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- Hacker News
- Communist brainwashing for Trust Fund kids?
Seriously speaking what in Liberal Arts can you learn that's not already on Youtube now?
by eddhead - You can learn anything from books, you never needed a college for that.
Except, discussing things, having somebody else grade your coursework etc., you don't get that from books or YouTube.
by bulbar - This comment really speaks to the article.
The commenter didn't even have the curiosity to read and comprehend the article, and made the articles point in that.
by CobaltFire - From the article,
A lot of people will make fun of you, but I think everyone should read a book or two that's not airport pulp.What can we learn about what other people are thinking, about their mental models of the world, by paying very careful attention to the words they use?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.
by areoform - Yet another dubious claim that "skills of close reading and critical questioning" are the products of a liberal arts education. Students can gain such things just fine in a STEM field if they care enough and aren't the sort who are just doing the bare minimum to get the sheepskin.by ThrowawayR2
- > Students can gain such things just fine in a STEM field
As long as you do not claim that "living only on proteins or stones and without carbs or leaves would be a good idea".
by mdp2021 - Nietzsche, Norse havamal, Greek epics and the Vedas of India did teach me some critical thinking skills on how we take certain types of morality and virtue for granted in the current society.
All this critical thinking runs opposite to the monoculture of liberal arts departments. Anyone would be better of studying them by themselves.
by wannabe44 - > a STEM field if they care enough and aren't the sort who are just doing the bare minimum to get the sheepskin.
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.
by creesch - by ajkjk
- I've always been a huge proponent of CMU, UIUC, and Stanford's CS+X programs for this very reason.
Innovation is inherently interdisciplinary, and learning how to synthesize multiple different domains has tremendous value.
by alephnerd - > 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 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...
by Animats - This is one class to deeply understand one of the most politically impactful texts in history. What about that is religious brainwashing? Do you even know the professor’s religious beliefs? Because they’re not obvious to me simply from the course description.
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.
by aruss - St. Paul's writing has this effect on people. It's either a burst of love and joy or seething hatred. Never in the middle. :D
> There are curricula based on the Great Books.
List not including the greatest book of them all... What did they mean by this?
by photios - > That's not a liberal education. That's religious brainwashing.
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.)
by flexagoon - There's nothing inherently wrong with theological education assuming it is also clubbed with other curricula and is not dogmatic in nature.
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.
by alephnerd - 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.
by WalterBright - > 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.
by vineyardmike - That doesn't preclude minoring or double majoring - which is what plenty of my peers who were also STEM majors often did (as did I)
Concentrating on monetizable skills is critical, but most colleges give enough space for interdisciplinary electives.
by alephnerd - 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 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.
- I had an extremely focused career, but am by nature a curious individual who craved the type of discussions the article talks about. They were closed to me because I came from poverty and had to focus to move myself up the ladder.
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.
by CobaltFire - 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 great works. Books from 500 years ago can teach us what being ethical means because human values are transcendental and totally outside of technological or vocational fads.
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!
by mlsu - Perhaps liberal arts abandoned its core principles and values?by throw8383949
- The ruling class received a classical education and many went on to a law degree. By becoming judges, solicitors, prosecutors, and politicians, they kept their position in society. Engineers, administrators, and medical doctors are not members of the ruling class. The former considered themselves natural leaders and determined society’s direction. Unless a humanities department belonged to one of the two universities the elite sent their children to, it was a fraud. They mimicked Oxford or Harvard but was not the educational institution the elite went to.by rawgabbit
- As someone who grew up poor and around dubious morals, nothing about university suggests to me that this is the case. On the other hand, the Confucian classics and perhaps the Ancient Greek works immediately dive into virtue and the likes.
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.
by pigbot223 - 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.by gdwatson