As technology progresses, our daily tasks and career skills are constantly changing. The rise of artificial intelligence, remote international labor markets and big data make the required career skills of the future uncertain. Will we still need millions of accountants, lawyers, and doctors in the next 10 – 20 years? How about in the next 50 years? Especially considering the average life expectancy continues to rise and maybe beyond 100+ soon resulting in longer careers.
The qualities that make us uniquely human and are difficult to automate away are where we should spend the majority of our time developing: adaptability, creativity, curiosity, storytelling, social intelligence, etc.
What study helps improve these human qualities? Liberal Arts are the overarching study of the human–including humanity’s history, the physical world we live in, and the natural laws of science we’re bound by.1
To avoid belaboring points made in the thousands of other articles, I’ll leave you with the most important reason I’m pursuing the liberal arts. I’m studying liberal arts in the pursuit to become a better Christian, husband, brother, son, family member, friend, colleague and human.
The classic 7 liberal arts, categorized into the trivium and quadrivium, came into vogue in ancient Greece around 500BC:
| Trivium: |
| Logic |
| Grammar |
| Rhetoric |
| Quadrivium: |
| Music |
| Arithmetic |
| Geometry |
| Astronomy |
My DIY Liberal Arts Degree Plan:
I plan to study these arts through a comprehensive reading list supplemented with lecture videos and friendly discussions. After going through the many reading lists linked below, I have decided to follow The Great Books of The Western World program by Mortimer Adler. I have a physical set of the 1960s edition to start from and will be adding books included in later editions.
Liberal Arts Reading List Resources:
| https://www.biola.edu/torrey/academics/reading-list#reading-list_full |
| https://www.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Admissions-2016-Great-Books-List.pdf |
| https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list |
| https://www.christendom.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Core-Booklist_.pdf |
| https://www.thomasaquinas.edu/a-liberating-education/syllabus |
| https://www.northcentralcollege.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2020-04/shimer%20great%20books%20reading%20list%202019.pdf |
| https://gutenberg.edu/academics/reading-list/ |
Liberal Arts Lecture Resources:
YouTube
Coursera
Harvard Online
Hillsdale Online