Nelson's remarks exemplify a disturbing trend amongst technologists, and especially those trying to reform education: Misidentifying sub-par educational experiences and areas of studies as "the liberal arts," and then attributing insufficient outcomes to the liberal arts themselves. If he went to Wharton Business school for undergrad, he does not have a liberal-arts education. History and literature are liberal arts,…
Nelson doesn't lament that his mind wasn't adequately "cultivated" but that he wasn't taught some basic skills that he quickly, but probably painfully, acquired on the job and which presumably he found critical in his career. This isn't a question of "mental development" but of having useful things pointed out so that you don't have to suffer whatever damage accrues from not knowing them.
>"My first six months, what did the consulting firm teach me? They didn't teach me the basics of how they do business. They taught me how to think. I didn't know how to check my work. I didn't think about order of magnitude.
and then his goals for Minerva:
>"We want to teach you how to think," Mr. Nelson says. A course on "multimodal communications" works on practical writing and debating skills. A "formal systems class" goes over "everything from logic to advanced stats, Big Data, to formal reasoning, to behavioral econ."
Both these comments suggest that he's looking to improve the core critical thinking skills of his students. Indeed, he explicitly says as much. Thinking, reading, writing...these are historically fundamental goals of education.
They are not, however, merely "useful things" which can be pointed out. You cannot simply sit down and "learn" how to read/write/think, anymore than you be can taught a foreign language without actually speaking or writing it, or programming without coding.
They are "basic" in the sense that they form a foundation for other skills. What he seems to be aiming for is not "basic" in the sense that you use, which seems to cover tasks like "how to perform this financial function" or "how to use this technology." (But maybe that's not the sense you're using "basic in).