A Good Liberal Arts Education and the American Caste System by Alan Beado, Emeritus Professor at Stanley Livingstone College I am not sure I can see much that is "good" about a "good liberal arts education", to be honest. You do not find other countries in such a frenzy over a "liberal arts education" as people in the US seem to be. It was quite a shock for me to observe this when I moved to the US.
"I have a conjecture: the probability of being “woke” is almost zero for someone who has read the classics."
This seems almost self-evident to me. After all, the reason thinking people reject the repugnant postmodernist ideology is that it runs counter the entire great Western philosophical and artistic tradition from the times of Homer and the Milesians. Sophocles, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius are exactly the targets of the mob led by Derrida, Butler, di Angelo, Žižek et al.
In previous times, say in 1930s, even those intellectuals who were open communists, but had classical education stood out as more normal than the rest of the mob. JBS Haldane got his diploma in classical studies, was a commie for a long time, but still argued that human behavior is essentially driven by biology and rejected the notion of "equality" as nonsense. He even wrote a collection of essays doubly politically incorrectly titled "The Inequality of Men".
The truth is somewhere in the middle and more nuanced. Yes, liberal arts is a luxury good from a pure economics perspective but life is long and the >50th percentiles who go to four-year colleges are all very rich in global terms.
More prosaically, even at the Ivy I attended a few decades ago, for the prep school kids it was review, whereas for others it would be the only time they would consume the Great Books. For me, reading philosophy has been an important part of life since I was 16 years old.
The Western tradition attracted the immigrants like me, and helps the multicultural societies we all live in cohere, just as English provides a lingua franca. The alternative is tribalism under bloated regional bureaucratic empires (i.e., USA, EU, Greater China) or corrupt petro-states (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Nigeria).
A master flight instructor, of all people, put the importance of education in the best, most concise statement I've ever read: "Education makes knowledge more soluble in the mind." He was referring to the knowledge required to be a pilot, but it applies universally. The better and broader the education, the better suited the mind is to absorb more knowledge. As a scientist, I do not think the humanities and social sciences are wasted time, so long as they are as broad as possible. The problem, it seems to me, is that the scope of education in these fields has become rather pinched.
Before going to University, I studied French in immersion classes during the summers at a small French college (over 480 hours of class, on top of the 9 years of study I had already dedicated to learning French). One of my close friends there was similar to me, with a similar grade school background. We both had a bit of an intellectual bent, and were passionate about academic work. This person, let's call him "Joe", was a brilliant individual. Later Joe won the national championship in a trivia contest, held in French, which was not his native language.
At university, we remained in contact. He studied "arts" and I studied physics. The only way Joe was able to get through freshman honors calculus (with proofs) was that I tutored him. Joe had had a year or two of calculus in high school, already, but this was a totally different beast to attempt to understand. I think his undergraduate major was economics, but Joe took a smattering of other humanities classes. Of course, by the time he had a bachelor's degree, Joe was completely unemployable for anything, so he went to law school and eventually obtained an LLD at Oxford University in the UK, graduating with the highest honors.
Even then, because of the early incarnation of DEI at the time, Joe was unable to obtain a teaching position without a lot of scrambling. Joe was told that since he was male, it would be impossible for him to obtain a teaching position at a law school, ever. All law schools in our country were effectively banned from hiring anything but women, from then on, until the end of time, no matter what the qualifications of the candidates were.
Now decades later, Joe satisfies more of the constantly evolving "woke" victimhood criteria, so many law schools are frantic to hire him. Joe is world famous now. He has argued cases in front of various supreme courts around the world, in various languages, and won his cases. But Joe was so insulted by how he was treated as a fresh LLD that he has never returned home to our country.
However, if I compare his impact on the world, and mine, although I might not be as "smart" as Joe is, certainly not in the Humanities or in Languages, there is little comparison. I have contributed far more. My focus on just a relatively narrow set of STEM fields has been tremendously beneficial. And if I am lucky, there will be more contributions to come.
I know many think STEM is just a bunch of nonsense. They are quite proud of their liberal arts backgrounds. Fair enough.
But STEM is not just some mindless manipulations of a handful of simple equations. It is part of a grand quest that goes back millennia. And the fruits of that quest are turned into tools for human flourishing.
Discard and dismiss STEM at your peril. I think we are in danger of doing so, because of this creeping evil woke ideology spawned in the depths of the humanities that currently threatens to destroy all of Western civilization.
These are nice thought provoking ideas. Here are some complementary views of mine:
While studying Literature, with other Humanities, is wonderful, it does not necessarily need be done for university degrees. For example in Germany, they have "Volkshochschulen", which are casual institutions for adults. They typically offer various subjects throughout the year at modest prices. I took some German classes there.
