What liberal arts education is for (2024)

Posted by mr_wiglaf 13 hours ago

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Comment by mlsu 11 hours ago

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!

Comment by gdwatson 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by yorwba 10 hours ago

It probably doesn't help that much of the medieval liberal arts curriculum is now taught in high school using modern textbooks, much diminishing the value of learning Ancient Greek so you can study Euclid's now 2300-year-old Elements for your Master of Arts degree.

Comment by rawgabbit 1 hour ago

The ruling class received a classical education and many went on to a law degree. By becoming judges, solicitors, prosecutors, and politicians, they kept their position in society. Engineers, administrators, and medical doctors are not members of the ruling class. The former considered themselves natural leaders and determined society’s direction. Unless a humanities department belonged to one of the two universities the elite sent their children to, it was a fraud. They mimicked Oxford or Harvard but was not the educational institution the elite went to.

Comment by pigbot223 10 hours ago

As someone who grew up poor and around dubious morals, nothing about university suggests to me that this is the case. On the other hand, the Confucian classics and perhaps the Ancient Greek works immediately dive into virtue and the likes.

What did I learn from my Japanese history class? To not let power into the hands of zealous military foot soldiers? Who took 大正，昭和，and 武士道 too seriously?

But the problem with the Confucian classics is that how can you be a 君子 when your neighbor sees your silent contempt for them as a reason to push you into the ground and make others feel humiliation when they consider seeing you as a friend. Or when your neighbor asks you for your car and then doesnt give it back. Or when your neighbor sees your success as a slight to them, when you don’t help their son get a job at your place, but they have a good friend who can extort very well, and they practice it often because the world is full of evil according to them. I think if I studied the liberal arts a bit more they dive into such contrived scenarios and how to avoid being ugly, corrupt, and rotten with a low spend rate in tight spaces.

The world isn’t evil though so perhaps the liberal arts dont need to get into these unrealistic cases.

Comment by rawgabbit 58 minutes ago

If you look into modern Western philosophy, it is not much better. Instead it embraces moral nihilism and the only thing it teaches is do whatever you want.

I am Catholic. Catholicism is far from perfect. But it teaches two principles which I believe in. We are all brothers and sisters, equally deserving in dignity and respect. We are in this journey of life together and we should strive for the common good meaning we should help the less fortunate. People are not valued by how much tax they pay and cannot be discarded when they are no longer “useful”.

Comment by throw8383949 10 hours ago

Perhaps liberal arts abandoned its core principles and values?

Comment by CobaltFire 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by WalterBright 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by Brian_K_White 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by WalterBright 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by Brian_K_White 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by WalterBright 1 hour ago

> Basically there is no way to spin it that being ignorant is better than being educated.

Being educated in things that are not true is worse than being ignorant. For example, advocacy of things like socialism that do not work.

Comment by BuyMyBitcoins 10 hours ago

>“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.

Comment by Brian_K_White 10 hours ago

Agreed that stem is a tool.

Tools help accomplish goals. Tools do not set goals.

Comment by wannabe44 10 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by beej71 1 hour ago

Or calligraphy class. What a waste! What has that ever brought us except the entire Macintosh line of computers?

You never know when something is going to pay off somewhere. You bag on the feminist perspective on Aztec dance, but that's someone new looking at something in a way no one has before. And you never know what might get found.

Maybe it's nothing. But if we stop looking, were only finding nothing, guaranteed. The best things are found by people looking where no one else thinks to.

Like TFA said, modern STEM education is training you to be an automaton for the machine. And now AI can do that.

Better to learn STEM and learn some liberal (as in freedom) arts. And I don't want us to focus solely on STEM just to be outperformed by countries that do STEM and humanities.

Finally, if I may be so bold, it appears your political identity is clouding your judgment. We need to research everything. It's really impossible to overdo this. Just ask China.

Disclosure: I teach undergrad computer science.

Comment by 45 minutes ago

Comment by vineyardmike 9 hours ago

> You neither need not count on someone who wrote a thesis on 'feminist perspective of aztek dance'

I like how we just make up fake arguments in incoherent grammar as a reason to criticize the humanities. There'd be irony there if people still were taught what that meant.

> just peddling political nonsense

Is this because the word liberal is in the name? Because that's not what that word means in this context.

Comment by ThrowawayR2 2 hours ago

Liberalism and leftism have parted ways in the United States. Liberalism is good but the progressive left that seem to be in charge of liberal arts in academia have rejected liberalism and its values.

Perhaps we should rename the liberal arts programs in American institutions of higher learning to the progressive arts to remind people of where the problem really lies, dohohoho.

