The foundation of the American liberal arts education system is that reading Shakespeare makes one a better doctor. Can an acting class make one a better pharmacist? Can an art history class make one a better ad agency creative?

Or, more broadly, does consuming and learning about art inherently enrich our lives and widen our view of the world, thereby making us into more empathetic and intelligent human beings?

Although a younger version of myself didn’t have the language to articulate this belief, I have intuitively understood from a young age that art has the unique capability to show us ourselves and other people with new vision, and for that reason it is the pillar of our education system.

At Brown University, where I studied Religious Studies and Anthropology, I loved every single art history, creative writing and archeology class in which I enrolled.

As an eighteen year old, I spent long hours pouring over 6,000 year old Israeli pot shards and 4th century Egyptian amulets and 3rd century B.C. Indian-Buddhist statues that were sculpted in the image of Apollo to satisfy the then ruler of what is now Northern India, who was Greek.

My senior year, I wrote a 200 page honors thesis that looked closely at 4th century heretical Christian iconography, specifically that made by a group of rogue Christians called Hermetists who believed that Jesus was the reincarnation of the Greek god Hermes, who was the reincarnation of the Egyptian god Thoth, who was always drawn as a giant winged bird called an Ibis that sometimes stands on the sun.

Looking at my life now, it is both a challenge and immensely easy to see the outward effect that these studies had on me.

I’m not an archeologist. The fact that I may be able to recount for you what Mohammad said he saw when he flew over Jerusalem does not help me organize our office.

A memory: me, a Catholic, Irish-Italian eight year old in the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, looking at a 12th century painting of Lakshmi standing in the middle of a giant blooming flower floating on a turquoise ocean, her four hands placed in all opposing directions, her feet placed at the center of her lotus boat, and me, a very small child, realizing that there was a very large, very beautiful world, to which I had previously never been exposed.

It’s not that consuming art makes doctors better at performing surgery, but rather that the idea of what physicians have done is ages past and will do again, (their completely vital role of taking care of people, the emotional weight of what it means to take on a profession where the well being of another human is what is at stake every minute in which you are engaged) only makes sense within the cultural eyeglass through which art helps us see.

It sounds frightfully cliché to say that my liberal arts education changed me, so I’ll resist that phrase, and say instead that my liberal arts education showed me how to see.

It’s actually a very radical philosophy — the idea to make art the pillar of an education system — and, in our modern world, it’s uniquely American. We need to know so much more than art in order to function in the world. But the idea that art, too, is essential to education is a philosophy that, as I have experienced in my own life, is genuinely true.

This month at ScholarMatch, we’re immensely proud to be hosting Tom Hanks at our joint benefit with 826 Valencia on Monday, April 24th. Hanks’ presence, and his emphatic emphasis of the importance of college access, echoes so many of the ideas that I hoped to hound down onto the page in this short essay; mainly, the idea that one’s profession and one’s education (in his case, studying theater at Chabot Community College in Hayward), have varying amounts of an obvious relation, but that the opportunity to study, and to have art be a pillar of your education, is a vital, American value that, in these shadowed times, should be defended and restated, and resaid in whatever way it can.

Rita Bullwinkel spent her undergraduate years at Brown University, where she majored in Anthropology and Religious Studies. She later went on to receive her Masters in Creative Writing from Vanderbilt University. As both an educator and a product of the California public school system, Rita is dedicated to increasing under-resourced students’ access to higher education.

#MyCollegeStory is a ScholarMatch original series highlighting the diverse and varied journeys to and through higher education. Check back each month for new stories!

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