School is for Learning How to Live and Work

June 16, 2013 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Fewer students are pursuing humanities degrees today because of concern about their value in the marketplace. Indeed, the issue has become a political football, with North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, among others, arguing that states should stop subsidizing certain humanities programs at pubic institutions because they don’t lead to jobs.

Colleges & universities are reacting to this kind of cost-benefit analysis with sharper arguments about the ways their offerings contribute to post-graduate life and work. Unfortunately, beyond all the arguments, the basic changes that are needed will only come when the custodians of higher education acknowledge how they’ve helped to make a liberal arts education irrelevant for most students. There are glimmers of hope, but there is little to suggest that these basic changes will be happening anytime soon.

For example, Harvard published a report last week that attempted to respond to concerns about fewer humanities majors and their poor prospects in the job market. The report said that its English and other humanities departments should “market themselves better” to undergraduates before they declare their majors while “improving their internship networks.” A Wall Street Journal article tried to bolster these modest proposals by noting that Harvard has been “for centuries a standard bearer of American letters” while, in a sidebar, identifying humanities graduates who went on to successful careers, including media magnate Sumner Redstone (Classics & Government) and Goldman Sack’s chair Lloyd Blankfein (Social Studies).

Proponents have also been more vocal about how the ideal humanities degree prepares you for the working world. One classics professor highlighted the core career competencies identified in the 2013 Job Outlook Survey from the National Association of Colleges & Employers, noting that they “correspond very strongly with the content and skills acquired through a liberal arts education,” namely: communication, teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking and organization.

University of Chicago’s president Robert Zimmer responded to students dropping out of college and going directly into business by noting that “[a]t their best, colleges and universities are themselves hothouses of innovation, a natural site and climate for translating ideas into application.” (In prior posts, I’ve also talked about when experience is the better teacher and the university as innovation hothouse.)

Wesleyan’s Michael Roth further bolsters the case by seeing higher education as “a catalytic resource that continues to energize and shape your life.”

Many seem to think that by narrowing our focus to just science and engineering, we will become more competitive. This is a serious mistake…

[I]nnovation in technology companies, automobile design, medicine or food production will not come only from isolated work in technical disciplines. Effective vaccine delivery programs, for example, require technical expertise, but they also require cultural understanding, economic planning and ethical reasoning. . .The growing field of animal studies, for example, brings together interpretative and analytic skills along with contemporary scientific research.

We should look at education not as a specific training program for a limited range of mental muscles but as a process through which one will generate some of the most important features in one’s life. It makes no sense to train people as narrowly as possible in a world going through cataclysmic changes, for you are building specific strengths that leave you merely muscle-bound, not stronger and more flexible.

We should think of education as a kind of intellectual cross-training that leads to many more things than at any one moment you could possibly know would be useful.

OK, so it’s not only skills but also qualities of mind like imagination, flexibility and the ability to grow that are the hoped-for byproducts of a liberal arts education. But is this what a humanities degree really provides today?

The same article announcing Harvard’s new report barely mentioned Wake Forest (in Governor McCrory’s most interesting state) and its integration of “personal and career development” into its curriculum. For several years now, I’ve been eavesdropping on what Wake and its champion on the issue, Andy Chan, have been up to. As it turns out, they seem to be getting at least half of it right.

Andy Chan, Personal & Career Development at Wake Forest

At Wake, what they’re aiming for in terms of personal & career (life & work) development isn’t a service department, like a guidance counselor you have to sit down with just before you leave, but what they call an “ecosystem.”

Individual career services departments cannot shoulder the burden of educating, advising and supporting students on their own. It is crucial that other constituents (faculty, staff, parents, alumni) are trained, encouraged and motivated to help students in a variety of ways – as advisors, connectors, influencers, and mentors.

In class, in one-on-one meetings, in internships, and other interactions, these constituents are encouraged to help students to grapple with a sequence of 4 questions: “Who am I?” “What shall I do?” “How will I get there?” and “Once there, how will I be successful?”

So far, so good. It’s about the entire college or university community helping their individual students to think about, so that they can connect in an effective manner with, the post-graduate world. It’s a different focus than having faculty off on celebrity book tours or alumni looking to have buildings or basketball courts named after them. In an ecosystem like this, “constituent payback” is assisting rising generations to successfully launch.

But community isn’t enough without the right course of study.

