The root area on which I think we may disagree is the meaning of “liberal arts.” A liberal arts education is supposed to be providing an education in citizenship for “free men,” as opposed to technical skills useful for servants who don't need to think. That is a historical fact beyond dispute.
You can focus on technical training all you want, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with technical training, but if people aren't being taught how to be good citizens, we're creating compliant servants, not educated voters who will select our future leaders. In America, that means teaching enough of America's founding principles so people know what America stands for, why those principles are important, and how to defend those principles.
You asked how far that should go. Yes, I certainly agree with you that teaching about the Civil War and the problems of the rise of 19th and 20th century socialism (including FDR) and Communism is important, and I definitely believe in teaching ancient, medieval, and early modern history, as well as American history. What is key is that students need to have a foundation to understand what America stands for. Memorizing lots of facts is helpful, but the goal is to learn the foundational principles so students will connect the dots and recognize it on their own when someone comes along and either tries to build bad things on those foundations or actually tries to jackhammer the foundations themselves.
Is the typical dumbed-down liberal arts college doing that? We all know that's not happening. But the solution is not to focus on technical training rather than a liberal arts education. The problem is that professors are indoctrinating their students into liberalism which isn't really education at all.
Selecting a good Christian college or a traditional conservative college like Hillsdale College goes a long way to solving those problems, but I'm well aware that means a very large investment in private schools which many families simply cannot afford. Also, I'm very much aware that college isn't the right choice for all kids. Some people just aren't cut out for college and there is no shame in that. Lots of good jobs don't require a college degree or even post-high-school technical training.
But let's get back to where I think we agree.
First, we agree that education starts at home. My 13-year-old is in a strongly conservative Christian school; many of the families in my church are homeschoolers. I'm not going to attack public schools in principle, but if parents send their children to a public school, they need to pay attention to what their teacher is teaching, re-teach or re-emphasize key parts of American history which may not be taught properly in school, and understand up front that a public school is not legally allowed to give the Christian foundation necessary to understand the motives of America. Even in my own situation where I do trust the teacher and the school, I spend about 45 minutes to an hour per day while driving back home asking questions about what the teacher taught and answering questions, which since the rest of my family is Korean, often turns into a discussion of the importance of America's founding principles and how they differ from those of Asia.
Second, you asked this: “Why shouldn’t all liberal arts majors be required to study at least a year of biology? Or chemistry? What is wrong with calculus? How well educated is a man who has never studied how the human mind works?”
Yes, students at the college level in a liberal arts curriculum **SHOULD** be taking not just history, English, and related classes but also math, science, etc. — that's what the common core of the first two years of study are supposed to be in a liberal arts program.
I'm not talking about basic classes, either. I did take advanced biology and chemistry in college, along with calculus, even though it had nothing to do with my major, because my college's policy was not to allow students to test out of classes but rather placed them in the highest-level class for which they qualified if they tested out of the freshman sequence or, as was the case with me, had already taken college-level classes in high school. Have I used my biology classes dissecting frogs and fetal pigs, my chemistry classes in stoichiometry, or my calculus classes? Probably not. My training in computer programming was once far more useful from a practical perspective, though I certainly have no call today to use FORTRAN or COBOL, and it has been decades since I loaded punchcards into a card reader for transmission to the mainframe and overnight processing of batch jobs.
However, an educated person is supposed to know enough about other subjects that he or she can at least understand what somebody is talking about and read books to bring them up to speed. (And no, I'm not arguing that testing out of college classes shouldn't be allowed, I'm just explaining that was my college's policy.)
I realize part of the problem is many high schools aren't doing their jobs and are dumbing down the classes because students don't want to study. Calculus is supposed to be a freshman college course, and if high schools were doing their jobs, people wouldn't be going to college unless they were done with algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and at least pre-calculus, preferably high school calculus.
Frankly, the first couple of years of college today are too often less of a liberal arts common-core, but rather re-teaching things that a couple of generations ago were considered high school classes.
While I think we probably agree on most of what you wrote, unfortunately I can't agree at all with some of what you wrote.
As for engineering being better preparation for critical thinking than history: Much depends on what is being taught and how it is being taught. I fully grant that a bad history teacher can get away with teaching nonsense, and lots of liberals do exactly that. It's harder to do that with math or sciences where objective standards exist, but it's still possible to teach science badly in ways that do not develop thinking skills.
However, there is a fundamental difference between even the best classes in engineering, chemistry, biology, etc., and a liberal arts education. A highly skilled engineer has skills, and I certainly want engineers to have skills, but a citizen needs more than mere skills. The issue here shouldn't be either-or, but rather both-and.
Let's go back to my original example of preparation for law school, where critical thinking skills are absolutely necessary.
If a young college student's goal is to be a patent attorney, a degree in engineering is probably a really good idea because highly specialized knowledge in that field is very helpful.
However, if a future lawyer is talking about preparation for going to law school and practicing in most areas of law, if he or she doesn't have a good foundation in American and British history, as well as background knowledge of Graeco-Roman history, that student isn't going to understand why our Constitution was written, what it was designed to guard against, and why the Anglo-American legal tradition is very different from the legal systems of most other countries.
