In Defense of the Liberal Arts

[paft.livejournal.com]

Bashing the liberal arts seems to be common these days, most frequently from people whose backgrounds are in business or technical fields. Again and again I’ve heard the old joke about the English majors working at McDonalds, seen history, literature and other fields all but denounced as elaborate scams. There seems to be a growing assumption that any knowledge that can’t be summed up either with equations or by filling in discrete circles with a #2 pencil is just not worth having. There’s also, not coincidentally, an increasing tendency to confuse “education” with “job training.”

First, about jobs… I’ve worked for an SF trade magazine, a college, two non-profits, a high tech corporation, and for several small businesses. I encountered no dearth of liberal arts majors at any of these jobs. True, an English major is more likely to be in a position of authority at a magazine, and a computer science major or MBA is more likely to be an upper executive at a high tech company, but there were still jobs to be had for techies at one and history majors at the other. And no, I wouldn’t advise a liberal arts major for anyone whose main ambition is to be wealthy. This last does not render a liberal arts major a waste of time. A liberal arts college education can impart an intellectual rigor that isn’t easily found in more technical fields. The fact that the questions asked are often “fuzzy,” and require a combination of knowledge, logic and informed opinion can prepare a student for a complex world riddled with such questions.

I’ve known a few people who, for one reason or another, had little to no liberal arts grounding -- most frequently techies from the 1980s who were on the cutting edge of a new field and so went from being wonky high school students or undergraduates to well paid employees at high tech start-ups. They either didn’t attend college, or only went briefly, and so never completed the few liberal arts courses required even from people in technical or scientific majors.

Often the end result was an oddly sheltered adult, gifted when it came to writing code and juggling numbers, but with little grasp of history, context, or even empathy. That old #2 pencil always seemed to be present. The concept of a question having more than one “correct” answer, of reasoned disagreement, of factoring in any but the most immediate and personal impact of an issue or policy, was alien to them and they tended to brush it aside impatiently. They may have been quite successful in their professional life, but they were (and are) completely at sea when it came to rational discussion of any subject outside their field. And there are a lot of subjects outside their fields, both in the personal and the political, that require the give and take of rational, contextual argument. Such people are in their own way as naïve as would be someone who did nothing but study history or art or literature, with no courses in math or science or business.

This is, I should emphasize, not true of every software engineer or MBA. What I’m describing above are extreme examples that show where a dearth of liberal arts education can lead.

There’s a reason why tyrants from Hitler to Stalin to Mao to Pinochet have historically looked askance at intellectuals in both the sciences and the liberal arts. People trained in science cannot always be trusted to present scientific results in line with a tyrant’s dogma. People trained in history or sociology cannot always be trusted to adhere to a tyrant’s version of either. And people trained in literature or art cannot always be trusted to enter into the black-or-white mindset required by tyrants, a world-view untroubled by shades of gray.

Dealing with those shades of gray, after all, is the very essence of a good liberal arts education.

*

Comments

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

Well there's one thing to be said about a liberal arts degree, you come out with one certain that you're gifted with a more critical insight into the world and more capable of dealing with complexity.

What do engineers know of logic. Fucking morons, amirite?

[paft.livejournal.com]

mb: Well there's one thing to be said about a liberal arts degree, you come out with one certain that you're gifted with a more critical insight into the world and more capable of dealing with complexity. What do engineers know of logic. Fucking morons, amirite?

No, you're not. My point is not that a liberal arts degree is inherently superior to a science or technical degree. My point is that both disciplines have something to offer in training a person to think, I believe I make that clear when I say that a person with no liberal arts background whatsoever is "in their own way as naïve as would be someone who did nothing but study history or art or literature, with no courses in math or science or business."

It's not science and business degrees that are currently under attack.

[root-fu.livejournal.com]

As far as people are concerned empirical science is the most exciting and progressive field.

'Soft' areas like liberal arts, history, philosophy, psychology are considered 'inferior' and therefore: 'undesirable' by empirical advocates and their believed "conquest" of the natural world.

It means nothing in the end. Man makes loud noises over the presumed erection of his latest Tower of Babel.

[paft.livejournal.com]

What's your point?

