Ask Them About Their iPhone

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In 2011, the iPad 2 flew off the shelves—over a million units sold in a single weekend. The magic behind that glossy tablet wasn’t just in its sleek circuits or flawless glass. It was a calligraphy course. Years earlier, Steve Jobs, a Reed College dropout, wandered into a class on serif fonts and spacing and was enchanted. Pointless, you say? Tell that to the Macintosh, the first computer to offer font choices, or to the iPad, which turned tech into art. At the iPad 2 launch, Jobs credited the liberal arts as his inspiration, saying, “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

Yet today, many education reformers are rushing to replace poetry with plumbing certificates. Policymakers—especially conservatives—are narrowing education to a pipeline for “marketable” jobs. And this shift has been building for years.

In 2016, David Banash, an English professor at Western Illinois University, pointed to former Ohio Governor John Kasich as a case in point: Kasich encouraged students to choose majors based on salary projections. For lovers of the liberal arts, that vision reframes college not as a place for seeking truth and wisdom, but as a vending machine for paychecks. Banash argued that this narrow idea betrays the spirit of the GI Bill-era university, which once flung open the doors to wonder.

To be fair, Kasich, based on my few readings, never entirely dismissed the liberal arts. His efforts to provide high schoolers with work experience and streamline access to job training were presented as alternatives, not replacements. His approach, it seems, had nuance.

But others on the right haven’t been so careful. Whatever “conservatism” means today, many self-described conservatives scoff at liberal arts degrees as useless, because they lack obvious career paths.

I remember then-Senator Marco Rubio saying we need “more welders and less philosophers.” I’ve worked with leaders who dismissed the liberal arts outright. I even wince when my favorite financial guru, Dave Ramsey, mocks what he calls “useless degrees”—many of which fall under the liberal arts. (To be fair, I agree: racking up debt for a degree with little return is foolish. But it’s ironic that Ramsey also promotes reading, as if writers don’t come from the very programs he deems financially irresponsible.)

Among education reformers, the figure I’m most skeptical of is the current administration’s Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon. While I supported her efforts to cut red tape and welcomed her nomination, I was one of the first among my colleagues to argue that her “skills-first” agenda inches conservatives closer to abandoning the liberal arts altogether. And more troubling still, her opposition to leftist ideologies like “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) seems rooted not in a moral critique, but in business interests.

Take her support for the Workforce Pell Act, which funds short-term training programs for “in-demand” jobs like IT and manufacturing. She calls traditional college “outdated” and favors micro-credentials tailored to local industries. It all sounds practical until you read the latest report from the American Enterprise Institute and the Burning Glass Institute, which found that only 12 percent of these credentials deliver meaningful wage gains. National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood noted that Workforce Pell “could easily become an incentive for young people to pursue frivolous programs that will provide them with neither useful workforce skills nor the foundation for further learning.”

Then there’s McMahon’s critique of the Biden administration’s DEI-laced apprenticeship regulations. Writing in a Fox op-ed, she criticized the Biden-era rules for imposing time-based training requirements and burdensome DEI mandates that would harm small businesses. However, notice that her critique centers on cost and efficiency, rather than the corrosive effect of DEI on meritocracy and free speech, its contribution to racial division, or its role in the decline of the liberal arts. She opposes DEI because it’s bad for business, not because it’s bad for the soul.

And here’s the problem: when education becomes solely about maximizing profits and “streamlining,” what’s the point of all that money and efficiency if no one reads the Western canon? I’m all for equipping a generation with practical skills, but technical training alone doesn’t make me a better citizen or voter. It doesn’t help me pass down the moral inheritance of our civilization.

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Of course, not every calligraphy student will start Apple. And I get that it’s not always obvious what value the liberal arts bring. But I think a major reason many conservatives push for credentialing and vocational programs not just as alternatives—but as full replacements—is because they’ve misunderstood what a liberal arts education actually is.

They look at our current universities—many hijacked by leftist ideologues—and assume the liberal arts have hit rock bottom. And in many cases, they’re not wrong. You can get an English degree without reading Shakespeare. You can swap Homer for Marx. Western Civilization courses have been replaced with “World Civ.” And in some schools, nonsense like the 1619 Project gets treated as gospel.

But let’s be clear: that’s not a true liberal arts education. That’s indoctrination. And ironically, this is exactly why conservatives should fight for the liberal arts, not flee from them.

What we need is a liberal arts education that forms free and thoughtful citizens. One that challenges students with Homer, Plato, and Shakespeare—books that stretch the mind, refine the soul, and teach students to reason, speak, and judge with clarity. As Wood says, these texts root students in the West’s legacy while also opening them to the best of other cultures. Philosophy sharpens logic. Literature trains the moral imagination. History cultivates perspective. The liberal arts don’t just fill our heads; they shape our lives.

So let’s drop the idea that a liberal arts education is useless. Rocket scientists can build bombs, but philosophers ask if we should. Coders can write apps, but poets teach us to feel. Engineers raise bridges, but historians remind us what we’re leaving behind. Doctors prolong life, but artists show why it matters in the first place. As someone recently wrote,

They’ll tell you that the arts and humanities aren’t practical and then read poetry at funerals and weddings, cry over films and search for meaning in ancient philosophy … Surviving is one type of practicality, knowing why we bother is another.

We need poets as much as plumbers. Philosophers as much as programmers. A kid who can code an iPad but can’t say why life is worth living isn’t just lost—he’s empty. So, the next time an education reformer sneers at the liberal arts, ask them about their iPhone.

(P.S. Patrick McGee, author of Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, found that by 2015, Apple was spending $55 billion a year there—training workers, building factories, and handing over state-of-the-art technology. That investment helped modernize China. Now they’re using it to compete with us—and are poised to surpass our GDP.

Anyone can glance at the headlines and see that a rising China threatens our economic standing. But it takes someone trained in the liberal arts to see deeper—to understand that what’s at stake is not merely power, but the soul of the world. What ascends in China is a regime of silence: a place where truth is outlawed, the human spirit is shackled, and beauty is sacrificed at the altar of control.

When such a nation rises, it does not lift humanity—it buries it. To grasp this, to feel its full moral weight, requires more than vocational training. It takes history to trace the arc of freedom, literature to imagine what tyranny steals, and the courage to speak. The liberal arts give us that—and we should save them while we still remember how.)

With that, onto this week’s articles.

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Image: “Silver iPhone 3GS 32GB” by Vanja Gavrić on Flickr