What Liberal Arts Education Is for (2024)

In college, I took a religious studies class called The Letters of Paul. I took it for two very good reasons:

I didn’t figure it was an especially practical course. It was for fun, for the challenge, for the cultural knowledge, for the pleasure of doing it.

The class turned out to be more or less “A Letter (singular) of Paul:” we spent the semester reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, at a rate of about 3 sentences per week. Per week! Why so slow? Because we read multiple translations of each of those sentences, and multiple commentaries on them, spanning many centuries — plus a bit of social and historical context. Slow, diligent, careful. And…

We asked, over and over: What do we think Paul was thinking, given that he chose those words? What do we think each translator and each commentator thought Paul was thinking? Why do we think they thought he was thinking that? Does it really make sense for Paul to have thought that? For us to think they thought he thought that? A theory of mind hall of mirrors!

At the heart of the course was this question: What can we learn about what other people are thinking, about their mental models of the world, by paying very careful attention to the words they use?

I loved that course, but thought it had no particular relevance to my career as a software developer…until I started encountering text like this (from a presentation by Lenore Zuck ):

Section 2.7.6: Security (~ page 10) “If the system sends a signal hot then send a message to the operator.”

Section 9.3.4: Temperatures (~ page 150) “If the system sends a signal hot and T>600, then send a message to the operator.”

Summary of critical aspects (~ page 650) “When the temperature is maximum, the system should display a message on the screen unless no operator is on the site except when T<600.”

It sounds precise at first, doesn’t it? Read it carefully, though. You’ll start to notice that it is unclear, even self-contradictory. It is unclear in ways that only authorial intent can resolve. Somebody wrote this. What did they mean? What did they want? What problem were they solving? A developer could resolve the ambiguity unilaterally by guessing what the words mean, and they could build something that way — but it’s unlikely it would be a satisfactory something.

When I’m on a software project, I try to listen hard to what everyone is saying, to the words they choose. “Don’t blame me! They asked for it!” is never good enough. I ask critical questions about what people are really thinking, what we’re all hearing each other say, from the start.

Why? Code is a whole lot easier to change before it exists.

I’ve saved many companies on many projects a whole lot of money (and heartache) by using the skills of close reading and critical questioning to nip misunderstandings and hidden assumptions in the bud early. Skills I honed in a Religious Studies course.

Here’s the hidden truth of education: You don’t know what you’re preparing for.

You don’t know. Your teacher doesn’t know. Your school doesn’t know. Your future employer doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Not really.

Much of what you’re preparing for doesn’t even exist yet. We hope it doesn’t exist: don’t we educate students in the hope that they will make the world better by changing it? By creating new realities?

Doesn’t that mean education is impossible? Not at all! Because we’ve learned over time that there are kinds of learning that help people prepare for an unknown and unknowable future world. Not just specific skills or subjects, but kinds of learning: approaches rooted in curiosity, exploration, seeing closely, questioning, critical examination, taking multiple perspectives, using multiple kinds of tools, synthesis, communication, dialogue, relationships. Learning like that has a solid track record of mattering in the long term, often in surprising ways. We can do that learning with joy and confidence in its value if we accept that we will only understand its specific utility in hindsight .

Is a Religious Studies course “for” a software career? Well, is a Computer Science course “for” a software career? That Religious Studies course applied to my software career in exactly the same way that my Algorithms course applied: I rarely use (and have largely forgotten) the specific knowledge from it; I use its approach, its patterns of thought, constantly.

There is always a tension in education between teaching the knowably practical and the unknowably valuable.

That first kind of education, the knowably practical, we generally call “vocational education:” specific knowledge we believe students will need for specific reasons in a very specific future. That kind of knowledge is often the primary barrier around entering a specific career, solving a specific problem, or occupying a specific place in the world. We might learn it in class, or in training, or in an online tutorial, or from fumbling our way through a problem and picking it up as we go. Vocational education takes all those forms. Its utility tends to be immediate but ephemeral.

That second kind of education — learning that will be valuable in unknowable ways in an unknowable future — has a name, too. It is liberal arts education .

Contrary to popular belief, “liberal arts” does not mean “humanities and fine arts.” I teach liberal arts computer science courses. Read that sentence again: I teach liberal arts computer science courses . I don’t assume that the only thing I’m preparing my students for is a software career. Yes, often I am! Yes, there is a vocational element to what I teach, and it matters — but it is only a part of the teaching, and more a seed or an anchoring point than a destination. Software industry career preparation neither constrains nor fulfills my teaching. I am preparing whole students for their whole lives, in ways neither they nor I can know in the moment. Liberal arts education.

