Art as soul and practicality

Each year, the Ateneo recognizes the creative achievements of its graduating students through the Loyola Schools Awards for the Arts. The latest Dalisayan¸ a ceremony to recognize these students, was held last weekend.

I am part of the judging committee, and every year, I see winners from a variety of fields: psychology majors who dance, physics majors who write poetry, management majors who sing. Nearly all permutations between professional leanings and creative endeavors are represented.

This is nothing new in the Ateneo, where students are trained for all skills in core classes that include philosophy, theology, and the social sciences. The students are balanced in their approach to work, disciplined, joyful. They make the case for a wider adoption of liberal arts education.

Higher education has been increasingly viewed as elitist, useless, blind to the true problems of society while indoctrinating students with dangerous ideas — and liberal arts education is even more brutally castigated. A Pennsylvania State University article, for example, claimed that students need a concentration of technical skills to get a lucrative job, rather than a menu of liberal arts courses that might “dilute” their learning.

This argument assumes that technical and thinking skills are distinct, rather than complementary and thriving on each other (I refuse to call these hard vs. soft skills; the hard vs. soft divide disappeared in 1935).

The same article claims that liberal arts-educated individuals tend to be paid less, but spend more on their education, so they end up deep in debt. A 2020 Georgetown University study, however, found that a liberal arts education actually has the highest return on investment, with payoffs not immediate in the short term, but sustained over the decades of one’s career.

Part of the payoff is adaptability to new situations, rather than overreliance on one’s technical skills. Erika Hagberg, a top Google executive, for instance, credits her liberal arts education for her ability to learn new concepts quickly in the workplace, and to be intellectually “nimble.”

To be clear: Liberal arts education is not just a set of classes, but a deliberate approach to training leaders. According to the Harvard Business Review and Princeton University, liberal arts education consists of a set of integrated core classes that push students to explore problems from different disciplinary lenses, critique society, identify structures of power and abuse, find joy in learning, and discover transdisciplinary links among the natural and social sciences.

The word “liberal” does not mean free-wheeling and undisciplined. Rather, it refers to the act of liberating one’s mind from dependence on other people’s opinions. A liberal arts education, therefore, seeks to mold innovators and thinkers rather than workers. This is consequential in a world where global problems cannot be solved by technical specialization alone, as Valerie Strauss says in a 2023 Washington Post article.

It is surprising, then, that so much enmity is drawn between the liberal arts and science, when both these fields aim for students to first analyze problems systematically.

The problem with liberal arts education lies not in its spirit but its application. Ryan McIlhenny, in an article for the American Association of University Professors, worries that in focusing too much on teaching students how to “be” certain things, most institutions forget to train students to also think of themselves as “becoming,” or works in progress.

What has been lost in such education, McIlhenny says, is the notion that students must work constantly to keep their liberation, and to work for others to be liberated as well.

Last weekend, our awardees were told to keep being artists: That they still had to work to live comfortably because they needed to earn money, but it would be their art, and their education, that would keep them alive — that could help them truly change the lives of others. Most people think of art as an “outlet.” In the spirit of the Dalisayan, I would like to think of art as one’s soul. It is forever there in all of us, seeking meaning, craving a life that goes beyond the world’s demands. It has to be sustained, or everything else in the so-called practical world falls apart.

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