The liberal arts education was originally conceived to educate the leaders of society. That is where the free-minded pedagogical angle comes from, it's explicitly privileged. The idea was that if the leaders of society learned what it means to have values, integrity, what it is to be virtuous, etc, then they would diffuse those values into society and create a just world. Society would transcend in the image of the great works. Books from 500 years ago can teach us what being ethical means because human values are transcendental and totally outside of technological or vocational fads.
Unfortunately, at some point in the last 30-40 years, we've totally abandoned this idea. The most powerful people in society are not just indifferent to the liberal arts but are actively hostile towards it. They see it as a frivolous waste of resources. Why waste time studying a great work of literature when you could be "building" instead?
Of course, it's predictable where this leads. We did all this building, but forgot what justice means, what it means to have values, what it means to do right. So now our society is ugly, corrupt, and rotten. Hey, at least we (the leaders) are rich!
There are two angles on this. There is the rejection of the humanities in favor of science and wealth, which are good things in themselves but are not everything. But, on the other hand, what many modern humanities faculties offer is a very time-bound activism that rejects books from 500 years ago and is not interested in the permanent things.
I had an extremely focused career, but am by nature a curious individual who craved the type of discussions the article talks about. They were closed to me because I came from poverty and had to focus to move myself up the ladder.
Much like the author however, I found that my natural curiosity, and specifically that desire to ask what the words being used MEANT, to serve me extremely well. When I was a PM for a billion dollar plus project (military can hit that easily) that attitude is what got me the job.
The constant push back from those who seem to value only their, and your, positions as cogs in a machine was exhausting. I really agree with this entire article. Thanks for posting it.
I took and engineering and science program in college. The education was in learning how to learn, learning how to solve problems, and how to distinguish fact from fiction. It's served me well.
To make a living, it is necessary to learn a skill that people are willing to pay for.
When I was an infant first couple years of college, us engineers knew we were the useful smarties. Art is nice and all but it doesn't grow crops or cure cancer. So the arts are just this luxury that we can only afford thanks to us non-luxury necessary engineers & scientists.
Sometime later I realized that stem only tells you how to build a bridge or a bomb etc. The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc.
Stem is actually merely the brawn for the humanities brain. Stem without the humanities is a baby with a gun.
> The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc.
That's just the justification they give for their existence. You neither need not count on someone who wrote a thesis on 'feminist perspective of aztek dance' or some nonsense like that.
The only reason humanities departments are this big today is because of the biological waste who can't make it to STEM or any other useful profession. If we limit humanities to classicists, linguists etc... whose work is actually rigorous and not just peddling political nonsense, humanities would not have such a bad rap.
> You neither need not count on someone who wrote a thesis on 'feminist perspective of aztek dance' or some nonsense like that.
I like how this criticism can never point to anything real, people just make something up and then assign an implausibly large budget to it and then say everyone is doing that.
>“The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc.”
This sounds good, but I suspect this is only applicable on a surface level due to the fact that the decision making will involve an extensive amount of stem-based analysis.
I haven't noticed that liberal arts majors are better at deciding whether to build a bomb or a bridge. Just look at all the boneheaded decisions by government.
A supposedly smart engineer type should be smart enough to spot the hole in this argument in their sleep.
"You need flour to make a cake."
"I have plenty of flour and it never turned into a cake."
You have observed that it's possible to be educated and unwise.
Any individual may or may not be worth a damn at anything regardless of anything.
But you very rarely arrive at wisdom just by ignorant native intuition. At best some people are naturally well-intentioned, but being well intentioned in ignorance isn't very good. You're just easy for everyone else to manipulate.
It works the other way too. If you want to be effective at abusing and manipulating everyone else, you are a lot more effective at your negative goals if you aren't ignorant.
Basically there is no way to spin it that being ignorant is better than being educated.
If education is the goal then it is a form of consumption and there is nothing wrong with consumption, but why should the government give out subsidized loans for consumption to young people?
If people want to have an education for the sake of an education they should stop arguing in favor of maximally inflated tuition.
You want the benefits of the consumer good while paying the least amount of money for it.
