
Novelist warns against utilitarian trends in higher education - wyclif
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/november/robinson-humanities-lecture-110315.html
======
rm_-rf_slash
I have maintained for a long time that our society should focus on
apprenticeships - not education - as the primary means to gain job skills.
There is a place for k-12 and higher ed, but with a BS being the modern entry
ticket to the middle class, it will only continue to raise costs for everyone.
Subsidizing apprenticeships instead gives people meaningful skills and a
decent income, and they don't spend 2-4 years of their working life either not
working and sitting in class, or working out of necessity to make ends meet,
which is a detriment to their education.

~~~
alwaysAttending
In a country that looks down upon unions and guild-like structures meant to
protect their workers, you'll never have enough people who trust
apprenticeships. Dedicating yourself to one specific task within the private
market is too foolish of a thing to do for any smart person in America.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
That's how most folks get trade jobs now! You work in a shop while taking some
classes at community college (welding, bookbinding or whatever). You then get
promoted after a couple of years, or even save your money and open your own
shop.

~~~
Retric
This directly leads to lots of older workers who only know one skill and can't
get a job. Right now States are dumping these people on Social Security
Disability to keep them off their welfare / unemployment rolls, because
industries are just not that stable and younger workers are healthier and
cheaper.

PS: 65 - 18 = 47 years. Just how many bricklayers do you need with 45 years
experience and back problems?

~~~
nkurz
Besides laying bricks, brick layers who really understand their craft can
supervise and train others on proper technique. Here's an excellent article
lamenting the lack of "master masons":

    
    
      A master architect and a master mason
    
      Back in 1891, when the Citizens Bank building was under 
      construction, there were two essential people on the job 
      site. One was the architect. I imagine that the architect — 
      someone who clearly cared about water management details — 
      visited the job site regularly. The project was also 
      blessed with the presence of a master mason — perhaps a 
      recent immigrant from Italy — who knew how to sift sand and 
      wield a trowel. Both of these people oversaw the work of 
      others, and both insisted that every worker on the job site 
      needed to adhere to high standards of quality.
    
      The results of their work included the impeccable mortar 
      joints at the Citizens Bank building.
    

[http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/articles/dept/musings/qu...](http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/articles/dept/musings/quality-
issues-brick-buildings)

~~~
Retric
That sounds great, but, we don't have a huge exponential growth rate or short
lifespans.

So, you can easily end up with vastly more people with 25+ years’ experience
than <5 years’ experience. That's not a problem for programing or
electricians, but for highly physical skills your body breaks down and you
don't need 3 supervisors for every worker. For some jobs older workers are
simply worse.

Now, with a solid general education these people can move on to less
physically demanding work, but trying to plan out the economy 40 years into
the future is a bad idea.

~~~
mcguire
" _So, you can easily end up with vastly more people with 25+ years’
experience than <5 years’ experience._"

That seems to be false in practice.

~~~
Retric
Depends on the field. This does happen in fields with low turnover and high
longevity. The point is if you want to railroad people into apprenticeship
programs you need to limit it to fields that people can do for 30+ years.

Otherwise as I said in a different post you end up handing out medical
disability early retirements to lots of people which is extremely expensive.

------
gdubs
I used to be an avid reader of Newtekniques magazine, which was required
reading for anyone obsessed with Lightwave3D and the Video Toaster. There was
Mojo's opinion column on the back page where he mused about rendering, the
Amiga, and sometimes things a little deeper.

I remember one column where mojo said (paraphrasing), "I see a lot of people
going to film school, learning everything they can about making movies;
cameras, lighting, props..."

"Problem is, when they get out of school, they know everything about _how_ to
make a film, but no clue what to make a film _about_."

The value of a liberal arts education is the world of stuff you don't know you
don't know. You get exposed to a wide range of topics, and you never know what
might catch your eye and reach deep inside of you, to your core, beyond
technical mastery of a skill.

