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Rather, why there should be more humanities / liberal arts outreach (and funding), so that STEM majors are more likely to have access to, engage with, and fall
by svat 8y ago
Rather, why there should be more humanities / liberal arts outreach (and funding), so that STEM majors are more likely to have access to, engage with, and fall in love with them.
I understand the impulse behind such comments, but making something "required" is generally a poor way to get people to love or appreciate something. (Think of all the people who "hate mathematics".) In education, often the system is broken, good instructors are to find, etc. (Consider Lockhart's Lament, and its generalization: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=410. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=410.) We see this in politics too (I don't mean just electoral politics, but e.g. open-source communities with codes of conduct etc), where even simple basic human kindness, when made mandatory, often seems to provoke backlash. We can't require people to be nice, and we can't require people to appreciate the humanities. We have to do the hard work of gently persuading.
- VLM 8y agoAnything made mandatory always becomes unpleasant. Consider sex, sounds fun when spontaneous and free, but slave-staffed prostitution is not so fun from the slave's perspective. Consider food, how could a nice meal be unpleasant, but force feeding has been used for torture, not so cool anymore. Consider religion, or politics, or housework, etc... To some extent if you're allowing people into higher ed who are not higher-quality people, they're not going to appreciate a wide ranging education and a wide education is useless for most vocational training (engineering, programming, etc) anyway. Historically higher vocational training was only pursued by the highest class of people; not so much anymore; probably time to remove legacy nobility from higher ed for the masses.
- minikites 8y agoAre you genuinely comparing educational requirements to slavery and torture?