Shared this with my students this week.

Why do I have to study literature / composition? Why do I have to write a literary analysis paper? I don't see the point.

Here are some answers, with help from Arthur Holmes's The Idea of a Christian College:

Reason 1: You are not merely a worker, a professional, or even a scholar. You are a human being created in God’s image. The Christian study of the liberal arts explores what it means to be a human being created in God’s image.

“The liberal arts [literature, history, etc.] are those which are appropriate to persons as persons, rather than to the specific function of a worker or a professional or even a scholar. A person may be all of these things, but she is more basically a person. It was Cicero who defined the liberal arts as those which are appropriate to humanity. If one is to be anything more than a specialist or technician, if one is to feel life whole and to live it whole rather than piecemeal, if one is to think for himself rather than live secondhand, the liberal arts are needed to educate the person. There is no difficulty in transferring this clue concerning liberal education to a Christian conception of persons created in the image of God. We are to image God in all of our creaturely activities, our cultural existence and every phase of our humanity. To image God in the fullness of our humanity is our highest calling.”

Reason 2: Usefulness isn’t the point. Literature (and the other liberal arts) may be useful in some ways, but their “usefulness” is not the point. They are intended to help us think about things like beauty, goodness, truth, and what it means to be human—things that have value in themselves, regardless of their usefulness.

"In his classic nineteenth-century work, The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman distinguishes between liberal and useful arts. It is not a complete disjunction, for the liberal arts are also useful, and the useful arts are often based on liberal arts and sciences. But the point is that some arts are more liberal than others, and some are more useful for economic and other particular purposes than they are of value to us in themselves. The distinction is worth preserving. It is the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value. Some things have little but instrumental value; for example, a shining new coin with the head of George Washington on one side and the American eagle on the other has instrumental worth: it is good for what you can buy with it but little else. If you tell me it is of intrinsic worth and you value it for itself, I call you a miser. Other things have far more intrinsic worth as well as some instrumental value. Understanding is valued for itself. Beauty and goodness are of value in themselves. . . . Liberal learning concerns itself with truth and beauty and goodness, which have intrinsic worth to people considered as persons rather than as workers or in whatever function alone.

“We may distinguish along these lines between literature as one of the liberal arts and journalism, in which the use of what is written predominates; between the natural sciences as a quest to understand nature, which is liberal learning, and the technology that does something with it; between political science on the one hand as the attempt to understand political institutions and processes, and propaganda techniques on the other; between the science of psychology and the useful art of counseling; between theology and the work of evangelism; between philosophy as a liberal art and apologetics as one use it might have. Usefulness is no crime. But the practical uses of things we learn are limited and changeable, while the effect of learning on the person is less limited because it lasts. Liberal learning therefore takes the long-range view and concentrates on what shapes a person’s understanding and values rather than on what he can use in one or two of the changing roles he might later play.”

Reason 3: Education is not really about usefulness, but about the kind of person you are becoming. What kind of person are you turning into? A person who thinks only about a job, only about “usefulness”? Or a person who understands what it means to have godly character and to love things of intrinsic worth, like beauty, goodness, and truth?

“The question to ask about education is not ‘What can I do with it?’ That is the wrong question because it concentrates on instrumental values and reduces everything to a useful art. The right question is rather ‘What can it do to me?’” To the Christian in the Christian college, then, the development of an inquiring mind becomes an expression of faith and hope and love addressed to God. It is part of our response to God’s self-revelation."

 Reason 4: The difficult work of carefully dissecting a text and writing an articulate analysis paper based on that text develops your intellect and your ability to reflect—and both a well-developed intellect and the ability to reflect have value in themselves, regardless of their usefulness.

"Intellectual development requires that we read and write. Reading is of course prerequisite to informed conversation, an art that is often sadly underdeveloped today. Writing is prerequisite to exactness of thought and expression. Together [reading and writing force students] to think and then to reshape their thoughts in more and more consistent and cogent and lucid ways. To read is to gain input, to fertilize imagination, to conceptualize, to follow an argument, to evaluate. To write is to become articulate, to express what I feel and explain why I feel as I do, to expound, to argue, to offer good reasons, to explore relationships, to have a sense of the whole, to see things in total context. [For a student] to [learn to read and write well] is to think for himself, to develop more fully the possession of his God-given powers. He becomes . . . a reflective, thinking being."