The study of the liberal arts is a necessary component in the education of a young person, as they inform the behavior and character of the civic enterprise. In particular, classical literature offers a wealth of wisdom in matters of living life with grace, virtue and authenticity. In an unattributed famous saying of Socrates the issue is elucidated succinctly: “Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.” Life is the proper laboratory to which we are given our final exam, and in matters of life, we might rightly wound those about us in ignorance of the knowledge of the good; we must caution against acting with imprudence and instead temper our inclinations and will with right principles. The liberal arts provide these principles by exposing us to a wealth of myth to contemplate upon and by offering to us a mental, even spiritual exercise (in the words of Pierre Hadot), by which to experience the spectrum of life and death, the range of human emotions. As a result of considering this mental meter, we are compelled to come to conclusions on the nature of life, and so gain wisdom, guiding our public and private behaviors while before we were naked in reasoning. The liberal arts challenge us, by thrusting upon us the transgressions of Oedipus and the destructive rage of Achilles, so that we might learn from vice, raise ourselves up from the mire and temper our actions with an understanding of consequence.
The question of whether or not the appreciation and training in visual arts should be necessarily educated in children is another issue. For sure, there is a need for visual artists, but there is not a need for all citizens to be visual artists in the same way that there is a need for all citizens to have a knowledge of right and wrong, of consequence and of civic duty. We might wisely offer to students with a love of beauty and form, those who hold some great innate yearning or talent in the arts, separate and specially suited instruction – but to impose on all students an instruction in the visual arts is ineffectual at best, and at worst compels students to revel in superficial and wasteful enterprises, enslaving them to the most superfluous aspects of civilization. For the citizens who have no interest in the arts, let us focus on teaching them how to act well, for action is the blood of life. As a corollary, we might recall that Plato warned against regarding the arts as true to life when in truth they simply mimic life and goodness; while they act as a glimpse at the truth, beauty or justice, they are not the authentic stuff. An obsession with false, pastiche forms is accompanied by a neglect of the most important and rightly apparent duties: the civic behavior. This notion is nowhere better pronounced than in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts of Sciences:
As for us, common men to whom heaven has not allotted such great talents and destined for so much glory, let us remain in our obscurity. Let us not run after a reputation which would elude us and which, in the present state of things, would never give back to us what it would cost, even if we had all the qualifications to obtain it. What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves? Let us leave to others the care of instructing people about their duties, and limit ourselves to carrying out our own well. We do not need to know any more than this.