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Literature Today With Stanely Mushava
Book: In Defence of a Liberal Education
Author: Fareed Zakaria
Publisher: W.W Norton & Company (2015)
ISBN: 978-0-393-24769-5

The incredible facility of science in the quest to enhance life and knowledge has earned it universal appeal.

Everyone seems eager to get a feel of the trending technology; to keep in step with the utility, ingenuity and allure of science.

Images of our technologically astute grandmothers on local television give the impression that the generation gap is becoming navigable.

A sustained current of high end applications and documentaries on the latest frontiers, from communications, nanotechnology, neuroscience, medicine and astronomy to the internet of things, are consolidating the allure of science.

The emergence of ICT magnates as the foremost models of entrepreneurship further guarantees a technologically-captive society.

Predictably, advances in science and technology are shaking up things in higher education and rewriting the rules of merit.

Access to content has been vastly democratised, thanks to digital publishing and streaming services.

The learning process is far less demanding: for a growing set of modules, anyone can manipulate computer programmes all the way to graduation.

For Fareed Zakaria, this is not all good news.

His latest book, “In Defence of a Liberal Education,” laments the declining significance of the liberal arts in the technology-powered era of higher education.

The bestselling author, who presents Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN, defends the liberal arts as an enriching intellectual experience and necessary function for a conscious and introspective society.

Liberal education essentially empowers students to process knowledge critically across different domains, think outside establishments and be civilly engaged.

The liberal arts include literature, history, philosophy, psychology, art history, religion, politics, linguistics, international relations and theory of science.

The immediate question, considering that most liberal arts are more slanted to the cultivation of the intellect rather than direct professional training, is why anyone should bother.

Fair question because the workplace requires mechanical aptitude more than theories, and we sow educationally to reap professionally.

Zakaria argues that a liberal education makes one articulate, empowers them to speak their mind instead of parroting convention and ignites the curiosity for knowledge.

These qualities are sure to enhance the work experience across the professions network.

Zakaria argues that, contrary to popular opinion, technology and globalisation are actually the liberal arts more valuable since most mechanical tasks can now be assigned to machines.

A vastly applicable knowledge, critical facility, civilly engaged outlook and transferable skills attained through the liberal arts, therefore, promise long-term professional and civic benefits compared to a specialised resume.

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesisers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely,” Zakaria opens his book with E.O Wilson’s pertinent observation.

He argues that in the industrial setting, a liberal arts background fits one for greater possibilities because of the curiosity for knowledge it cultivates and, supported by a professional course, a liberal education can well be the way to the top.

In the civic space, liberal education is an exercise in freedom as it inculcates an attitude incompatible with subjugation.

Zakaria draws from history to demonstrate the liberating quality of this education.

Early Pan-Africanist icon Fredrick Douglas is invoked to demonstrate the dread oppressors had at the prospect of the attainment of a liberal education by the oppressed.

“When his master heard that young Frederick was reading well, he was furious, saying, ‘Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world. If he learns to read the Bible it will forever unfit him to be a slave.’”

“Douglass recalled that he ‘instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.”

Zakaria is worried about the decreasing numbers of students taking up the humanities, as candidates find direct job training preferable.

In Zimbabwe where distribution is relatively consistent across faculties, it is the quality of liberal education rather than the numbers one is concerned about.

Applications which can process data from an infinite range of repositories are making it less compelling for students to exert themselves intellectually.

Humanities and social sciences become less valuable as the burden of original thinking is supplanted by mechanical appropriation of readily available data.

At least from my experience, it is now rare to read anything approaching originality and novelty in the social sciences.

One encounters endless tabulation of statistics which represent nothing new as if a researcher needs eight months to do graphs a football analyst can do in ninety minutes.

The great discourses are recycled without disruptive challenges from academics of the day, something obviously unthinkable when the discourses were originated.

The point of liberal arts is not to go easy but to gasp for new language and shake up convention.

Zakaria extols liberal arts not just for equipping students with the great outlines of knowledge and empowering them to think beyond the canon, but also to teach them the art of writing.

For Zakaria, the cultivation of good writing is the central virtue of a liberal education, since clear writing leads to clear thinking, instead of the reverse, as more widely assumed.

“Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly, and reasonably quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill,” Zakaria points out.

He throws in an anecdote of columnist Walter Lippmann who, having been asked his views on a particular topic, is said to have replied: “I don’t know what I think on that one. I haven’t written about it yet.”

Zakaria refers to the great debate in modern philosophy on whether thought or language comes first.

“Do we think abstractly and then put those ideas into words, or do we think in words that then create a scaffolding of thought?

“When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-formed ideas strung together, with gaping holes between them.

“It is the act of writing that forces me to sort them out,” he cites his own example.

As to the professional utility of a liberal education, Zakaria says whether one is a politician, a businessperson, a lawyer, a historian, or a novelist, writing facilitates choices and allows one to clarify and sequent their ideas properly.

He cites Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s insistence for his senior executives to write up to six printed pages of memos and to begin senior-management meetings with a period of quiet reflection in which everyone reads and makes notes on the memos.

While Zakaria makes an engaging case for liberal education, one needs to discriminate purely educationistic points from his book’s overtly Western orientation, evident in his choice of allusions and an apparent assumption of the West as the global centre.

The last two chapters are more discursive than operational, and I particularly object to Zakaria’s delegation of the Christian account of creation to myth in the chapter “Knowledge and Power.”

Zakaria wrests the account of the fall of man out of context, pairing it with the Greek account of Prometheus as examples of myths bordering on the fear of knowledge.

“The forbidden fruit of knowledge is clearly central to the story,” Zakaria says, shooting down the understanding that obedience to God not knowledge is central to the story.

Zakaria misses the essence of the account in that he refers to a “tree of knowledge” rather than the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” as specified by Moses in the account.

The essential symbol here is that of a civilisation built on a balance between good and evil — a balance at the heart of mankind’s problems from the fall to the present.

On a summative score, Zakaria’s case for the liberal arts is urgent in as much as human agency and critical thought must be fortified as the great traditions of higher education.

• Stanely Mushava blogs at upstreamafrica.blogspot.com