As an entrepreneur, having empathy and a deep understanding of the humanities
is extremely useful throughout your personal journey.

~~~
romaniv
Exposed to a wide range of topics for the low price of $23,410 per year
($46,272 in private colleges). No thanks. I'd rather go to the nearest
bookstore, library or use the Internet for what's intended.

[http://www.collegedata.com/cs/content/content_payarticle_tmp...](http://www.collegedata.com/cs/content/content_payarticle_tmpl.jhtml?articleId=10064)

~~~
abruzzi
There are plenty of much cheaper (and still good universities). The local one
here is $2000 a semester and while it doesn't have prestige, it's a very good
all around university.

Also, the Internet makes it easy to learn random things about different
topics, it's not very good at guiding you through topics that you didn't know
to investigate. It's also not able to force you to study topics you don't want
to, or take an entire class worth of material instead of a single Wikipedia
article.

~~~
koopuluri
"It's also not able to force you to study topics you don't want to, or take an
entire class worth of material instead of a single Wikipedia article" \- It's
entirely possible to cover a class worth of material & study topics you don't
want to without paying for someone to help you do that.

I think the point is that given two people that learned a course (say computer
science), with one learning formally at a university and the other learning
through a combination of sources on the internet, and they both end up with
roughly the same knowledge and competence - the one who went to university is
likely to have more options open to them.

A system that requires that kind of money to "certify" people of their skills
is unfair as it blocks off the chance of certification for a large population
of citizens. (-Certification here is one that is accepted by other members of
society such as employers).

~~~
abruzzi
"It's entirely possible to cover a class worth of material & study topics you
don't want to without paying for someone to help you do that."

True, but that misses the point. If you expecting to gain a well rounded
education, where you learn about many things that you otherwise wouldn't have,
then relying only on you're intellectual curiosity will not work for most
people I've met. Yes, for the rare auto-didact, they will dive deep on their
own time into many different subjects, but in my experience most people I've
known (even liberal arts majors) would never look beyond the confines of their
chosen area of study.

I can't remember how many times in high school and college I heard classmates
grumble about "after I graduate, when will I ever need this". In high school
(for me) it was mostly aimed at math classes (I grew up in a very blue collar
area where the high school had something like 10% of their students going on
the college). They were happier learning history or having to read cliff notes
on some novel.

But in college it was usually people in one major complaining that they had to
take the "wider world" requirements. Though actually I heard it the absolute
most from fellow music majors that had to take a physics class on acoustics.

The reality is so many people see college solely as job prep, and that is a
very strong part of what it can do, but (and this is kind of the point of the
article) it can function in many other ways. I'm a counter example. I've spent
something like 15 years in college. I have two bachelors (philosophy and
english), an MFA (creative writing) and and working towards a PhD (math). But
I work in computers, and not only do I not have a CS or related degree, the
only computer class I ever took was a "wider world" class I had to take (and
ironically I groused about it, because I'm already a programmer and manage a
staff of programmers and DBAs)

~~~
Retra
Most people entering university have no real-world experience, and thus don't
get to see the kind of decision-making that results from the general malaise
of careless incompetence caused by over-specialization.

------
dataker
It's really easy to be agains't utilitarian trends in higher education when:

1) your parents have money

2) you are lucky/skilled enough to make a living off a Humanities degree

Most people are not like that and a Humanities degree is a terrible choice.

There's no self-discovery when your own survival is at stake.

~~~
panglott
She's not talking about humanities majors. She's talking about liberal arts
educations.

You can get an engineering degree at a liberal arts college, they just make
you take some philosophy/arts/&c. courses also. There is enormous value in
this, because people are humans, not merely workers. Liberal arts colleges
should do a better job in getting their students technical skills also,
though.

~~~
1971genocide
Of'course humans are just not workers , but if you want to eat you need to
sell something of value to buy your food from the farmers - and they most
often then not really do not care about your humanities nonsense.

