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>But what is the practical work product of a deep knowledge of medieval history? It's extremely difficult to test the past, so it's certainly not predictions ab
by spats1990 7y ago
>But what is the practical work product of a deep knowledge of medieval history? It's extremely difficult to test the past, so it's certainly not predictions about what already happened.
This strikes me as a really sad way to see the world.
Would you then agree that say, archaeology or palaeontology are things that nobody needs knowledge of for any practical purpose in the modern day? If you disagree, why?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoI didn't say we shouldn't study those things. I just said that there is not a much of a practical work product, and especially not one that a student could produce. But, I also think that probably more people are studying them than need to be. If that is a student's interest, then well enough. Otherwise, I'm not sure that, e.g., a middle school medieval history class is a good use of a student's time.
- spats1990 7y agoThere is a practical work product: research, formation of theories, etc. Edit: Possible new ways to understand the modern world. Just like archaeology or palaeontology. In my opinion, the issue in liberal arts education is with grade inflation, along with the scalability of assessing learning discussed in the essay/these comments. I suspect that really rigorous liberal arts education is much harder to do at scale than really rigorous science/engineering education because to be blunt, there is less room for argument in scientific concepts. For example, properly grading student essays and research is more difficult at scale in the liberal arts and the level of the whole thing gets dumbed down as a result.