Patrick Carlyon: Why arts degrees provide vital, critical thinking

The federal government plans to lift fees for humanities subjects and lower fees for more employment-oriented pursuits. Does this mean that reason, perspective, analysis, books and art works are not useful, asks Patrick Carlyon.

What arts students share is the gift of tools for the pursuit of wisdom.

The rules for an arts degree are pretty simple.

In this case, subjects were chosen according to contact hours. A subject that had Friday classes would not be taken, because learning was secondary to Thursday night drinks.

There were other highlights. Such as the day we smoked joints on the university lawn. I learned a powerful lesson that day — sometimes, one is better than two.

Yet I learned some other things, too. Call it osmosis. I turned up to politics lectures and criminology tutorials and absorbed approaches to critical thought that I have applied ever since.

This was an indulgence, or so we’re now being told. Learning ought to be more practical. The Federal Government’s plans to lift fees for humanities subjects and lower fees for more employment-oriented pursuits.

Useful, it seems, is a person who can build a bridge or save a life. Does it follow that useless are the so-called fripperies, such as reason, perspective, analysis, books and art works?

Humanity is more advanced than ever, and yet more uncertain of what lies ahead.

Education Minister Dan Tehan, himself an arts graduate, wants students to think about being “job relevant”.

More than ever, an arts degree is to be doomed as the prodigal path, the fallback, that sits in behind engineering or science.

In applying a market price on the search for wisdom, Tehan deserves points for timing. Could it be any worse?

We live in a changed world of pandemics and political unrest. Humanity is more advanced than ever, and yet more uncertain of what lies ahead.

We rely on packaged and simplified messaging. Opinion masquerades as fact. Sentiment substitutes for reason, and campaigns have come to assume intolerances lifted from the Salem witch trials of 1692.

There’s a thrusting anti-intellectualism in shrill debates about our past. Take Victoria’s deputy chief medical officer Annaliese van Diemen. She is a very useful person right now. But her notions of early history, and Captain Cook’s place, as she tweeted, are an affront to considered thought.

Arts subjects offer insights that more specialised courses do not.

You may learn that the notion of right and wrong is a simplistic yardstick. That “truth” is an abstraction that cannot be appropriated by one or other side of a debate.

You may learn that almost no modern concept is “unprecedented”. That there was once a Spanish Flu, for example, far worse than COVID-19 and that many of our current responses borrow from those relatively ignorant times.

You may learn that tweets and labels drive talking points, but slogans lack the depth or insight to bring about real change.

You may learn that kneejerk responses to perceived injustices — such as the recent clamour over the brand names of beer and lollies — will probably dim as “fashionable” feel-good pursuits and won’t matter very much.

You may learn history began before the first millennial was born, and that “Black Lives Matter” warrants a relatively minor place alongside earlier civil-rights movements.

You may grasp that big historical figures, from Winston Churchill to James Cook, defy lazy labels of good or bad.

You may acknowledge the unjust assumptions of the past because you accept you yourself, as part of the collective, may have submitted to some of the prevailing mores of the day.

Humanities subjects foster curiosity in a world in which off-topic meanderings are dissed as unproductive.

You may question the rules of judgment as applied through a modern lens of righteousness.

That failings and horrors blend with triumphs and breakthroughs, and that to try to separate the parts can be intellectually fraught.

You may see that “cancel culture”, from erased comedy programs to grovelling comedian apologies, serves to deepen the growing distaste for the unfettered exchange of ideas.

You may decide decriminalising drugs may not work terribly well, but that it works far better than the law-and-order approach.

You may realise Donald Trump is not the first idiot to run America and the republic survived all the other imbeciles.

You may suspect technology, and its advances, further the world but do not describe its progress. An iPhone makes life easier, but does Siri make you wiser?

Every arts student sees these things differently.

There is no orthodoxy, which is why some graduates
would challenge any or all of the above assertions.

What they do share is the gift of tools for the pursuit of wisdom (even if some of them squander it by smoking grass instead).

Humanities subjects foster curiosity in a world in which off-topic meanderings are dissed as unproductive.

They encourage imagination and empathy. They get you to think.

Don’t we need more thinkers in the current climate of mistrust and fear?

Or do we steer the brightest minds to engineering or maths because the bald metrics of the marketplace invite literalistic stamps of usefulness?

Yes, the geeks will inherit the Earth. They will be the scientists and doctors who better lives and promote progress. This is no bad thing.

But if we also marginalise the study of critical thought, won’t they be steering blind?

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Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist