The Importance of the Liberal Arts

January 2021

 This month, we asked out writers to write about the importance
of a Liberal Arts education

The seven windows

McKenna Snow
Class of 2024

When I chose my business major, I walked through a welcoming door, into a very pretty mechanical box. It had high ceilings, lots of rooms, and a staircase. Because of all its cogs and wheels and gears, the box made a lot of noise, and got the attention of a lot of the world. I was proud to live in that big mechanical box. I had the freedom to go in and out of the front door, which connected me to the rest of the world, whenever I wanted. I truly loved being in the box, because when I was in there, learning about my future career, I better enabled myself to help a lot of people. I could make a big difference in my box, creating, inventing, thinking of new ways to reach my future customers. I could design, employ, dream, and memorize. Another big plus about staying in this mechanical box was that I really liked its interior. It had couches, decor, and loads of hefty books about the field of business. Not to mention, so much technology was at my disposal.

But something that really fascinated me after I came into the box were its seven windows. I began looking through the windows during the first week of my stay in the box. Each one showed me some different scene from the outside world.

In one window, I looked out and saw miles and miles of sand and ocean. People walked up and down the shore in quiet contemplation. They watched the sunrise and sunset, and all they did was think. Part of me wanted to learn what all those people were thinking. As I sat at the sill, a girl from the beach came up to the window and we conversed through the screen. "What are you thinking about out there?" I asked her. She replied simply, "We are just thinking about why we are who we are—and what that means about everything else."

The next window was a breathtaking sight: the imagery was constantly shifting. I first saw ancient cities, and the people who governed them. The scene then changed to a coliseum, with lions emerging from the dark to appease a great angry crowd. I then saw a massive stone castle. Knights rode across the plane, carrying a beautiful white flag with a red cross in the center. Then three ships were at sea, crashing over the waves. And so the scene continued to change, over and over again. It showed a brilliant history of the human race in vivid detail, portraying both the beautiful and the tragic.

The third window showed me a large museum, full of marble statues and acrylic paintings and brilliant-colored vases. In one corner of the museum a massive orchestra played, and I wished I could get the window open so I could listen to their music while I worked.

The fourth window captivated me in a way I did not expect. I saw a large backyard, with trees, a wrap-around porch, and at least two dozen people. A man was grilling barbeque and a group of young adults were playing cards at a picnic table. At least ten children ran about the yard, swinging on a tire swing, and playing red-light-green-light. I assumed this scene was some sort of family reunion. Here was a portrayal of a happy little society. It occurred to me that being able to understand them as human beings, all with their own personalities, preferences, opinions and backgrounds, was essential to me as a businesswoman.

The fifth window showed me a beautiful feat of architecture: towers of all shapes and sizes, a library, and churches of exquisite design. The amount of geometric skill that must’ve been required to successfully craft these massive structures could not be overstated. Written on the inside of this window sill was 2+2=4. I admit that math and I were not wonderful friends, but this window amazed me.

The sixth window was up the staircase of my box. This window showed me a brilliant midnight sky struck through its heart by the Northern Lights. A thousand stars twinkled on either side of the Lights, and if I looked closely down at the ground, there were people gazing through telescopes.

The final window of my box showed me the inside of a church, with low lighting, and a candlelit spotlight on the monstrance on the altar. Someone in the church noticed my presence at the window, and came up to me. "What are you doing in there?" I asked him. He answered me, "We come in here to contemplate God. We get to know Him better in here, and in studying theology." I envied those in this quiet place, who did not always listen to all the noisy gears of my box. I wanted to open this window and climb through.

After exploring these seven windows, I was astounded to wake up the next morning and discover that the windows had turned into doors. Who had done this? I contacted the University that gave me my box. They told me that through my University’s curriculum, which doesn’t want me to study solely about my major, such windows become doors.

I now have the freedom to travel through the doors and explore these scenes thoroughly, and bring back what I can to make my box better. I’ve since then brought back much sand from the seaside of philosophy, history that better prepares me for the future of my business, and music that helps me study more efficiently. I’ve made friends with that family, and understand their dynamics better through studying anthropology. The arithmetic I learned through the fifth door helps me crunch numbers for my business better. The night sky is a place I sit under to study—the same night sky the medieval astronomers looked upon. And that quiet church is a place I frequent to know better the One who made my soul. These doors changed life in my box so much. It is a richer place because of these "liberal arts doors." In fact, where I reside is no longer a box. All its corners and edges have been worn away; now it is a big, well-rounded home.