Most humanities departments have thrown out a core curriculum based on Western thought in favor of a smorgasbord of victim studies, self-directed projects, exercises in political correctness, and field trips. Job qualities like imagination and flexibility are more likely to spring from a more comprehensive knowledge base than this, and 40 years ago a liberal arts education provided it—along with some of the raw materials for living a life with meaning and purpose.

In the cafeteria plan of higher education today, most students don’t know enough to pick what will ultimately be “good” for them. So the issue is whether the ecosystem is also willing to provide a menu “with healthier choices” that includes comprehensive exposure to our civilization’s greatest ideas and stories. It’s precisely what Anthony Kronman urges in Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.

Artes liberals or liberal arts means “the skills of free person.” It’s a course of study that can be the ticket to a satisfying job and a fulfilling life. It’s what those in the forefront, like Andy Chan and Anthony Kronman, are proposing. Unfortunately, most of higher education is not even close to providing it.

What Good is My English Degree?

November 25, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

What kind of job are you going to get with an English degree (or a degree in History, Classics, Religion, Music, Art History, Anthropology, Philosophy or French)? You’re wondering. Maybe your parents are too.

Or then again: you studied the humanities and now you’re 10 or 15 or 25 years out of school. But every workday, you feel like you need a crash course in technology, social media, marketing, engineering and accounting? Why does what you studied seem to have so little value? Why do all these other things seem so important?

What you learned by studying the humanities does have value—tremendous value. But there are many reasons you might not think so, and a brief look at some of them might be helpful before discussing how the humanities can bring the greatest value to your job today.

The Industrial Revolution kicked off an explosion of technological advancement that has only accelerated in our lifetimes. (It’s x amount of memory on that chip today, twice as much tomorrow, and so on.) At the same time, advances in science created an experiment-based way of explaining the world that clashed with—and has now largely overtaken—a faith- or story-based worldview, at least in so-called “advanced societies.” (It’s less church attendance and more individualized spirituality, when faith remains a part of our lives at all.)

In their upward trajectory, technology and science were also vastly improving our standard of living. At the same time that questions of meaning and purpose became more personalized, many of us were also feeling that we no longer needed the humanities to improve the quality of our lives. Technology and science were attending to our material comfort along with our wellbeing.

Or so we thought.

Several writers have lamented the sidelining of the humanities. For example, Anthony Kronman has argued that as the arts have lost their prominence in our schools, we have almost lost the ability to develop an important dimension in our lives.

Where education used to mean exposure to a canon of Western thought to help students determine “how I should live my life,” that canon has increasingly come under attack. Some viewed it as propaganda from a group of white, Eurocentric oppressors, while others challenged these texts for presenting “subjective” interpretations of reality instead of the “objective” (and therefore more reliable) view that science and technology provides.

So in the face of this powerful onslaught, where is the value in your English degree?

Its value is to give you something that science and technology never can: a personal story that gives your life as well as your work both meaning and purpose. Despite our human flaws and ultimate mortality, the story you’re writing recounts how you can make a difference for yourself and others in your community by what you chose to do everyday. Through the humanities, you have lifelong access to role models and ideas that help you to live a good and fulfilling life.

It is the insight gained from these stories that business needs the most today.

In his “How to Avoid a Bonfire of the Humanities,” Michael S. Malone notes that since the best products and services aim at meeting real human needs and making our lives better, the best way to bring them to market is with stories that resonate in people’s lives.

Given the dominance of science and technology and its associated impacts today, fewer people know how to find what’s meaningful on their own, and fewer still can deliver it to them. Asked what made his company special, Steve Jobs said: “It’s 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 heart sing.”

Think about it. It’s not what the product is that makes you buy it, or how you use it, but why it makes your life better. (Simon Sinek’s much-viewed TED talk is about just this point.) Your humanities degree has economic value precisely because it enables you to understand “the why.”

Where the English major is needed is at the intersection between the company and its customers. Having studied “humanity,” you have the ability to focus your company on meeting basic human needs in ways that neither science nor technology ever can. It is a priceless perspective that is needed in marketing, sales, and customer service, but also at every stage of product development and design. Again: Apple ads, Apple stores, and Apple products satisfy Apple customers as much as they do because of Apple’s English majors.

