3 ms·

Saving the Liberal Arts

3 points by jseliger 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago
He is "saving the liberal arts in order to kill it". That is, the liberal arts are in a death spiral because they're not responsive to reality, people's needs, ... The more I have studied Asian culture, history of technology, etc. the more I think that there is less of a difference between "east" and "west" but more that "liberal arts" went down a path dependent path when it chose to teach the Illiad but not the Romance of Three Kingdoms. That is, the liberal arts are more imperialistic, racist, whatever than the "western" culture that they teach from. Ever since I realized that Japanese cultural critics think that Lasch's "Culture of Narcissism" applies to the Tokugawa period I try to delete "western" from "civilization" and "culture" as much as I can. (They also manage the weird trick of making recent French philosophy more clear to the English speaker than the English translations by the "liberal arts" people)
- jfengel 5y ago
  I believe he's making a mistake of separating the liberal arts from professional education. I was really struck by his quotes from Reagan ("shouldn’t be subsidizing intellectual curiosity") and Obama ("We need more folks in engineering, math, science, technology, computer science"). Don't you want your engineers to be intellectually curious? Are mathematicians really in it because they want to invent new consumer products? Sure, some do, but a lot of math and hard science are purely functions of curiosity. We spent billions on the Higgs boson, and it's never going to produce anything of value -- except maybe for spinoff of the engineering process. He seems to want to separate a "how we do it" education from a "why we do it" education. And people with just the former tend to make mediocre engineers. We surely need at least some of them, but the most desirable ones are the ones who want to learn. And especially, want to learn more about their fellow humans. You don't just write software; you write software for people. We programmers hold the highest respect for the people who write the software for us -- the OS writers, the compiler writers, the algorithm theorists -- and the lowest for the code monkeys who just plug things together. Even now, there's a lot of discrimination against people who go to coding camps and vo-tech schools. Partly it's because we think of that as the lazy route, it's "lazy" because they haven't done the rest of the crap that a four-year education provides. I'm all for finding routes around the overwhelming cost of a four-year college education. For starters, move it online -- but not to MOOCs. Move it to live discussion forums where students communicate with each other about the things they're studying -- art, history, language, anthropology, etc etc etc. That can be done at a tiny fraction of the cost and 99% of the benefit. That massive cost savings could save the humanities degrees. And then we can get into the thornier problem of getting employers to recognize what those graduates can do.

3 points by jseliger 5y ago

He is "saving the liberal arts in order to kill it". That is, the liberal arts are in a death spiral because they're not responsive to reality, people's needs, ... The more I have studied Asian culture, history of technology, etc. the more I think that there is less of a difference between "east" and "west" but more that "liberal arts" went down a path dependent path when it chose to teach the Illiad but not the Romance of Three Kingdoms. That is, the liberal arts are more imperialistic, racist, whatever than the "western" culture that they teach from. Ever since I realized that Japanese cultural critics think that Lasch's "Culture of Narcissism" applies to the Tokugawa period I try to delete "western" from "civilization" and "culture" as much as I can. (They also manage the weird trick of making recent French philosophy more clear to the English speaker than the English translations by the "liberal arts" people)

jfengel 5y ago
I believe he's making a mistake of separating the liberal arts from professional education. I was really struck by his quotes from Reagan ("shouldn’t be subsidizing intellectual curiosity") and Obama ("We need more folks in engineering, math, science, technology, computer science"). Don't you want your engineers to be intellectually curious? Are mathematicians really in it because they want to invent new consumer products? Sure, some do, but a lot of math and hard science are purely functions of curiosity. We spent billions on the Higgs boson, and it's never going to produce anything of value -- except maybe for spinoff of the engineering process. He seems to want to separate a "how we do it" education from a "why we do it" education. And people with just the former tend to make mediocre engineers. We surely need at least some of them, but the most desirable ones are the ones who want to learn. And especially, want to learn more about their fellow humans. You don't just write software; you write software for people. We programmers hold the highest respect for the people who write the software for us -- the OS writers, the compiler writers, the algorithm theorists -- and the lowest for the code monkeys who just plug things together. Even now, there's a lot of discrimination against people who go to coding camps and vo-tech schools. Partly it's because we think of that as the lazy route, it's "lazy" because they haven't done the rest of the crap that a four-year education provides. I'm all for finding routes around the overwhelming cost of a four-year college education. For starters, move it online -- but not to MOOCs. Move it to live discussion forums where students communicate with each other about the things they're studying -- art, history, language, anthropology, etc etc etc. That can be done at a tiny fraction of the cost and 99% of the benefit. That massive cost savings could save the humanities degrees. And then we can get into the thornier problem of getting employers to recognize what those graduates can do.