Empowering Citizens for the 21st Century: 2009 Update

This piece is an updated version of an essay that I originally wrote in 2006 for the Liberal Arts Essay Scholarship competition. With three years of hindsight and the changes in the world that have occurred since then, I wanted to take the time to reiterate the importance of a liberal arts education for those who still have doubts about its relevance in the world.

My original piece can be found here.

Today, my updated piece appeared in the National Gallery of Writing.

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Here is the full text! Let me know what you think.

Empowering Citizens for the Twenty-first Century: 2009 Update.

By Andrew Myszewski

October 19, 2009

Since graduating from college, the vital importance of a liberal arts education has become clearer to me than ever. Yet, amidst the most severe economic contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the liberal arts are threatened. Students and parents alike often look at a college education as a financial investment, as a ticket to a higher standard of living and career success. With college tuition becoming ever more expensive, especially at private universities, many argue that only a pre-professional, career oriented major (i.e. engineering, business, medicine, law, etc.) provides a high enough financial return to justify the expense of higher education. With the average student debt load increasing year after year, students rightly worry about the future and about how to justify the expense of going to college.

These developments in no way justify abandoning the study of the liberal arts and all that it has to offer both for individuals and American society at large. More than ever, a liberal arts education—the intensive study of history, art, politics, foreign languages, literature, the physical and natural sciences, human cultures past and present—offers the best possible preparation for life in the chaotic world we continue to find ourselves. A liberal arts education provides students with a broad framework to approach both the known challenges and opportunities of today and the unknown ones of tomorrow. The task of four-year research universities in the United States must be to promote the study of the liberal arts for the ultimate benefit of individuals and society as a whole. This kind of education creates versatile individuals with adaptable skills capable both of making a living and acting of agents of change in the world around us.

Modern American society tends to view higher education as a machine whose inputs are students and money and whose outputs are career-ready professionals ready for work in their chosen fields of study. Instead of viewing the university’s task as one of training students in their respective areas of inquiry, however, the emphasis should instead lie upon giving students broad tools of analysis and interpretation that enable them to function effectively across disciplines, regardless of what they happen to study while attending the university.

The economic competitiveness of the United States in the twenty-first century will greatly depend upon the ability of the secondary and higher education institutions of our country to produce citizens with the ability to observe, reason, analyze, criticize, understand, and act upon information from increasingly diverse sources, using integrated methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis reaching across the social and natural sciences and the humanities. The demands of the twenty-first century require the colleges and universities of our country to strive toward the development of globally minded, fluid, analytical citizens able to effectively function in the context of an increasingly complex, pluralistic world order.

The same scientific revolution that brought about the onset of industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century has confronted modern society with changes that are reshaping it more quickly and fundamentally than is easily understandable. Information and communications technologies, such as laptop computers, cellular phones, ocean-spanning fiber-optic lines, satellites, and the Internet, have resulted in the decline in influence of even the nation-state, which once stood as the primary social institution on the global level, second only to perhaps the family. Multinational corporations now operate across national boundaries, increasing the difficulty of the state’s regulation of economic activity; the rise of global terror networks has redefined our enemies as well-equipped individuals not linked to any single country.

Globalization and broadband information technologies have deeply affected many different aspects of our lives. At home, economic deregulation has created greater opportunities for risk-taking, for earning high financial rewards for building companies, innovating, and developing the high-tech industries of the future. Alongside this potential for gain, the country and world have also witnessed the potential for extreme losses and social disruption directly caused by this “creative destruction” directly caused by business activity. Factories have closed, back-office and call center operations have been outsourced. Financial deregulation produced a severe financial crisis and led to the bailouts of firms seen as “too big to fail.” Millions of Americans can no longer count on finding work in the fields and industries to which they have dedicated their professional careers. The goal of higher education must be to prepare students for work in industries and careers that do not yet exist.

A liberal arts education provides a broad set of skills useful across many industries and can help students better to adapt to this changing marketplace. The Association of American Colleges and Universities has championed four essential learning outcomes from a liberal arts education: (1) knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world, (2) intellectual and practical skills, (3) personal and social responsibility, and (4) integrative and applied learning.[i] All of these outcomes are essential for the human race to successfully overcome a cascade of interwoven challenges that confront the world in our time, including natural resource scarcity, global climate change, a dramatic increase in the human population, geopolitical conflict, and tensions over cultural change within and among societies. The educational institutions of this country must gear themselves to train citizens across a wide span of intellectual disciplines in order to address these issues in the most effective manner possible. Students who receive this kind of education and achieve these outcomes will be able to serve effectively as both flexible, creative employees and informed citizens.

