Teaching Liberal Arts: In The Time Of Corona & The “Job Market”

By Liyanage Amarakeerthi –NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Prof. Liyanage Amarakeerthi

At universities, we are busy teaching online. And it is heartbreaking to find many students are lacking in required facilities. Teaching on Zoom, for example, takes smart phones and personal computers for granted. And we have to assume that Internet access is as ubiquitous as air. Reality is totally different. Attendance to live Zoom classes can be as low as 40 percent in faculty of arts where students from underprivileged backgrounds make the majority. Therefore, we need to record our lectures and make them available through other means. I myself have WhatsApp groups for all my classes in order to transmit important course content with a minimal cost. The university and the faculty take admirable care, with extremely limited resources, to make sure that no student is left behind. But the situation is far from satisfactory. 

In addition to Corona, our political authorities routinely tell us that what we teach at the faculties of arts has become irrelevant and obsolete. They regularly ask us to produce employable graduates.  Recently, President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa was caught in a video clip telling a graduate that she should have studied ‘something technical.’ While it is wrong to produce an endless number of external graduates merely with degree certificates to wave at media cameras at Lipton circle learning something ‘technical’ signifies much poorer understanding of university Education.

  In this speech, I want to reflect on the true meaning of education at the faculties of Arts. At our faculties we teach courses in the humanities and the social sciences. As a scholar in literature and language, I am at the most pressured end of the spectrum: Learning literature is the most removed from ‘something technical.’ Therefore, we, the humanities scholars at universities, routinely have to justify what we are doing in teaching and research. These reflections are made in that context.

Vision of the founding fathers

The founding fathers (There were only ‘fathers’ those early days) of the University of Ceylon, never have imagined future scholars in the Humanities would have to face the particular challenged mentioned above. In the inaugural address of the Ceylon University movement Ponnambalam Arunachalam, the president of the movement, had elaborate plans for a University of our own. Out of thirteen professorships they had imagined to create in the University of Ceylon, eight were for the humanities. They wanted professorships for vernacular languages such as Sinhala and Tamil, and when the university was established in 1942 the curriculum had considerable focus on local language and traditions. Indeed there were professorships for natural sciences, and many science-based subjects were to enter within the first decade of the university.  

 In addition, those founding fathers had much larger and grander ideals for education; here are the words of Arunachalam: 

“University will be a powerful instrument for forming character, for giving us men and women armed with reason and self-control, braced by knowledge, clothed with steadfastness and courage and inspired by public spirit and public virtue.” “A Plea for a Ceylon University” (A. T. Alwis. Peradeniya: The Founding of a University).

 Those beautifully profound words demonstrate that Arunachalam’s vision for education was much more than teaching ‘something technical.’ 

Liberal Arts

In order to rediscover the true meaning of the Humanities education, one may look into what is meant by the liberal arts in contemporary international universities. ‘Liberal arts’ is a bit more inclusive than what we call ‘arts subjects’ since they (liberal arts) include natural sciences, basic mathematics and the like. A rich liberal arts degree program exposes students to a wide range of subjects: Languages, literature, philosophy, religion, natural sciences, mathematics, Fine Arts, citizenship education, Social Sciences (at least key concepts of them) and so on. Since there is nothing strictly prohibited from the domain of liberal arts one could add numerous other things to the curriculum. 

The word ‘liberal’ in liberal arts a loaded one: It includes knowledge required to liberate human beings from socio-cultural bonds they are trapped in producing hierarchy, inequality and injustice. Rousseau famously claimed that chains that bind human beings are human-made’ and the hammers to break them are also made in earth not in heaven.  A high quality education in liberal arts should help us see those chains and to forge the hammers that can break them. In other words, liberal arts teach us the significance of working towards a just society. For that goal, there are many sources of wisdom. Unlike political parties and rigid ideologues, universities believe that there are multiples ways to reach that goal. That goal may be always at the horizon resisting our reaching it. Still, a society that has given up on that goal is perhaps so much poor even with endless affluence. Teaching liberal arts at universities is one important way societies holding onto a richer dream even in the midst of relative economic hardship. A country can be poor but yet not philistine. 

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