Meanwhile the standard narrative is that people should be allowed to get into massive unpayable debts that trap them in deadend jobs while people who focus on money end up using their freedom to do the very thing the people who got into debt claim you can only do by getting into debt.
It is worth noting that liberal arts education is fantastically cheap compared to many STEM degrees, especially medicine. Whenever you need a laboratory, a hospital.. it gets much more expensive than anything a liberal arts teacher can come up with.
I think it is a uniquely American perspective to automatically assume that worthy education just somehow has to cost at least 200k USD financed through life-altering, non-defaultable student loan contracts.
No wonder there is only a very small fraction of the population who would choose to study humanities in such a system. But it says much more about the system than about the humanities or liberal arts.
At Caltech, the usual was to double major with one to make money, the other for fun. The fun one was usually Astronomy, where it was well known there were no prospects for employment.
In my case the problem was there were too many fascinating engineering classes to take. I tried to pick out ones that would be of maximum benefit to my chosen career.
Tbf, Caltech is also a much more self selecting student base.
Plenty of my MIT friends explicitly chose MIT over Caltech because they wanted a technical education but also the freedom to deep dive in English or Political Science as well (Caltech has great faculty in the HSS, but class choice was unsurprisingly limited).
That said, based on your account age, I think you studied in the 1980s to early 2000s back when programs were much less interdisciplinary. It's much easier to double major with a STEM and humanities major from the 2010s to present versus before.
I graduated before 1980. A degree requirement was taking some liberal arts courses. I decided on economics. The prof taught that free markets were bad and marxism was good. That left(!) a bad taste wrt liberal arts. He went on to garner many accolades for his work.
I fulfilled the rest of the liberal arts requirement with foreign language classes and business accounting classes. I was not interested in taking political classes.
Fortunately, Newtonian Mechanics was free of politics. If your rocket doesn't fly, you cannot pretend it did.
> The class turned out to be more or less “A Letter (singular) of Paul:” we spent the semester reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, at a rate of about 3 sentences per week. Per week!
That's not a liberal education. That's religious brainwashing. It's the kind of thing madrassas and yeshivas do - obsessively school students on a very few texts said to be sacred.
Liberal education was traditionally broad. There are curricula based on the Great Books. [1] They can be criticized for being retro, but they are not narrow.
This is one class to deeply understand one of the most politically impactful texts in history. What about that is religious brainwashing? Do you even know the professor’s religious beliefs? Because they’re not obvious to me simply from the course description.
I took a religious studies course in college amid a liberal arts math/CS major. I can say it was one of my favorite classes in college, primarily for exposing me to ways of thinking that differ from my own, and yet I left with my (lack of) religious beliefs intact.
There's nothing inherently wrong with theological education assuming it is also clubbed with other curricula and is not dogmatic in nature.
Most major theological programs in the US like Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Chicago, Vandy, and Notre Dame take this kind of an interdisciplinary approach.
The issue with madrassas and some hardcore yeshivas and seminaries is they do not allow any curricula that isn't litigurical in nature.
> Liberal education was traditionally broad. There are curricula based on the Great Books. [1] They can be criticized for being retro, but they are not narrow
I've found the Great Books curricula to be closer in style to madrassa and hardcore yeshivot curricula than a traditional liberal arts education, as they don't actively try to connect past texts and treatise with the present.
The Great Books curriculum is itself a holdover from back when UChicago was meant to be a fundy evangelical theological program.
Yet another dubious claim that "skills of close reading and critical questioning" are the products of a liberal arts education. Students can gain such things just fine in a STEM field if they care enough and aren't the sort who are just doing the bare minimum to get the sheepskin.
Nietzsche, Norse havamal, Greek epics and the Vedas of India did teach me some critical thinking skills on how we take certain types of morality and virtue for granted in the current society.
All this critical thinking runs opposite to the monoculture of liberal arts departments. Anyone would be better of studying them by themselves.
> a STEM field if they care enough and aren't the sort who are just doing the bare minimum to get the sheepskin.