~~~
anigbrowl
The 1971 genocide you commemorate in your username might not have occurred if
your culture was a bit more invested in that 'humanities nonsense.'

~~~
1971genocide
ad hominem attack much ?

Sure - you should have told the British to stay the fuck away from the Indian
subcontinent.

~~~
anigbrowl
No, not at all. You seem unclear on the concept.

------
astazangasta
Putting on my cynical hat, the problem is much worse than merely higher
education. In the previous Gilded Age, the rapaciousness of our ruling classes
was met with a storm of organizing from our working classes. Millions of
people worked together to advance their rights and those of others. There were
hundreds of civic organizations, political parties and other popular organs
being formed.

This time, crickets. Now there is no class consciousnesses, no faith in
politics, no collective action of any kind. Something is very different, I
don't know what.

~~~
arca_vorago
Many will balk at the idea, but the oligarchy recognized this danger and
planned against it since the early 1900's. Hanlon's razor only applies to the
middlemen, for the .01% the conspiratorial view of history (based on facts of
course) is the correct one.

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/3768227/Dodd-Report-to-the-
Reece-C...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/3768227/Dodd-Report-to-the-Reece-
Committee-on-Foundations-1954)

~~~
laotzu
>Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means
that we've got to stay together. We've got to stay together and maintain
unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in
Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He
kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get
together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves
in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out
of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.

-MLK, I've Been to The Mountaintop, last speech the night before assassination

~~~
arca_vorago
I just want to point out how relevant I find your username, or more
specifically, Lao Tzu, these days. He is a very undervalued character in
philosophy. Also, thanks for the MLK quote. I think for Americans at least,
the bill of rights and the constitution should be our unifying point, which in
turn is why people who threaten to undermine the division of people, such as
MLK, are seen as such huge threats to TPTB.

------
mc32
So, it's nice to think of civics and arts. I think these should be more
heavily stressed in k-12. The great majority will go beyond secondary
education, so we can "waste" more time on civics, art and morality.

On the other hand, people first and foremost want survival, they want to find
a modicum of success in this new world economy. Liberal arts students know all
too well how their prospects compare to those of others who chose CS, finance,
statistics, etc. Just listen to the bitter kids on npr who rag on the new
economy. They feel left out, and they are right, they are falling behind.
Their professions of choice are not as prestigious any more.

She can make these claims being an exception at the top. Most people following
her would probably feel disappointed at their achievement, if they were to
follow.

Higher ed is not like it was 100 - 200 years ago where the idle children of
the rich could explore their fancy ideas about civilization and humanity. Most
people just want to be employable, that is all.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Folks today have it easier, not harder, than folks 100-200 years ago. There's
something very wrong if we cannot afford _more_ arts and civics today.

Also, I'm not ready to consign the bulk of the country to a life of labor.
Instead of, for instance, exploring what makes us human. Are there no
workhouses? Are there no prisons?

~~~
domfletcher
I think the point OP is making is that the people who went to University
100-200 years ago didn't have to worry about employability because they were
usually from wealthy families. What has happened in the intervening time is
that higher education has extended down the income scale and as such more
students need jobs at the end of their degrees.

~~~
Thriptic
The costs have also dramatically risen, so people view their education as an
investment as opposed to an interest.

------
josefresco
Hate to pull an ad hominem attack, but do we expect any other opinion from
someone so entrenched within the existing higher education world?

 _Robinson, who has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including
her current position at the Writers ' Workshop at the University of Iowa,
identified a troubling trend in higher education today._

Acedemics and hackers alike tend to idealize their choices, and often turn a
blind eye to those that don't fit _their_ chosen educational or business
model.

Also, "self-discovery" works only for those that have the luxury to explore
without the pressures to support themselves or their immediate family.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Cuts both ways: makes her an expert at her field, no? Can we now criticize and
ignore experts because they're 'entrenched'?

