The liberal arts are vital to fostering future leaders

It is hard to read the news lately without seeing the value of the arts and humanities denigrated. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, for example, has repeatedly attacked what she sees as ‘rip-off’ degrees offering little economic value. Such positions are repeated ad nauseum, despite the arts sector being a consistent bright-spot in the post-Brexit economy. 

Employers have consistently said they want agile and intellectually curious graduates, comfortable with critical thinking, who are confident problem solvers, all of which are hallmarks of arts and humanities education. Still, the arts and humanities are attacked as, at best, a nice thing to have for rich kids and, at worst, an expensive lie that distracts from the real money and value of STEM.

Imagine, then, what I deal with leading a Liberal Arts programme.

Origins in ancient Greece

As an intellectual tradition, the Liberal Arts is one of the foundations of how we conceive of education. With its origins in ancient Greece, the Liberal Arts have held a prominent place in the classical Western world. Assuming its modern form in Renaissance Europe, a liberal education – usually comprising grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy – was seen as the key set of skills necessary for the development of any well-rounded and engaged citizen. 

Some 20 years ago, academic leaders and thinkers in the UK saw the need to adapt and grow the higher education offer and the skills university graduates needed, turning to successful US and European models of liberal education. Since then, over 115 Liberal Arts courses have emerged in dozens of universities across the UK.

I have the privilege of working with some wonderful undergraduates who have joined our liberal arts course at Warwick for all sorts of reasons. Some are drawn to the interdisciplinary structure and breadth of possible study – a rarity in single-honours programmes in the UK. Others don’t want to be limited by narrow focus on one discipline. And some – it must be said – can’t make up their minds but know our programme will grow and change with them. 

Understanding the ‘meta’

But something curious unites many of my students and cuts across these reasons: many self-identify as gamers. Gaming – specifically computer gaming – is an important pastime for them. As a result, I’ve had numerous conversations over the years about why they devote so many hours to it and how they get so much satisfaction from the time they spend in digital worlds.

Through the conversations, these students have taught me a key concept in gaming: the ‘meta’. In this use of the term, the meta refers to strategies gamers adopt, the decisions they make in-game, and the way they allocate resources (both real and virtual) to be as successful as possible. 

The interesting thing about the meta, though, is that it’s often created by players through consensus gained via spirited discussions and the hard experience of long and intentional hours in front of a screen. As any gamer will tell you, the games constantly change – with updates, patches and new content. So, the meta and the players must change constantly, too.

Disciplinary certainty doesn’t exist

It struck me this is what’s happening in Liberal Arts as well. Our approach is focused as much on the processes needed to develop robust critical thinking skills and create persuasive evidence-informed arguments as it is on the specific content of any module or discipline. What we’re doing is helping students identify the ‘meta’ of their world. This, in turn, enables them to identify and develop the skills they need to excel in an ever-changing present, to say nothing of a very uncertain future.

We do this in a host of ways. For example, one core first-year module – Principles and Praxis – explores the principles that underpin liberal education and inform the journey our students have embarked upon. It introduces academic skills they need to be successful. And in an early seminar, we introduce what poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

To paraphrase, we’re trying to get our students to see that the disciplinary certainty their secondary education was predicated on doesn’t really exist – and that’s okay.  For students, negative capability can feel a lot like vulnerability, and vulnerability feels uncomfortable. Understanding how to embrace it is a skill we don’t prioritise enough.

Stakes are different, but learning is the same

Jean Piaget understood this well. His concept of disequilibrium – the uncomfortable state we, as learners, enter when confronted with knowledge or situations we don’t have any prior system for dealing with – is very relevant here. For far too much of their educational lives, students have not been pressed to go beyond the boundaries set in the classroom. Most have never had the opportunity to fail either.

That combination means, when presented with unseen complexity or real-world challenges, students often don’t have the skills to embrace the unknown, the discomfort and the risk of not getting the ‘right’ answer. Gamers take the opposite approach, with failure and experimentation going hand-in-hand towards success.  The stakes may be different, but the learning required is the same.

By asking students to think actively and by developing their awareness of negative capability and how they can recognise and embrace disequilibrium, at Warwick we hope to foster a willingness to discover their own meta. With students from so many intellectual backgrounds, and with so many possible routes through our Liberal Arts programme, the meta is not a single, overarching thing. 

What’s vital is for students to see vulnerability and disequilibrium as capability and opportunity. In this way, the Liberal Arts work to reimagine and reimplement a former tradition for an as-yet-unseen future – a future in which graduates understand how to find the ever-changing meta that enables them to be the citizen-leaders we need.