<p>I am always amazed how people who love to define liberal arts actually seem to know very little about the scope of a liberal arts education. It might be helpful to read what a school such as Wharton says about the subject and how it defines itself.</p>
<p>I am equally amazed to read that a high school should be a place to explore. No wonder why so many are determined to pretend that a high school can teach college level classes! High schools should be teaching the foundations that lead to higher education, and this without alphabet soup programs and gimmicks. KoolAid should be a two letters brand. it works well for IB and AP!</p>
Many students come into college with little experience with the humanities. The function of undergraduate courses is to provide basic knowledge and a firm foundation for future study. Critical thinking is always desirable, but that is something particularly cultivated in upper-level courses and seminars once a knowledge base has been established. </p>
<p>To use classics as an example, as the originally posted article did, a standard Greek history course would spend only part of a single lecture discussing Socrates – who he was, when he lived, what he did. Just the basics; there simply isn’t enough time in a term for more. A more advanced course, on the other hand, would approach the subject a little differently. Just who was the guy, anyway? Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes all provide wildly different descriptions of him. Who was “right,” if any of them? How do we know? How much can we glean from these people about his behavior and motivations? There is no time for this sort of speculation in many undergraduate courses, particularly lower-level/intro courses. Professors are perfectly cognizant of these intricacies, contrary to popular belief, but they’re also aware that throwing too much too fast at undergrads simply confuses them. </p>
<p>I do find this somewhat regrettable. Most students, despite having had years of history education, have very little idea of what being a historian actually entails. Other areas of the humanities are even more foreign to them.</p>
<p>^Again, whatever is right for one imight be all wrong for another. Whatever amazes you, will not amaze another, they just going to accept that virtue of education is very different from person to person. For example, not knowing many or all facts about art does not prevent anybody to appreciate it, does not prevent anybody to create it and does not prevent anybody to have their own unique perspective and personal connections to specific artists. Nobody can assert that knowing art history and certain facts will enrich this experience. it will for some and it will not for others. Actually, some artists are staying away from searching education in their field to protect their own unique perception and the way to express it.</p>
<p>^ well, this is interesting. Those kids I know at the art college, the ones who have to take liberal arts classes, including art history…turn out to be better prepared for their art careers. How? They can draw references from styles of other periods, knowledge of history and values during those periods, techniques and the psychology behind both creating art and interpeteting it. It’s more than being able to go into a museum and say, I like this one and don’t get that one.</p>
<p>Fwiw, my mother used to say, if we never experiment, we’d still be eating baby food. I’ve got plennnty of useles info running through my head, some collected inadvertently (through someone else’s efforts in, say, reporting in depth on a subject) and plenty I pursued. Sometimes, “value” is simply in how we personally feel about expanding our knowledge.</p>
<p>Leaf, eg, has had the unfortunate experience of being bored (in what I presume are intro level classes.) Ah, but he has been exposed to those arenas.</p>
<p>^Again, you see how different it could be for different people. I was referring to myself in my previous post. This is my approach as one who loves to go to museum for entertainment and who love to create my own art (have to sell it to have enough space at home, selling part is not my favorite, but the fact that pieces sell tells me that others appreciate it)
comparison and pushing one view is irrelevent in education. Each person prospective is unigue, each families goals could be respected even if they are completely opposite of your own.</p>
<p>This has a lot more to do with your learning environment than with the subject taught. Ex cathedra teaching is different from relying on a Socratic method.</p>
<p>Despite attending a magnet high school focused on math & science, one cannot get away with doing only 1-2 years in an English lit course or any other humanities/social science courses to escape one’s weaknesses. In fact, we were not only required to take all 4 years of English on top of our other humanities/social science and math/science requirements, we all had to submit a 20 page senior English thesis. </p>
<p>One kid in my year who tried to skip out on some English courses because he was a hardcore STEM kid and felt they were a waste of his time. Guess what? Despite somehow gaining admission to Cornell, Brown, and other elite colleges…our high school notified those colleges he didn’t fulfill his graduation requirements and they forced him to stay until he fulfilled all of his requirements. </p>
<p>Don’t feel too bad for him. After a year at a SUNY flagship, he successfully transferred to Cornell A & S and ended up in a great med school.</p>
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<p>First, grad schools do account for risk taking…especially if you submit an addendum to explain that. </p>
<p>Second…someone whose GPA will seriously tank because of a glaring weakness is probably someone who will have serious problems once they hit the “real world”…regardless of occupation. Seen dozens of people fired/demoted for having embarrassingly mediocre writing or basic arithmetic skills. </p>
<p>Moreover…for those who feel the sole objective of education is to attain a job…you can always send your kids off to a vocational school/job apprenticeship. Why go to college?</p>
<p>The reverse side of sending your kids off to voactional school would be
Why rack up 200k in debt to get a BA in English from a LAC when you already own a library card?<br>
I say what I say because I’m looking for balance. I know that in my case my college English professors weren’t any better than my high school English teachers. I’m probably much like the person with 16 units of non-STEM courses, from three different subject areas. So I don’t see the point in pay top dollar for that kind of class. Now if the families that find that LA works for them are getting a better quality of teaching - that is wonderful. As long as they are meeting a minimum of math that would keep them from passing a law that says no one with make less than the average wage or some other mathematical impossiblity. Different kids need different things. Mine need to get as much math, science and business stuffed into their brains as possible before they have to support themselves. Then they have the rest of their lives to read the classics and actually enjoy them rather than repeating the professor’s viewpoint.
