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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!
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.
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.
To make a living, it is necessary to learn a skill that people are willing to pay for.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Tools help accomplish goals. Tools do not set goals.
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.
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 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.
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.
The other direction is possible but not so easy.
> fairly easily... not so easy.
Yea, totally, STEM majors are inherently special and better at learning ;)
Concentrating on monetizable skills is critical, but most colleges give enough space for interdisciplinary electives.
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.
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.
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...
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.)
> There are curricula based on the Great Books.
List not including the greatest book of them all... What did they mean by this?
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.
> The Bhagavad Gita
Well memed, sir!
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 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.
Innovation is inherently interdisciplinary, and learning how to synthesize multiple different domains has tremendous value.
All this critical thinking runs opposite to the monoculture of liberal arts departments. Anyone would be better of studying them by themselves.
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.
As long as you do not claim that "living only on proteins or stones and without carbs or leaves would be a good idea".
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.
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.
Seriously speaking what in Liberal Arts can you learn that's not already on Youtube now?
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.
The commenter didn't even have the curiosity to read and comprehend the article, and made the articles point in that.
Except, discussing things, having somebody else grade your coursework etc., you don't get that from books or YouTube.