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That's precisely the point I was speaking to. Engineering colleges don't need to use "personal development" as a way to justify their expense. Medical schools,

That's precisely the point I was speaking to. Engineering colleges don't need to use "personal development" as a way to justify their expense. Medical schools, law colleges, and other professional degree programs don't need to do so either. The fact that liberal education needs to refer to something as diffuse and difficult to value as "personal development" should raise hackles in an era when a college education costs almost as much as a house.

_delirium 15y ago
It is a common justification for some of the science core curriculum, such as why computer scientists should have to take two semesters of physics, while it'd probably be more useful for future employment to just take more CS courses. General well-roundedness / being an educated person is the usual argument.
chernevik 15y ago
Fair enough. But the "personal development" justification is stupid; "well rounded person" is only a little better. One man's opinion: The purpose of a good liberal arts education is to provide the tools to learn about yourself, your place among other men, and your place in the world (qua God, Nature, Not-God, Tao, whatever). Such studies have the practical, if somewhat removed, benefit of equipping you to understand what you value, and what you should value, and prepare you to explore how to live well. They also have the more obviously and immediately practical benefit of helping you understand how _other_ people think. Done properly, these studies require great rigor and imagination, which is excellent training for all sorts of things. Those are the Big Questions, and there is so much crap out there speaking to them that you can easily wonder if there is any hope of getting anywhere on them. The liberal arts schools have made the problem worse by their allergic reaction to "judgment" and "objectivity" -- the conceit that all viewpoints are equally valid makes the whole enterprise impossible. All I can tell you is that, just as we shouldn't judge the great programmers by the 98% of the software crap swimming around us, neither should we judge the great liberal teachers by the swamp of babble hiding them. I have enormous respect for engineers and technical types -- I'm teaching myself to program, and my graduate studies focused on building my quantitative skills. Your complaint that the "broadening" motivation rarely reaches to the mathy stuff is spot-on. I wish I'd studied more math in college. But my studies in philosophy and political science are foundational to everything I think and do. So, yeah, I share your suspicion of the diffuse and difficult to value. The shame is that the schools themselves haven't better dedicated themselves to something that would be a lot easier to value. tldr; "those who do not study the workings of their own minds must necessarily be unhappy" -- Aurelius. But the liberal arts schools chickened out of teaching him, so we're left with "well rounded".

_delirium 15y ago

It is a common justification for some of the science core curriculum, such as why computer scientists should have to take two semesters of physics, while it'd probably be more useful for future employment to just take more CS courses. General well-roundedness / being an educated person is the usual argument.

chernevik 15y ago

Fair enough. But the "personal development" justification is stupid; "well rounded person" is only a little better. One man's opinion: The purpose of a good liberal arts education is to provide the tools to learn about yourself, your place among other men, and your place in the world (qua God, Nature, Not-God, Tao, whatever). Such studies have the practical, if somewhat removed, benefit of equipping you to understand what you value, and what you should value, and prepare you to explore how to live well. They also have the more obviously and immediately practical benefit of helping you understand how _other_ people think. Done properly, these studies require great rigor and imagination, which is excellent training for all sorts of things. Those are the Big Questions, and there is so much crap out there speaking to them that you can easily wonder if there is any hope of getting anywhere on them. The liberal arts schools have made the problem worse by their allergic reaction to "judgment" and "objectivity" -- the conceit that all viewpoints are equally valid makes the whole enterprise impossible. All I can tell you is that, just as we shouldn't judge the great programmers by the 98% of the software crap swimming around us, neither should we judge the great liberal teachers by the swamp of babble hiding them. I have enormous respect for engineers and technical types -- I'm teaching myself to program, and my graduate studies focused on building my quantitative skills. Your complaint that the "broadening" motivation rarely reaches to the mathy stuff is spot-on. I wish I'd studied more math in college. But my studies in philosophy and political science are foundational to everything I think and do. So, yeah, I share your suspicion of the diffuse and difficult to value. The shame is that the schools themselves haven't better dedicated themselves to something that would be a lot easier to value. tldr; "those who do not study the workings of their own minds must necessarily be unhappy" -- Aurelius. But the liberal arts schools chickened out of teaching him, so we're left with "well rounded".