“ These lessons were some of the first opportunities for me as a young person to think about what would make a good life and why.”
The Value of Saint David’ s Liberal Arts Foundation
By David Lighton’ 02
Primary education becomes the basis for almost everything you do in life. Because of that, the lessons of Saint David’ s for me stretch much farther than just academic ones— including great memories of early teamwork on the Great Lawn, slowly learning table manners, laughing when we were not supposed to, among other important life lessons. But, Saint David’ s was( and I know still is) a genuine foundation for a liberal arts education, with its emphasis on the classics, history, arts, politics, literature, and culture.
It is too easy in today’ s world of high technology to think that education must focus more on the development of hard, specialized skills. The demand for STEM grads in the job market reflects this, but the value of a Saint David’ s education is separate. Ron Daniels, the President of Johns Hopkins, made my point best in a 2018 letter to students:“ As our world is transformed by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation, the uniquely human qualities of creativity, imagination, discernment, and moral reasoning will be the ultimate coin of the realm.”
I believe this is correct, and increasingly in 2025 as technology keeps on improving but our collective views on what we want to achieve with it do not. So, as I reflect on my 11 years at Saint David’ s and how they prepared me for life and career today, I don’ t think at all of the time I spent in the 1990’ s honing specific skills in multiplication or algebra. I think about the hours we spent on Ancient Greece and Rome with Mr. Barbieri, reading psalms with Dr. Czuchlewski, learning the heroic story of Jackie Robinson, or the all-important Humanities course with Dr. Maiocco in the eighth grade. These lessons were some of the first opportunities for me as a young person to think about what would make a good life and why.
“ These lessons were some of the first opportunities for me as a young person to think about what would make a good life and why.”
I continued to think about that question during my studies at Choate, Johns Hopkins, and eventually M. I. T. before choosing entrepreneurship as a career path and launching my own financial software startup, Diameter. I also served for five years as a staff member in the World Bank, including three in Haiti following the catastrophic earthquake of 2010. I learned from these experiences that I wanted to dedicate my career to improving financial access with technology because it is an area of opportunity both to create interesting businesses and to solve accessibility problems.
I’ m of course very grateful— and a little surprised— that Saint David’ s asked me to prepare this reflection. But I believe it’ s true that the school’ s extraordinary primary education emphasizing the humanities doesn’ t just prepare students for more academic work— it equips them with tools to ask hard questions and solve hard problems, in both life and work. Along the way, I also made many lifelong friends. And even though I don’ t see East 89th Street as often these days, my wife Jessica and I are thinking more deeply about our daughter’ s education and preparing to welcome our second daughter in the coming days. So, the request is timely as I’ m finding myself thinking more about the value of a liberal arts education, not just at Saint David’ s, but as a foundation for making choices throughout life. •
David Lighton’ 02 is Founder and CEO of Diameter Pay, a payments technology platform for International Clients, incubated at M. I. T., a Fellow at the Global Justice Program at Yale and a graduate of M. I. T.
30 • Saint David’ s Magazine