Liberal Arts to Liberate the Mind: Why Every First-Generation Student Ought to Consider a Traditional Liberal Arts Degree

When I reflect on my experience applying to colleges as a high school student, I marvel at my family’s dearth of “insider information” in comparison to others. I now realize how some parents helped their children publish op-ed articles in the local newspaper, enroll in local college classes while still in high school, or guide them through countless science-related competitions. I am happy for these folks. Their kids ended up at MIT, Stanford, and the likes, and they earned it.
But I envy a different sort of insider information. That of families who realized the importance of a liberal arts education.

I didn’t know what a liberal arts college was when I submitted my applications to universities. I thought that real colleges were called “universities,” and that they were predominately research institutions that were featured in the US News rankings for “National Universities”. I paid no attention to the other list of top colleges produced by the same publisher: “National Liberal Arts Colleges”.

Maybe I missed this because of my immigrant background—I only imagined college as a means for acquiring a good career, which at that time probably meant becoming a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or someone who works in “finance”. The notion of education as a means to a job–a high paying job–is a relatively modern phenomenon, and one that has enraptured much of the South Asian immigrant community. Perhaps the roots of this, in my community at least, stems from strategic measures by British colonists to erase institutions of traditional learning (including madrasas steeped in what is now called the Islamic liberal arts) in India, replacing them with English-standard schools meant to train individuals to acquire “good jobs” in the colonial administration. (See John Walbridge, God and Logic in Islam: The Caliphate of Reason, 157-169, Cambridge University Press (2013)).

So, what is a liberal arts education, and why is it important? The American philosopher Mortimer Adler says:

The liberal arts are traditionally intended to develop the faculties of the human mind, those powers of intelligence and imagination without which no intellectual work can be accomplished. Liberal education is not tied to certain academic subjects, such as philosophy, history, literature, music, art, and other so-called "humanities." In the liberal-arts tradition, scientific disciplines, such as mathematics and physics, are considered equally liberal, that is, equally able to develop the powers of the mind.

The liberal-arts tradition goes back to the medieval curriculum. It consisted of two parts. The first part, trivium, comprised grammar, rhetoric, and logic. It taught the arts of reading and writing, of listening and speaking, and of sound thinking. The other part, the quadivium, consisted of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (not audible music, but music conceived as a mathematical science). It taught the arts of observation, calculation, and measurement, how to apprehend the quantitative aspect of things. Nowadays, of course, we would add many more sciences, natural and social. This is just what has been done in the various modern attempts to renew liberal education.

More importantly, Adler explains that the aim of a liberal arts education is to “develop free human beings who know how to use their minds and are able to think for themselves.” And in doing so, “[A liberal arts education] produces citizens who can exercise their political liberty responsibly. It develops cultivated persons who can use their leisure fruitfully. It is an education for all free men, whether they intend to be scientists or not.”

Finally, Adler concludes: “Our educational problem is how to produce free men, not hordes of uncultivated, trained technicians.” 

Interestingly, there is an argument for the liberal arts as a "social justice" tool to uplift those who face unparalleled, and even structural, challenges. Dr. Anika Prather and Dr. Angel Adams Parham argue in their recently published book, The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature, that the power of a classical liberal arts education is such that it is a tool to even “liberate the black mind.” 

This should be of no surprise to folks who have studied the great black intellectuals of the civil rights movement. 

The classical liberal arts undoubtedly influenced Dr. King. He was a master of the Western intellectual tradition. The syllabus for a seminar course he taught at Morehouse College would be controversial in the eyes of the contemporary “woke” culture at progressive institutions. It commences with writings from Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, and continues chronologically with Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, and John Stuart Mill—all dead white men, though with flaws in their lives and thoughts, nonetheless vital in their roles in the quest for justice and the good life.

Dr. King didn’t just teach these works, he internalized them. His Letter from a Birmingham Jail is replete with references to Socrates and verbatim quotations (from memory) from Aquinas, Augustine, and other great thinkers from the Western canon.

Roosevelt Montás, a senior lecturer at Columbia University, eloquently concludes of Dr. King’s relationship with the classical liberal arts and its relationship to our time:

King had internalised the liberatory history of ideas and debates he taught. For him, the Morehouse syllabus traced “the moral arc of the universe”, which he believed “bends towards justice”. Faced with ideological polarisation that threatens the foundations of liberal democracy, it behoves us to recover the political tradition embodied in King’s syllabus. It represents the connective tissue of our politics, the discursive bridges by which we may work out solutions to our thorniest problems. We must challenge the simplistic mentality that casts this tradition as irredeemably patriarchal, white, and elitist, and which, by doing so, makes students more provincial and less effective actors for social change. It is precisely because the tradition reflects an unfolding struggle for justice that it provides us with potent sources of argument, strategy and vision for addressing the inequalities and abuses that persist in our society. 

