CNN's Fareed Zakaria Defends A Liberal Arts Education

Washington Post columnist and host of his own show on CNN, Fareed Zakaria spoke Tuesday on UNC’s campus about his new book entitled “In Defense of a Liberal Education.”

“The assault on liberal education right now, the attack on it and the defunding of it, is because principally the argument is you can’t get a job if you do this,” said Zakaria.

Zakaria said he wrote his book to prove that a liberal arts education does prepare you for a job, contrary to what many are saying to justify cuts in funding.

Liberal, as in liberal arts education, is different from the word used to describe partisan politics; it means the study of a variety of subjects. Zakaria argued that we cannot simply focus on science and technology.

Audience gathered in the Genome Science Building at UNC. Photo via Chris Grunert.

“My argument is not that we need less science, it’s that we need to understand that science alone cannot suffice to comprise the broad, deep kind of education that the United States has been good at,” said Zakaria.

Zakaria said liberal education in the United State goes back to the founding fathers, who believed in teaching various disciplines, opposed to the trade and apprenticeship style of education that was popular in Europe at the time.

With a foundation of a liberal arts education, Zakaria argues, the United States has been able to create a diverse economy and lead the world in innovation.

“It’s never just technology that makes you so successful, it has to be how humans use technology because that is the crucial element. If you don’t understand how human beings are going to use it, then you’re not going to understand how to sell it,” said Zakaria.

Zakaria mentioned how Steve Jobs once said that the most important college class he took, before he dropped out, was a calligraphy course where he learned about design that eventually inspired Apple’s products.

“It was calligraphy and textual design that made him understand that a computer needed to look beautiful and he drew from that Japanese design and that was in many ways the origin of the original Macintosh,” said Zakaria.

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory has been critical of certain college course offerings in the past, he said on a radio program in 2013 that if you “want to take gender studies that’s fine, go to a private school and take it.”

In the Connect NC Bond, which North Carolinians will vote on during the March 15 primary, more than half of the funds will go to the UNC System but many of the projects focus on medicine, engineering or business facilities, such as a new medical school building at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Zakaria described how in ancient Rome, emphasis was placed on learning literature and law to get a job, and studying science was to gain a better appreciation of the world. Now, Zakaria said, we focus on science to get a job but both are equally as important to society.

“In the grand sweep of history, there will be phases. There will be phases when one [subject] seems more important or directly related to a job than another but actually the reality is that you need both and they feed into each other, in the way that they have done for so many thousands of years,” said Zakaria.

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria Defends A Liberal Arts Education

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