It’s that time of year when young people fresh out of sixth form get to choose a subject area at university. Exactly silver-haired I am not, but there are enough white stubs to render credible an attempt at guidance. I also teach at university, which doubly qualifies me. And, since I happen to do so in one of the faculties that are the topic of what follows, I suppose I am thrice said well placed.
I would, in the strongest possible terms, advise young people to steer clear of the humanities specifically, and of what might be called a liberal education more generally. This includes subjects like literature, art, history and anthropology, as well as a number of disciplines in the field of natural science.
Instead they will want to consider things like digital game design (there is an excellent institute at the University of Malta), banking and finance, engineering, and the technical aspects of construction (though strictly not architecture, which is to be avoided at all costs).
I haven’t been drinking, and I’m dead serious. My reasoning for this sort of guidance advisory service has nothing to do with employment or income prospects. Humanities graduates are, surprisingly perhaps, eminently employable and tend to report very high levels of job satisfaction. The same applies to people with science qualifications, and nor is starvation a main cause of death in architects.
Which means we can dispense with the old chestnut of useless knowledge right away. Even if there were such a thing, which there isn’t, art and history and architecture and the rest wouldn’t qualify – simply because they can and often do lead to a comfortable livelihood.
I would, in the strongest possible terms, advise young people to steer clear of the humanities specifically
The point, rather, is that the kind of knowledge that comes with a liberal education is worse than useless: it is actually harmful. And, as I do not wish young people harm, I would advise them against it.
The backbone of my argument is that with a certain kind of knowledge comes a sensitivity to things like continuity, beauty, historical depth, and so on. I’m talking strictly about emotions here. The litmus of a liberal education is the extent to which one feels at one with a good building, a fine book binding, or a set of rubble walls.
It follows that, in a place that is rapidly becoming a wasteland of building sites, party walls, convenience shops, petrol stations, beach hovels, lifestyle developments and tower cranes, and in which good buildings and rubble walls and book bindings are dodos, liberally-educated people are likely to feel alienated or desperate or both.
But first, three caveats. A liberal university education has no monopoly on this kind of sensitivity. I personally know people who have the sensitivity (sadly for them) but no formal education whatsoever. It’s just that to study art or architecture is to greatly increase one’s chances of developing it, and therefore of leading an alienated life.
Second, the alienation I have in mind does not necessarily mean a general gloom or unhappiness of the existential kind. Rather, I take it to mean a constant and deeply disturbing anxiety about one’s place in the habitat, or rather the lack of it. Whether or not that leads to full-blown clinical depression is another matter.
Third, this is not about prettiness of the Prince Charles variety. On the contrary, a liberally-educated person will likely find something like the Prince’s Poundbury absolutely godawful. Nor is it about nostalgia for a romaticised past when happy people tilled the fields and tended to rubble walls. There is nothing quaint about Richard England’s Manikata chapel (concrete, mostly) or Architecture Project’s Barrakka lift (steel), but both are excellent and rare treats.
I’ve roped in three people who will help me make my point. The first is Oliver Friggieri, a scholar who has spent his life researching Maltese literature and producing some of his own.
He also doodles, obsessively almost. His scribbles are profoundly elegiac and usually end up looking like the kind of landscape he has developed a sensitivity for in the course of decades of reading and reflection. With respect to the physical environment, the doodled landscape is Friggieri’s last refuge. If that sounds pathological, it’s my point exactly.
My second ally is Adrian Grima, a scholar of literature, poet, and colleague at university. Grima lives in Pembroke, and last week he blew his top. Deeply disturbed by the relentless assault on the urban fabric, he wrote about the psychological effects of habitat destruction. He also wrote a poignant poem that he intends to publish at some point. I’ve read it, and hope he does.
Readers of this newspaper will have guessed who my third pillar is. Last Sunday, Luciano Micallef wrote an opinion piece in which he came across as alienated to the point of despondency. He described himself as being ‘homesick at home’ (in the sense of being sick of home) and as feeling a stranger in his own land, even as his habitat collapsed about him.
Micallef is not an environmentalist in the standard sense, but rather an artist and man of liberal education generally. One of the online comments was by Debbie Caruana Dingli, herself a fine painter. But that is my point here. It is not that artists and liberally-educated people are the only ones to sense the loss. It is that they are more likely to do so, and therefore to feel uncomfortable in the collective skin, so to say.
Thus my advice to young people. A liberal education produces just the kind of culture and sensitivity that ill-equips them to deal with wasteland Malta. Prospero’s books have turned against him and made him feel a stranger in his own island. He would be well advised to bury them, and to take up digital gaming instead.
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