too much" on the Internet Leaving 'Friendprints'.

What have I learned from these segments, these slices, of economic/technological life? Liberal arts is not dead -- history repeats itself; reading and writing eloquently, and making critical decisions about how you present yourself, are keys to succeeding in today's economy.

I do not teach at a liberal arts school. Instead, I perform my duties as an adjunct instructor at a for-profit technical institute. Therefore, why I am on a soapbox preaching about liberal arts? Because I believe in the human capacity to create more than survival, hands-on, or on-the-job skills.

But I don't know the limit that separates survival from overkill (that is, overuse of our capacity to create). More on that later.

My parents grew up on farms and wanted their children to have more than they did. I have had friends who bought and operated farms for a while and moved back to the city because running a farm was "too much work." In China, India, Africa and other "developing" economies of the world, the same is going on - more people moving off farms and into urban areas.

Therefore, for a large portion of the human population, it seems that being a primate directly attached to the natural environment is not a desirable thing to do. We really seem to enjoy leisure time, showing we're more than just animals raising other animals and plants for food, shelter and clothing.

In today's economy, that's certainly true.

My whole life is an example of a society seeing something useful in one of its own, encouraging me as a young person to seek training in arts/crafts more complex than farming such as engineering or science. Then again, I am only one example of seven billion or so, but I can extract some of my tendencies into a general human trend.

Let's ignore me for a moment. Look at yourself. You have the capacity to learn a computer system even if you don't know how to program a computer. You learned how to read, write, and type somewhere along the line, most probably through a formalized education system. You read history and learned some math. In other words, you benefit from some or all aspects of a liberal arts education: art, music, literature, languages, philosophy, politics, history, mathematics, and science.

But Lynda's argument is that a liberal arts education in and of itself is not enough - one must move forward to a higher or postgraduate degree in order to have a career [in today's economy], with acronyms like PhD, JD, MFA, etc.

I disagree. In my experience as a manager and classroom instructor, I've found it's not a person with technical training who excels in daily technical work, it's the person who thrives on learning. Thus, I'd rather hire a person trained in the liberal arts, who brings a plethora of "things that you'll never actually use" to the job along with a burning desire to learn, so that while that person is learning to master technical skills, he/she is training the rest of us in the liberal arts, helping us master skills in art, music, literature, languages, philosophy, politics, history, mathematics, and science.

I'd like to think that we humans would improve our chances for long-term survival by also mastering skills on the farm, showing us that we truly are connected to the natural environment in more ways than being inconvenienced by a passing thunderstorm on our way to and from the office place. [On a side note, I credit the wife of the current U.S. president for encouraging us to dig our hands into the soil again, even if she seems to spend most of her time shuttling back and forth from one fancy restaurant to another -- such is the life of the nouveau riche, caught between being homefolks and royalty -- a juxtaposition/dichotomy to be envied. I spent the first 10 years of home ownership by raising flowers, herbs and fruit trees, keeping a tidy lawn and neat landscape, but slowly giving way to longer and longer workhours at the office, either in the hometown or in foreign offices, so I see the difficulty in trying to do two things at once -- one or the other occupation has to suffer if one wants to spend time on a third occupation (in this case, writing) -- my yard has been a deciduous jungle for a long time now. At least the president's wife has landscape or groundskeepers to tend her garden. My "quiet millionaire next door" budget does not include professional groundskeepers.]

Since we don't farm, we develop, for lack of a better word, non-natural habits and skills we share with one another, seeking specializations that help improve our workplace worthiness economically and give us a sense of personal worth.

As we decide the economic paths to take to improve ourselves and give job opportunities for all employable persons, let's remember the skills that separate us from being repetitious automatons, skills in the area of liberal arts, as well as the skills that still put food on the table, such as farming and ranching. When deciding whether to hire a person from a technical school or a liberal arts school, I challenge all of us to hire the person who has a burning desire to learn, who'll teach others in the process, no matter whether the person's skills are in liberal arts or technology. So, too, a person fresh off the farm can be your best work asset if he/she wants to excel strongly enough.

In all cases, don't forget to add a dash of liberal arts to one's education along the way, professionally or self-taught. It's like making a gourmet meal - a little bit of the right spice turns bland to extraordinary but too much turns it into sensory overload. On the other side, one person's work of fine art is another person's forgotten background.

Lastly, in these economic times, while remaining true to the principle that humans can protect and defend their right of survival of its species, at the reasonable cost of the lives and extinction of other species, realizing our place in the confines of living in the natural environment we call Earth, there is still a place for "l'art pour l'art."