In Defense Of A Liberal Education

Fareed Zakaria’s defense of the liberal arts responds to specific attacks on liberal arts curricula and degrees in the 2010s that came from policy makers across the political spectrum. Zakaria contends that a liberal education remains valuable for all people, despite calls for increased focus on technical and vocational fields. He suggests that the latter, moreover, can also benefit from a grounding in the liberal arts. The liberal arts are not outdated and useless, as some critics suggest. According to Zakaria, they are essential for an equitable society, democracy’s survival, and innovation.

Zakaria’s book was published during the second Obama administration. One of this administration’s top educational priorities was strengthening STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education through teacher training, the creation of schools centered on STEM learning, and reforming pedagogy to center technology and engineering. These changes at the elementary and secondary levels would impact higher education in the long term. Students turned away from the humanities, arts, and social sciences in favor of STEM fields that they believed could guarantee a career. Zakaria concurs that American knowledge of the sciences needs improvement, but not at the expense of a liberal education. Indeed, the more recent rise of anti-science and anti-vaccine movements in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic lend further credence to this argument.

Zakaria suggests that we return to the productive symbiotic relationship between the sciences and humanities, using the curricular model of Yale-NUS (National University of Singapore) as a promising example. However, political support is necessary for this reform to occur, and political attacks on higher education have increased since Zakaria wrote his book. Most institutions of higher education are publicly funded (unlike Yale, which is private), and thus legislators and governors who determine their budgets must understand and support the liberal arts’ role in both sustaining a healthy democracy and cultivating successful careers. Zakaria cites CEOs who argue that they value the liberal arts backgrounds of their employees because they bring creativity and critical thinking into the workplace. Zakaria asserts, however, that the liberal arts are not simply valuable for the workers they produce for the capitalist marketplace—their study also makes life better because they introduce us to ideas and knowledge to which we might otherwise have limited access.

It is this very access to knowledge that makes the liberal arts dangerous, as Zakaria points out. Fear about liberal arts education is especially high in the United States. Critics have claimed that critical race theory is taught in curricula from the elementary to college levels (even though it is largely taught at the graduate level and in law schools), and some states, like Texas and Florida, have banned or limited teaching certain topics deemed “divisive,” like the history of race and racism, as part of this attack. Colleges and universities are not immune to these attacks since legislators may use public funding as a mechanism to dictate what is or is not taught, thus encroaching on faculty members’ academic freedom. Likewise, wealthy donors to both public and private institutions may choose to limit their donations based on this ongoing educational culture war.

The liberal arts are at the center of this ideological battle since these subjects cover topics like the history of American enslavement, the civil rights movement, contemporary issues focused on LGBTQ+ communities and other marginalized groups, women’s history, the sociology of gender, and the study of a diverse body of literature, among other things. Opposition to a liberal education persists, making Zakaria’s defense even more relevant than it was upon its release in 2014.