37 pages • 1 hour read
Fareed ZakariaIn Defense Of A Liberal Education
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaChapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Zakaria argues that a liberal education has three primary benefits. First, it emphasizes writing, which encourages critical thinking instead of rote memorization. Writing makes one “sort out” their ideas (74). These skills are essential regardless of career. Second, an education in the liberal arts fosters superior oral communication, or what the Yale-NUS partnership calls “articulate communication” (75). The ability to provide coherent presentations and articulate one’s ideas verbally in an organized manner is also an essential skill: “The seminar, a form of teaching and learning at the heart of a liberal education, helps you to read, analyze, and dissect. Above all, it helps you to express yourself” (76). Finally, a liberal education stresses “how to learn” (78): It creates life-long learners with an inherent curiosity. These skills are critical to any career and facilitate the many career transitions that one experiences over the course of one’s employed life.
An effective liberal education fosters interdisciplinary thinking, from which emerging technology and scientific research can benefit. Technical skills and the humanities are not opposing forces because the latter depends on creativity, which the humanities support and which artificial intelligence cannot master:
Technology and liberal education go hand in hand in business. Twenty years ago, tech companies might have survived simply as industrial product manufacturers. Now they have to be at the cutting edge of design, marketing, and social networking (83).
Specific fields like anthropology or art history also offer “real rewards in the outside world” because they necessitate the study of languages and cultures (87)—skills that are useful in our modern, globalized world. A survey conducted by the American Association of University Professors confirms that 74% of employers value the skills that a liberal education provides and that the “wage gap” between engineering degree holders and those with liberal arts degrees “narrows” over one’s career lifespan (88).
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conducts a standardized test every three years that assesses scientific, mathematical, and reading skills at the secondary level. US students ranked 21st in the 2012 results. Furthermore, US test scores are comparatively poor. However, standardized tests cannot effectively gauge all forms of intelligence, like creativity. The US, Sweden, and Israel all have less-than-impressive results on the OECD exam, yet they are all performing exceptionally in the production of technological innovation because all three countries “are open societies, happy to let in the world’s ideas, goods, and services” (96). Students from these nations possess confidence in facing challenges and faith in the human ability to achieve greatness, even in the face of failure.
Zakaria posits that the best model of education combines the skills-based emphasis and culture of hard work from Asian countries with the Western liberal arts model. Unfortunately, contemporary college students study much less than their predecessors did in the 1960s, and higher education currently centers an “industry” of college athletics to the detriment of academic discipline. The liberal arts have thus become “less structured and demanding” (103), which may encourage the negative social stigma associated with liberal arts degrees, despite their inherent value. Majors like English have lost enrollments, while the social sciences have grown, perhaps because “they remain somewhat rigorous” (104). Zakaria argues that higher education must return to the rigor that once defined a liberal arts education.
Chapter 4 Summary
Benjamin Franklin made an influential mark on American education by “envisioning” the modern liberal arts college. He viewed education’s purpose as not only practical but also important for creating well-rounded individuals. He promoted a curriculum that included arithmetic, astronomy, agriculture, religion, and history, among other subjects, and emphasized public speaking over writing skills. He promoted a broad education because he recognized its value from his own wide-ranging intellectual pursuits. Thomas Jefferson also promoted liberal education. It was a means of ensuring an enduring democracy for Jefferson, who wrote that an educated populace was a buffer against tyranny. He thus promoted public education and the creation of a national university, establishing the University of Virginia after serving as president.
The school’s purpose was to educate men for public service in a democracy and create broad-minded citizens. Jefferson’s curriculum “was more academic than Franklin’s, with a good deal of math and science, as well as modern and ancient languages, law and history, writing and grammar” (111). He also encouraged elective courses. This education, Jefferson argued, gives rise to a “natural aristocracy” not centered on one’s position of birth or wealth but on merit: “America’s elite should come from finding the best and the brightest and educating them well” (112). This theory means that people from all classes have access to publicly funded education.