Concurrently in America, we can substantially benefit by Vocational Trade Schools for "university degrees". The non-elites can surely use these quite effectively for their careers, definitely much better than by Liberal Art Colleges.
The author is combining two different questions: the benefits of a liberal arts education and the economics of paying for that experience. As to the former, I found the liberal arts program at a competitive college to be life changing. I attended a small, rural high school with a very limited set of courses and perspectives. The history, art, calculus, chemistry, anthropology, and english classes, among others, that I took my first year of college were earth shaking as was being surrounded by really smart, motivated, worldly peers. I didn't know what I wanted to study because I had not been exposed to much of it. My life would be quite different had I followed the few high-achieving classmates in my high school to study chemical engineering in order to join the dying paper making industry.
I managed to pay off my loans over the next 25 years and that investment was worthwhile to me, and, at the same time, I understand the economic trade off. I will also add that identifying as a teen the field of study that will provide a lifetime of financial success is an inexact science. Ask a recent pharmacy school grad.
Though I heartily sympathize with the description of the liberal arts cafeteria curriculum described by Alan Beado, and even relish his contempt, I think perhaps one should not abandon such a curriculum simply because it has been abused or poorly implemented. Indeed, it may be this very corruption which has prevent many from seeing the value of it and leading them, justly, to ridicule its false and venal ambassadors. Something very important has been lost when college is merely seen as a way of making money for oneself.
I have a degree in engineering, which I myself find lacking, so I read humanities as much as possible on the side. I also spend a lot of time talking to other engineers about humanities to mitigate the lack of formal education in these disciplines.
I think engineering studies how to organize and manipulate things, and humanity studies how to organize and manipulate people. There are a lot of similarities.
However, if you fuck something up in a system of things, the consequences are usually obvious and immediate. If you fuck something up in a system of people, the consequences can be very slow to show, and the cause and effect can be ambiguous, leaving a lot of room for wishful and magical thinking.
The best way to learn the humanities is with a set of required courses that all students take at the same time. Then they can talk with each other about the same books.
It's noteworthy that business schools moved 20 years ago to a rigid cohort system, where the 1st year courses are almost all required and you take all your classes with the same 50 student cohort. That's even tho the MBA's only have 2 years of courses. Law schools are rigid in the 1st year too. And PhD programs in economics.
"I have a conjecture: the probability of being “woke” is almost zero for someone who has read the classics."
This seems almost self-evident to me. After all, the reason thinking people reject the repugnant postmodernist ideology is that it runs counter the entire great Western philosophical and artistic tradition from the times of Homer and the Milesians. Sophocles, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius are exactly the targets of the mob led by Derrida, Butler, di Angelo, Žižek et al.
In previous times, say in 1930s, even those intellectuals who were open communists, but had classical education stood out as more normal than the rest of the mob. JBS Haldane got his diploma in classical studies, was a commie for a long time, but still argued that human behavior is essentially driven by biology and rejected the notion of "equality" as nonsense. He even wrote a collection of essays doubly politically incorrectly titled "The Inequality of Men".
The truth is somewhere in the middle and more nuanced. Yes, liberal arts is a luxury good from a pure economics perspective but life is long and the >50th percentiles who go to four-year colleges are all very rich in global terms.
More prosaically, even at the Ivy I attended a few decades ago, for the prep school kids it was review, whereas for others it would be the only time they would consume the Great Books. For me, reading philosophy has been an important part of life since I was 16 years old.
The Western tradition attracted the immigrants like me, and helps the multicultural societies we all live in cohere, just as English provides a lingua franca. The alternative is tribalism under bloated regional bureaucratic empires (i.e., USA, EU, Greater China) or corrupt petro-states (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Nigeria).
A master flight instructor, of all people, put the importance of education in the best, most concise statement I've ever read: "Education makes knowledge more soluble in the mind." He was referring to the knowledge required to be a pilot, but it applies universally. The better and broader the education, the better suited the mind is to absorb more knowledge. As a scientist, I do not think the humanities and social sciences are wasted time, so long as they are as broad as possible. The problem, it seems to me, is that the scope of education in these fields has become rather pinched.
Before going to University, I studied French in immersion classes during the summers at a small French college (over 480 hours of class, on top of the 9 years of study I had already dedicated to learning French). One of my close friends there was similar to me, with a similar grade school background. We both had a bit of an intellectual bent, and were passionate about academic work. This person, let's call him "Joe", was a brilliant individual. Later Joe won the national championship in a trivia contest, held in French, which was not his native language.
