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What liberal arts education is for (2024)

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Re: What liberal arts education is for (2024)

#51

Post by vixen99 »

WalterBright wrote: post #33
alephnerd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

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 politic…

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".

Re: What liberal arts education is for (2024)

#52

Post by defrost »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #50
vineyardmike wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

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.

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

Re: What liberal arts education is for (2024)

#53

Post by alephnerd »

WalterBright wrote: post #33
alephnerd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

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 politic…

Yeah I can see why that left a bad taste.

Re: What liberal arts education is for (2024)

#54

Post by [deleted] »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #28
WalterBright wrote: post #4

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.

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 bom…

[deleted]

Re: What liberal arts education is for (2024)

#55

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

vineyardmike wrote: post #46
wannabe44 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

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.

Re: What liberal arts education is for (2024)

#56

Post by SanjayMehta »

defrost wrote: post #52
SanjayMehta wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Never met him. Have you?

Re: What liberal arts education is for (2024)

#57

Post by beej71 »

wannabe44 wrote: post #31
Brian_K_White wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bom…

> 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…

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.

Re: What liberal arts education is for (2024)

#58

Post by WalterBright »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #34
WalterBright wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 be…

> 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.

Re: What liberal arts education is for (2024)

#59

Post by WalterBright »

vineyardmike wrote: post #45
SanjayMehta wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A STEM grad can learn history, literature etc fairly easily. The other direction is possible but not so easy.

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 ;)

> 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.

Re: What liberal arts education is for (2024)

#60

Post by WalterBright »

defrost wrote: post #52
SanjayMehta wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

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