Read other articles by McKenna Snow

To learn is to live is to love

Emmy Jansen
Class of 2023

I love to learn. This is something that has come to the forefront of my mind in the past few months as I toil between various college classes. When I realized graduation was only two years away, it was an unsettling feeling, not because I’m scared to be a true independent adult, but because I would be leaving the classroom. Frankly, I can’t imagine not learning, writing papers, and pursuing education.

For most people, 2020 was a year of survival. We were focused on the finish line and whatever got us there the fastest would have to do. This was especially true in schools, where the goal was to stay open despite rising case numbers and the tedious task of enforcing protocols. In the end, we were successful. We proved that universities can survive during a pandemic and higher education can continue through it all. It is an accomplishment that should not be downplayed.

However, surviving is not thriving. The purpose of university is to cultivate knowledge and promote a community of scholars. This goal gets lost in the shadows when the focus of the institution is on staying open and staying safe. We have proven in 2020 that live can go on even with shutdowns, stay-at-home orders, and the ever-present fear of COVID-19. Now, our task is to prove that we can live lives worth living as we navigate this new normal.

This year, especially, has taught me the importance of liberal arts education. These disciplines are at the heart of university, not because they are steppingstones to six figure salaries but because they are the cornerstones of higher education. Movies like "The Dead Poets’ Society" are reminiscent of a time where learning was a passion, literature was praised for its beauty, and philosophy was discussed outside of the classroom. You can study biology and research chemistry, but it cannot be done separately from the humanities. This is the age-old debate of science versus religion and philosophy, but it is one that needs to be settled by both disciplines being included in higher education.

Despite the changing tides of higher education, the Mount has stayed true to its belief in higher education. Every student, no matter what diploma they are chasing, is required to study philosophy, theology, history, and the like. Not because it will land them a job in a research lab, but because it creates a well-rounded student as well as a well-rounded individual. While we could be goal-oriented and fill our course schedules with only classes for our major, the Mount makes sure we are grounded in history, knowledge, art, and beauty.

This does not mean that the debate of liberal arts education is over. Far from it. Because secondary education has become increasingly focused on test scores and college acceptances, there is a loss of the love of learning early in adolescents. It is now the job of universities and colleges to reignite this passion, which is an uphill battle that will be hard to conquer. In my core classes at the Mount, I notice the students around me are disengaged because they do not see the point of what we’re doing. We read Nietzsche, Merton, and Homer but we do not internalize the information we are given. Once the final grades are posted, we forget all about philosophy and the virtues we can cultivate. How are these century old poems and doctrines relevant to modern society, as we face unprecedented events that are vastly different than what these authors knew? Students find themselves asking questions like this frequently, and even I am not innocent of this. In our success driven society, we always want to know what the point is. What do I get out of it? What’s in it for me? How will this help me? It’s the end goal, not the process. The destination, not the journey.

COVID-19 shook up our world. It changed how we view the family, community, health, education, religion, and everything that life touches. For many students and faculty, it has changed the way we view our roles in university. Around midterms, I found myself and other students discussing how we felt like we weren’t retaining any of what we learned. Before our worlds were flipped upside down by the virus, I would fill pages and pages of philosophical thoughts and ideas to ask professors over coffee and debate with friends late at night in the dorms. This semester, the margins of my notebooks were blank, filled with only the notes I needed for tests and papers. After all, how can you retain information or think about the big picture when you’re merely trying to survive and stay on campus? No one could love learning because learning wasn’t our goal. We had to survive before we could thrive.

Students looked forward to the start of the fall semester because it was a marked end of quarantine and a sign that life was continuing outside of the homes in which we’d been sheltering. Now, we can look forward to the spring semester as a chance to learn and to love what we’re learning. The liberal arts are where passion lives and it is this drive that keeps universities open, despite the ‘wasteland’ language used by the media. When I was in high school, the counselors always pushed STEM and technical degrees. For a teenager who chose to take Creative Writing instead of Physics and Calculus, these were not viable options for me. When I declared a major in English, I was prepared for the judgmental looks and the jokes about my future salary (or lack thereof). But you can’t live a life that is solely based on science and math. Literature, art, and philosophy are the things that make life worth living. They are what makes the human experience beautiful, money is not.

Yes, we need scientists. This is clear more than ever, as we look to doctors and researchers to provide us with vaccines and cures. But science will only get us so far. The humanities continue because they are human. It is where we feel connected, whole, and understood. It is where we feel emotion and passion. It is where love lives.

