What Liberal Arts Education Is for (2024)(innig.net) |
What Liberal Arts Education Is for (2024)(innig.net) |
Unfortunately, at some point in the last 30-40 years, we've totally abandoned this idea. The most powerful people in society are not just indifferent to the liberal arts but are actively hostile towards it. They see it as a frivolous waste of resources. Why waste time studying a great work of literature when you could be "building" instead?
Of course, it's predictable where this leads. We did all this building, but forgot what justice means, what it means to have values, what it means to do right. So now our society is ugly, corrupt, and rotten. Hey, at least we (the leaders) are rich!
Much like the author however, I found that my natural curiosity, and specifically that desire to ask what the words being used MEANT, to serve me extremely well. When I was a PM for a billion dollar plus project (military can hit that easily) that attitude is what got me the job.
The constant push back from those who seem to value only their, and your, positions as cogs in a machine was exhausting. I really agree with this entire article. Thanks for posting it.
That's not a liberal education. That's religious brainwashing. It's the kind of thing madrassas and yeshivas do - obsessively school students on a very few texts said to be sacred.
Liberal education was traditionally broad. There are curricula based on the Great Books. [1] They can be criticized for being retro, but they are not narrow.
[1] https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-bo...
> There are curricula based on the Great Books.
List not including the greatest book of them all... What did they mean by this?
The linked list included both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in the Sophomore year section.
If it was The Bhagavad Gita you were jonesing for, that appears later in the Junior section.
I took a religious studies course in college amid a liberal arts math/CS major. I can say it was one of my favorite classes in college, primarily for exposing me to ways of thinking that differ from my own, and yet I left with my (lack of) religious beliefs intact.
Most major theological programs in the US like Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Chicago, Vandy, and Notre Dame take this kind of an interdisciplinary approach.
The issue with madrassas and some hardcore yeshivas and seminaries is they do not allow any curricula that isn't litigurical in nature.
> Liberal education was traditionally broad. There are curricula based on the Great Books. [1] They can be criticized for being retro, but they are not narrow
I've found the Great Books curricula to be closer in style to madrassa and hardcore yeshivot curricula than a traditional liberal arts education, as they don't actively try to connect past texts and treatise with the present.
The Great Books curriculum is itself a holdover from back when UChicago was meant to be a fundy evangelical theological program.
To make a living, it is necessary to learn a skill that people are willing to pay for.
Innovation is inherently interdisciplinary, and learning how to synthesize multiple different domains has tremendous value.
That's the thing though, part of it is about caring. Part of it is being exposed to other things in order to realize there is more out there. I honestly think that STEM field education would benefit from including Liberal Art related courses exactly because of that. Basically as a way to broaden students world view and the way they might interact in it.
The same is probably true the other way around as well btw.
As long as you do not claim that "living only on proteins or stones and without carbs or leaves would be a good idea".
What they miss is the joy of understanding how the world works. I remember many "aha!" moments like somebody turning on the lights in a dark cathedral.
Like when I found out how jet engines really worked, not the handwavy cartoons one usually sees. Or when suddenly all the pieces fit together and I knew how a computer worked. Or when Prof Gomez turned math from black+white to color when he taught me calculus.
Seriously speaking what in Liberal Arts can you learn that's not already on Youtube now?
What can we learn about what other people are thinking, about their mental models of the world, by paying very careful attention to the words they use?
Given you're on HN, try Gödel, Escher, Bach. https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden...
Be warned though, it'll take you well over a decade.
The commenter didn't even have the curiosity to read and comprehend the article, and made the articles point in that.
Except, discussing things, having somebody else grade your coursework etc., you don't get that from books or YouTube.
Sometime later I realized that stem only tells you how to build a bridge or a bomb etc. The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc.
Stem is actually merely the brawn for the humanities brain. Stem without the humanities is a baby with a gun.
That's just the justification they give for their existence. You neither need not count on someone who wrote a thesis on 'feminist perspective of aztek dance' or some nonsense like that.
The only reason humanities departments are this big today is because of the biological waste who can't make it to STEM or any other useful profession. If we limit humanities to classicists, linguists etc... whose work is actually rigorous and not just peddling political nonsense, humanities would not have such a bad rap.
Sounds pretty close to a liberal arts education.
That said, not everything is about a job or work. Sometimes (usually) education is itself a goal.
That's the plan, but it doesn't seem to work out too well.
> not everything is about a job or work
Yes, if you are independently wealthy. Need to pay back those student loans!
The other direction is possible but not so easy.
If people want to have an education for the sake of an education they should stop arguing in favor of maximally inflated tuition.
You want the benefits of the consumer good while paying the least amount of money for it.
Meanwhile the standard narrative is that people should be allowed to get into massive unpayable debts that trap them in deadend jobs while people who focus on money end up using their freedom to do the very thing the people who got into debt claim you can only do by getting into debt.
Concentrating on monetizable skills is critical, but most colleges give enough space for interdisciplinary electives.
In my case the problem was there were too many fascinating engineering classes to take. I tried to pick out ones that would be of maximum benefit to my chosen career.
Maybe it's a generational thing, but I haven't noticed this amongst my peers and those younger than me, but I do agree that there is some degree of ressentiment amongst humanities majors to STEM because of the earning trajectory.
But you very rarely arrive at wisdom just by ignorant native intuition. At best some people are naturally well-intentioned, but being well intentioned in ignorance isn't very good. You're just easy for everyone else to manipulate.
It works the other way too. If you want to be effective at abusing and manipulating everyone else, you are a lot more effective at your negative goals if you aren't ignorant.
Basically there is no way to spin it that being ignorant is better than being educated.
Plenty of my MIT friends explicitly chose MIT over Caltech because they wanted a technical education but also the freedom to deep dive in English or Political Science as well (Caltech has great faculty in the HSS, but class choice was unsurprisingly limited).
That said, based on your account age, I think you studied in the 1980s to early 2000s back when programs were much less interdisciplinary. It's much easier to double major with a STEM and humanities major from the 2010s to present versus before.
I fulfilled the rest of the liberal arts requirement with foreign language classes and business accounting classes. I was not interested in taking political classes.
Fortunately, Newtonian Mechanics was free of politics. If your rocket doesn't fly, you cannot pretend it did.