That's the thing though, part of it is about caring. Part of it is being exposed to other things in order to realize there is more out there. I honestly think that STEM field education would benefit from including Liberal Art related courses exactly because of that. Basically as a way to broaden students world view and the way they might interact in it.
The same is probably true the other way around as well btw.
Those with a liberal arts education do indeed look down on STEM educations as merely a trade.
What they miss is the joy of understanding how the world works. I remember many "aha!" moments like somebody turning on the lights in a dark cathedral.
Like when I found out how jet engines really worked, not the handwavy cartoons one usually sees. Or when suddenly all the pieces fit together and I knew how a computer worked. Or when Prof Gomez turned math from black+white to color when he taught me calculus.
> Those with a liberal arts education do indeed look down on STEM educations as merely a trade
Maybe it's a generational thing, but I haven't noticed this amongst my peers and those younger than me, but I do agree that there is some degree of ressentiment amongst humanities majors to STEM because of the earning trajectory.
What can we learn about what other people are thinking, about their mental models of the world, by paying very careful attention to the words they use?
A lot of people will make fun of you, but I think everyone should read a book or two that's not airport pulp.
The liberal arts education was originally conceived to educate the leaders of society. That is where the free-minded pedagogical angle comes from, it's explicitly privileged. The idea was that if the leaders of society learned what it means to have values, integrity, what it is to be virtuous, etc, then they would diffuse those values into society and create a just world. Society would transcend in the image of the great works. Books from 500 years ago can teach us what being ethical means because human values are transcendental and totally outside of technological or vocational fads.
Unfortunately, at some point in the last 30-40 years, we've totally abandoned this idea. The most powerful people in society are not just indifferent to the liberal arts but are actively hostile towards it. They see it as a frivolous waste of resources. Why waste time studying a great work of literature when you could be "building" instead?
Of course, it's predictable where this leads. We did all this building, but forgot what justice means, what it means to have values, what it means to do right. So now our society is ugly, corrupt, and rotten. Hey, at least we (the leaders) are rich!
There are two angles on this. There is the rejection of the humanities in favor of science and wealth, which are good things in themselves but are not everything. But, on the other hand, what many modern humanities faculties offer is a very time-bound activism that rejects books from 500 years ago and is not interested in the permanent things.
I had an extremely focused career, but am by nature a curious individual who craved the type of discussions the article talks about. They were closed to me because I came from poverty and had to focus to move myself up the ladder.
Much like the author however, I found that my natural curiosity, and specifically that desire to ask what the words being used MEANT, to serve me extremely well. When I was a PM for a billion dollar plus project (military can hit that easily) that attitude is what got me the job.
The constant push back from those who seem to value only their, and your, positions as cogs in a machine was exhausting. I really agree with this entire article. Thanks for posting it.
Related: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case...
I took and engineering and science program in college. The education was in learning how to learn, learning how to solve problems, and how to distinguish fact from fiction. It's served me well.
To make a living, it is necessary to learn a skill that people are willing to pay for.
When I was an infant first couple years of college, us engineers knew we were the useful smarties. Art is nice and all but it doesn't grow crops or cure cancer. So the arts are just this luxury that we can only afford thanks to us non-luxury necessary engineers & scientists.
Sometime later I realized that stem only tells you how to build a bridge or a bomb etc. The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc.
Stem is actually merely the brawn for the humanities brain. Stem without the humanities is a baby with a gun.
> The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc.
That's just the justification they give for their existence. You neither need not count on someone who wrote a thesis on 'feminist perspective of aztek dance' or some nonsense like that.
The only reason humanities departments are this big today is because of the biological waste who can't make it to STEM or any other useful profession. If we limit humanities to classicists, linguists etc... whose work is actually rigorous and not just peddling political nonsense, humanities would not have such a bad rap.
> You neither need not count on someone who wrote a thesis on 'feminist perspective of aztek dance' or some nonsense like that.
I like how this criticism can never point to anything real, people just make something up and then assign an implausibly large budget to it and then say everyone is doing that.
>“The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc.”
This sounds good, but I suspect this is only applicable on a surface level due to the fact that the decision making will involve an extensive amount of stem-based analysis.
Agreed that stem is a tool.