[okmewriting.livejournal.com]

What I’m describing above are extreme examples that show where a dearth of liberal arts education can lead.
Really so the fact I have no liberal arts education means that I am a sheltered human being, lacking in historical knowledge and empathy?

I'm sick and fed up of people with degrees acting like they are some how better than the rest of us. That we're somehow lacking because we don't have so much education. I've seen graduates coming out with letters after their names but completely lacking in basic life skills, work skills. They seem to expect because they have a degree the world should be handed to them on a plate.

[paft.livejournal.com]

p: What I’m describing above are extreme examples that show where a dearth of liberal arts education can lead.
O: Really so the fact I have no liberal arts education means that I am a sheltered human being, lacking in historical knowledge and empathy?

No. Do you understand the meaning of the term "extreme examples?"

[harry-beast.livejournal.com]

They also expect your tax dollars to subsidize their education.

[evildamsel.livejournal.com]

The trouble with all this is the idea that a college education is there to make a well rounded person is not appropriate for this day and age. Children should not have to mortgage their futures at tens of thousands of dollars per year just to learn to analyze Marx or Plato. Our basic high school education should provide that. And it can. But it's so much more fun to cling to the failure of NCLB, isn't it? And watch as a college degree becomes more and more useless.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

The trouble with all this is the idea that a college education is there to make a well rounded person is not appropriate for this day and age.

"This day and age," one of increasingly restricted knowledge based on information and technologies that are increasingly becoming more isolated and specialized makes the case we desperately need that "well rounded person." As philosophy of science historian James Burke has noted:

“Learners may study either history or physics, or perhaps only Renaissance history and astrophysics. People tend to become experts in highly specialized fields, learning more and more about less and less. Unfortunately, so much specialization falsely creates the illusion that knowledge and discovery exist in a vacuum, in context only with their own disciplines, when in reality they are born from interdisciplinary connections. Without an ability to see these connections, history and science won't be learnable in a truly meaningful way and innovation will be stifled.”

[paft.livejournal.com]

So you figure this "day and age" should just toss out all that stoopit ol' culture? "Well rounded" people should become a thing of the past?

[harry-beast.livejournal.com]

Improving the education of children would probably be the better way to go, but for political reasons, it isn't likely to happen. For one thing, a rigorous high school education would result in many students failing out if, for example, they lacked basic literacy or numeracy.

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

"Our basic high school education should provide that"

IAWTC

[prog-expat.livejournal.com]

"Children should not have to mortgage their futures at tens of thousands of dollars per year just to learn to analyze Marx or Plato."

I agree, which is why I favor increasing government funding to the point that tuition is no longer needed in public schools.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Welp, we've had a post talking about how dumb everyone is, a post about how dumb college grads are, and a post talking about how good college grads are. I'm so confused.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Why?

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna post about brake jobs and swimming lessons in a minute.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Do you have an actual point?

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

While you raise some excellent points you ignore the argument that is most often invoked against Liberal Arts, specifically the lack of focus on actual skills.

History and context are important when it comes to understanding world affairs but do very little to put food on the table unless the student/scholar has some other marketable skill to supplement thier knowledge.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

This is not the case. An understanding of the world, the ability to write and construct arguments, etc. are actually all marketable skills.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I've been hearing this same crap all my life. Growing up in the Air Capital of the World, and having gotten my BA at a university whose primary mission in life seems to be to advance its engineering programs at the expense of all else, I can tell you one thing: no degree is worthless, and all degree programs have their share of scam. I (and many others who were at best marginal at math and science) got happily recruited into computer science, even though I scored an 18 on the math portion of the ACT, with lavish promises of making megabucks immediately after graduation and having job security for life. They even showed us figures about how a "majority" of CS grads were successfully employed "in the field."

Then, while I was struggling in the first semester of the program, I also worked at the Wichita State University Foundation, calling alumni and soliciting donations; we generally called within our own majors. For every one successful and happy CS graduate I talked to, there were four or five others who were bitter and angry and felt they had been lied to about their job prospects after graduation; many were working "in the field" in the sense of being "stuck" doing full-time low-level tech support for little better than minimum wage and no prospect of advancement, and many others had found that these nebulous jobs they had been enticed with had been outsourced to India long before they entered the program. Probably 20% of them ended up going back to school to get a degree they could actually use. These people told me bluntly to get out while I still could, before I wasted any more time and money.