Read other articles by Emmy Jansen

Liberal arts as resting in the Good

Harry Scherer
Class of 2022

In his Symposium, Plato’s Diotima says, "that is what is so bad about ignorance – that you think you know enough." In our world, and, it should be recalled, in the world of our ancestors, men have found self-comforting satisfaction in identifying their fellow men as ignorant. It seems that the good men, though, can be easily identified if they grant to the world in such fervent search of virtue the easily observable fact of their ignorance.

When college students in their freshman year enter this new place of physical and social being, they could find themselves in a place of emotional confusion, excitement or dread. They are open and excited for the possibilities because of their mostly pleasant pre-college experiences or they fear the potential because they know how much the actual has harmed them in the past. In either case, they have a general conception that people change during college, but they don’t know what this change means and the extent to which this personal shift will affect them.

If Plato is right, it seems to me that the college life should leave a deep impression on the graduate that says, "you were ignorant, you came here to learn, but at least now you know of your ignorance." The recognition of ignorance should be the defining distinction between the eager freshman and the hopefully self-aware graduate.

It seems that the most efficient way to impress this truth on college students is through the mode of education known as the "liberal arts." Josef Pieper, the noteworthy Thomistic philosopher of the 20th century, notes in his Leisure: The Basis of Culture that "the "liberality" or "freedom" of the liberal arts consists in their not being disposable for purposes, that they do not need to be legitimated by a social function, by being "work."" I hope the reader will excuse the lengthy reference to his quote, but the meaning of these words seems to be so essential for our times.

As historical descendants and beneficiaries of the industrial revolution, we are obsessed with the realm of human action that delivers a product; the sooner this product is realized, the better. This impulse to create quickly has only been further aggravated by the technological revolution. A practice of the liberal arts, then, at least under the framework that Pieper lays out, seems almost impossible in the modern world.

Perhaps this is why we need to follow this framework all the more diligently. These two revolutions that required the mechanization of human work have led to an efficiency and specialization revolution in every industry of labor; this revolution does not need to extend into the realm of higher education. When young people go to college, they should be provided a reprieve from the cult of productivity in the world around them. How are students to learn more intimately the truth of their ignorance if they are instructed to participate in mindless production? How could students possibly be expected to partake in the hard work of inspecting the human heart as a reflection of its Creator while granting a seemingly singular focus on the optimization of their résumés?

Indeed, the progress of the modern world has not successfully shunned the liberal arts; it has only made their necessity all the more obvious. Through the study of history, the liberal arts student learns that his struggles are not all that unique but that the potential for uniquely remarkable action lies within his response to these struggles. Through the study of politics, he learns the art of human interaction on every social level and the weight that men place on words and their meanings. Through the study of his native tongue or the tongues of antiquity, he learns how to use well the gift of the written word and the ways in which this gift has developed over the centuries. Through the study of rhetoric, he learns how to best utilize the spoken word as a means to participate with the grace of God and not as a spark for division. Through the study of philosophy, he learns about the reality of things, their nature and their end, their relation to one another and the ways that we can know them. Through the study of theology, he learns of the nature of God, His participation in the world today and the ways in which his ancestors treated this topic.

What could possibly be inappropriate about this project for our time? Looking back at the purposes of each of these disciplines, it becomes clear that among the hustle and bustle of our productive work, every discerning human person has considered, or someday will consider, the importance of these questions. These questions are pertinent to every person in every time and space because they are fundamentally human questions that, through the grace of God, deserve human answers. The questions and answers interact with one another; who doubts that one’s use of rhetorical ability should not be put into practice through the lens of a proper ethical framework? Does the awareness and encounter with history not impact how one views the nature of the human person? Everyone is asking these questions; the liberal arts teach the student how to ask them well. How many of the problems that we feverishly attempt to solve would have been previously resolved with a proper formulation of the right questions?

In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas says that "the essence of virtue consists more in the Good than in the difficult." Life in college should not be characterized by multiple individuals conquering difficult tasks but in a social order resting in the Good. In my two and a half years in college, I have experienced the rush of the former and the peace of the latter and I can say, both from the perspectives of principle and personal experience, that I much prefer the tranquility of rest in the Good for its own sake and for the sake of protection from the clamor of confusion.

