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Good luck with her "watering the desert" analogy while bemoaning the rise of productive disciplines, like civil engineering. The article reeks of bland arts pr

Good luck with her "watering the desert" analogy while bemoaning the rise of productive disciplines, like civil engineering. The article reeks of bland arts prejudice -- that it is more noble to be the "educated" artist writing verse about how ghastly a problem must feel like, and then write something even more verse about how dreadful it is that so few read or understood your beautiful words, than the "merely utilitarian" person who understands how to analyse the cause of the problem and is equipped to design and create a means to fix it. There is nothing inherently less "prepared for citizenship or democracy" about an engineer. And neither, in these design-intensive times, do they necessarily understand humanity or social ills any less than an artist writing about them.

eropple 11y ago
I don't think you actually understand what a liberal arts education is. It has very little to do with being an "artist", it has to do with a broad and humanistic--opposing mechanistic--education. Such an education, in my experience, tends to make one interested in creation, and perhaps thus art, but isn't directly related. I have a CS degree and was fortunate to luck into a liberal education--one with grounding in literature, history, economics, sociology, and political science. Not only does it make me better at my day job, because much of it is easily applicable, but it makes me able to meaningfully parse the world around me. Most engineers I know are not particularly good at this--they do not have a liberal education and it shows when one gets outside of a narrow band of small, usually very self-focused interests. (It shows, in the aggressive disregard of history and the corpus of human experience needed to think that the Austrian school, or even your garden-variety libertarian fantasy, has bearing on the real world.) Your "merely utilitarian" person is not equipped to understand (much less solve) the causes of the problems that she describes. That's her point entirely.

eropple 11y ago

I don't think you actually understand what a liberal arts education is. It has very little to do with being an "artist", it has to do with a broad and humanistic--opposing mechanistic--education. Such an education, in my experience, tends to make one interested in creation, and perhaps thus art, but isn't directly related. I have a CS degree and was fortunate to luck into a liberal education--one with grounding in literature, history, economics, sociology, and political science. Not only does it make me better at my day job, because much of it is easily applicable, but it makes me able to meaningfully parse the world around me. Most engineers I know are not particularly good at this--they do not have a liberal education and it shows when one gets outside of a narrow band of small, usually very self-focused interests. (It shows, in the aggressive disregard of history and the corpus of human experience needed to think that the Austrian school, or even your garden-variety libertarian fantasy, has bearing on the real world.) Your "merely utilitarian" person is not equipped to understand (much less solve) the causes of the problems that she describes. That's her point entirely.