Defence Of Liberal Arts Education By Farees Zakaria
Fareed Zakaria’s lauding of the liberal arts system is the crux to his book, In Defense of a Liberal Education. He ardently defends a liberal arts education program under threat from the proliferation of STEM in American society. He contrasts America’s education system to that of foreign nations with varying standards of education, including his native India. Zakaria’s main conceit is to persuade audiences to revert to value of a liberal arts educations of past generations, including his own from Yale. He also discusses the historic usages of an education within society.
Liberal arts are presented by Zakaria as any pursuit of knowledge that is less based around the presentation of scientific facts and more around the humanistic qualities of seeking and acquiring knowledge. Zakaria specifically details those in the fields and their researches upon the benefits of the liberal arts. He also conveys the threat upon liberal arts portrayed from the very top of society. He directly invokes former President Obama’s comment made in jest about the lack of importance of an Art History degree. Zakaria’s message resonates with those who feel education has become increasingly one sided. He seeks to present his view to a new audience, where people increasingly reference the lack of importance of college educations that are not related to high paying, immediate job offering fields such as those of Engineering and Biology. Zakaria’s statements on the degradation of prestige and respect for the liberal arts within present society acts as a sobering reminder of the evolution of American culture into a more quantitative organization. America has watched a metamorphosis in the post-Industrial society, within these institutions leaders and chairs have instrumented a major restructuring of traditional liberal arts colleges into premiere research universities while also desperately fighting to maintain their roots in other fields, as described by Zakaria.
Zakaria further utilizes the changes in American institutions of higher learning as a contrasting agent to those found across the world, primarily those found in his native India, as well as in parts of east Asia including Japan and Singapore. His personal understanding of those institutions of higher learning located within India provide the key to why he left his home in order to pursue a specialized education at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America. He details the importance of the exam system found in India that determines the fate of those who seek to further their educational career. These directly parlay into Institutions of Technology, with his limited options in the Liberal Arts being a few remake colleges that were residual of the British Raj of India. This is included with his statements of the American education system being lower in test scores to similar concepts in Asia but growing its successes through the methods of individuality born in American liberal arts institutes. Zakaria seeks to present the liberal arts as a pillar of the American dream. His prose designates a distinctive understanding of what it means to BE American, especially through presenting his story as an immigrant into the country and discovering its charms from someone who understands the successes and plights of other regions of the world. He discusses the heterogenous blend pushed by some emerging partnerships between Eastern Asian Universities and Ivy League liberal arts institutions, with his primary example being that of the new cooperative agreement between Yale and the more STEM based USO based out of Singapore. These comparisons allow the reader to better distinguish WHAT makes America so unique, why the values espoused in the nation are so instantaneously distinguishable from any other facet of the world. This is determined to benefit America’s world class standards of education within universities.
Ultimately, Zakaria’s primary challenge is to convey the shift in American belief away from the liberal arts and admonish the persisting belief that a liberal arts education is benefit less. Liberal arts according to Zakaria is how America is provided with a breadth of occupations not commonly found within other regions of the world. Liberal arts are presented as being a multifaceted skill set, rather than occupational training to learn and meet a specified, focused criterion. Zakaria states this provides liberal arts degree holders to start from a less qualified position to hold a job, but as experience and post graduate education accumulate establish a greater agency for the degree holder to seek out and receive a job that works with the qualities they learned while seeking an education. Ultimately Zakaria wants to establish the perception of liberal arts less as a degree system where one will attempt to seek occupation following an Art History or Literature degree, but rather the tools the educated learns during the journey to obtain that degree. Liberal arts is a multifaceted patchwork of qualifications and experiences designed to enrich the human spirit and fulfill a basic desire of humanity, the thirst for knowledge. Zakaria seeks to grow respect for an endangered form of humanistic studies and the rebirth of the liberal arts program.
Zakaria’s method to fully persuade those still off board with the concept of a revitalized liberal arts presence within modern society is to back it up with bookends of historical evidence about the growth and proliferation of liberal arts to the extent it was at during its height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He develops it from the early creation myths and religious views, especially those of the Titan Prometheus and the Biblical tale of Adam and Eve, both of whom led a “curse” on humanity to benefit from and develop knowledge. From this Greek, Latin, and Arabic thinkers adapted this into a streamlined form of knowledge and study that would evolve into early institutions. From there, as immigration occurred into the early Colonial Americas, great Founding Fathers would pursue a “diffusion of knowledge” and established the first universities. From here they would develop into liberal arts colleges and into the information age as prominent research institutions wherein liberal arts and STEM converge and the most pronounced and prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world were born. Zakaria weaves this tale to demonstrate how the liberal arts have endured for millennia, and how this can be extrapolated into how they shall continue to be a dominant force in society to date. These institutes are not fading into obscurity, rather they are undergoing a new rebirth, liberal arts must evolve into a new form in order to compete against the surging number of high school graduates rapidly moving into STEM fields in order to receive a decent wage outside of college. Rather, Zakaria’s historical context portrays not a shift in how the liberal arts are taught, but rather how they are marketed to the world.
Zakaria’s goal is a clearly demarcated one, help to return the liberal arts to the forefront and reestablish the profound prior glory they once held. His portrayal of the rise of STEM almost as a menace allows for a favorable compare and contrast relationship with the STEM dominance found in other nations across the world. This allows him to work an attempt on the audience to demonstrate the necessities of the liberal arts in a distinctive and new perspective. Lastly, he utilizes historical aspects of the liberal arts to demonstrate why they will remain prominent well into the future. The liberal arts is not a dying breed, rather it is a changing one, more and more people are seeking STEM degrees first and then pursuing a liberal arts education post graduation. Zakaria seeks to define how they have become engrained into the culture of America, and how they must endear the populace in order to endure in an ever evolving world of shifting perceptions by the public. The liberal arts still remain vibrant and vital, a crown jewel in the education system of America