At university, we remained in contact. He studied "arts" and I studied physics. The only way Joe was able to get through freshman honors calculus (with proofs) was that I tutored him. Joe had had a year or two of calculus in high school, already, but this was a totally different beast to attempt to understand. I think his undergraduate major was economics, but Joe took a smattering of other humanities classes. Of course, by the time he had a bachelor's degree, Joe was completely unemployable for anything, so he went to law school and eventually obtained an LLD at Oxford University in the UK, graduating with the highest honors.
Even then, because of the early incarnation of DEI at the time, Joe was unable to obtain a teaching position without a lot of scrambling. Joe was told that since he was male, it would be impossible for him to obtain a teaching position at a law school, ever. All law schools in our country were effectively banned from hiring anything but women, from then on, until the end of time, no matter what the qualifications of the candidates were.
Now decades later, Joe satisfies more of the constantly evolving "woke" victimhood criteria, so many law schools are frantic to hire him. Joe is world famous now. He has argued cases in front of various supreme courts around the world, in various languages, and won his cases. But Joe was so insulted by how he was treated as a fresh LLD that he has never returned home to our country.
However, if I compare his impact on the world, and mine, although I might not be as "smart" as Joe is, certainly not in the Humanities or in Languages, there is little comparison. I have contributed far more. My focus on just a relatively narrow set of STEM fields has been tremendously beneficial. And if I am lucky, there will be more contributions to come.
I know many think STEM is just a bunch of nonsense. They are quite proud of their liberal arts backgrounds. Fair enough.
But STEM is not just some mindless manipulations of a handful of simple equations. It is part of a grand quest that goes back millennia. And the fruits of that quest are turned into tools for human flourishing.
Discard and dismiss STEM at your peril. I think we are in danger of doing so, because of this creeping evil woke ideology spawned in the depths of the humanities that currently threatens to destroy all of Western civilization.
These are nice thought provoking ideas. Here are some complementary views of mine:
While studying Literature, with other Humanities, is wonderful, it does not necessarily need be done for university degrees. For example in Germany, they have "Volkshochschulen", which are casual institutions for adults. They typically offer various subjects throughout the year at modest prices. I took some German classes there.
Concurrently in America, we can substantially benefit by Vocational Trade Schools for "university degrees". The non-elites can surely use these quite effectively for their careers, definitely much better than by Liberal Art Colleges.
But my question is this. Why get a degree in humanities when one can read Cervantes and Yeats and Homer on one's own time?
The author is combining two different questions: the benefits of a liberal arts education and the economics of paying for that experience. As to the former, I found the liberal arts program at a competitive college to be life changing. I attended a small, rural high school with a very limited set of courses and perspectives. The history, art, calculus, chemistry, anthropology, and english classes, among others, that I took my first year of college were earth shaking as was being surrounded by really smart, motivated, worldly peers. I didn't know what I wanted to study because I had not been exposed to much of it. My life would be quite different had I followed the few high-achieving classmates in my high school to study chemical engineering in order to join the dying paper making industry.
I managed to pay off my loans over the next 25 years and that investment was worthwhile to me, and, at the same time, I understand the economic trade off. I will also add that identifying as a teen the field of study that will provide a lifetime of financial success is an inexact science. Ask a recent pharmacy school grad.
Though I heartily sympathize with the description of the liberal arts cafeteria curriculum described by Alan Beado, and even relish his contempt, I think perhaps one should not abandon such a curriculum simply because it has been abused or poorly implemented. Indeed, it may be this very corruption which has prevent many from seeing the value of it and leading them, justly, to ridicule its false and venal ambassadors. Something very important has been lost when college is merely seen as a way of making money for oneself.
I have a degree in engineering, which I myself find lacking, so I read humanities as much as possible on the side. I also spend a lot of time talking to other engineers about humanities to mitigate the lack of formal education in these disciplines.
I think engineering studies how to organize and manipulate things, and humanity studies how to organize and manipulate people. There are a lot of similarities.
However, if you fuck something up in a system of things, the consequences are usually obvious and immediate. If you fuck something up in a system of people, the consequences can be very slow to show, and the cause and effect can be ambiguous, leaving a lot of room for wishful and magical thinking.
Awesome
The best way to learn the humanities is with a set of required courses that all students take at the same time. Then they can talk with each other about the same books.
It's noteworthy that business schools moved 20 years ago to a rigid cohort system, where the 1st year courses are almost all required and you take all your classes with the same 50 student cohort. That's even tho the MBA's only have 2 years of courses. Law schools are rigid in the 1st year too. And PhD programs in economics.