Why you should take a liberal arts course

MANILA, Philippines - My title is phrased positively, but it could have easily been the negative: “Why you shouldn’t take a business course.” The liberal arts and commerce, after all, tend to be pitted against each other, with the former implying poverty and the latter wealth (those who don’t want to sound greedy euphemize and say “stability”). I am, however, not asking you to be poor. I am only asking you to make college a humanizing experience.

I teach politics and history at Ateneo de Manila, and I usually crack a borderline offensive joke when a student tells me his/her course is BS Management: “Oh, you’re taking BS College.” BS College because Management is the course everyone in college takes — the one parents expect their kids to sign up for by default. Since studying business is becoming the norm for many students, the college experience now entails learning accounting, operations management, and “leadership.” It used to be reading Shakespeare. Or Rizal.

College is not vocational school. Contrary to the common assumption, the primary goal of institutions of higher learning is not the imparting of work-related skills. If you are going to a large college or university, consider yourself lucky, because you will be spending the next three to five years in a place where scholars examine multiple aspects of human life: from how we think, how we tell stories, to how we organize ourselves in political communities. Make the most of this situation. Don’t throw it away by only learning how to work. Most of the skills you’ll need for your job, you’ll get on the job anyway. Employers look for employees they can teach, not employees who already know everything.

If you really want to become a manager, you have the rest of your life to crunch numbers and balance spreadsheets. For now, spend your youth devouring literature, watching movies, and writing amateur love poems that will later make you cringe when life has made you cynical.

When else, except college, will you be allowed to consume so much culture? And when else will you be rewarded for it? Do you think your boss from your prospective soap company will give you an A for writing eloquently about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? He won’t, but a film teacher might.

College carves out a space for you to figure out what kind of adult you want to become, before the tunnel vision of careeristic thinking sets in. An operations management class, which tells you the optimal way to pack merchandise into a box, won’t tell you the optimal way to treat others. For that, you need to read Aristotle. 

All well and good, you say, but how does one get a stable job with a degree in English or Philosophy? Simple: one gets high grades. An English major who graduated magna cum laude is more competitive than the nth Management graduate with a mediocre transcript. Besides, contemporary economies are driven more by creativity than technical skill.  I have friends who read a lot of fiction, write elegant prose, and get paid by major advertising companies.

As countries advance economically, their leaders begin to realize that development is premised on having literate, cosmopolitan, and urbane citizens. Both Singapore and Hong Kong, for instance, are investing in liberal arts universities in the hopes of producing the next Steve Jobs — an entrepreneur with the mind and the disposition of an artist. In case I haven’t been clear, there is money to be made in the liberal arts.

It is true, however, that you take a risk with a liberal arts education. A commerce education is, indeed, more likely to land you a stable 9-5 job, while a liberal arts course may turn you into a novelist, a poet, or professional pedant. Heaven forbid, you might even end up with a PhD and become an academic.

But what is wrong with low-paying jobs? Many of the jobs above don’t pay much, but they give you time. And since all that we do is grafted onto time, time is life. IMHO, life is more important than money.

Besides, a country can become a sad place if its most brilliant minds prioritize profit. In the 1990s and 2000s, most of the top graduates of the American Ivy League went to big Wall Street banks, and it was these geniuses who caused the financial crash of 2008. The world would have been better off if they had done something else.

Dear High School Senior, I know most of your friends are taking the easy way out. I know most of them are ready to take BS College and join the herd. But if you think you’re special, you should take a risk with the liberal arts. It might turn out to be a better investment.

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Apart from teaching and researching at Ateneo de Manila, Leloy Claudio also edits The Manila Review (www.themanilreview.com).