I’m a high school junior, which means the next question I get from anyone who inquires into my grade, without fail is some variation of “so have you begun to think about college yet?”
The short answer is yes. I have started to think about the only thing that my school, family, and society have pushed me towards since the first day of sixth grade when the assistant principal of my middle school gave us a short lunch-time assembly about how we needed to start doing well for college because “it’ll be here sooner than you know it!” But, as the contrarian I am, I decided that I did not want to go to college upon graduation. One could say I was Charlie-Kirk-pilled.
A few months ago, I found myself in (yet another) interesting conversation with a peer of a different political persuasion. We are both the same age, so the topic at hand, “the future of higher education” was personal to us both.
The primary purpose of liberal arts education is to know yourself, know your society, and know yourself within the scope of your society. Logically, I should be an exceptional candidate for a formal liberal arts education in my future, but in reality, by arguing what I did, I believe I only further degraded its image in today’s culture.
“I don’t really want to go to college” I would respond. Depending on our relationship, the other person’s age, and the context of the conversation, I received a range of reactions from disappointment to disgust.
In this conversation with my friend, I was stunned at how utilitarian I sounded when making my Kirk-like arguments about the scam of “useless” college credit requirements and the liberally-arts-educated 30-year-old pink-haired Starbucks baristas.
According to Michael Knowles, a good college education is supposed to teach people how to spend their free time, not just having graduated with a diploma and a cap, but with a lifetime arsenal of “useless” skills. However, to me, this made no sense. “Going to college just for the experience isn’t worth the money” I countered, as I wasted the little free time I had that afternoon watching YouTube Shorts and scrolling on X.
Only now have I realized that, quite contrary to my contrarian disposition, Charlie Kirk and I had unknowingly fallen into the vicissitudes of a modern culture. I wanted results quickly. If you want to be a doctor, go to college, where you have a direct path. If you want to continue exploring, do nothing, take a gap year, get a job, make money, and hopefully become a more fulfilled citizen in the process. Today, it only sounds like some variation of a woke right take on liberal arts education, because at its core, liberal arts education is not about skills, but wisdom. It is not about a clear-cut path, but about a journey through the main streets and back alleys of the human condition. A true liberal arts education is deeply rooted within our country, has guided our Christian culture, and influenced the entire world.
Today, we want answers. It is baked into our psyche that we not only have the ability to get instant answers, but that we have a God-given right to them. We get impatient over slow service and low-resolution YouTube videos. We disdain people for interrupting a top-priority Instagram scrolling session. It is only natural that after teaching our children that the only way to gain information about the world is by demanding it from a screen in less than a second, that they do not want a more abstract way of approaching postsecondary living.
Thirty years ago, William F. Buckley and Co. had observed academia’s obsession with a millisecond-answer, clear cut version of a liberal arts education. While watching the 1993 episode of Firing Line, I began to realize liberal education’s “discipline of mind and body,” as posited by Elizabeth Kennan. Today, it is widely seen as a discipline of entry level salary and job retention. I, along with Charlie Kirk and the rest of society, wanted an easy way through education. In other words, I wanted a dismantling of the true liberal arts education system, even if I didn’t yet realize it.
It is not liberal arts education’s job to provide students with a textbook path through college, but to arm students with the intellectual arsenal needed to maintain sanity in the public square, and to enrich our culture. The task of occupational instruction lies purely at the feet of vocational institutions. The honor of creating our future lies at the feet of a liberal arts curriculum.
Albert Jay Nock said it best in his work The Theory of Education in the United States:
“If Socrates had come before the Athenians with some fine new piece of machinery like a protective tariff, workmen's compensation, old-age pensions, collective ownership of the means of production, or whatnot; if he had told them that what they must do to be saved was simply to install his piece of machinery forthwith, and set it going; no doubt he would have interested a number of people, perhaps enough to put him in office as the standard-bearer of an enlightened and progressive liberalism. When he came before them, however, with nothing to say but “Know thyself,” they found his discourse unsatisfactory, and became impatient with him.”
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