I haven't noticed that liberal arts majors are better at deciding whether to build a bomb or a bridge. Just look at all the boneheaded decisions by government.
A supposedly smart engineer type should be smart enough to spot the hole in this argument in their sleep.
"You need flour to make a cake." "I have plenty of flour and it never turned into a cake."
You have observed that it's possible to be educated and unwise.
Any individual may or may not be worth a damn at anything regardless of anything.
But you very rarely arrive at wisdom just by ignorant native intuition. At best some people are naturally well-intentioned, but being well intentioned in ignorance isn't very good. You're just easy for everyone else to manipulate.
It works the other way too. If you want to be effective at abusing and manipulating everyone else, you are a lot more effective at your negative goals if you aren't ignorant.
Basically there is no way to spin it that being ignorant is better than being educated.
> The education was in learning how to learn, learning how to solve problems, and how to distinguish fact from fiction
Sounds pretty close to a liberal arts education.
That said, not everything is about a job or work. Sometimes (usually) education is itself a goal.
> Sounds pretty close to a liberal arts education
That's the plan, but it doesn't seem to work out too well.
> not everything is about a job or work
Yes, if you are independently wealthy. Need to pay back those student loans!
If education is the goal then it is a form of consumption and there is nothing wrong with consumption, but why should the government give out subsidized loans for consumption to young people?
If people want to have an education for the sake of an education they should stop arguing in favor of maximally inflated tuition.
You want the benefits of the consumer good while paying the least amount of money for it.
Meanwhile the standard narrative is that people should be allowed to get into massive unpayable debts that trap them in deadend jobs while people who focus on money end up using their freedom to do the very thing the people who got into debt claim you can only do by getting into debt.
It is worth noting that liberal arts education is fantastically cheap compared to many STEM degrees, especially medicine. Whenever you need a laboratory, a hospital.. it gets much more expensive than anything a liberal arts teacher can come up with.
I think it is a uniquely American perspective to automatically assume that worthy education just somehow has to cost at least 200k USD financed through life-altering, non-defaultable student loan contracts.
No wonder there is only a very small fraction of the population who would choose to study humanities in such a system. But it says much more about the system than about the humanities or liberal arts.
A STEM grad can learn history, literature etc fairly easily.
The other direction is possible but not so easy.
That doesn't preclude minoring or double majoring - which is what plenty of my peers who were also STEM majors often did (as did I)
Concentrating on monetizable skills is critical, but most colleges give enough space for interdisciplinary electives.
At Caltech, the usual was to double major with one to make money, the other for fun. The fun one was usually Astronomy, where it was well known there were no prospects for employment.
In my case the problem was there were too many fascinating engineering classes to take. I tried to pick out ones that would be of maximum benefit to my chosen career.
Tbf, Caltech is also a much more self selecting student base.
Plenty of my MIT friends explicitly chose MIT over Caltech because they wanted a technical education but also the freedom to deep dive in English or Political Science as well (Caltech has great faculty in the HSS, but class choice was unsurprisingly limited).
That said, based on your account age, I think you studied in the 1980s to early 2000s back when programs were much less interdisciplinary. It's much easier to double major with a STEM and humanities major from the 2010s to present versus before.
I graduated before 1980. A degree requirement was taking some liberal arts courses. I decided on economics. The prof taught that free markets were bad and marxism was good. That left(!) a bad taste wrt liberal arts. He went on to garner many accolades for his work.
I fulfilled the rest of the liberal arts requirement with foreign language classes and business accounting classes. I was not interested in taking political classes.
Fortunately, Newtonian Mechanics was free of politics. If your rocket doesn't fly, you cannot pretend it did.
> The class turned out to be more or less “A Letter (singular) of Paul:” we spent the semester reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, at a rate of about 3 sentences per week. Per week!
That's not a liberal education. That's religious brainwashing. It's the kind of thing madrassas and yeshivas do - obsessively school students on a very few texts said to be sacred.
Liberal education was traditionally broad. There are curricula based on the Great Books. [1] They can be criticized for being retro, but they are not narrow.
[1] https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-bo...
