<p>Does intellectualism have to include every topic under the earth when you get to college? what about people who are more focused in specific areas? The engineering types dont always care to know what the meaning of life is according to Socrates or Plato or for that matter Phil Jackson while the people who care about french romanticism or art history may not care what Zen and art the of motorcycle maintenance has to teach them about life, let alone how supply chains work or what a wrench socket is.</p>
<p>So for someone to point out one is anti-intellectual by pointing out they don’t care about certain subjects is a bit disingenuous. Colleges trying to forcefeed them some subjects through core is ok but it should be a more open curriculum in terms of the core and the choices that come with it. I suspect Brown is the only school that meets such a requirement.</p>
<p>^ agreed - you stated that point better than I did. Another point: students are intellectual about what they care about, and you might not get to see them really engaged in it if, say, you’re a chemistry or English major and the person is into civil engineering. So they might come across as non-intellectual since you don’t see them engaged in their passion, and they would come across as anti-intellectual in regard to subjects they don’t like / are forced to take.</p>
<p>Higher education does not address those basic social skills. So unless he is stupid or dishonest or crazy, that can’t be what Deresiewicz means by “talking to the plumber”.</p>
<p>What about talking to the plumber about a billing dispute, a death in the family, a business failure, or a crime? Could you have a serious conversation that draws on the advantages of your college education, while still communicating in an idiom that is familiar and comfortable to both of you? Could a typical elite college graduate do that today as well as a typical elite college graduate could 100 years ago?</p>
<p>If in such a conversation an educated person brought up the tribulations of Job, 100 years ago the plumber probably would have understood. Today, he’d think you were a little weird. He’d think you far more than a little weird if instead you start yammering about deconstructing gender, race, and class expression in the nationalist sentiment of Young Lords Party poets. </p>
<p>Better stick to asking him if he’d like a glass of water.</p>
<p>“What about talking to the plumber about a billing dispute, a death in the family, a business failure, or a crime? Could you have a serious conversation that draws on the advantages of your college education, while still communicating in an idiom that is familiar and comfortable to both of you?”</p>
<p>Why do these conversations need to draw on the advantages of my college education? Why can’t they just be conversations between two people about whatever topic at hand?</p>
<p>"He’d think you far more than a little weird if instead you start yammering about deconstructing gender, race, and class expression in the nationalist sentiment of Young Lords Party poets. "</p>
<p>Well, of course – especially when we are discussing when my sink would be fixed, what he will charge, and maybe some light chit chat about the weather or the Cubs. Deconstructing gender and race with the plumber would be inappropriate because it’s irrelevant to the topic at hand – not because he’s a plumber. I don’t get where you are heading – “intellectual” discussions simply arent needed every day and in every context.</p>
<p>Why would it occur to anyone to talk about that to other people who probably have no interest in it? </p>
<p>Let’s rewind the tape back to when I graduated from high school. There were some future plumbers and other tradesmen who graduated along with me. I could converse easily with them then and I can converse easily with them now. Why would my subsequent college and grad school education cause me to lose that ability? There is nothing in higher education that destroys the ability to carry on ordinary conversations with people from all walks of life. </p>
<p>I think the author is way overplaying his talking-to-the-plumber angle. It just doesn’t ring true. Unless the Ivy League people he knows all have some medical condition like Asperger’s or something that interferes with their ability to relate to others, that example is just plain bogus.</p>
They don’t, and they can be.
But then, what is the purpose of your college humanities classes? </p>
<p>
I think that is a widely-held contemporary point of view, because we’ve come to think of higher reasoning (in the arts as well as the sciences) as something specialized and separate from everyday life. This bothers William Deresiewicz and Matthew Crawford.
