There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

-David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College

The Virtue of a Liberal Arts Education

For a long time I’ve been thinking about the nature and virtues of a Liberal Arts education. Among all the benefits I garnered from my time at Harvard, “learning how to think” will remain my most important lesson. Because this observation is incredibly cliché , I have heretofore withheld my musings from this forum. Then, as if by divine (or seasonal) intervention, I stumbled across the text of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College Commencement speech from 2005.

With eloquent precision Wallace explains the ineffable within my own wandering thoughts. Here is one particularly relevant excerpt:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

DFW continues with an investigation of the alternative, unexamined life and the human tendency to operate on the default settings dictated by context and conditioning. These “default settings” can be all encompassing as well as entirely invisible so that some people never notice the influences guiding their navigation through the sea of life.

While this speech focuses on the “what” of human consciousness, my interest as an educator is in “how to cultivate” the curiosity extolled by Wallace. DFW has a self-admitted “tendency to over-intellectualize,” but what about those people whose default setting is not intellectual? My answer to that question is the somewhat childish concept of Free Play.

Free Play

As the word “play” implies, this type of activity is most often manifest in childhood behavior. In fact, some of my most vivid memories involve a few friends, a ball, and collective improvisation. Currently, however, the mounting influence of television, video games, and organized activities has attenuated this creative behavior so that teenagers are rarely required to use their imaginations.

According to a recent article, “Serious Need for Play,” in the February 2009 issue of Scientific American, there are numerous clinical studies to support the importance of play in cognitive and social development with several sources, including a classic study published in Developmental Psychology in 1973:

Researchers divided 90 preschool children into three groups. One group was told to play freely with four common objects—among the choices were a pile of paper towels, a screwdriver, a wooden board and a pile of paper clips. A second set was asked to imitate an experimenter using the four objects in common ways. The last group was told to sit at a table and draw whatever they wanted, without ever seeing the objects. Each scenario lasted 10 minutes. Immediately afterward, the researchers asked the children to come up with ideas for how one of the objects could be used. The kids who had played with the objects named, on average, three times as many nonstandard, creative uses for the objects than the youths in either of the other two groups did, suggesting that play fosters creative thinking.

“Play is like a kaleidoscope,” says evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff of the University of Colorado at Boulder, in that it is random and creative. The bottom line, he posits, is that play encourages flexibility and creativity that may, in the future, be advantageous in unexpected situations or new environments.

The fact is, many parents believe they are acting in their children’s best interests by holding them to a full schedule of learning activities. While camp, tutoring, and little league are all valuable activities, there should always be time allotted for free, unfettered play without predetermined rules in order to develop a level of comfort with the act of sifting through the infinite possibilities of the mind.

This sort of creative and unstructured activity, I believe, is also excellent preparation for success within a Liberal Arts College, where students are asked to select from a catalogue of humankind’s collective knowledge four or five topics to study for months at a time. College in most regards is recess for adults – only with bats and balls replaced by books. Within that near-unlimited sea of information, you must discover for yourself the best course of study. Without preparation, of course, this can be an extremely cumbersome task.

With proper training, however, you are prepared to study and learn, as Matthew Arnold posited, “the best that has been thought and said.” Amid the breadth of knowledge inherent to the liberal study of arts, every person is capable of finding at least one topic to enlighten the mind and enliven the soul to creativity.

All work and no play makes adults boring too

The benefits of free play, however, are not limited to children or college students. Adults too have demonstrated there are numerous benefits to the regular practice of creativity in and out of the workplace. One example of a successful adult play pen is Google with its policy of twenty percent time, when employees are given the freedom to work on any project (company related of course) of personal interest. Google News, for instance, was a project borne from a single employee’s self-guided work, proving that time for creative improvisation can be beneficial to the individual and public good.

Although it is important to allow creativity to enter life with regularity, this does not necessarily mean you should spend your own twenty percent time quietly waiting for something to happen. Rather, you should make sure to cultivate greatness in and knowledge of whatever pursuit inspires you. For instance, while jazz improvisation has been shown to ignite the parts of the brain commonly linked to creativity, such activity only comes after years of practice and learning. The novice’s random notes are not creative. Only after gaining knowledge of the structures and rules of a system can one begin to willfully engage with the art form in an improvisatory manner.

Just remember, no matter how you choose to spend your twenty percent time, keep reminding yourself, over and over, “This is water, this is water.”