While I have not had the experience myself, other professors I know report being approached by parents of graduating seniors with the pressing question, Now that my daughter (or son) has a B.A. in English, what can she do with it? This seems to occur on the occasion of graduation, and I take the question to mean, What kind of job can she get, or what kind of career can she pursue, with this degree? I find two things to be curious about the question, one of which is the timing–why wait until graduation weekend to ask?
But it’s really the second point that I find more pressing, and this point has to do with what I think must be the question’s assumption that such a degree as a B.A. in English should translate into employment. That I would even question this assumption might strike some (at least in the pocket of the globe that I occupy) as in itself odd, since I take it that the pragmatic idea that education should translate into employment is all but hard-wired into much American thinking. No doubt, a hardy pragmatism relates to many fine qualities, but it can create certain blind spots as well.
As a matter of fact, there are many very fine schools–trade schools and others–that one might attend if what one is after is education for employment and one is not planning to attend either a graduate or a professional school. On the other hand, one might consider the possibility that a liberal arts education has a value in itself, regardless of the pragmatic results. As it happens, such an education does in fact have applications in the worlds of employment, even if these applications remain incidental to the chief good of the liberal arts.
Since I was recently asked to serve on a panel considering the purposes of the liberal arts, I thought that I would take this opportunity to write up some of my convictions about what this work is for. As the poet Mark Strand says in a prose piece about the art of translation, language “belongs to everyone and to no one.” Language is a constantly shifting structure that attaches to the most personal experiences while at the same time functioning, as it must function, as a public possession. From the time of the Medieval university–though with roots going back to the classical age–the arts of language (specifically, the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic) have formed the groundwork of a liberal arts education. Language has a long history, or rather long histories–which are and must remain multiple–and it tends to carry these histories along with it. A given word will have its agreed-upon and more or less readily accessible meanings, but then it will also have a kind of shadow life of the formerly dominant meanings that it has carried in the past. The structure of language, with its shifting and shadowy life, is not merely a public possession; it is also a structure that possesses us and speaks us into existence. The meanings that we encounter in our language worlds have been developed and conditioned through centuries of use. Part of what it means to be educated in a liberal arts tradition is to come into fuller, more conscious possession of the language worlds that possess us.
Another part of such an education has to do with entering into an increasing realization that engaging with language, both as a reader and as a writer, means engaging in a process of discovery, for any human utterance implies more than it explicitly says because it arises from a vast field of significance. Any human utterance makes sense only with reference to common traditions, shared assumptions, common bodily experiences, etc. To make such a statement as this is not to fall into an easy relativism, but rather to point toward what has been styled by Walter J. Ong (from whose work I am cribbing much of this present paragraph) as relationalism. Because everything is connected to everything else, there is no single thing to say about anything. There is simply no way to raise to the level of full consciousness and explicitness the entire significance of a given utterance. Any statement, no matter how true, calls forth further questions and further responses, further insights. The human situation is thus characterized by what Ong refers to in the title of a late article, “Hermeneutic Forever,” a constant motion of interpretation. However true a given utterance may be, there is always more to say. One meaning of discovery in the study of the liberal arts has to do with learning how to ask further questions and respond with further insights in the variety of language worlds–from history to philosophy to mathematics to geology to psychology et cetera–available. Of course, attending an institution of higher learning is not the ony way to get a liberal arts education, but it remains one very helpful way of receving and achieving such a formation.