# In Defense of a Liberal Education  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Fareed Zakaria]] - Full Title:: In Defense of a Liberal Education - Category: #books ## Highlights > The link between a broad education and liberty became important to the Greeks. Describing this approach to instruction centuries later, the Romans coined a term for it: a “liberal” education, using the word liberal in its original Latin sense, “of or pertaining to free men.” ([Location 257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=257)) > From the beginning, people disagreed over the purpose of a liberal education. (Perhaps intellectual disagreement is inherent in the idea itself.) The first great divide took place in ancient Greece, between Plato, the philosopher, and Isocrates, the orator. Plato and his followers, including Aristotle, considered education a search for truth. Inspired by Socrates, they used the dialectic mode of reasoning and discourse to pursue knowledge in its purest form. Isocrates, on the other hand, hearkened back to the tradition of arête. He and his followers believed a person could best arrive at virtue and make a good living by studying the arts of rhetoric, language, and morality. This debate—between those who understand liberal education in instrumental terms and those who see it as an end in and of itself—has continued to the present day. ([Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=263)) > In general, the more practical rationale for liberal education gained the upper hand in the ancient world. Yet the two traditions have never been mutually exclusive. The Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, one of the earliest writers on record to use the term artes liberales, wanted to combine the search for truth with rhetoric, which was seen as a more useful skill. “For it is from knowledge that oratory must derive its beauty and fullness,” the philosopher-statesman wrote around 55 AD. While debate continues, the reality is that liberal education has always combined a mixture of both approaches—practical and philosophical. ([Location 269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=269)) > In the first century BC, this dualistic approach to education was “finally and definitively formalized” into a system described as “the seven liberal arts.” The curriculum was split between science and humanities, the theoretical and the practical. ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=277)) > Centuries later, it was often divided into two subgroups: the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—was taught first; the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—came next. ([Location 279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=279)) > Islamic learning produced innovations, especially in the study of mathematics. Algebra comes from the Arab phrase al-jabr, meaning “the reunion of broken parts.” ([Location 290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=290)) > In the early twentieth century, among the major universities, Harvard and Yale adopted the full-fledged residential college model for student housing, partly in an effort to retain the intimate setting of liberal arts colleges while pursuing their ambitions to become great research universities. The residential college has come to be seen as possessing certain qualities that enhance the experience of liberal education beyond the curriculum. The advantages of such an arrangement are often described today in terms like “living-learning experiences,” “peer-to-peer education,” and “lateral learning.” Samuel Eliot Morison, the legendary historian of Harvard, best described the distinctive benefits of the residential setting: “Book learning alone might be got by lectures and reading; but it was only by studying and disputing, eating and drinking, playing and praying as members of the same collegiate community, in close and constant association with each other and with their tutors, that the priceless gift of character could be imparted.” An emphasis on building character, stemming from the religious origins of colleges, remains an aim of liberal arts colleges almost everywhere, at least in theory. ([Location 325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=325)) > The Yale report explained that the essence of liberal education was “not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions; but to lay the foundation which is common to them all.” It described its two goals in terms that still resonate: training the mind to think and filling the mind with specific content. ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=345)) > But for me, the central virtue of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to write, and writing makes you think. Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly, and reasonably quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill. ([Location 548](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=548)) > In what is probably an apocryphal story, when the columnist Walter Lippmann was once asked his views on a particular topic, he is said to have replied, “I don’t know what I think on that one. I haven’t written about it yet.” ([Location 557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=557)) > Norman Augustine, reflecting on his years as the CEO of Lockheed Martin, recalled that “the firm I led at the end of my formal business career employed some one hundred eighty thousand people, mostly college graduates, of whom over eighty thousand were engineers or scientists. I have concluded that one of the stronger correlations with advancement through the management ranks was the ability of an individual to express clearly his or her thoughts in writing.” ([Location 570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=570)) > The second great advantage of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to speak. The Yale-NUS report states that the college wants to make “articulate communication” central to its intellectual experience. That involves writing, of course, but also the ability to give compelling verbal explanations of, say, scientific experiments or to deliver presentations before small and large groups. ([Location 574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=574)) > That brings me to the third great strength of a liberal education: it teaches you how to learn. ([Location 602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=602)) > just one. Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist and expert on education, has posited that there are at least eight kinds of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal. ([Location 614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=614)) > Even technical skills by themselves are a wonderful manifestation of human ingenuity. But they don’t have to be praised at the expense of humanities, as they often are today. Engineering is not better than art history. Society needs both, often in combination. When unveiling a new edition of the iPad, Steve Jobs explained that “it is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” ([Location 641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=641)) > That marriage is not simply a matter of adding design to technology. Consider the case of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg was a classic liberal arts student who also happened to be passionately interested in computers. He studied ancient Greek intensively in high school and was a psychology major when he attended college. The crucial insights that made Facebook the giant it is today have as much to do with psychology as they do technology. In interviews and talks, Zuckerberg has often pointed out that before Facebook was created, most people shielded their identities on the Internet. ([Location 645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=645)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > You can make a sneaker equally well in many parts of the world. But you can’t sell it for three hundred dollars unless you have built a story around it. The same is true for cars, clothes, and coffee. The value added is in the brand—how it is imagined, presented, sold, and sustained. Bruce Nussbaum, an expert on innovation, wrote in a 2005 essay in Businessweek that the “Knowledge Economy as we know it is being eclipsed by something new—call it the Creativity Economy. . . . What was once central to corporations—price, quality, and much of the left-brain, digitized analytical work associated with knowledge—is fast being shipped off to lower-paid, highly trained Chinese and Indians, as well as Hungarians, Czechs, and Russians. Increasingly, the new core competence is creativity—the right-brain stuff that smart companies are now harnessing to generate top-line growth. . . . It isn’t just about math and science anymore. It’s about creativity, imagination, and, above all, innovation.” ([Location 655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=655)) > Tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those that demand flexibility, judgment, and common sense—skills that we understand only tacitly—for example, developing a hypothesis or organizing a closet. ([Location 665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=665)) > In 2013, the American Association of Colleges and Universities published a survey showing that 74 percent of employers would recommend a good liberal education to students as the best way to prepare for today’s global economy. ([Location 702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=702)) > Norman Augustine (the former Lockheed Martin CEO) stressed the importance of both scientific skills and humanistic thought: So what does business need from our educational system? One answer is that it needs more employees who excel in science and engineering. . . . But that is only the beginning; one cannot live by equations alone. The need is increasing for workers with greater foreign-language skills and an expanded knowledge of economics, history, and geography. And who wants a technology-driven economy if those who drive it are not grounded in such fields as ethics? . . . Certainly when it comes to life’s major decisions, would it not be well for the leaders and employees of our government and our nation’s firms to have knowledge of the thoughts of the world’s great philosophers and the provocative dilemmas found in the works of great authors and playwrights? I believe the answer is a resounding “yes.” ([Location 710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=710)) > Similarly, Edgar Bronfman, former CEO of Seagram Company, has offered students looking to succeed in business one piece of advice: Get a liberal arts degree. In my experience, a liberal arts degree is the most important factor in forming individuals into interesting and interested people who can determine their own paths through the future. For all of the decisions young business leaders will be asked to make based on facts and figures, needs and wants, numbers and speculation, all of those choices will require one common skill: how to evaluate raw information, be it from people or a spreadsheet, and make reasoned and critical decisions. ([Location 717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=717)) > In 2013, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released the results of the first-ever survey of the skills adults require to work in the modern economy. Three areas were considered: literacy, numeracy, and technology. The United States performed terribly, scoring below the OECD average in literacy and technological proficiency, and third from the bottom in numeracy. The test was designed to assess problem-solving skills, not rote memorization. The technology test, for instance, asked people to sort computer files into folders. Most troubling is that in numeracy and technological proficiency, young Americans, ages sixteen to twenty-four, ranked last. ([Location 724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=724)) > Many years ago, I had a conversation about all this with Singapore’s minister of education at the time, Tharman Shanmugaratnam. Singapore is the right country to look at because it sits among the top-performing nations on international tests. And yet, it is actively seeking to boost innovation and entrepreneurship among the students producing those top scores. “We both have meritocracies,” Shanmugaratnam said. “Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well—like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America.” ([Location 747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=747)) > U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has estimated that Chinese students spend 25 to 30 percent longer a year in school than their American counterparts. By the age of fifteen, when the test is taken, students have been at school for about ten years. So, with the number of school days in the United States set at 180 