41–50 of 75 posts
The liberal arts education was originally conceived to educate the leaders of society. That is where the free-minded pedagogical angle comes from, it's explicitly privileged. The idea was that if the leaders of society learned what it means to have values, integrity, what it is to be virtuous, etc, then they would diffuse those values into society and create a just world. Society would transcend in the image of the g…
The liberal arts education was originally conceived to educate the leaders of society. That is where the free-minded pedagogical angle comes from, it's explicitly privileged. The idea was that if the leaders of society learned what it means to have values, integrity, what it is to be virtuous, etc, then they would diffuse those values into society and create a just world. Society would transcend in the image of the g…
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.
The liberal arts education was originally conceived to educate the leaders of society. That is where the free-minded pedagogical angle comes from, it's explicitly privileged. The idea was that if the leaders of society learned what it means to have values, integrity, what it is to be virtuous, etc, then they would diffuse those values into society and create a just world. Society would transcend in the image of the g…
There are two angles on this. There is the rejection of the humanities in favor of science and wealth, which are good things in themselves but are not everything. But, on the other hand, what many modern humanities faculties offer is a very time-bound activism that rejects books from 500 years ago and is not interested in the permanent things.
> The class turned out to be more or less “A Letter (singular) of Paul:” we spent the semester reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, at a rate of about 3 sentences per week. Per week! 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 cur…
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.)
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> The education was in learning how to learn, learning how to solve problems, and how to distinguish fact from fiction 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.
A STEM grad can learn history, literature etc fairly easily. 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 ;)
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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…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The education was in learning how to learn, learning how to solve problems, and how to distinguish fact from fiction 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.
If education is the goal then it is a form of consumption and there is nothing wrong with consumption, but why should the government give out subsidized loans for consumption to young people? 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. Meanwhil…
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 ;)
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 ;)
I've yet to find a liberal arts grad who even knows what a partial differential equation is.