Some Things Never Go Out of Style

4/1/2024

Particularly in this era of great technological change, where every day we hear how AI will make our lives easier and our jobs obsolete, the tendency is to promote an education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as the pathway to personal and collective prosperity.

The idea that school should involve learning about technology is not new—and not foreign to Roeper—but neither is the idea that it alone does not constitute a complete education. In many ways how we think about curriculum has remained the same since classical times (curriculum itself is a Latin word meaning “little course”). Made famous in the work of a fifth-century writer named Martianus Capella, the liberal arts education (more Latin: liberal from libertas meaning “freedom”), involving a breadth of subjects including languages, mathematics, history, sciences, philosophy, and fine arts, represented the learning that one required to be a thoughtful and contributing citizen. Nor, as some might suggest, should that learning be restricted to the Western Canon; we are far better able to think and contribute when that thinking and those contributions draw from a range of diverse traditions and perspectives.¹

These things are no less, and I would argue more, important in a world dominated by technology. Our ability to communicate, make ethical and aesthetic choices, decide who to vote for, and discern which online stories to trust becomes significantly more crucial with the vast technological resources available to us, allowing unprecedented opportunities to shape our social and natural surroundings.

Or, to quote the admissions department of Princeton University:

A liberal arts education challenges you to consider not only how to solve problems, but also trains you to ask which problems to solve and why, preparing you for positions of leadership and a life of service to the nation and all of humanity.²

Of course, if you don’t buy that argument (rhetoric is one of the liberal arts, by the way), it’s also true that despite its bad “what can you do with that?” reputation, more and more employers, even in high-tech industries, are hiring people with backgrounds in liberal arts fields, and more and more entrepreneurs are emerging from those fields, precisely because an education in STEM alone does not provide them with the skills necessary for success.³

It’s not an either-or proposition: whether our graduates go on to earn MBAs or P.Engs, they will need to draw upon a wide range of skills and knowledge—of music and mathematics, history and HTML, French and physics—and that is why we continue to innovate to ensure that our curriculum offers our students a wide range of choices across a range of disciplines that they will need to be successful in a world of rapid change and emerging opportunities.

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^{1 See, for example, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?” New Yorker, March 11, 2024.
2 https://admission.princeton.edu/academics/what-does-liberal-arts-mean
3 This is far from a trendy idea. See, for example, George Sanders, “That That 'Useless' Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech's Hottest Ticket,” Forbes, August 17, 2015, or “The Unexpected Value of the Liberal Arts,” The Atlantic, August 1, 2017.}

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