Well, I think he did. He’s an English professor. He uses figures of speech. He tries to illustrate abstract ideas with concrete imagery. Not that he did it very well in this article, but that’s beside the point. Many people besides him have had trouble for decades figuring out the relevance of elite liberal education to everyday life.</p>
<p>It was not always so (or not to the same extent). My father attended a New England LAC then a famous Ivy law school in the 1940s. He also served in combat in the Army Air Corps, then built our family home with his own hands. This was not unusual among men of his generation. He could relate the Latin he learned in school to the Latin he heard weekly in church. He could relate the trigonometry he learned in school to the practical task of navigating a bomber. The dramatic literature he learned in college was the same Shakespeare everybody had been familiar with for hundreds of years, not abstruse avant garde stuff that only an intellectual elite can appreciate.</p>
<p>Fewer and fewer college educated people today grow up on farms, learn to do skilled work with their hands, go to church, serve in the military, or work in the same town where they grew up. So I don’t think there’s much question that there is a widening gap between many people who attend elite universities and your average plumber or carpenter (notwithstanding the efforts these schools have made to recruit more minorities and low-income students.)</p>
<p>And CC people keep comparing the value of HYP just like a Lexus or Mercedes !!! Example shows how they value education. It’s all about money and brand name !!!</p>
<p>Ha…if you remember watching the “This Old House” episodes, can you really imagine some of those homeowners carrying on a conversation with Richard Trethewey, the plumber on the show? I assume most of those homeowners were in professional occupations and that many of them probably attended elite universities. Beyond common courtesies and the context of the immediate situation at hand, I just can’t see some of those home owners having much to talk about with Richard. And there’s a big gap between someone like Richard and the working class person in a service position at Harvard. It’s understandable that they don’t have much in common. And that’s OK…unless one of those home owners decides to run for public office and can’t communicate effectively or empathize with the people he/she wants to represent. </p>
<p>On the other hand, if one of those working class persons should approach such a home owner in another context to request help advocating on his behalf (assuming an elite education cultivated some liberal attitudes) with an employer, the police, a government agency, that person will benefit from some of the advantages of his advocate’s elite education; his advocate will know how to write an effective letter, who to contact, what levels to pull, etc.</p>
<p>Some people don’t want to go to college just for the sake of learning? Oh no. But if the top schools have it bad, look at other schools. There, we have commuter students who want to get ahead in their lives (not a bad thing) and then people who just want to party everday. It is seriously not any better.</p>
<p>Besides, who cares if college students are intellectual or not? Most of the self-described intellectuals I know are really just pseudo-intellectuals, who enjoy vague-sounding ideas and don’t seem to like facts that much. I have to admit, I fall under this category too.</p>
<p>Just got back from Cornell’s orientation weekend. Not once did I hear a speaker utter the phrases : “Ivy League”, “admission percentage”, “average SAT”, “class rank”, “world News & Report Rankings”, etc. …in short NO ONE “tooted the horn” of the college, no one gave any indication that they considered themselves “elite”. 400 upper classmen volunteer with orientation & couldn’t have been more helpful. Pretty much every other college we visited
tried to give off more of a vibe of being “elite” than Cornell did.</p>
<p>" The dramatic literature he learned in college was the same Shakespeare everybody had been familiar with for hundreds of years, not abstruse avant garde stuff that only an intellectual elite can appreciate."</p>
<p>I think you are way romanticizing the past and the extent to which most people learned about, cared about and engaged in topics such as Shakespeare. I’m pretty sure my ancestors, who were manual laborers, truck deliverymen, factory workers, and cleaning ladies didn’t have the luxury of learning about Shakespeare. They were too busy making a living.</p>
<p>csdad - I heard it was nice from my brother and nephew. My nephew is living on the same floor as D1 4 years ago, tradition continues. Hope your daughter enjoys the next four years.</p>