It’s possible to get a liberal arts education in comp sci — and it’s possible to get non-liberal-arts education in the arts or humanities. Preparing for an orchestral career with a degree from Curtis is a great example of that: you are going to graduate ready to kick ass in the very specific, very competitive job of playing in a top-tier orchestra. Whatever other growth you happen to find as a human being is up to you; if you choose a different path in life, who knows if that education helped? Not the goal. Not liberal arts. A stellar education that serves its purpose well, no doubt! Just not liberal arts.

Liberal arts is an educational philosophy, an attitude , not a set of disciplines.

Of course the “I didn’t realize learning X would be applicable to Y!” phenomenon exists everywhere in education, inside and outside of school. (School is a subset of education.) What “liberal arts” means is centering that serendipity, making it not just a happy coincidence but a primary goal. It’s about preparing students with the expectation that they’ll have to adapt to an unknown future they’re helping to shape.

There’s a history behind that, one with an ugly side — and a tough lesson for us now.

Do you know where the term “liberal arts” comes from? Despite studying at a liberal arts college, I didn’t find out until many years after I graduated. I knew it didn’t mean politically liberal. I long assumed it meant “liberal” as in “all-inclusive” or something…but no. The original Latin phrase, artes liberalis , roughly means “skills or practiced principles worthy of a free person.”

Free as in taking a fully privileged part in civic life.

If a person lives a life of servitude, if they are enslaved, don’t they need only vocational education? If their human existence has no utility beyond their job, if they cannot shape their world or create new paths through it, then why do they need anything but immediately practical skills? Why teach them things we know they don’t need? Isn’t it only free, fully privileged, self-determining people who also need a liberal arts education?

Think about that. Think the mixture of elitism and derision with which our society views “liberal arts” today. Think what that says about how we view human beings.

Don’t get me wrong: I emphatically do not think absolutely everyone should attend a 4-year liberal arts college like the one where I teach. I don’t think everyone should have to go to college at all; I’m highly skeptical of society’s current hyperfocus on college as an educational path. Education can — should, must — take many, many forms. It should take many forms across society, and it should take many forms for each individual. Education doesn’t even have to happen in school!

What I do believe is that some form of education with that liberal arts philosophy — “ Because you are free, you must prepare for the unknown ” — should be present in the life of every human being .

I cringe, cringe deeply, to my core, when people try to create socioeconomic mobility by force-pushing tech and STEM and give-them-lucrative-careers content into schools. I cringe even though access to that kind of learning is important, is crucial . It can unlock choices. It can change lives.

I cringe because at its heart, this push is about meeting employer needs, not human needs. It is asking students to conform to the world, not to reshape it. It does not treat students as human beings who are and should be free.

Our society treats liberal arts education as a luxury good. Think: Which K-12 schools cut supposedly inessential programming to focus on “practical” learning, using phrases like “job skills” and “college readiness?” And which K-12 schools still have that supposedly inessential stuff like, say, robust music ensembles?

This is the same question as, “Which students does society view as fully privileged, free human beings, and which does it view as cut out for a life of servitude?”

The term “liberal arts” came from a world where servitude and slavery were the norm, where the power structures of society worked to limit self-determination and world-shaping to a select few. I wonder how different that world really is from ours.

There is a naive, crappy version of this essay that goes something like, “Don’t worry about practicality! Just follow your bliss, and everything will work out!” That’s a pleasant thought. It’s also a thought rooted in extreme privilege, and a dangerous one for anyone who doesn’t enjoy that kind of privilege (and a fair bit of luck on top of it). To be blunt: it’s a thought I’ve only ever heard from white people.

Learning out of utility or necessity, learning to navigate the world as it exists — that’s an important part of life, a crucial part, and it needs to be a part of education too. Vocational education matters.

That doesn’t mean your college major determines your whole life and if you major in [whatever] you’ll never get a job oh noes!!1! Get a grip, people. Seriously. It doesn’t mean that. (Some of the best software industry folks I’ve known majored in philosophy and anthropology; one of the best graphic designers I’ve worked with majored in…computer science.) No, it means that having no access to vocational education is as damaging as having only access to vocational education. Denying access to vocational education is a hallmark of systems of oppression.

Here’s the thing: so too is making education nothing but vocational . Somehow people have more trouble seeing that second side of the coin. They especially struggle to see it in my field: software development has a prestige halo that harms our ability to see it clearly. Surely computer science makes people rich? Surely forcing kids to do STEM will force them to be equals in society? Surely economic advancement is the same thing as liberation??

I don’t think that increasing the size of the STEM labor pool by shoving marginalized kids into it ends marginalization. I think it lowers labor costs for employers who are sick of paying people so much money to write software.

It’s the “shoving