Let's take a standard conservative hot-button issue: the Second Amendment. If somebody doesn't understand how the traditional “liberties” of free British citizens expanded in colonial America to include widespread firearms ownership as a means of self-defense rather than (like most of Europe) disarmed peasant populations relying on the “protection” of their feudal overlords, they're not going to understand the context of the colonial militias. You can't read primary source documents about colonial America without understanding that most able-bodied townsmen were drilling regularly in the village green, and out in more isolated communities, firearms were a necessary part of defense not only against wild animals but also roving bandits and occasional Indian (or foreign) raids as well as the risk of open warfare.
I suspect your response is going to be that students in typical liberal arts schools aren't getting that kind of education. Well, guess what — WE AGREE!!!! Conservative parents sending their kids to conservative schools is kind of important, don't you think?
Liberal arts education is supposed to train people how to be free citizens in a free republic. Technical training is certainly good, but it has a different purpose. The solution isn't to ditch liberal arts education, but rather to send students to schools that are doing what they're supposed to be doing, and if their interest is in math, science, or some other technical field, make sure they're well-grounded before they go to college if they're going to attend an engineering school where in many cases they aren't going to get they need to be good citizens.
Of course, in a perfect world we would be sending future engineers and scientists to a top-level research university where their common core classes for the first two years would **ALSO** include a solid conservative education in the liberal arts, or at a bare minimum, in American history and government. Unfortunately, our top-level training in technical fields usually happens at large state universities because the conservative private colleges don't have the necessary money for labs and equipment and research facilities. The result is our conservative students who are oriented toward math and science are being shortchanged of the kind of education they should be getting, and there probably is no short-term solution for that without major cultural changes.
Bravo! Your post #53 was an excellent refutation of the standard Freeper’s response to articles dealing with liberal arts education. It covered the points that I wish I had made, but did not.
I have already saved that post and request your permission to use parts of it to deal with these ignoramuses who worship at the altar of ENGINEERING to the exclusion of a good—and I emphasize “good”—liberal arts education. I will, of course, credit you and indicate that I am quoting you word for word.
As an example:
“However, if a future lawyer is talking about preparation for going to law school and practicing in most areas of law, if he or she doesn’t have a good foundation in American and British history, as well as background knowledge of Graeco-Roman history, that student isn’t going to understand why our Constitution was written, what it was designed to guard against, and why the Anglo-American legal tradition is very different from the legal systems of most other countries.”
Someone switching from engineering to law would have no trouble reading that information and assimilating it. It would take a day, perhaps. Maybe two.
What is more important is understanding how to think and how to connect facts together in a logical manner. Indeed, the very idea that facts matter would be helpful!
This is where the humanities and liberal arts have gone astray. An engineer who needed to discuss Custer’s attitudes on Indians would want to read what Custer wrote, find out what Custer said, and see how Custer’s acts compared with the opinions of the day. But in most history classes - based on students I’ve run met and what professors write - one can just assume that Custer was an evil white man committing acts of oppression, and one can get away with it.
An economist doesn’t worry about outcomes, but his opinions. One can find plenty of economists who think Jerry Brown is going to save California. And they can afford to think so, because no one will ever call them on the carpet for results.
In math, there may be more than one way to prove a trig identity, but one cannot simply throw around terms like sine or tangent and hope to create enough smoke to pass. In engineering, one might add a fudge factor for safety, but one cannot build a bridge that falls down without anyone noticing.
An engineer or mathematician responsible for writing about the 2nd Amendment would know to look for the context in which it was written, rather than applying one’s own belief’s to the text. Asked about original intent, they would try to find the answers, in the belief that such answers exist and are important.
My wife completed her BS in nursing last year. I helped her by reading various ‘research’ articles and highlighting helpful passages. But I honestly spent much of my time being shocked at the incredibly bad quality of the published ‘research’. The large majority of the papers I read made no attempt to connect the opinions expressed in the paper to anything resembling a fact. Paper after paper would assume that ‘patient outcomes’ would be positive or negative without any attempt to measure actual patient outcomes.
That is the disconnect that has many on FR pissed off at ‘liberal arts’. I would wholly agree that a good history course is every bit as valuable in teaching logical thinking as mathematics. What I would deny is that the liberal arts majors I’ve met have ever encountered a GOOD history professor.
When one moves from history to English, it gets worse. And when one moves from English to Womyn Studies, one leaps off the cliff.
“It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.” - C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
The critics didn’t answer Lewis. They ignored him, and moved on, and took over the arts and humanities. Not only do they not teach facts, but they would be appalled if someone suggested they try.
“A liberal arts education is supposed to be providing an education in citizenship for “free men,” as opposed to technical skills useful for servants who don’t need to think.”
Sorry, but there is nothing about mathematics or science that justifies lumping them in as technical skills for servants who don’t need to think. In fact, we demand our mechanics think. If a mechanic invents a reason why your car goes thump thump thump, he won’t be able to stop the thump thump thump. And when he charges you $50/hour, and doesn’t fix the thump thump thump, you will be mad.
But consider the following, pulled from the University of Arizona:
The Department of Mexican American Studies is committed to contemporary applied public policy research on Mexican Americans.
The UA Institute for LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) Studies fosters curriculum, promotes research on gender and sexual diversity, and presents public programming that addresses the histories, politics, and cultures of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.
Center for CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES: promoting rigorous and leading edge approaches to all aspects of the study of conscious experience.
Do you really believe anyone ever holds any of these departments accountable for anything?
In modern society, it is the “servants who don’t need to think” who need to think. Someone educated in the liberal arts doesn’t need to think, if thinking is supposed to be related to facts or logic. In the liberal arts, OPINIONS count, not LOGIC. And outside of politics, who wants to hire someone like that?