The Study of Liberal Arts

Some people say that the study of liberal arts is a useless luxury we can not afford in hard times. Students, they argue, who do not develop salable skills will find it difficult to land a job upon graduation. But there is a problem in speaking of "salable skills". What skills are salable? Right now, skills for making automobiles are not highly salable, but they have been for decades and might be again. Skills in teaching are not now as salable as they were during the past 20 years, and the population charts indicate they may not be soon again. Home construction skills are another example of varying salability, as the job market fluctuates. What's more, if one wants to build a curriculum exclusively on what is salable, one will have to make the courses very short and change them very often, in order to keep up with the rapid changes in the job market. But will not the effort be in vain? In very few things can we be sure of future salability, and in a society where people are free to study what they want, and work where they want, and invest as they want, there is no way to keep supply and demand in labor in perfect accord.

A school that devotes itself totally to salable skills, especially in a time of high unemployment, sending young men and women into the world armed with only a narrow range of skills, is also sending lambs into the lion's den. If those people gain nothing more from their studies than supposedly salable skills, and can't make the sale because of changes in the job market, they have been cheated. But if those skills were more than salable, if study gave them a better understanding of the world around them and greater adaptability in a changing world, they have not been cheated. They will find some kind of job soon enough. Flexibility, an ability to change and learn new things, is a valuable skill. People who have learned how to learn can learn outside of school. That is where most of us have learned to do what we do, not in school. Learning to learn is one of the highest liberal skills.