http://spectator.org/articles/60752/defense-liberal-arts
Given the recent shift toward emphasizing STEM degrees, often at the expense of liberal arts, what are your thoughts on this shift?
I personally believe that a college degree has to be flexible enough to hold up in a changing labor market, which is why STEM is being favored. However, I don’t believe the value of a liberal education should be diminished just because its “counterpart” is gaining importance.
Thoughts?
The demographics of higher education are broader than they used to be. Colleges were less practical in the past, but that’s because their students were elite and didn’t have to worry so much about getting jobs. The “common people” are going to college now, and they have always worried about utility over everything else.
I agree with you, and I think a liberal education can be especially valuable for working-class students who wouldn’t have gone to college fifty years ago. (It’s called “liberal” because it makes you free. Presumably, it’s especially freeing for those who are least free.)
I don’t think anything has diminished, because there was never a “golden age” where everyone studied the liberal arts. It’s just that colleges haven’t figured out how to effectively implement the liberal arts ideal on the larger scales they deal with now.
No, it’s called a liberal arts education because it’s made by liberals.
It’s obviously an indoctrination to the obvious next step, the Radical Arts.
We need more moderate education. I’d vouch for the conservative arts, but that would just lead to more reactionaries.
/sarcasm
Seriously though, I do think that liberal arts are necessary. I think that high school english classes really leave a sour taste in a lot of kids mouths.
It’s like collegeboard and the teachers thought - “Hey! We should focus on rich aristocrats writing about how awful their life is. After all, Jane Austen writing about marrying a not as rich person is totally as terrible as cholera, typhus, yellow fever, workplace abuse, and all those other things that the poor put up with. And we’ll let teachers decide whether to talk about the horrors of colonization! Students may or may not need to know that.”
I actually recently wrote an editorial for my school newspaper about this, and did some research. I found out that there are actually more than enough STEM majors, so the whole “we’re short on STEM majors and need more” isn’t true.