The one thing I have learned from this board is that while getting a Humanities degree from a well respected college can be a rewarding experience, getting one from a questionable college is truly a worthless and expensive mistake. I think that is why this board exists. If one wants a Humanities degree, one better do his or her homework or these colleges will take you to the cleaners!</p>
<p>I went to a rigorous international school where the IB students were seen as either lazy or stupid (which was of course harsh and untrue, the way the things high schoolers say often are, but reflected the immense academic intensity of the school’s own curriculum, a unique hybrid of several education systems), and I did all these things in high school too. After one semester at a school known for its commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, I can safely say that no high school, however rigorous, can provide the same level of intellectual stimulation as a good liberal arts college. It is impossible to receive this education in high school, full stop.</p>
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<p>I hope you realize that says more about your college than it does about the liberal arts.</p>
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<li><p>Math and science are part of the liberal arts.</p></li>
<li><p>The sad truth is that if you don’t receive a solid grounding in literature, history and philosophy at some point before you graduate from college, you are extremely unlikely to ever sit down and “read the classics” on your own later on in life. Human curiosity and openness to new intellectual challenges goes down as age goes up, and receiving an intellectually challenging education is one of the very few ways to stall or reverse this trend.</p></li>
<li><p>None of my professors, not one, has even expressed his personal opinion about any of the texts we’ve read so far (well, sometimes remarks like that do slip through in class, but they are always prefaced with ''I don’t know about you, but I…" or “personally, …”; it is always very clear to us that if our professors are sharing their opinions with us, it is because we’re having a conversation as equals and are free to examine each other’s opinions), let alone asked us to repeat it back to him. It is actually a little frustrating, being pushed to generate your own ideas all the time without relying on the teacher’s personal reaction to the text to guide you. My classes so far have been all about making us think about the many different ways in which we can interpret, say, Sappho or Herodotus or the Presocratics, or the many arguments and counter-arguments behind every single concept in political science, etc.</p></li>
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<p>It seems to me that many people are underestimating the value of a liberal arts education either because of their own bad experiences or out of ignorance about what that type of education is really about.</p>
<p>IMHO, there is much more math and science illiteracy among Humanities students than humanities illiteracy among STEM graduates. Any core curriculum I’ve seen requires many more credits in the humanities than science and math, although I am happy that statistics is often a requirement for graduation. </p>
<p>I believe that math illiteracy has a hand in the bad decisions that many people make about credit (look at the current student debt fiasco), and in the belief in statistics that are couched in deceiving terms and grossly misunderstood. I think the rampant physics illiteracy is dangerous in a country where voters have an input into policies about technology and energy. (The favorite nonmajor course I seen on this issue is Physics for Future Presidents at Berkeley, which is also the name of a textbook and also a more readable book for the masses.)</p>
<p>I am not a STEM “snob”. Humanities are also vitally important for an educated worldview -not just the ability to write and communicate well, but a knowledge of history and psychology. I encouraged my eldest STEM graduate to complete an honors humanities program in addition to his engineering degree and business minor, while my youngest completed a STEM major while also completing a humanities major and 2 minors. Both also took art classes. </p>
<p>If I were designing a core curriculum, I would also add a couple of overview business and entrepreneurship classes.</p>
<p>You are correct insofar as the math and science requirements at many colleges are inadequate for one who wants to be considered as an educated person. IMO, every educated person has an understanding of basic calculus and statistics as well as biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology. </p>
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<p>One reason for this may be that the humanities (by which I take it you would also include the social sciences, i.e., anything not STEM) are a lot broader in scope than are science and math.</p>