St. Paul's writing has this effect on people. It's either a burst of love and joy or seething hatred. Never in the middle. :D
> There are curricula based on the Great Books.
List not including the greatest book of them all... What did they mean by this?
> List not including the greatest book of them all...
The linked list included both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in the Sophomore year section.
If it was The Bhagavad Gita you were jonesing for, that appears later in the Junior section.
I stand corrected. I probably went through the Freshman list only.
> The Bhagavad Gita
Well memed, sir!
I have Krishna riding shotgun on the stagecoach of my life.
This is one class to deeply understand one of the most politically impactful texts in history. What about that is religious brainwashing? Do you even know the professor’s religious beliefs? Because they’re not obvious to me simply from the course description.
I took a religious studies course in college amid a liberal arts math/CS major. I can say it was one of my favorite classes in college, primarily for exposing me to ways of thinking that differ from my own, and yet I left with my (lack of) religious beliefs intact.
There's nothing inherently wrong with theological education assuming it is also clubbed with other curricula and is not dogmatic in nature.
Most major theological programs in the US like Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Chicago, Vandy, and Notre Dame take this kind of an interdisciplinary approach.
The issue with madrassas and some hardcore yeshivas and seminaries is they do not allow any curricula that isn't litigurical in nature.
> Liberal education was traditionally broad. There are curricula based on the Great Books. [1] They can be criticized for being retro, but they are not narrow
I've found the Great Books curricula to be closer in style to madrassa and hardcore yeshivot curricula than a traditional liberal arts education, as they don't actively try to connect past texts and treatise with the present.
The Great Books curriculum is itself a holdover from back when UChicago was meant to be a fundy evangelical theological program.
I've always been a huge proponent of CMU, UIUC, and Stanford's CS+X programs for this very reason.
Innovation is inherently interdisciplinary, and learning how to synthesize multiple different domains has tremendous value.
Yet another dubious claim that "skills of close reading and critical questioning" are the products of a liberal arts education. Students can gain such things just fine in a STEM field if they care enough and aren't the sort who are just doing the bare minimum to get the sheepskin.
Nietzsche, Norse havamal, Greek epics and the Vedas of India did teach me some critical thinking skills on how we take certain types of morality and virtue for granted in the current society.
All this critical thinking runs opposite to the monoculture of liberal arts departments. Anyone would be better of studying them by themselves.
> a STEM field if they care enough and aren't the sort who are just doing the bare minimum to get the sheepskin.
That's the thing though, part of it is about caring. Part of it is being exposed to other things in order to realize there is more out there. I honestly think that STEM field education would benefit from including Liberal Art related courses exactly because of that. Basically as a way to broaden students world view and the way they might interact in it.
The same is probably true the other way around as well btw.
> Students can gain such things just fine in a STEM field
As long as you do not claim that "living only on proteins or stones and without carbs or leaves would be a good idea".
Those with a liberal arts education do indeed look down on STEM educations as merely a trade.
What they miss is the joy of understanding how the world works. I remember many "aha!" moments like somebody turning on the lights in a dark cathedral.
Like when I found out how jet engines really worked, not the handwavy cartoons one usually sees. Or when suddenly all the pieces fit together and I knew how a computer worked. Or when Prof Gomez turned math from black+white to color when he taught me calculus.
> Those with a liberal arts education do indeed look down on STEM educations as merely a trade
Maybe it's a generational thing, but I haven't noticed this amongst my peers and those younger than me, but I do agree that there is some degree of ressentiment amongst humanities majors to STEM because of the earning trajectory.
Communist brainwashing for Trust Fund kids?
Seriously speaking what in Liberal Arts can you learn that's not already on Youtube now?
From the article,
A lot of people will make fun of you, but I think everyone should read a book or two that's not airport pulp.Given you're on HN, try Gödel, Escher, Bach. https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden...
Be warned though, it'll take you well over a decade.
This comment really speaks to the article.
The commenter didn't even have the curiosity to read and comprehend the article, and made the articles point in that.
You can learn anything from books, you never needed a college for that.
Except, discussing things, having somebody else grade your coursework etc., you don't get that from books or YouTube.