Malone concludes his “Bonfires” article by noting that in the future the market advantage will go to companies like this:

that can effectively employ imagination, metaphor, and most of all, storytelling. And not just creative writing, but every discipline in the humanities, from the classics to rhetoric to philosophy. Twenty-first century storytelling: multimedia, mass customizable, portable and scalable, drawing upon the myths and archetypes of the ancient world, on ethics, and upon a deep understanding of human nature and even religious faith.

The humanities have been undervalued and shunted aside, but what they have given us is more essential in the best jobs than ever. Far from putting you at a disadvantage in the workforce, they give you a powerful advantage. And the places where you should want to be working know it.

Learning as Roadmap for Finding Your Life’s Work

July 12, 2012 By David Griesing 4 Comments

How do you decide what you should do with your life? How do you figure out what “a good life” would look like for you?

How do you sort through the possibilities and choose the kind of work you will do? After years of working, how can you transition from a deadening job to work that will energize you?

What happens if you never learned how to think and feel your way through questions like these?

Why aren’t we getting more help here?

One thing is certain: our schools should be doing a better job preparing our kids to lead good and satisfying lives at work and in their communities.

Unfortunately, our students aren’t prepared, because our schools aren’t helping them to identify what they value the most, or showing them how their values can transform the work they will do into a vocation. Increasingly, our kids are left to figure out “how best to live” with no real guidance from educators at all.

Every student is seeking information that will give their lives direction and meaning. But instead of providing this information in a user-friendly way, students get a lesson here (a glimpse of the heroic in English class) and a lesson there (on the football field, in the lab, or from a counselor), but are generally left to put these assorted pieces together on their own. As a result, most students never manage to assemble a roadmap they can follow when they go out into the world.

What follows should not be surprising.

Our kids spend time doing this and that, and dream impossible futures, but they are increasingly unable to discover a path in life that will bring them genuine satisfaction. (For years, Stanford education professor William Damon has discussed why so many young people “fail to launch” in books like The Path to Purpose (Free Press, 2008))

While it won’t change everything, there should be a class in every school that will help students identify what they value the most, and how to apply those values to the decisions they are confronting everyday.

– Students could be given tools like the Rokeach Value Survey to identify their most important terminal and instrumental values.

– They could learn about the value choices made by peer groups and admired individuals, and consider how making different values their lodestar (like “equality,” “fairness,” “freedom” or “security“) can influence their choices about life and work.

– They could learn how their values will change over time as their value awareness improves, and how those changes relate to new goals they will start identifying for themselves.

– They could learn how their behavior and decision-making is guided by their values, not in the abstract but by considering decisions that are being made around them everyday: about allocation of school resources (new equipment for the football team vs. a new chemistry teacher), school conflicts (like bullying) or a political issue polarizing their community.

There might be an institutional drive to combine these value-choice exercises with resume writing or work-interview101—an extension of what guidance counselors are doing in our schools already. That’s ok, because this curriculum has everything to do with the work you will do after school. But it is not just about finding A Job, it is about ultimately finding or creating The Right Job for who you are and what you value the most, so you will gain fulfillment from your effort and maintain a life-long sense of purpose.

To help ensure this result, “resume writing” and “mastering the interview” modules could be combined with an extended exercise where each student prepares his or her own plan for the future. It would be a practical exercise on where their individual values might lead them in the real world. (I’ll elaborate in the next post.)

Why aren’t we giving our kids this kind of learning experience today?

Most students leave school without a compass for navigating the working world. Having only vague ideas about the kind of work that will bring them satisfaction or how to go about getting it, a tremendous effort goes into finding any job—any kind of paycheck. But it doesn’t have to be this way. When students truly want to do something, know why they’re suited to do it, and understand the value to themselves and others that will be gained by doing it, their goals aren’t random and ill-defined, but specific.

Our schools need to be helping students to identify what they value the most, how to identify real-world work that vindicates those values, and how to bring their strongest competencies into their working lives.

What kind of coursework could be more relevant to them or to the challenges they face in the world?

When our schools start integrating their disparate lessons into a curriculum that helps students find their vocations in life, they will be providing our young people with a valuable roadmap that points the way to working lives with both meaning and purpose. And as teachers, Americans, inhabitants of a troubled planet, we would get something too: a chance to mold a hopeful and energized generation to go forth and make the world a better place.

(I’ll be talking about values and education at the #140edu conference, which will be taking place at the 92nd Street Y in New York City later this month. Join me by registering today.)