Liberal-arts bashing rejects Western culture

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin has upset a few people by waving a budget scalpel and announcing cuts to certain education programs. But even with the cuts, Kentucky is still spending about half its total budget on elementary and secondary education. This should be enough; and if it’s not, then someone needs to take a serious look at whether all this money is being spent efficiently.

But one of the things we need to be careful about is running down traditional education.

In a recent radio interview, Bevin launched another broadside similar to 2016 statements he made assailing humanities majors: “All the people in the world that want to study French literature can do so, they are just not going to be subsidized by the taxpayer.”

Such remarks are indicative of a broader shift in conservative educational policymaking, away from liberal arts toward vocationalism. It is the idea that the purpose of schools is not to develop more broadly educated human beings who can do anything better, but instead to equip students so they can better do jobs that politicians and policymakers predict (often erroneously) the economy will need.

This utilitarian educational emphasis is behind recent remarks by some high-profile Republicans. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush: “When a student shows up, they ought to say ‘Hey, that psych major deal, that philosophy major thing, that’s great.’ It’s important to have liberal arts ... but realize, you’re going to be working at Chick-fil-A.” Florida Gov. Rick Scott: “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.”

For one thing, these statements aren’t even true. In the long term, liberal-arts majors make more on average than those with most professional or pre-professional degrees. And for higher-level positions — managers and CEOs — many companies look specifically for people who can think broadly and creatively, rather than those with narrow technical backgrounds.

In all the talk about job skills and all the emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs, we need to make sure we preserve the ideal of schools as institutions focused on developing the minds of students and passing on our culture.

The traditional conservative view of education was exemplified by Reagan- and Bush-era figures such as former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett and former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lynne Cheney. They knew the importance of passing on Western culture.

Bennett’s James Madison Proposal, a model curriculum for schools, was based on a liberal-arts education whose purpose was to inculcate functional, moral and cultural literacy. To him, education was the “architecture of the soul.”

Hating on the humanities is far from conservative, and in fact has been more the hallmark of left-wing thinking. Modern conservatives need to be careful that their emphasis on vocational education doesn’t place them on the same side as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and protesters at Stanford University who marched in 1987, chanting, “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ has got to go.”

To be fair, many conservatives rightly see that the average university English and social-sciences department has become an ideological boot camp. Post-structuralism, deconstruction and the single-minded emphasis on race, gender and class in these disciplines have turned many into intellectual wastelands.

But modern conservatives should want to cure the arts and humanities, not kill the patient.

This story was originally published February 23, 2018 at 7:19 PM with the headline "Liberal-arts bashing rejects Western culture."