David Merritt is a junior majoring in communication. He can be contacted at [email protected].There is something about college that encourages indecisiveness. It’s probably the abundance of options that college students are presented with. Where do you want to live? Where do you want to eat dinner? Who do you want to room with? What classes do you want to take? What do you want your major to be?
Students are swept from the world of high school where there is structure and order to a place called college that is frighteningly free. College freshmen are left on campus in a daze and normally take a few years to figure out what they’re doing.
Students are expected to find their place and role in their new surroundings, and if they don’t, they’re thought to be a slacker or unmotivated.
But there are some that epitomize this sense of indecision.
We call them “liberal arts kids.” These “liberal arts kids” are the masters of undesirable meddling and other sorts of undirected shenaniganing.
In fact, many would say their entire field of study is undirected shenaniganing. It has no place in our industrial world unless we’re talking about flipping burgers.
Unfortunately, I sort of agree with these people. Our culture has snubbed those who find interest in English, history, philosophy, anthropology and the like. After college it’s become difficult to find a job in these areas other than maybe teaching. The only degrees that seem to rake in the dough are ones like engineering. It appears that intelligence is now defined by how well one is able to memorize trivial bits of knowledge rather than being able to process information and form one’s own perspective of reality.
In a thousand years, when historians (if they still exist), look back on our culture they will ask what happened to the novelists, playwrights and artists. The answer is simple: society forgot them. Our culture was too busy building bridges or selling shoes to acknowledge the great thinkers of its time.
Of course, this isn’t a recent problem. The philosopher has always been jaded. As much as our post-industrial society has devalued thought this has been the trend all throughout history. The liberal arts have nearly always been unable to produce the same economic usefulness as other professions and thus will never be able to achieve the same social acceptance.
If liberal arts students are ever to find direction, it must first be provided by society. The liberal arts can always be studied and that will hopefully always occur, but for a culture to appreciate them is required if the liberal arts are going to grow. So don’t judge those liberal arts kids. They’re just waiting for our culture to change.