Liberal arts degrees teach the skills that last

Here’s a grenade: a liberal education will be more useful to you and your employer than a job-targeted degree.

British columnist and economist John Kay, writing in the Financial Times of London— which people read to learn how to study money, make money and spend money — makes a good case that students need to be trained in synthesis more than anything else.

For what is the biggest change in our lifetime?

Every piece of knowledge ever known to man is at hand on a screen near you. So the problem isn’t finding information, it’s knowing how to link different bits of knowledge, to “make connections be- tween disparate sources of information,” as Kay writes.

He applies this to many jobs: running businesses, managing assets, advising legal clients, and, yes, writing newspaper columns. All the information you need is online, but a good trained logical mind will be able to pluck here and there for original insights and approaches.

Much as I deplore the public’s ignorance about mathematics and science — this is my shame as well — I know that a liberal arts degree has let me range widely, which has proved useful. I am also creepily aware that every advance in technology eventually sours like milk past its Best Before date and is replaced.

Job-specific skills are wonderful up to a point. But who can predict which industries will be exported to China or vanish entirely? Only recently, we thought Japan would run the world. Japan thought that too, it overextended itself and is a shadow now. Although admittedly, Nikkei just bought the Financial Times.

When you choose your degree, you’re placing a bet that the degree obtained will still be germane 25 years later, or five, who knows.

I placed my bet on people being forever able to speak English. I studied EngLit plus a minor mishmash of philosophy, film history and French. What I learned was how little I knew — this is fantastically useful — and so I started soaking it up over a lifetime.

Post-university, a journalism diploma — anything over a year is a waste of time — taught me how to organize writing in any manner that was asked for and crucially, how to summarize.

Think of literature as a pyramid, my professor used to say. If you’re a writer, you sit on the peak of everything that has ever been written and must come up with something new. There’s something terrifically discouraging about this but it’s also why good novelists are enthusiastic readers of everything. Their knowledge emits sparks, which you can use to serve creativity.

If you are specifically a digital person, it’s hugely enjoyable to toss out old skills while learning new ones. You swoop like a hawk on a new creature, but the rest of us just keep stolidly building up the pyramid brick by brick.

I took a lot of survey courses at university, they’re the polymath’s box of chocolates, full of bits, cheap and random — you love them, you hate them — and they’re always there.

Here are four things I learned in survey courses that keep on giving.

In Psycho, when Norman Bates tries to sink Marion Crane’s car in the river after killing her, you feel sorry for him. Why? The scene is filmed from his point of view. POV is crucial. If ISIS knew this, some of their execution videos might arouse a little less sneering.

How much land does a man need? It’s the title of a short story by Tolstoy. If you’re money-hungry to the point of exhaustion, read it.

Memorize poetry in bits. It comes in useful in bad situations. “I planted him in this country like a flag.” “Margaret, are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving?” “Then all smiles stopped together.” “The expensive delicate ship.” “Nine bean rows.” “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun nor the furious winter’s rages.” And “greasy Joan doth keel the pot.” (Yes, you win points for identifying these.)

Memorize comedy catchphrases, which are handy if you’re kidnapped and need a quote to reassure your family. “Whores will have their trinkets.” “We said we wouldn’t talk about Canada.” “I Hate Myself and Want to Die.” “I do sell a lot of wank, don’t I?” “I feel . . . unusual.”

Don’t drop your survey courses this week. Treasure them. They’re old gold.

Think of literature as a pyramid, my professor used to say. If you’re a writer, you sit on the peak of everything that has ever been written and must come up with something new