However, in today’s America, education is less accessible to the poor and middle classes. SAT scores, participation in co-curricular activities, and good grades that get students admission to the best schools are “correlated with family income” (114). Until the 1970s, college and university education was affordable, but reduction in state appropriations to public universities has made college expensive and less accessible, while “an increasing number of rich out-of-state kids who can pay full tuition get relaxed admissions criteria” (116). Elite universities have moved away from merit and make exceptions for various students in the admissions process, most notably student athletes. The rising emphasis on college sports has “warped […] academic values” (117). Zakaria believes that “[a]ggressive efforts” are needed to counter the privilege of the wealthy in higher education (119).
While higher education “is booming,” the increasing cost of college is “unsustainable” (119). It has increased by 1,200% since the late 1970s. This cost undermines liberal education. Families are concerned that their students will earn a useless degree at great expense. Consumer culture treats a degree as a product “yet can’t really judge its quality” (122). Measuring the value of a college education is difficult. Students’ improvement over time may be a good indicator, but assessing improvement likewise proves challenging. Courses present students with light workloads and do not effectively foster critical thinking.
Technological innovation in the form of massive open online courses (MOOCs) may offer a resolution to these challenges. MOOCs serve the developing world by making higher education accessible. Anyone can take these courses. Most fail to complete the courses in which they enroll, yet a 5% completion rate on large MOOC platforms, like Coursera, is a substantial number of people. Zakaria believes that the popularity of these alternative forms of higher education
will force teachers to do better, since they will now be measured against the world’s best. They will pressure colleges to contain costs […] They will make students decide what really matters to them—knowledge, credentials, classroom discussion—and find the best way to get it (129).
Data sets will emerge as more students enroll in these online courses, which will allow instructors to tailor them to specific needs. Overall, MOOCs’ primary value is their accessibility and appeal to diverse learners rather than traditional college students. By 2025, over 260 million learners might be served. Many learners enrolled in courses offered by these platforms do so out of general curiosity, indicating that “a large portion of MOOC users are interested in acquiring a liberal education—or enhancing the one they received years ago” (133).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Zakaria suggests in Chapters 3 and 4 that The Value of a Liberal Arts Education lies in three main benefits: the ability to write, which in turn encourages critical thinking, and the cultivation of curiosity. International testing often shows American education falling behind on multiple measures. However, Zakaria shows that these scores do not align with America’s ability to compete successfully in the global economy. He argues that this dichotomy exists because testing cannot measure Adaptability and Creativity in Education. Creativity is essential to America’s global competitive edge because it supports innovation.
According to Zakaria, American education is plagued by problems including a lack of rigor: “A 2010 research paper found that the average number of hours college students spend studying outside the classroom a week declined from forty in 1961 to twenty-seven in 2003” (102). This is an example of how Zakaria backs up his views with facts and figures. He also notes that the number of pages that students read for their courses is small. He thus suggests that American universities are not teaching enough and are jeopardizing students’ abilities to develop genuine knowledge. Zakaria appears to define a rigorous education as one that comes with a heavy workload. However, he does not consider further causes for these statistics, such as the possibilities that today’s students work more hours outside of their classes to pay for college than they did in the 1960s. Students from wealthy backgrounds, who do not have to work their way through college and whom Zakaria criticizes as the “unnatural aristocracy,” are, ironically, the very students who may have the time to devote to “rigorous” coursework, as he defines it.
Disparaging remarks about the liberal arts from leaders like those mentioned in Zakaria’s first chapter only buffer the misconception that a liberal arts education is valueless. Zakaria notes the rising cost of college as a barrier to cultivating an American meritocracy well equipped to withstand tyrannical threats. He argues that political leaders must reassert the importance of a liberal education in conjunction with vocational education to enhance The Role of Education in Democracy. Both are essential to a successful society, state, and economy, as men like Thomas Jefferson recognized.
Zakaria explores the solutions necessary to reform higher education and save the liberal arts. As Zakaria argues, higher education is in dire straits today because of declining state appropriations. Public funding for education has fallen dramatically since the 1970s. These funding cuts have led to faculty attrition, the growth of adjuncts (temporary faculty), and increased workload for teaching faculty. Their poor working conditions directly impact student learning conditions, often in negative ways. These conditions mean that students may not know if their professor will be at their campus from one semester to the next. It also means that these faculty teach so many students that they find it difficult to give them the individualized attention they need. As Zakaria points out, the ideal learning environment is small seminar settings, but funding cuts create larger classes and higher teaching loads that often make this ideal teaching and learning style impossible.
