The Wealthy Arts

The Liberal Arts are increasingly reverting to their original meaning—they are becoming the arts practiced by just a handful of truly free men, and now women, too. The definition of “liberal” in the phrase “Liberal Arts” has of course nothing to do with political leanings towards the left or the right, as we have known them since the French Revolution.  Rather “Liberal” in the ancient sense, refers to those people who are free from labor, those who do not need to work to survive. These land and slave owners were the original practitioners of the Liberal Arts, anyone who had an inherited position that liberated them from having to worry about their material existence. 

As the middle classes in the twenty-first century feel increasingly worried about their financial position, they no longer feel confident that their children will have a better life  than they enjoyed, and as a result of this anxiety enrollments in the Liberal Arts have declined. 

Behind the drop in English majors stands a loss of faith in progress.  Parents no longer feel that their children can afford to educate themselves to the full mental capacities.  Instead they worry about their long-term economic prospects to such an extent that they advise their children to specialize in a set of skills.  And the surest sign that this loss of faith in progress is real—children follow their parents’ advice.  They don’t rebel with a confidence that their parents’ pessimism is misguided.

The idea that university education prepared you for a lifetime of intellectual growth and curiosity seems too much of a long-term bet for the middle classes.  Only the wealthy can afford to gamble on the uncertain prospect that a Liberal Arts education will teach their children to think more critically and swiftly, so that they can adjust to new organizational structures in the future. 

Defenders of the humanities often point out that high level managers and political leaders have all enjoyed the benefits of a Liberal Arts education. They like to point out that philosophy majors are more likely to land in positions of institutional power than their business majoring peers.  While this may be true, it seems like a long-shot to many working class families, and so they opt for the more promising near-term major in supply-chain management—a worthy field of endeavor to be sure.

Behind this decision lies the presumption that their children no longer have a serious chance at entering into the upper class.  These families are more concerned with guessing which skills will matter after the next economic transformation than in positioning their children to have the intellectual skills to guide that transformation. These parents, and their obedient children, no longer imagine that they can participate in the upper-echelon decisions about society.  They just want to have an occupation that will be needed—thus they are not free in the ancient sense.