The liberal arts represent a foundation, preparing learners for whatever comes next. Minimizing their value, including eliminating study opportunities, is new and frightening.
In 1944, during World War II, Patrick Leigh Fermor and William Stanley Moss kidnapped General Heinrich Kreipe, the German general in charge of Crete. Fleeing from the German garrisons searching for their leader, the two British soldiers, their captive, and their band of Cretan guerrillas hid in the mountains.
William Moss, General Kreipe, and Patrick Lee Fermor (photo from the estate of William Stanley Moss)
On the third day, Kreipe, watching a brilliant dawn break over Mount Ida, quoted the Roman poet Horace: “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum/Soracte” (“You see how [Mount] Soracte remains white with deep snow).” Fermor heard him and continued from where the general had broken off, reciting the remaining five stanzas from the Odes.
You see how [Mount] Soracte remains white
with deep snow, and the struggling trees can
no longer sustain the burden, and the rivers
will have been frozen with sharp frost.
Dispel the cold by liberally piling logs on
the fireplace, and draw out more generously,
o Thaliarchus, four-year-old unmixed wine
from the two-handled Sabine jar.
Entrust everything else to the gods; as soon as
they have stilled the winds battling on the heaving
sea, neither the cypress trees nor
the ancient ash trees are shaken.
Leave off asking what tomorrow will bring, and
whatever days fortune will give, count them
as profit, and while you’re young don’t scorn
sweet love affairs and dances,
so long as crabbed old age is far from
your vigor. Now let the playing field and the
public squares and soft whisperings at nightfall
(the appointed hour) be your pursuits.
now too the sweet laughter of a girl hiding
in a secret corner, which gives her away,
and a pledge snatched from her wrists
or her feebly resisting finger.
The German turned to Fermor, their eyes meeting, and said, “Ach so, Herr Major!” Fermor later reflects, “It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had drunk from the same fountain long before, and things were different for the rest of our time together.”
As a 1946 Baby Boomer, I was often told, “Get an education!” As said by those older than me and my respected elders, the words also conveyed the sentiment that I should drink from the same fountain as Fermor and the general. As said, the phrase was never explained, but my contemporaries and I were expected to understand that so many of the speakers of the phrase were telling us to get more “schooling” than they had had. For them, many who had just struggled through WW II, more “schooling” was a way out of low-paying work, for a “better” life, and for me, that meant the cotton mills of NC.
So, we finished high school, learned a trade, developed a skill, joined the military, or attended college. We Baby Boomers traveled various paths, but we never forgot to “get an education,” which was our path to a life better than our elders. We learned to swim in the waters of a new world.
As a small state college student, swimming was fine as long as I was immersed in literature or composition, but the math and science I encountered humbled me. After my third attempt, I barely cleared my last science hurdle. Foreign languages were not much better.
I re-entered the scholastic world twenty years later to earn an advanced degree. My diet of reading and writing, sprinkled heavily with history and political science, had become my vocation and avocation. The swimming was still work, but not labor.
I had drunk some water from the fountain and recently thought of my liberal arts education when I read a news report from Utah. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the Utah legislature has passed HB265 in conjunction with HB1, the base budget bill for higher education, which Governor Cox has signed.
“HB265 shifts $60 million away from the state’s eight public colleges and universities. HB265 then provides for schools to get their share of the money back, only after showing that it will be reallocated for high-demand and high-wage majors, as the state pushes higher education to be more job-focused. University presidents have also been directed to cut ‘inefficient’ programs with low enrollment and little impact on the state’s workforce.”
For a college or university to be bribed–and that is what HB265 is–because elected officials tell Utah educational leaders, “to do as we say,” or there is no money for your institutions. Still, the institutions are tasked with reading the future by deciding what majors will be in demand and paying high wages. In other words, the state legislature is saying, “It’s all about money, children.”
What the elected politicians are not saying but implying is that Utah students should not be concerned with learning for its sake and advantages but only with knowing what might pay a high wage; don’t be concerned with understanding subtleties of language or thought, only with a major that will pay a high salary; and since such studies as history, poetry, philosophy, art, or music will likely never pay a high wage, major in an unknown high-wage earner.
I graduated from college in 1968, a very different time from now. Some of my friends had majors in fields like business that they viewed as roads to high wages. Others majored in a science as a path to a medical degree and high wages. Others, like me, studied what was referred to as “the arts” to teach or continue to a terminal degree for scholarship. Making a high wage is not a new desire for a college student. However, disregarding a base, a foundation for any learning, is new and frightening.
Fermor and Kreipe were enemies who tried to kill one another. Yet, because of the ancient poet, they discovered they had a common bond. They were still enemies and needed to be aware of that always, but Horace’s words bridged their worlds. Because they had drunk from the same fountain, they shared something.
That is the advantage of liberal arts—it is a foundation on which to build and be prepared for whatever comes. Horace, Shakespeare, Hardy, Douglas, Hurston, Baldwin, Meacham, and many more scholars and writers are available to build a sound foundation.
Reading and studying them teach us how to think, appreciate, and realize that we are not alone and share so much with others. To cancel them out will only weaken us.