each year, a fifteen-year-old student in Shanghai will have attended school for what amounts to roughly two to three more academic years than a fifteen-year-old in Massachusetts. They’re two years ahead in math because they’ve taken at least two more years of math! It’s not Chinese genes, not a better system, not a magic formula—just more work. ([Location 814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=814)) > system and it’s not conducive to thinking, problem solving, or creativity. The founder of China’s Internet behemoth Alibaba, Jack Ma, gave a speech recently in which he asked why the Chinese were not as innovative as Americans and Europeans. His answer was that the Chinese educational system teaches the basics very well, but it does not nourish a person’s complete intelligence and creativity. It needs to allow people to range freely, experiment, and enjoy themselves while learning. “[Innovations] will only come regularly if we rethink our culture . . . and our sports,” he said. “Many painters learn by having fun, many works [of art and literature] are the products of having fun. So, our entrepreneurs need to learn to have fun, too.” ([Location 822](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=822)) > Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, the authors of Academically Adrift, summarize their findings succinctly: Large numbers of four-year college students experience only limited academic demands, invest only modest levels of effort, and demonstrate limited or no growth on an objective measure of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication. Fifty percent of sophomores in our sample reported that they had not taken a single course the prior semester that required more than twenty pages of writing over the course of the semester; one-third did not take a single course the prior semester that required on average even more than 40 pages of reading per week. Students in our sample reported studying on average only 12 hours per week during their sophomore year, one third of which was spent studying with peers. Even more alarming, 37 percent dedicated five or fewer hours per week to studying alone. These patterns persisted through the senior year and are broadly consistent with findings on academic engagement from other studies. These findings also should be considered in the context of empirical evidence documenting large declines over recent decades in the number of hours full-time college students spend studying. ([Location 834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=834)) > Franklin wanted students to be part of a residential college, even specifying that it would ideally be somewhere with a garden, an orchard, a meadow, and a “field or two.” They should live together “frugally,” he wrote, and exercise frequently to “render active their bodies.” The subjects Franklin suggested they study were broad and diverse: arithmetic, astronomy, geography, religion, agriculture, and history along many dimensions (of laws, customs, nature, and morality). In particular, he stressed the importance of the study of English over Latin and Greek. He urged that greater attention be placed on writing than on oratory, as he believed communication in the modern world was more effective through the written than the spoken word. One wonders what he would have urged once he saw the impact of television and the Internet. ([Location 887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=887)) > “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it,” Adams wrote. “There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.” ([Location 937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=937)) > IF IGNORANCE IS bliss, why do people want knowledge? This is a question with a long pedigree in Western culture. Prometheus brought fire from Mount Olympus down to earth and its mortal inhabitants. In doing so, he enraged Zeus, the supreme deity, who had him chained to a rock and tortured for eternity by an eagle feasting on his liver. And that was just the punishment for Prometheus. Human beings were sent a curse in the form of Pandora, with her box of ills that would afflict humankind forever once it was unlocked—disease, sickness, sorrow, envy, hatred. Prometheus’s fire may have been a metaphor for knowledge. In Aeschylus’s version of the legend, in addition to the burning branch, Prometheus introduced humans to the arts, including writing, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, and medicine. In other words, Prometheus decided to bring a liberal arts curriculum down from the heavens—and he and all of humankind paid a dreadful price for it. ([Location 1143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1143)) > Bertrand Russell, the early-twentieth-century scientist and philosopher, once pithily described the difference between science and philosophy. “Science,” he explained, “is what we know, and philosophy is what we don’t know.” ([Location 1185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1185)) > The search for knowledge gave human beings power, just as the Bible anticipated, and that power has been used for good and ill. But on the whole, there has been a steady and persistent effort to improve human life. Progress in technology and medicine certainly has dark side effects—the dangers of nuclear war, the impact of economic growth on the environment, the moral dilemmas of cloning. Over the last five hundred years, however, the consequences of knowledge have been positive, and over the last two hundred, staggeringly positive. ([Location 1198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1198)) > In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker makes the now famous claim that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. He argues that the rise of certain ideas has had a powerful, beneficial impact on the world. The Enlightenment concepts of individual liberty, autonomy, and dignity, for instance, and the beginning of a “humanitarian revolution” transformed the world by ending practices like slavery. Pinker also writes about the more recent “rights revolutions,” which have led to less cruelty toward minorities, women, gays, and others who were not at the center of the old power structures of society. ([Location 1223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1223)) > Practices like slavery, serfdom, dueling, and the abuse of women and children have dwindled over the last few centuries—as a consequence of