Read other articles by Harry Scherer

Change of heart

Angela Guiao
Class of 2021

I am going to be completely honest with you. When I first applied to Mount St. Mary’s, I had no idea what a liberal arts college was. In fact, I didn’t even notice the Mount considered itself a liberal arts college until my mom asked me what that meant. At the time, I kind of just brushed it off and said that it was their way of saying they provide classes that were aimed at making students more well-rounded. I had remembered hearing the upperclassman talk about veritas classes on my tour of the campus and figured that was the reason they were a liberal arts college. It all sounded very renaissance to me.

Or should I say, classical antiquity? According to Niche, liberal arts began during the era of classical antiquity. There were three particular studies that together were called trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Eventually, these three studies grew to include geometry, music, history, anthropology and more. These subjects were considered liberales, or worthy of a free person, thus creating the liberal arts.

Liberal arts colleges, as a result, are higher ed institutions that focus their curriculum on these classic ideas and beliefs. According to Niche, liberal arts schools tend to be smaller than most schools, have more accessible professors, and be focused more on undergraduates. This, in turn, attracts students who prefer smaller class sizes and prioritize one-on-one opportunities with their professors.

As a result of being a liberal arts institution, Mount students were required to take core curriculum classes, including philosophy, social sciences, history and theology classes alongside their classes that related to their major. Now, this may just be my cynical side talking, but I used to think the core classes were a waste of my time. I believed that they took away valuable time from studying for my major classes, which at the time were the only classes I thought mattered. Now, granted I am an Accounting major, which has nothing to do with the humanities, so it is possible that played a part in my bias.

I was all about business. I enjoyed logical thinking and simple reasoning. In accounting, things were usually right or wrong; it was not very often that there be gray area. I liked knowing that there was a correct answer, and that there was a way to get that answer. While accounting wasn’t entirely black or white, it was definitely not whatever color philosophy was. I couldn’t find the sense in spending an entire class period analyzing the words of Plato, and it frustrated me that everything was up to interpretation. In my theology classes, I spent a lot of time reviewing things I’ve learned in years of religion classes growing up, so I kept wondering why I had to spend time writing a paper on the Resurrection instead of studying for my accounting exam.

Now, what kind of article would this be if I didn’t have a change of heart? I am proud to say that now, today I am honored to have experienced a liberal arts education. I don’t think I really recognized the impact it had on my well-roundedness until I was able to contribute to conversations that referenced Aristotle and Socrates. Or until I was able to correct one of my coworkers that the Vietnam War happened before the Persian Gulf war, not the other way around. Or maybe it was when I contemplated joining a book club, only to realize that I’ve already read the books that they had planned to read in my Modernity class the year before.

What I didn’t realize while taking the classes, was how much I learned. I could be considered well-versed in literature, history and the arts, greatly due to my participation in the core curriculum here at the Mount. This pandemic has allowed me to reconnect with my friends from big state universities, and it still baffles me how they haven’t heard half the stuff I mentioned above because they weren’t required to take the classes.

It’s funny, how much something has an impact on you after the fact. Information I had at one point dubbed as useless helped shape my way of thinking and understanding until today. The philosophy classes that I thought were so impractical turned out to be quite the opposite and actually taught me some very valuable lessons: to ask why, and to challenge beliefs. Where I once prided myself in being a logical, straightforward thinker, I can now say I am more insightful and understanding.

The liberal arts education that the Mount provided me with has set me up to be more successful in all my future endeavors. Recently, I have gone through the long and tedious process of interviewing for my internship, and I now understand fully why so many employers recruit from the Mount. A liberal arts education not only makes a student well-rounded but also more worldly and aware.

It appears the humanities are dying, or so they say. The younger generation has more reason to think more realistically, with larger student loans and higher rent in some areas, they need to make decisions that would benefit them financially. And the reality is, financial/business majors offer higher paying careers than those in the humanities. And while I understand this decision, I do believe that the humanities shouldn’t be cast aside. In fact, I believe in it so much, I would recommend to all future college students to try and attend a liberal arts college.

I was offered the support and encouragement that I know I would not have received at a bigger school. I transformed from a shy, quiet biology student and became a curious, confident future accounting graduate, and I have my liberal arts education to thank for that. Without this curriculum, I would never have been forced to work on my speech skills in English class, or my critical thinking skills in theology, or my memory skills in history. The core curriculum contributed more to my general education than I ever would have expected and for that I am eternally grateful.

Read other articles by Angela Guiao

Read Past Editions of Four Years at the Mount