Comment by 41 minutes ago

Comment by wannabe44 8 hours ago

Everyone knows the humanities departments are bastions of certain types of propaganda. Either you're naive or engaging in bad faith rhetoric.

Comment by XorNot 10 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by wannabe44 37 minutes ago

Good that you asked, I found even worse wastages of your taxpayer money.

https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/1d69a970-812a-43...

Or let's talk about our own field:

https://www.felienne.com/archives/8470

Everyone knows how ridiculous anti-science, anti-logic, and anti-progress propaganda has gotten. Anyone arguing otherwise is engaging in bad faith rhetoric.

Aside- the right had all the chances to be the side of science and logic, given how left-liberals deny genetics and realities of evolution. Alas, they have worse issues.

Comment by vineyardmike 12 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by WalterBright 12 hours ago

> 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!

Comment by imtringued 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by adrianN 8 hours ago

Arguably an educated populace is a corner stone of democratic societies. Too much of a focus on economic applicability of education is dangerous imo.

Comment by fwn 10 hours ago

It is worth noting that most of 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 (or even just prestigious) education somehow has to cost at least 200k USD financed through life-altering, non-defaultable student loan contracts.

I do understand that the money is not just drained. Whenever I was on an American campus as a student, I was in awe at their extravagant setups. Lots of food, an irritating amount of sports, more like a small resort town than a place to do educational work.

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.

Comment by SanjayMehta 11 hours ago

A STEM grad can learn history, literature etc fairly easily.

The other direction is possible but not so easy.

Comment by vineyardmike 10 hours ago

Did you read the article? As it highlights elegantly, "liberal arts" is about the educational methodology and structure, not the course material. You can learn STEM subjects in a liberal arts education.

> fairly easily... not so easy.

Yea, totally, STEM majors are inherently special and better at learning ;)

Comment by WalterBright 1 hour ago

> STEM majors are inherently special and better at learning

I learned how to learn by going through STEM.

Also, STEM produces right and wrong answers. If the airplane you design doesn't fly, you cannot pretend that it is flying.

That isn't true with liberal arts. Any failure can be explained away.

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by SanjayMehta 7 hours ago

STEM majors are inherently better overall. Are you trying to be sarcastic or funny? I can't tell.

I've yet to find a liberal arts grad who even knows what a partial differential equation is.

Comment by defrost 7 hours ago

You might need to get out more, many BAs understand what differential equations are.

  He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890 and graduated in 1893 with a Bachelor of Arts.

  At Cambridge, Russell was introduced to philosophy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

Comment by WalterBright 1 hour ago

My college econ textbook went through a couple pages of math. I read through it and realized they were showing how to do a derivative, without using any of the usual nomenclature for calculus.

It was clear the authors did not expect the econ students to know calculus, and they obfuscated the calculus so they would not scare the students off.

Comment by SanjayMehta 2 hours ago

Never met him. Have you?

Comment by alephnerd 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by WalterBright 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by alephnerd 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by WalterBright 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by alephnerd 3 hours ago

Yeah I can see why that left a bad taste.

Comment by vixen99 7 hours ago

Some people say it nevertheless. Oscar Kambona, a Cabinet Minister in President Nyerere's Tanzanian Government tells how he met Mao in China. Prior to the meeting he spoke to some surgeons repairing a fractured leg. Were they satisfied the operation had been a success? "Yes", they said, "because we read Chairman Mao's Little Red Book before the operation. You can achieve anything if you follow a leader".

Comment by Animats 12 hours ago

> 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...

Comment by flexagoon 10 hours ago

> That's not a liberal education. That's religious brainwashing.

No it's not. It's theology. A text that influenced millions of lifes and deaths can be studied in great detail without any brainwashing.

(To be fair, it can also be brainwashing! But from the blog post it seemed like the course was more about language and culture than about God.)

Comment by photios 11 hours ago

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?

Comment by defrost 11 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by photios 11 hours ago

I stand corrected. I probably went through the Freshman list only.

> The Bhagavad Gita

Well memed, sir!

Comment by defrost 11 hours ago

I have Krishna riding shotgun on the stagecoach of my life.

Comment by alephnerd 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by aruss 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by ajkjk 10 hours ago

Related: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case...

Comment by alephnerd 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by ThrowawayR2 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by creesch 11 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by wannabe44 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by mdp2021 12 hours ago

> 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".

Comment by WalterBright 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by alephnerd 11 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by eddhead 12 hours ago

Communist brainwashing for Trust Fund kids?

Seriously speaking what in Liberal Arts can you learn that's not already on Youtube now?

Comment by areoform 12 hours ago

From the article,

    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.

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.

Comment by CobaltFire 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by bulbar 12 hours ago

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.