<p>I can say exactly the same thing about a Business or STEM degree. </p>
<p>In fact, one financial services firm I worked for made it a point to refuse hiring undergrad business majors from anywhere except topflight undergrad B-schools on the level of Wharton, Berkeley Haas, NYU-Stern, UVA McIntire, etc due to bad experiences with prior graduates from lower-tiered undergrad B-schools. On the other hand, they had no such reluctance in hiring “liberal arts” grads from the same lower-tiered schools. </p>
<p>I also know several people in large computer technology firms who stated they made it a point to avoid CS departments which were geared only for churning out “code monkeys”, those limited mostly/solely to the Windows operating system, and not provide a decent foundation in the theories in the CS field.</p>
<p>It’s a long time ago, but my STEM teachers in high school were MUCH better than those I experienced in college (#1 LAC), and more demanding. But then my high school is famous for science and math.</p>
<p>Mini, I have reasons to believe that you have might have come across the teachings of a certain Edward Burger in your homeschooling journey. This award winning Professor of Mathematics is a pioneer in the use of technology to teach mathematics and especially Calculus. </p>
<p>You missed him by a couple of decades. And, fwiw, I also think that there are LACs that would present quite a challenge in STEM areas for the graduates of the prestigious HS you attended. You know one in the frigid northern part of our country; I know at least one in a much more clement weather zone. People in the know … do know!</p>
<p>Strange. The STEM teachers in my high school(Think we attended the same one) were at best a draw…and at worst…went waaay too fast and had a tendency to make students feel really stupid for asking questions or clarification. The STEM Profs at my LAC(Oberlin) paced the class much more reasonably and were much more patient and accessible. </p>
<p>As for humanities/social-sciences…the best in high school matched the best ones I’ve had in college. However, the LAC was far better only because the worst Profs I’ve had was nowhere near the jerky twit as the worst high school humanities/social science teacher I’ve had unfortunately.</p>
<p>If the only tool in your belt is a hammer, all the world’s problems tend to look like nails. One-tool technicians can get stuck in career ruts without the flexibility to change directions.</p>
<p>Technical training is great for teaching students how to do things. Knowing how to assess what things are appropriate, warranted, ethical, and wise for the long run are things that discussions and debates around the liberal arts help to develop. The guy who predicted that the apocalypse was coming May 21st is a civil engineer from Berkeley. I’m sure that he has the technical skills to design a viable bridge, but I doubt that he ever learned how to critically assess and weigh the relative merits of ideas. A liberal arts undergrad degree combined with subsequent technical training is a great strategy.</p>
<p>I’m sure there are kids who you could put on a 4-year journey around the world who would do wonders at the end. If you take those who never attended a tenth of the classes, you’ll find some who’ll do well in the real world. If a student lacks these real-world skills that are needed to make someone successful, a great alternative is vocational education, and STEM is a pretty good flavor in this path. </p>
<p>My STEMmish son took classes in philosophy and such because he was forced to get some humanities credits. He observed that the STEM students generally did better than the non-STEMS even in these disciplines. Given that some of the latter students will do very well and in fact run companies where they’ll hire their STEM classmates, the key is not what gets good grades in LAC courses, but something far less tangible - leadership skills, the ability to sell, risk taking, etc.</p>
<p>As someone who has previously posted that people who major in STEM majors are less valuable to society than people who major in non-STEM majors, you don’t get to sit on your open-minded high horse. You are the same as all those “Humanities are stupid. Everyone should major in Engineering.” posters. </p>
<p>Regarding the topic at hand, I think a lot of people don’t take enough classes outside their subject. Generally humanities majors take “joke” math/science classes, and STEM majors take “joke” humanities classes. I can attest to the fact that the “English for Engineers” classes we have to take are worthless and don’t prepare anyone to write competently. And having spoken to humanities and social science majors, I am confident that any “math illiterate” can pass a basic Calc 1 or intro statistics class. </p>
<p>Though there is value in having some people specialize and others generalize. Not everybody needs to have a broad education. Some people should just be engineers. A broad education isn’t right for everyone.</p>