Undergraduate research represents an absolutely essential cornerstone of a modern college education. For many students, college consists of dutifully attending lectures and discussions, taking notes, studying hard, writing good papers, performing well on exams, accumulating credits, graduating, then heading into the job market. Learning how to learn from the knowledge created by others is a crucial skill that most students can manage. However, learning to produce knowledge through original research—through the writing of a senior thesis, independent study, lab work, internships, and other such experiences—students learn how to engage with real world challenges in a far more intimate way than is possible in a lecture hall. Posing a research question, examining the secondary literature to find out what others have to say on the subject, engaging with evidence collected through sustained efforts, and presenting that research both orally and in writing for the world’s review represent an invaluable learning experience for all students up to the task.

Although such research experiences are not required for most undergraduates, students seeking the best possible undergraduate education should actively seek out such challenges. Those who successfully triumph over them will stand above their cohort through a superior ability both to critically evaluate information received from others and to provide knowledge to the world in return. Most importantly, long-term research experiences induce habits of mind invaluable to life after college: persistence, organization, tenacity, and a nagging sense of doubt leading to a constant quest to keep asking hard questions of the world around us in order to uncover its truths.

A broadened acceptance of the importance of liberal arts education would help to heal the gaping wounds in the American body politic caused by decades of oversimplification, reductionism, and ideology loosely shrouded in the supposed interests of the public. In today’s media, hyperbole, exaggerated partisan divisions, and broad public apathy toward the challenges of our time. We cannot solve the complex, interwoven, seemingly intractable problems of the twenty-first century until we change our thinking, until we overcome the fundamental limitations imposed by beggar-thy-neighbor, selfish, “me first” interest group politics. A desire for simple, easy answers to social questions continues to lead too many citizens into the trap of single-minded rigidity that prevents the synthesis of innovative interpretations of social questions leading to social change.

At the onset of the twenty-first century, our society has begun finally to listen to voices that have been silenced throughout our history, the voices of millions of African Americans, women, immigrants, LGBT individuals, and others. Overall, our country has worked continually to broaden the rights and privileges enjoyed by its citizens. In order for this diversity to serve as a source of national strength and social greatness, and in order for individuals to gain a fuller understanding of the richness of manifold human experience, citizens must be exposed to the diversity of individuals and their lives. Racism, bigotry, sexism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and homophobia represent forces inimical to the maintenance of a healthy, functional society. Educated citizens must strive to understand the differences that exist between themselves and others in order for the expansion of individual freedom implicit in American ideals to continue. Only through the inculcation of tolerance for diverse peoples can we hope to build the bridges of understanding necessary for successful, meaningful citizenship in an era of increasing national diversity and global integration.

The goal of higher education in the twenty-first century must be to empower all citizens to make observations, draw conclusions, test those conclusions against the ideas of others, and use their knowledge to make an impact upon the world. From the beginnings of the European scientific revolution onward, this system of liberal scientific inquiry has revolutionized the process of truth seeking. A broad, liberal arts education represents the key to the richness of this tradition. By providing individuals with these fundamental capacities, a liberal education empowers individuals to act as fully effective citizens within the context of American democracy. By developing the ability of students to analyze problems on both qualitative and quantitative bases, to continually test and reexamine what they know, to debate opposing viewpoints, colleges and universities can give students the tools to apply their knowledge to the world around them. By teaching students how to communicate—to discuss, to argue, to write, to debate—colleges and universities can arm them with the crucial capacity of being able to take action based upon their knowledge.

The ability of the United States to adapt to the dynamic globalism of the twenty-first century greatly depends on the capacity of our populace to understand and adapt to the fluid context in which they live. The establishment of global communication networks has radically altered the nature of physical space on this planet through the progression of globalization. In order to confront this century’s new and enduring challenges, American educational institutions must maximally strive to provide citizens with the skills they need to face these challenges and triumph over them. The challenge posed to our country in this century is not only to produce highly-educated doctors, lawyers, and college professors. The challenge, rather, is to empower the bulk of the American public with the tools of a liberal arts education. By empowering all people, professional and non-professional alike, we can work to prepare college graduates for the rigors of global competition, the increasing cosmopolitanism and diversity of American society, and for a world with problems ever-resistant to easy solutions.

Andrew Myszewski is a Phi Beta Kappa 2009 graduate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he studied History, Political Science, and International Studies (International Political Economy Track), with a Certificate in Business.

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[i] http://www.aacu.org/core_commitments/index.cfm