Unfortunately, for me, I realized this late. But I believed so strongly in the importance of a liberal arts education that I returned to college in my mid 20s to complete a second four-year bachelor's degree at a small liberal arts college. Despite the pressures to go to college to earn a degree that simply results in a good-paying job, I urge young students to explore the liberal arts, and to enter into the fascinating and immensely important realm of the life of the mind. 
 

The materialistic underpinnings of upward mobility and class migration

Every time you make a major decision in your life—whether changing your job, moving across the state for school, or getting married—your choice results in some sacrifices, or trade-offs. When my mother decided to immigrate to the United States, she recognized that doing so would sever her from home, where her entire family resided and where she spoke the same language as everyone else. The economic opportunities in America were, perhaps, worth the sacrifice at the time. At least that is the calculus she made.

The impact of such trade-offs is especially salient for first generation college students in America. In a recent episode of The Hidden Brain podcast, Philosophy Professor Jennifer Morton discusses the difficulties first gen students face when deciding whether to make such trade-offs to seek upward mobility. In fact, Professor Morton sympathizes with those who, unlike herself, decided that the potential for upward mobility was not worth the non-economic sacrifices required to attain such prosperity:

And so, I think there’s a lot to be said for being deeply rooted and connected to a place. And so, I think in the case of students and young people who are growing up in concentrated poverty in the United States, there’s a similar rhetoric that opportunities are elsewhere and that they would be lucky to leave. And then puzzlement as those who might’ve been able to leave and don’t leave, as if they’re making some sort of mistake. But I don’t think in many cases they are making a mistake. They are prioritizing other valuable things in their lives over economic advancement and opportunity.

I would go one step further to argue that such decision to stay despite clear opportunities to migrate to an elevated economic class should be celebrated and even encouraged rather than merely viewed as “not being a mistake.” This is because there is more to be cherished in the world and in human beings than material “success”.

The stereotypical notion of a “rags to riches” success story is often depicted in light of material rags to material riches. Arguably, the American dream itself, is a “rags to riches” dream. Dr. Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir Educated is another, more nuanced, example. Yes, her story is largely about becoming “educated,” but how is education to be assessed? Is it materialistic? I would argue that in our times, yes, because the purpose of becoming “educated” is largely to make money. 

This is a uniquely modern phenomenon. Traditionally, (as early as Plato) the primary purpose of education has been to inculcate virtues into the soul—to live a virtuous life. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was especially cognizant of this. Here are his words from an article he published at Morehouse College in 1947, titled “The Purpose of Education:”

But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals. …
Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.

Thus, when we talk about upward mobility and class migration, we must ask whether we consider non-materialistic aspects of the trade-off analysis? Is it possible to achieve “upward mobility” in life without an increase in economic earnings?

The reason this is vital to our discourse is because neglecting the real benefits of selecting non-economic interests over material ones breeds societal distaste and contempt for non-elite jobs and those who work them. Consider how our society views garbage collection or janitorial work in comparison to any type of engineering. We even use different terms to describe the work—one is a job, the other a career.

When I lived in Egypt, I met countless folks who thrived—not just survived—upon income levels that were appallingly low in comparison to the American poverty standard. The opportunity to move for the sake of more money was unthinkable because they already had everything that they needed, as basic as it might seem to a modern American mind.

My teachers have echoed this with stories of their own from their time studying with Bedouin scholars living in tents in Mauritania.

I will never forget the quote one teacher shared: "Everything you desire exists with God—so if you have God, you have everything you desire.”

My purpose for sharing this is to highlight that there are people living in our times (and not just overseas) who ascribe to and operate within a completely different worldview than that of the zeitgeist of modern materialism. And discussing upward mobility in order to address the ostensible plight of such people misses the mark and results in greater harm than good. This is not to say that there isn’t a baseline threshold of material resources that one needs to survive, and potentially thrive. However, by touting “success” as that which conforms to the materialistic framework of class migration, we risk perpetuating part of the problem of class structures in the first place. That is, we devalue the honor and dignity of work, whether it be engineering or janitorial, and we breed contempt for those who choose not to migrate economic classes despite their migration of spiritual “classes”.