broad, humanistic ideas, the bedrock of a liberal education. To be sure, more progress is needed, and in some cases, new and perverse forms of oppression have replaced the old-fashioned, easily identifiable ones. But that cannot negate the reality that knowledge has led to human advances in tangible ways. ([Location 1230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1230)) > Four hundred years ago, absolute monarchs governed much of the world, and the vast majority of the human population possessed little economic and political freedom. Today, most people live in democracies, and whatever their flaws, they are usually better than the rapacious dictatorships of the past. ([Location 1233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1233)) > The fundamental reason for the rise of the rest—the fact that developing countries are growing much faster than in decades past—has to do with the diffusion of knowledge. ([Location 1240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1240)) > The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has pointed to three ideas associated with the humanities that have positively shaped the world. First, he notes the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s warning that the belief in a single, all-encompassing truth inevitably produces blind arrogance, possibly leading to dangerous consequences. Second, he highlights John Rawls’s contribution to political thought: that the most just society would be the one you would choose if you did not know how rich or poor or how talented or untalented you were when born into it. Since those are often matters of genetics and luck, Rawls posited that we should judge a society from behind this “veil of ignorance.” Lastly, Kristof highlights the work of Peter Singer, who has brought the treatment of animals and the pain that human beings often needlessly cause them to the fore of our moral consciousness. ([Location 1265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1265)) > ONE OF THE enduring benefits of a liberal education is that it broadens us. When we absorb great literature, we come face to face with ideas, experiences, and emotions that we might never otherwise encounter in our lifetime. When we read history, we encounter people from a different age and learn from their triumphs and travails. When we study physics and biology, we comprehend the mysteries of the universe and human life. And when we listen to great music, we are moved in ways that reason cannot comprehend. This may not help make a living, but it will help make a life. ([Location 1280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1280)) > We all play many roles, professional and personal, in one lifetime. A liberal education gives us a greater capacity to be good workers, but it will also give us the capacity to be good partners, friends, parents, and citizens. ([Location 1284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1284)) > As John Adams famously wrote during the American Revolution, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” So maybe today they’re writing apps rather than studying poetry, but that’s an adjustment for the age. ([Location 1459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1459)) # In Defense of a Liberal Education  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Fareed Zakaria]] - Full Title:: In Defense of a Liberal Education - Category: #books ## Highlights > The link between a broad education and liberty became important to the Greeks. Describing this approach to instruction centuries later, the Romans coined a term for it: a “liberal” education, using the word liberal in its original Latin sense, “of or pertaining to free men.” ([Location 257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=257)) > From the beginning, people disagreed over the purpose of a liberal education. (Perhaps intellectual disagreement is inherent in the idea itself.) The first great divide took place in ancient Greece, between Plato, the philosopher, and Isocrates, the orator. Plato and his followers, including Aristotle, considered education a search for truth. Inspired by Socrates, they used the dialectic mode of reasoning and discourse to pursue knowledge in its purest form. Isocrates, on the other hand, hearkened back to the tradition of arête. He and his followers believed a person could best arrive at virtue and make a good living by studying the arts of rhetoric, language, and morality. This debate—between those who understand liberal education in instrumental terms and those who see it as an end in and of itself—has continued to the present day. ([Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=263)) > In general, the more practical rationale for liberal education gained the upper hand in the ancient world. Yet the two traditions have never been mutually exclusive. The Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, one of the earliest writers on record to use the term artes liberales, wanted to combine the search for truth with rhetoric, which was seen as a more useful skill. “For it is from knowledge that oratory must derive its beauty and fullness,” the philosopher-statesman wrote around 55 AD. While debate continues, the reality is that liberal education has always combined a mixture of both approaches—practical and philosophical. ([Location 269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=269)) > In the first century BC, this dualistic approach to education was “finally and definitively formalized” into a system described as “the seven liberal arts.” The curriculum was split between science and humanities, the theoretical and the practical. ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=277)) > Centuries later, it was often divided into two subgroups: the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—was taught first; the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—came next. ([Location 279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=279)) > Islamic learning produced innovations, especially in the study of mathematics. Algebra comes from the Arab phrase al-jabr, meaning “the reunion of broken parts.” ([Location 290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=290)) > In the early twentieth century, among the major universities, Harvard and Yale adopted the full-fledged residential college model for student housing, partly in an effort to retain the intimate setting of liberal arts colleges while pursuing their ambitions to become great research universities. The residential college has come to be seen as possessing certain qualities that enhance the experience of liberal education beyond the curriculum. The advantages of such an arrangement are often described today in terms like “living-learning experiences,” “peer-to-peer education,” and “lateral learning.” Samuel Eliot Morison, the legendary historian of Harvard, best described the distinctive benefits of the residential setting: “Book learning alone might be got by lectures and reading; but it was only by studying and disputing, eating and drinking, playing and praying as members of the same collegiate community, in close and constant association with each other and with their tutors, that the priceless gift of character could be imparted.” An emphasis on building character, stemming from the religious origins of colleges, remains an aim of liberal arts colleges almost everywhere, at least in theory. ([Location 325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=325)) > The Yale report explained that the essence of liberal education was “not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions; but to lay the foundation which is common to them all.” It described its two goals in terms that still resonate: training the mind to think and filling the mind with specific content. ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=345)) > But for me, the central virtue of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to write, and writing makes you think. Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly, and reasonably quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill. ([Location 548](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=548)) > In what is probably an apocryphal story, when the columnist Walter Lippmann was once asked his views on a particular topic, he is said to have replied, “I don’t know what I think on that one. I haven’t written about it yet.” ([Location 557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=557)) > Norman Augustine, reflecting on his years as the CEO of Lockheed Martin, recalled that “the firm I led at the end of my formal business career employed some one hundred eighty thousand people, mostly college graduates, of whom over eighty thousand were engineers or scientists. I have concluded that one of the stronger correlations with advancement through the management ranks was the ability of an individual to express clearly his or her thoughts in writing.” ([Location 570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=570)) > The second great advantage of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to speak. The Yale-NUS report states that the college wants to make “articulate communication” central to its intellectual experience. That involves writing, of course, but also the ability to give compelling verbal explanations of, say, scientific experiments or to deliver presentations before small and large groups. ([Location 574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=574)) > That brings me to the third great strength of a liberal education: it teaches you how to learn. ([Location 602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=602)) > just one. Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist and expert on education, has posited that there are at least eight kinds of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal. ([Location 614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=614)) > Even technical skills by themselves are a wonderful manifestation of human ingenuity. But they don’t have to be praised at the expense of humanities, as they often are today. Engineering is not better than art history. Society needs both, often in combination. When unveiling a new edition of the iPad, Steve Jobs explained that “it is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” ([Location 641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=641)) > That marriage is not simply a matter of adding design to technology. Consider the case of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg was a classic liberal arts student who also happened to be passionately interested in computers. He studied ancient Greek intensively in high school and was a psychology major when he attended college. The crucial insights that made Facebook the giant it is today have as much to do with psychology as they do technology. In interviews and talks, Zuckerberg has often pointed out that before Facebook was created, most people shielded their identities on the Internet. ([Location 645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=645)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > You can make a sneaker equally well in many parts of the world. But you can’t sell it for three hundred dollars unless you have built a story around it. The same is true for cars, clothes, and coffee. The value added is in the brand—how it is imagined, presented, sold, and sustained. Bruce Nussbaum, an expert on innovation, wrote in a 2005 essay in Businessweek that the “Knowledge Economy as we know it is being eclipsed by something new—call it the Creativity Economy. . . . What was once central to corporations—price, quality, and much of the left-brain, digitized analytical work associated with knowledge—is fast being shipped off to lower-paid, highly trained Chinese and Indians, as well as Hungarians, Czechs, and Russians. Increasingly, the new core competence is creativity—the right-brain stuff that smart companies are now harnessing to generate top-line growth. . . . It isn’t just about math and science anymore. It’s about creativity, imagination, and, above all, innovation.” ([Location 655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=655)) > Tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those that demand flexibility, judgment, and common sense—skills that we understand only tacitly—for example, developing a hypothesis or organizing a closet. ([Location 665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=665)) > In 2013, the American Association of Colleges and Universities published a survey showing that 74 percent of employers would recommend a good liberal education to students as the best way to prepare for today’s global economy. ([Location 702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=702)) > Norman Augustine (the former Lockheed Martin CEO) stressed the importance of both scientific skills and humanistic thought: So what does business need from our educational system? One answer is that it needs more employees who excel in science and engineering. . . . But that is only the beginning; one cannot live by equations alone. The need is increasing for workers with greater foreign-language skills and an expanded knowledge of economics, history, and geography. And who wants a technology-driven economy if those who drive it are not grounded in such fields as ethics? . . . Certainly when it comes to life’s major decisions, would it not be well for the leaders and employees of our government and our nation’s firms to have knowledge of the thoughts of the world’s great philosophers and the provocative dilemmas found in the works of great authors and playwrights? I believe the answer is a resounding “yes.” ([Location 710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=710)) > Similarly, Edgar Bronfman, former CEO of Seagram Company, has offered students looking to succeed in business one piece of advice: Get a liberal arts degree. In my experience, a liberal arts degree is the most important factor in forming individuals into interesting and interested people who can determine their own paths through the future. For all of the decisions young business leaders will be asked to make based on facts and figures, needs and wants, numbers and speculation, all of those choices will require one common skill: how to evaluate raw information, be it from people or a spreadsheet, and make reasoned and critical decisions. ([Location 717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=717)) > In 2013, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released the results of the first-ever survey of the skills adults require to work in the modern economy. Three areas were considered: literacy, numeracy, and technology. The United States performed terribly, scoring below the OECD average in literacy and technological proficiency, and third from the bottom in numeracy. The test was designed to assess problem-solving skills, not rote memorization. The technology test, for instance, asked people to sort computer files into folders. Most troubling is that in numeracy and technological proficiency, young Americans, ages sixteen to twenty-four, ranked last. ([Location 724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=724)) > Many years ago, I had a conversation about all this with Singapore’s minister of education at the time, Tharman Shanmugaratnam. Singapore is the right country to look at because it sits among the top-performing nations on international tests. And yet, it is actively seeking to boost innovation and entrepreneurship among the students producing those top scores. “We both have meritocracies,” Shanmugaratnam said. “Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well—like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America.” ([Location 747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=747)) > U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has estimated that Chinese students spend 25 to 30 percent longer a year in school than their American counterparts. By the age of fifteen, when the test is taken, students have been at school for about ten years. So, with the number of school days in the United States set at 180 each year, a fifteen-year-old student in Shanghai will have attended school for what amounts to roughly two to three more academic years than a fifteen-year-old in Massachusetts. They’re two years ahead in math because they’ve taken at least two more years of math! It’s not Chinese genes, not a better system, not a magic formula—just more work. ([Location 814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=814)) > system and it’s not conducive to thinking, problem solving, or creativity. The founder of China’s Internet behemoth Alibaba, Jack Ma, gave a speech recently in which he asked why the Chinese were not as innovative as Americans and Europeans. His answer was that the Chinese educational system teaches the basics very well, but it does not nourish a person’s complete intelligence and creativity. It needs to allow people to range freely, experiment, and enjoy themselves while learning. “[Innovations] will only come regularly if we rethink our culture . . . and our sports,” he said. “Many painters learn by having fun, many works [of art and literature] are the products of having fun. So, our entrepreneurs need to learn to have fun, too.” ([Location 822](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=822)) > Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, the authors of Academically Adrift, summarize their findings succinctly: Large numbers of four-year college students experience only limited academic demands, invest only modest levels of effort, and demonstrate limited or no growth on an objective measure of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication. Fifty percent of sophomores in our sample reported that they had not taken a single course the prior semester that required more than twenty pages of writing over the course of the semester; one-third did not take a single course the prior semester that required on average even more than 40 pages of reading per week. Students in our sample reported studying on average only 12 hours per week during their sophomore year, one third of which was spent studying with peers. Even more alarming, 37 percent dedicated five or fewer hours per week to studying alone. These patterns persisted through the senior year and are broadly consistent with findings on academic engagement from other studies. These findings also should be considered in the context of empirical evidence documenting large declines over recent decades in the number of hours full-time college students spend studying. ([Location 834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=834)) > Franklin wanted students to be part of a residential college, even specifying that it would ideally be somewhere with a garden, an orchard, a meadow, and a “field or two.” They should live together “frugally,” he wrote, and exercise frequently to “render active their bodies.” The subjects Franklin suggested they study were broad and diverse: arithmetic, astronomy, geography, religion, agriculture, and history along many dimensions (of laws, customs, nature, and morality). In particular, he stressed the importance of the study of English over Latin and Greek. He urged that greater attention be placed on writing than on oratory, as he believed communication in the modern world was