A Simple Theory of Liberal Arts Education
Nick Gillespie | December 21, 2007, 8:53am
Marginal Revolutionary and Inner Economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University lays out some reasons to get a liberal arts education:
Information in the modern world is virtually free, and well-defined tasks can be outsourced very cheaply, if need be. Don't specialize in those.
Bias is everywhere, and overcoming bias yields great gains. Empirically, our biases stem strongly from our nationality, our language, and our cultural background. (It is, by the way, remarkable how much libertarianism is an Anglo-American phenomenon.)
To overcome those biases we should travel, spend some time living in other countries, and learn other languages. In other words, the more knowledge is held in the minds of other people, the more competent we wish to be in assessing who is right and who is wrong, and that requires exposure to lots of different points of view.
Judgment, judgment, judgment. That's the scarce asset which most people underinvest in, and which yields especially high returns. It can't be outsourced very well either.
Marketing is becoming all-important as well. That also requires judgment and the ability to see things from other people's points of view. Again, live abroad and learn other languages.
At the very least, date foreign women (or men).
More here. reason interviewed Cowen on his latest book, Discover Your Inner Economist (go here) and his most excellent Creative Destruction (go here). He's written for us over the years (not all his stuff is online, alas) and has had nice things to say about reason over the years, so you can benchmark his judgment, judgment, judgment based on all that.
I made the case for studying the arts here and, at longer length, here. That's not exactly the same as the liberal arts (though the overlap is significant) but the points are very similar.
Hat Tip: Saw Cowen's post first at the New York Sun's excellent Economics on the Web blog.
dhex | December 21, 2007, 11:19am | #
man this fucking thread again. jeeze. the blowjob deficit rides again.
i'm just kidding; it's really about status. that's why you have a small but definitely non-imaginary streak of "cultural studies" types running up the "science is socially constructed flag." (i am firm in my conviction that kuhn is the second most mis-read or quoted but unread author since the alien overlords who wrote the bible)
why would they bother with such a thing, outside of pique? that's always confused me. while i don't see the value in, say, lacan, (if you must go french, foucault is the way to go, with baudrillard a distant second) i do see the value in cross-cultural literary studies, or primary source work with writers and personal papers, drafts, etc. the word is quite important, and a tremendous part of being human.
and obviously the sciences are important. given a good cornering, even the most marxy of marks would 'fess up to this. even the poor bastards who go to work for weapons manufacturers are contributing to technologies that will - if past performance is any indication - filter into the mainstream in dozens of unpredictable and largely beneficial ways.
me, personally, i respect folks who can do stuff well, especially stuff i can't get (like math in general). speaking second and third languages well, or understanding study construction, or being real good at statistics, being able to boil down complex ideas and teach them to others. (that last bit might be the most difficult of all)
i think a secondary thing here is people don't like hearing opinions outside of their own viewpoints, either due to brittle convictions or just being easily riled up (i think the second is more likely than the first). so this way the cult-studs can continue on thinking anyone who likes math is some kinda weird conservative machine and the engineers can continue thinking of non-engineers as commie scum.
why anyone would spend much time making broad general charges - beyond a search for status, real or imagined - about such wide and varied fields is beyond me.
even lawyers, may god have mercy on their blackguard souls.
thoreau | December 21, 2007, 3:04pm | #
Late to the thread, but a few things:
1) I'll start with the people who say that natural sciences = liberal arts. It may be true as a matter of traditional definitions that the natural sciences and mathematics are grouped in with the liberal arts, but the differences between the natural sciences and the other liberal arts fields (humanities and social sciences) are pretty substantial. In our research, we are more likely to collaborate with people from professional schools (engineering, medicine, etc.) than the humanities or social sciences.
Also, in my (admittedly anecdotal) experiences, science students tend not to self-identify as liberal arts majors. Take it for what it's worth. To me, it means that the common usage today does not match up with the older usage. I'll let the pedants fight it out over which definition is right.
2) That said, as a faculty member, I find that I have a lot in common with faculty from just about every discipline, whether it's categorized as a professional major, a liberal arts major, or whatever. We seem to want a lot of the same things for our students, believe it or not.
3) To me, what matters most is the thinking skills acquired from science classes, not the mastery of the particular topic. I don't really give a damn if my students master the subtleties of magnetic fields or Newton's Laws or perturbation theory in quantum mechanics (or perturbatin' theory in URKOBOLD mechanics) or whatever. I'm more interested in the skill in setting up a problem, solving it, and checking it. And the skill of writing a good lab report, as well as trouble-shooting your apparatus or your computer code. Whether you go into industrial R&D, academia, or some completely different field, I think those skills will carry over.
I find that a lot of my colleagues in other disciplines (liberal arts or otherwise) feel the same way. I can't speak for all schools, however. Maybe we're just special here.
4) In college, I minored in economics, and I felt the same way about that education: What I retained was some overall intellectual skills, rather than the particulars of any topic. If you ask me to manipulate the cost curves and explain how a per-unit tax will shift the supply or demand curves and change the equilibrium, I'll have to strain to remember how that's done. But my overall ability to understand and interpret graphs and data and models is something I've retained, even if I only have mastery of it in contexts where I use those skills.
5) I'm a big believer in science GE classes, and classes that combine science with liberal arts. For liberal arts majors, I don't see much point in having them take the specialized, technical classes that we teach for science majors. They'll never retain any of it. But they might retain what they learn in a class on, say, ethics and technology, or the economic impacts of materials science, or whatever. For science majors, the higher-level skills that you can get from liberal arts classes will not be retained if these classes are never taught in the context of science and technology. If all of your long writing assignments prior to senior year are in literature and history classes, except for a few short lab reports, we shouldn't be shocked if your senior project report sucks.
6) Finally, I used to have a big bias against liberal arts. Then I mellowed out.
Someone Who Doesn't Want to Lose His Job | December 21, 2007, 6:32pm | #
I have a non-Liberal Arts background (in mathematics and engineering), but (I gather) like thoreau, I teach mathematics at a small private Liberal Arts college. There is a value to this sort of education, but too often the students are trying to find the path of least resistance through rather than gain something from every class. Also, far too often, the courses that they take to meet the general education requirements are too standardized and not able to give students what they are looking for, which doesn't really help them become well-rounded, or anything else.
As others have said, mathematics is most definitely not a science; its ways of coming to answers and its standards of justification are completely different, whether you view the sciences in the empiricist mode as Hume (which I hope is pretty far out of favor) or the later Popperian view of falsification. However, saying it is an art is maybe a bit too strong a statement as well. There certainly is beauty in a clever and elegant proof, but it isn't quite the same as artistic beauty.
GILMORE:
Some technical specialties can be resourced, but certainly not all. As an engineering undergraduate, I didn't need to know all the various lists of physical constants, but I did need to know how they went together. At a certain level, the material gets too technical to just wing it without having a strong background. Maybe economics isn't one of those types of fields; I have only a little background in it.
thoreau:
I'd say the only topics you master are the ones that you have to teach. (I imagine that you might agree.) I suppose that constant use of something without teaching could do as well, but there's nothing like knowing that you have to be able to explain nearly every nuance of the subject to your students to make sure that you understand it.
Also, my interest in teaching my students is similar to yours. I hope that even the general education students will come away with some basic competence in the methods they're taught, but the real goal is to get them to understand problem solving as a general task and how mathematics makes it possible. The beauty angle is another tactic, but it's hard to get that across to non-majors.
