The Ultimate Utility of Nonutility

Summary: The author of this article, Lisa Colleta, is writing about the importance of liberal arts education in the face of its decline in popularity. It has become more and more common to view such an education as antiquated and impractical, and even should be obsolete. Colleta argues that it greatly enhances individuals ability to think critically and creatively, thus making them better workers and people as a whole.

Reaction: I am actually in a unique position to react to this article because I attended a liberal arts school for three years, and now I am attending Rowan in a program with a far more vocational, practical basis. I think you can definitely get by in life and be happy without studying classic authors, learning a foreign language, or writing thesis papers. However, expanding ones horizons can only be beneficial and a better understanding of the world as a whole and well as respect for differences is crucial to improving the conditions of our world.

As someone who was exposed to many ideas, I did adopt very liberal, accepting views regarding various schools of thought, cultures, and historical events. And though I believe I became a more “well-rounded” person, it did not prepare me very well for the challenges I would face in daily life. Yes, reading, or attempting to read Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan was intellectually beneficially, I was still rendered useless when trying to understand/deal with health insurance claims or understand human anatomy and physiology to be able to explain a medical problem to a doctor. Admittedly though, most of my peers at my previous are able to do these things.

Tie-in to Carr, Cascio

The main connection that I see here with Colleta’s article and the other two is the worth of a cultivated mind. Carr definitely recognizes that human minds are changing and is unsettled by this. He also describes how people generally, including intellectuals, are becoming highly superficial in their thinking. He laments this turn of events and fears the potential consequences of the turn. He doesn’t really put forth a detailed argument for a deeply thinking mind, but focuses more on how we are getting away from deep thought and his concern about it, thus validating the worth of reflective thinking much in the same way that Colletta does in her article.

Cascio writes that are minds are changing, but that the may ultimately change for the better. He stresses that despite being somewhat overwhelmed by our the current onslaught of information and distraction, we are only at the beginning stages of our mental transformation and will most likely adapt. He also champions the idea that having computers augment or perhaps even replace an individual’s intelligence is fantastic and that technology will be powerful enough to think for us and solve our problems. Colleta and I disagree with Cascio here because we see the value of an individual coming to his or her own conclusions about the world through deep thinking, not just operating on algorithms. A profound education is essential to making us better people and deciding how best to use the technological tools at our disposal.