more effective through the written than the spoken word. One wonders what he would have urged once he saw the impact of television and the Internet. ([Location 887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=887)) > “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it,” Adams wrote. “There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.” ([Location 937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=937)) > IF IGNORANCE IS bliss, why do people want knowledge? This is a question with a long pedigree in Western culture. Prometheus brought fire from Mount Olympus down to earth and its mortal inhabitants. In doing so, he enraged Zeus, the supreme deity, who had him chained to a rock and tortured for eternity by an eagle feasting on his liver. And that was just the punishment for Prometheus. Human beings were sent a curse in the form of Pandora, with her box of ills that would afflict humankind forever once it was unlocked—disease, sickness, sorrow, envy, hatred. Prometheus’s fire may have been a metaphor for knowledge. In Aeschylus’s version of the legend, in addition to the burning branch, Prometheus introduced humans to the arts, including writing, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, and medicine. In other words, Prometheus decided to bring a liberal arts curriculum down from the heavens—and he and all of humankind paid a dreadful price for it. ([Location 1143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1143)) > Bertrand Russell, the early-twentieth-century scientist and philosopher, once pithily described the difference between science and philosophy. “Science,” he explained, “is what we know, and philosophy is what we don’t know.” ([Location 1185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1185)) > The search for knowledge gave human beings power, just as the Bible anticipated, and that power has been used for good and ill. But on the whole, there has been a steady and persistent effort to improve human life. Progress in technology and medicine certainly has dark side effects—the dangers of nuclear war, the impact of economic growth on the environment, the moral dilemmas of cloning. Over the last five hundred years, however, the consequences of knowledge have been positive, and over the last two hundred, staggeringly positive. ([Location 1198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1198)) > In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker makes the now famous claim that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. He argues that the rise of certain ideas has had a powerful, beneficial impact on the world. The Enlightenment concepts of individual liberty, autonomy, and dignity, for instance, and the beginning of a “humanitarian revolution” transformed the world by ending practices like slavery. Pinker also writes about the more recent “rights revolutions,” which have led to less cruelty toward minorities, women, gays, and others who were not at the center of the old power structures of society. ([Location 1223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1223)) > Practices like slavery, serfdom, dueling, and the abuse of women and children have dwindled over the last few centuries—as a consequence of broad, humanistic ideas, the bedrock of a liberal education. To be sure, more progress is needed, and in some cases, new and perverse forms of oppression have replaced the old-fashioned, easily identifiable ones. But that cannot negate the reality that knowledge has led to human advances in tangible ways. ([Location 1230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1230)) > Four hundred years ago, absolute monarchs governed much of the world, and the vast majority of the human population possessed little economic and political freedom. Today, most people live in democracies, and whatever their flaws, they are usually better than the rapacious dictatorships of the past. ([Location 1233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1233)) > The fundamental reason for the rise of the rest—the fact that developing countries are growing much faster than in decades past—has to do with the diffusion of knowledge. ([Location 1240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1240)) > The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has pointed to three ideas associated with the humanities that have positively shaped the world. First, he notes the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s warning that the belief in a single, all-encompassing truth inevitably produces blind arrogance, possibly leading to dangerous consequences. Second, he highlights John Rawls’s contribution to political thought: that the most just society would be the one you would choose if you did not know how rich or poor or how talented or untalented you were when born into it. Since those are often matters of genetics and luck, Rawls posited that we should judge a society from behind this “veil of ignorance.” Lastly, Kristof highlights the work of Peter Singer, who has brought the treatment of animals and the pain that human beings often needlessly cause them to the fore of our moral consciousness. ([Location 1265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1265)) > ONE OF THE enduring benefits of a liberal education is that it broadens us. When we absorb great literature, we come face to face with ideas, experiences, and emotions that we might never otherwise encounter in our lifetime. When we read history, we encounter people from a different age and learn from their triumphs and travails. When we study physics and biology, we comprehend the mysteries of the universe and human life. And when we listen to great music, we are moved in ways that reason cannot comprehend. This may not help make a living, but it will help make a life. ([Location 1280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1280)) > We all play many roles, professional and personal, in one lifetime. A liberal education gives us a greater capacity to be good workers, but it will also give us the capacity to be good partners, friends, parents, and citizens. ([Location 1284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1284)) > As John Adams famously wrote during the American Revolution, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” So maybe today they’re writing apps rather than studying poetry, but that’s an adjustment for the age. ([Location 1459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RZXW0Z8&location=1459))