…according to Marilynne Robinson speaking at Stanford last week.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/november/robinson-humanities-lecture-110315.html
It’s an interesting idea, that (many? all? some?) universities have shifted away from educating leaders, thinkers, creators of society, towards (highly skilled) workers in society. I can see that point.
Plenty people on this forum deride majors (usually the humanities) that don’t “train” for a specific skilled jobs (usually in STEM.) Universities are simply responding to the market demands.
Um, most voters in this country didn’t go to college. And the ones they did go to tended to be publics where practical education has always been stressed. And when colleges were more about learning than training, they were much smaller and educated a much smaller percentage of the populace.
So she’s setting up this platonic ideal that never existed.
In fact, she has the history completely backwards. When the liberal arts curriculum was set at small Northeastern privates, it was to educate clergy and sons of the elites who actually had the time to learn Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. It certainly wasn’t meant to democratize anything. It was the land-grants and other publics, with their emphasis on practical education and well as the WWII GI bill that democratized higher education more than the classical liberal arts curriculum.
Thank goodness you don’t have to go to college to participate in a democratic society, though.
Does this mean that no critical thinkers come out of STEM programs?
Yes, in the idealized past of greater emphasis on liberal arts education in college, a much smaller percentage of people went to college, so college was not really a democratizing force in society (indeed, it may have functioned more of confirmation of one’s status in the elite classes).
The great expansion of college education starting in the 1950s probably did expand pre-professional study much more than liberal arts study, but the percentage of all people who have bachelor’s degrees in liberal arts today is greater than the percentage of all people who had bachelor’s degrees of any kind in that idealized past.
I did the humanities thing in undergrad and grad school. I think this whole citizenship line is a load of malarkey. Even assuming I have some capacity to think better formed thoughts about the common weal, nobody cares what I think anyway.
I wish I’d done CS.
True. I don’t think she is saying that isn’t so, only saying it shouldn’t be that way:
Perhaps this sort of broad education that makes a “citizen” of the sort she means is not practical for many today.
^ I think she’s referring to the professions that serve society and don’t necessarily pay well here. Teaching, social work, politics?
(I also find her phrasing a little…flowery…for my taste. But she’s a writer I guess.)
I am very tired of the assumption that those who studied science or engineering in college are automatons that don’t learn how to think. I can assure you that many liberal arts students are not concerned with citizenship and democracy. Engineers and scientists can be just as good citizens as English or poli sci majors. Just because I spent more time in a laboratory than a classroom doesn’t mean I am uninterested or uniformed about the world or about arts and literature.
It could certainly be argued that it is the lack of reliance on science that is causing some to be ill equipped as citizens. Pretending a scientific fact is not valid simply because it doesn’t fit your political view seems like more of a problem with democratization these days than lack of liberal arts study. Lack of basic food, water, health care, shelter and political stability though out the world are problems that scientists and engineers can certainly help to solve.
Not to mention the obvious fact that studying science or engineering is often a more reliable path out of poverty or working class than studying art history. That has always been the case. As UCB points out, college is no longer for the elite who can afford to study whatever interests them.
The sciences are liberal arts. So she wouldn’t mean those.
Maybe not engineering to the same degree. The author doesn’t give specific examples of these “utilitarian” skills being taught so we can only guess.
Well she wouldn’t be including the “S” or the “M” as both are liberal arts. I don’t think anyone, even she, would argue that “E” and “T” educations mean one can’t think critically, but that perhaps those wouldn’t “prepare people for citizenship and democracy”?
Re: “prepare people for citizenship and democracy”
But what should be required to be included in one’s college course work to be “prepared for citizenship and democracy”, regardless of one’s major? And what about the majority of people who do not eventually earn bachelor’s degrees – are they considered “unprepared for citizenship and democracy”?
^ presumably a broad spectrum of liberal arts subjects 
Would such a “broad spectrum” mean something like the general education requirements at MIT and Harvey Mudd? Or, for more typical college students, the general education requirements at the California State Universities?
I really like Marilynne Robinson … but I wonder if she’s really thought this through… And as the (humanities-educated) daughter, sister and sister-in-law of engineers, I can say honestly that our abilities to be critical citizens are about equal.
@OHMomof2, it never was practical for many.
Even in Emerson’s time, only a tiny number of privileged few could spend their days getting educated in the classical liberal arts.
Anyone else find it ironic that someone who professes so much love for the liberal arts is so ignorant of history (one of the main liberal arts subjects)?
While some of @PurpleTitan 's observations are valid, I think he or she has some things fundamentally wrong, too. Harvard in 1636 was democratizing because students who were neither Anglican nor Catholic were effectively barred from university education in England. It represented an effort to construct a Puritan leadership class based on education and scholarship, not inherited wealth and title. The great American universities of the 18th Century played a critical role in nurturing a class of American leaders who did some pretty cool things.
But the design and concept of the modern university really dates from the educational reforms of the 19th Century, reforms that were embodied by Cornell and that led to the founding of Stanford, Chicago, Vanderbilt, MIT, and many state universities. They were democratizing in opening up membership in the social/political elites to people of talent who weren’t Lowells or Cabots. It wasn’t broad-based, not yet, but it was broader and more vibrant than strict class hierarchy would have permitted. And all of Karabell’s stuff about how Harvard started doing holistic admissions to restrict the number of Jews there reminds you that Harvard was actually admitting quite a lot of Jews 100 years ago (including my grandmother, all three of her brothers, and a future brother-in-law), when Jews were still openly excluded from many fields of commerce and government. Yes, they were well-to-do, but they were not part of any hereditary elite – my great-grandfather whose children went to Harvard had maybe the equivalent of an 8th-grade education in rural Lithuania.
@JHS, I’m pretty certain that many of the early LACs that became Ivies were discriminatory in their own way and did not take in any and all religious denominations. How accepting was Harvard (and the Bay colony as a whole) of Quakers and Anabaptists, for instance?
Also, Cornell, MIT, Chicago, JHU, and Stanford were all founded about the same time and looked to Germany as a model for research universities (not to each other).
And yep, I remembered correctly. Brown was the first American college who did not discriminate on religion, which means that Harvard, W&M, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and (maybe) Penn did not accept you if you were not of the right faith.
Dartmouth originally only accepted Native Americans. Talk about discriminatory.
People might be willing to primarily entertain flights of fancy when a vacation tab is $2500, and next year they can indulge in another choice of vacation.
But when the experience is a one-off, and the tab is $250,000 followed by a decade of crushing debt-- well, that tends to color people’s expectations of “payoff”.