Max Lerner

Safeguarding the humanities as an obligation to ourselves

Steve Jobs said that among the most impactful classes he ever took in college was a class on calligraphy. It may be easy to turn one’s nose at this statement, writing it off as foolish or performative, or conclude that Big Calligraphy lobbied Jobs to share it. It is especially easy to do so if one subscribes to the idea that all education must provide a specific set of skills that one can lift straight from the classroom to a job site — or at least a graduate school application.