Posted on 03/12/2023 8:44:13 AM PDT by karpov
You’ve heard the complaints: When am I ever gonna use this? How is this relevant to the real world? How is reading Shakespeare going to make me a better banker?
I don’t run into this kind of thinking as frequently in the economics classroom, but I hear my students’ complaints about their other courses pretty regularly (and maybe professors in those courses hear students’ complaints about mine). Why, they wonder, are they expected to study art history? Or biology? Or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? Or Mesoamerican mythology? When are they ever gonna use this stuff?
My answer? Literally every time they make an important decision.
The ideas you encounter, consider, and adopt shape the kind of person you become. Liberal education is not about helping you sound impressive at snooty parties. It’s about you becoming a particular kind of person: reflective, analytical, and capable of sound evaluation and sound judgment. To this end, college means a few years marinating in the best that has ever been thought and written by the greatest minds our species has produced.
That is the ideal, at any rate. A lot goes sideways between vision and implementation, and it’s the rare person who makes the most of a golden opportunity. Some of us find ourselves lamenting, with the bald man telling George Bailey to kiss Mary in It’s A Wonderful Life, that “youth is wasted on the wrong people.”
But we all have time to repent and turn from our wicked ways. College students have more of it. The book of Proverbs implores its readers to surround themselves with wise counselors offering wise guidance.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
When I asked that question of my physics professor, he had this to say: If you go to a party and try to talk physics, the chances are that you will go home alone.
Or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Oh! That is creepy! I just read this yesterday!
I recommend it.
The old Abbot and Costello joke comes to mind regarding current college “students”.
Abbot: Didn’t you go to school stupid?
Costello: Yea. And I came out the same way.
You may well be right about the first part, about not offering the education the author advocates. If you are right about the second part, that is unspeakably sad. The point of a liberal arts education was to make you a better person and citizen.
“If you go to a party and try to talk physics, the chances are that you will go home alone.”
In today’s society, when did intelligent conversation about anything become the social meter of success as a human? And if you find the right person, you not only will not go home alone but they will stay for breakfast (or make it) and maybe beyond. Luring is predatorial. Of course, leave it to a college instructor with his/her background of success and that’s what they expect...animals they tend.
wy69
A healthy symbiosis between teacher and student demands curosity and discipline on the part of both.
A STEM education is essential for most jobs in 2023.
But if you know only STEM you will never be more than a worker drone. To be in management you need to understand people. History, literature, and art are essential for that.
I’ll bet not one “equity” or “gender” studies student will ask this question. And they should.
In many places the “liberal arts education” no longer exists. A corrupt clownish inferior version masquerades in its place.
Much of or a least a foundation of your “liberal arts education” should come from the “high school experience”. It does not for the same reason stated above.
I have been teaching Music Appreciation in college to nurses for at least a decade, and I was teaching a history of ethics to nurse wannabes for at least two decades before that.
It’s been my job to get them to believe two things: first, that Beethoven/Aristotle will help them be better nurses, and second, that Beethoven/Aristotle will help them to live fuller lives as educated beings. For the students that cared, this has been my calling. For the students that didn’t givadam, so be it, they were no worse off, and my bills got paid. It’s like the sower in the Lord’s parable.
The original seven liberal arts were the trivium - Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric - and the quadrivium - Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy and Music. Since then it seems like the math and science parts have been elbowed aside.
There’s tons of wisdom available. Every atheist should be tricked into reading the Bible just based on wisdom.
Hillsdale College.
All these people were being held prisoner in a cave, you see, and the people who ran the cave made shadows on the wall.
Man, was that ever some crazy hsit or what.
Now here I am later in life, wondering why no one ever warned me about the mass media, or conformity in general.
Anyway all that philosophy stuff that got started by all those old Greek dudes is still just bullhsit.
“Liberal education is not about helping you sound impressive at snooty parties.“
But c’mon, it helps!
But if you know only STEM you will never be more than a worker drone. To be in management you need to understand people. History, literature, and art are essential for that.
I had a friend back in the 1980s who worked as a recruiter for IBM in the Northeast. One of his favorite places to recruit was Union College in Schenectady, NY, because the STEM program is integrated into a liberal arts education, and as a result, STEM majors were better prepared to communicate their knowledge both verbally and in writing.
I graduated from William and Mary in 1977 with a degree in ‘physiology of Marine Science,’ essentially the best undergrad marine biology curriculum on the east coast. It was very heavy on cell physiology, pathways and systems and organic chemistry.
At the same time W&M REQUIRED all students to complete a “liberal education.” So courses in foreign language, literature, history and sociology were required to graduate.
It was a genuinely balanced college education.
Since then W&M has gone full Progressive/Woke and is no longer and educational institution worth considering.
My professor was being funny at the time. Some people, like myself, make merriment of society.
“...Since then W&M has gone full Progressive/Woke and is no longer and educational institution worth considering....”
I hope when they ask for money from you, you tell them that!
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