In Defense of a Liberal Education (2014) is a work of nonfiction by Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria is a journalist, author, lecturer, and political pundit who received a liberal arts education at Yale University in the 1980s. In this work, Zakaria uses his personal experiences as a student to argue for the utility of the liberal arts, professionally and personally, as they face rising bipartisan criticism. Cultural critics and educational experts widely praised the book for its clarity, accessibility, and argumentative strengths. Attacks on the liberal arts have grown in the decade since his work was published, making his defense more relevant than ever.

This guide refers to the 2104 edition published by W.W. Norton and Company.

Summary

Zakaria’s book is a collection of essays that began as a commencement speech given at Sarah Lawrence College in 2014. He emphasizes liberal education’s essentiality to the modern world. The liberal arts are not outdated or useless, as some critics would have us believe. Rather, a liberal education creates well-rounded learners and citizens who are well equipped for any career, with a mindset and skillset that strengthen democracy. A liberal education benefits everyone and makes life better.

The book combines personal reflections, educational history, and polemics. Zakaria admits that higher education has its flaws, but not necessarily those that its critics highlight. Today’s college students, for example, are products of the competitive job market that they will soon enter, making them career focused. They think less about big ideas than students of the past for this reason and others, including the less divisive nature of American politics in 2014.

Zakaria explains how he encountered the power of a liberal arts education at Yale, where he turned away from the rote memorization of his secondary education in India. The liberal arts taught him how to think, write, and communicate effectively—all skills displayed in the very authoring of his defense. American students seem to perform more poorly than their counterparts in Asia on standardized tests, but Zakaria notes that this distinction is not due to lower intelligence but to the inability of testing to measure skills like creativity that are critical to American innovation. He admits that Americans’ scientific knowledge is lacking and argues that reuniting the liberal arts and sciences in college curricula can remedy this problem.

Zakaria admires a liberal education’s ability to create a “natural aristocracy,” or meritorious society, which preserves democracy. However, the rising expense of a college education has the potential to price lower- and middle-class students out of this meritocracy. He suggests that massive open online courses present an opportunity to disrupt this trend and force traditional colleges and universities to lower costs.

Zakaria’s book encourages conversations about the contemporary state of American higher education and the value of the liberal arts. He suggests that everyone, regardless of their career, can benefit from a liberal education because its value lies not only in the skills it produces but also in cultivating more virtuous and wise citizens.