<p>^^ Read The Federalist Papers and realize they were written to persuade ordinary people of the benefits of the new constitution. They are written in long, rolling, complex sentences for an audience familiar with the language of the Bible and the contemporary political press. Read some of the letters of ordinary enlisted men written during the Civil War. They also tend to display a high tone and relatively formal, complex language. Think about the language of the Gettysburg Address and the intended audience.</p>
<p>In the new version of the movie True Grit, the Coen brothers try to capture the patterns of 19th century speech. There are few contractions. It sounds very stilted to modern ears. Nobody knows for sure how accurately the film reflects 19th century speech, but the theory behind it seems plausible (that the King James Bible strongly influenced the way people talked).</p>
<p>China’s population today is about 50% rural. After 50 years of aggressive literacy campaigns, many communities still have high rates (~30%) of illiteracy. Nevertheless, classical language and stories powerfully influence the speech of ordinary peasants throughout the country. Although I cannot document it, I have no trouble imagining that many ordinary Americans (people with little formal education) were fairly familiar at one time with Shakespeare and other rather high-brow stuff (perhaps in derivative, vernacular forms).</p>
<p>IMO, that IS the point. Perhaps if he used less abstract ideas and imagery, his point could be made more clearly. But then again, if he used less abstract ideas an imagery, he wouldn’t have an essay bcos he has no point. :)</p>
<p>Don’t forget, he writes for a national journal which itself, has an pltheora (SAT word) of editors. Thus, they collectively…</p>
Why? Because you don’t like the execution of the current system? Or you are opposed to the idea of every student receiving some semblance of a liberal education? </p>
<p>
This is where we’ll have to agree to disagree. I just do not see how a student cannot find one class in the humanities that he would enjoy. Same with social science. Same with natural sciences. These are the working foundation of our current and future lives as citizens in a 21st century world. Some may not like the reading and essays inherent in many of the liberal arts classes. If so, that only provides more reason to take them. Reading and writing are fundamental skills in this world. To not enjoy learning about deeply relevant issues and to not embrace the challenges of critical reading and argumentative writing is inherently non-intellectual. </p>
<p>Math may not appear as relevant to our daily lives and practices. The intellectual should still take math, however. It offers a different way of looking at problems. In the real world there are problems. Many write essays, some invaluable, on them. But at the end of the day someone has to solve them. This is where the math method comes in. Use a procedure to solve a problem. Test to see if your solution is correct. If not, go back and start over. Engineering frames problems in a similar way, albeit more applied, hence its value. </p>
<p>I think there could be more math and engineering offerings tailored to students who are attempting to fulfill the GER yet are not jokes of classes. And most of my Liberal Arts classes, my professors tell us at the beginning (if it is not obvious enough already) why this class matters for our intellectual growth and future lives. My science, math, and engineering classes have rarely done this. Is it because these classes don’t matter for the non-major? Some may say that, but I think it’s more that the professors just don’t want to figure out why it matters.</p>
It’s non-intellectual to not have a range of academic interests. As generally defined today, being intellectual involves a component of applying one’s academic knowledge to the public discourse. Whoever does this should care deeply about a range of considerations: knowing the audience and its history, knowing the medium to relay the ideas, having a sound argument to relay, and knowing the potential objections (among others). </p>
<p>Knowing a ton about one subject (and little else) does not make an intellectual. It makes an academic. What sets them apart is that the intellectual should also feel at home in the public sphere, utilizing his skills taken from other disciplines to successfully advance his primary argument.</p>
<p>^ That is your definition of an intellectual and that is what is wrong with people defining what an intellectual is. Intellectuals are no forcefed to learn things they want to forget the moment they leave the class. They are not required to know everything either but they are required to learn being rational, thinking about all sides to a problem and being able to argue a point. If you are considering yourself an intellectual, I am sorry to say, you have lost your argument.</p>
<p>Being the anti-intellectual I am since I only know some engineering and nothing else, I go with the expression your dog don’t hunt.</p>
<p>If someone is smart, hardworking, and disciplined, does it matter whether he or she is an intellectual too? Does every smart person need to be that way?</p>