During a highly anticipated media event in January, Apple introduced its
latest innovation: the iPad. At the conclusion of a ninety-minute
presentation extolling this “magic and revolutionary device,” CEO Steve
Jobs said “the reason that Apple is able to create products like the
iPad is that we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology
and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both . . . And it’s the
combination of these two things that I think has let us make the kind of
creative products like the iPad.” For the audience gathered, as if to
underscore the point, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, this may
have seemed a somewhat mystifying explanation for Apple’s position on
the cutting edge of consumer electronics. But readers of Liberal
Education will know exactly what Jobs meant. Indeed, Dan Edelstein’s
article here, “How Is Innovation Taught?” speaks directly to the same
point, explaining why “a liberal arts education grounded in the
humanities” is the best preparation for success in an economy driven by
innovation.

The argument that study in the humanities results in the development of
highly marketable skills is gaining salience in the current educational
environment, which is characterized by a pre*dominant emphasis on job
preparation. As Leslie Berlowitz reports in this issue, data from the
Humanities Indicators project “show that, overall, the humanities have
lost significant market share to vocational degrees, primarily business,
as the number of students entering college has increased.” Among the
reasons to lament this decline, Berlowitz explains, is the relevance of
the humanities to “the preparation of a literate, flexible, creative
American workforce.”

Persuasive and necessary though it undoubtedly is, the case for the
economic benefits of study in the humanities distracts attention from
and, in effect, downplays the broader importance of the humanities
themselves. This is especially regrettable given their centrality to
liberal education. As the LEAP report notes, “throughout history,
liberal education—and especially the arts and humanities—has been a
constant resource, not just for civic life but for the inner life of
self-discovery, values, moral inspiration, spiritual quests and solace,
and the deep pleasures of encountering beauty, insight, and expressive
power.” In this issue’s lead article, Helen Vendler elaborates this
notion of the arts and humanities as a resource for life and proposes
making the arts central objects of humanistic study because, as she
says, they “help us live our lives.”

Although it does not begin or end in college, the exploration of what it
means to be human—along with the allied project of striving to live more
fully—is enriched and advanced there through sustained engagement with
the arts and humanities. Critically important though they so obviously
are, learning to innovate and preparing for success in the global
economy are but ancillary outcomes of this exploration.


http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation...i10_Editor.cfm