Anecdotal evidence, maybe, but I called probably 3,000 Computer Science and Computer Engineering graduates during my time at the WSUF, and that roughly 4.5:1 ratio was constant. These were smart, capable people recruited with promises of making $80,000 a year right after graduation. And this was long before the Great Recession, too.

Later, when I was in the history and political science programs, there were no grand promises, no shady recruitment of marginal candidates, just solid instruction and a personal concern on the part of professors for the intellectual nurturing of their students. After I switched majors I worked at the WSFU for another semester, and called maybe 750-1000 history majors (about half of my calls, then; the other half was doing the "orphan" Health Professions alumni, and there's nothing like getting screamed at by people whose degree programs had been eliminated six months after graduation). At least 2/3 were satisfied with their degrees and their employment after graduation. Again, anecdotal evidence, but I think it's telling.

As I said somewhere else recently, some engineering, science, and mathematics folks have an unfortunate tendency to hold themselves and their chosen fields as being the semi-divine pinnacles of human knowledge, far superior to those useless liberal arts people who waste all their time reading and writing.

This old history major wishes we would all recognize that all programs involve intellectual rigor.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Thanks. When I was getting my degrees in English and writing (and my minor in history), my professors and advisors were brutally realistic about job prospects. In fact, in retrospect I believe they were more pessimistic about it than was really warranted. Both my English and my writing degrees have helped me in job searches.

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

Yes, a broad based liberal education is invaluable,

Here is the problem, you can get one of those while learning to do something actually useful. Studying "liberal arts" or even one of it's sub-fields like English Lit or Comparative Film Studies or Theatre as the actual focus of your education however is not terribly useful unless you actually plan to persue a career in those fields. Thing is those fields tend to be far easier for the average person to master than something concrete like Physics or Computer programming and so many times more people pursue such degrees than are actually needed to work in those fields than can even be employed in them and while it is true that the top 50% of the liberal arts students will have little trouble landing more traditional jobs in government or corporations it is the bottom 50% who are the problem.

You know the ones, the 35 year olds working at Starbucks with the masters in English Lit. The TGI Fridays waitstaff with their Theater degrees. Those people, most of whom accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in debt to get the most expensive wall decoration in history.


There is nothing wrong with liberal arts degrees or pursuing one as a major, but government backed student loans to finance them for literally millions of students a year are a scam and should be considered a crime.

[paft.livejournal.com]

r: Studying "liberal arts" or even one of it's sub-fields like English Lit or Comparative Film Studies or Theatre as the actual focus of your education however is not terribly useful unless you actually plan to persue a career in those fields.

The fact that I had studied English (which on a college level means literature) was considered an asset when I applied for jobs well outside that field. It was believed this meant I could write lucidly, edit, and meet deadlines -- skills important in many jobs outside the field of literature.

r: You know the ones, the 35 year olds working at Starbucks with the masters in English Lit.

I've known a great many people in their thirties with masters in English Lit. None of them were working at Starbucks, or TGI Fridays.

r: There is nothing wrong with liberal arts degrees or pursuing one as a major, but government backed student loans to finance them for literally millions of students a year are a scam and should be considered a crime.

You have a disturbingly broad definition of what qualifies as both a "scam" and a "crime."

[paft.livejournal.com]

How does studying art in college qualify as giving up one's creativity and individuality?

[dwer.livejournal.com]

Having an English degree has been invaluable to my career in IT. My ability to engage with people, my ability to analyze, my ability to translate "IT-ese" into english, all came from my liberal arts college experiences.

Also, how to drink a six pack in six minutes, but I don't do that much anymore.

That being said, college is certainly a choice; if my sons don't want to go, I won't make them.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

It's just a straight-up fact that college grads earn way more than highschool grads. Either you can try to reform society to improve disparity or you make college educations more affordable. Guess which one is more reasonable?

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

actually making college degrees more affordable does not help.

let us assume that we made it free and that we had some magical way of ensuring that every single person achieved maximum educational success and actually did learn everything they could.

Every single person in the country would then be a college graduate and the value of those degrees in terms of earning potential would be destroyed.

The reason that College grads used to make more is because they used to be RARE. Increase the percentage of the population with a degree enough and the sheepskin becomes worthless.