~~~
josefresco
Bias is always an important consideration. Yes IMHO we should discount (not
ignore) opinions from those heavily entrenched on either side of this argument
(which is why I mentioned hackers).

There's no one solution that applies to everyone. Some need "self discovery"
but can't afford it, some need job training but are pressured to obtain a
degree solely for the prestige.

I'd like to hear from voices without extensive _skin in the game_. This
includes the other extreme, such as successful business people who advocate
against higher education simply because that's the route they chose.

------
jeffdavis
Great vision, but it's really the fault of a horrible trend in the liberal
arts.

Liberal arts is supposed to be about passing down and building upon wisdom and
culture gained over thousands of years.

Instead, at most universities, it's an uncriticized and unaccountable platform
for instructors' personal agendas. Political agendas are common, but it's more
than that: it's about self-promotion and self-aggrandization.

And the education is more confusing than enlightening. Vague, unintelligible
jumbles of keywords pass for brilliance and depth.

I've had really good teachers in liberal arts, and they are amazing. But
unfortunately that's the exception rather than the rule.

In other words, fix the liberal arts, and then maybe more people will
appreciate them.

------
wbillingsley
Good luck with her "watering the desert" analogy while bemoaning the rise of
productive disciplines, like civil engineering.

The article reeks of bland arts prejudice -- that it is more noble to be the
"educated" artist writing verse about how ghastly a problem must feel like,
and then write something even more verse about how dreadful it is that so few
read or understood your beautiful words, than the "merely utilitarian" person
who understands how to analyse the cause of the problem and is equipped to
design and create a means to fix it.

There is nothing inherently less "prepared for citizenship or democracy" about
an engineer. And neither, in these design-intensive times, do they necessarily
understand humanity or social ills any less than an artist writing about them.

~~~
eropple
I don't think you actually understand what a liberal arts education is. It has
very little to do with being an "artist", it has to do with a broad and
humanistic--opposing mechanistic--education. Such an education, in my
experience, tends to make one interested in creation, and perhaps thus art,
but isn't directly related. I have a CS degree and was fortunate to luck into
a liberal education--one with grounding in literature, history, economics,
sociology, and political science. Not only does it make me better at my day
job, because much of it is easily applicable, but it makes me able to
meaningfully parse the world around me. Most engineers I know are not
particularly good at this--they do not have a liberal education and it shows
when one gets outside of a narrow band of small, usually very self-focused
interests. (It shows, in the aggressive disregard of history and the corpus of
human experience needed to think that the Austrian school, or even your
garden-variety libertarian fantasy, has bearing on the real world.)

Your "merely utilitarian" person is not equipped to understand (much less
solve) the causes of the problems that she describes. _That 's her point
entirely._

------
denniskane
So by this logic, MIT, Caltech, GaTech, Carnegie Mellon, as well as every
community college that focuses on real world training is doing a fundamental
disservice to our civil society.

I disagree, to say the least.

If everyone were an engineer, that probably would not be such a terrible
thing, but if everyone were a novelist, that probably would.

~~~
astazangasta
I am both. Actually, MIT trained me for both. Everyone ought to be both, a
little bit.

~~~
denniskane
If you want to throw around _oughts_ and _shoulds_ , I would confine those to
the rational/empirical side of the spectrum because that is the very
foundation upon which a society may be constructed.

Now, once that society is constructed, all of the other stuff is nice to have,
but I would not describe those things in morally imperative terms like that.

~~~
astazangasta
Eh? No, humanity is not constructed on a rational/empirical basis. For
example, most people want children; this is not rational, it's simply the way
humans are constructed. We enjoy music. We need sunlight to be happy. We have
a desire to live; none of these things are rational, they just are. We have
deep-seated fantasies about our position in the world; we imagine ourselves to
be heroes in a long-running saga. We cleave the world along the planes of this
narrative into 'good' and 'evil'. We hate, despite assurances that the
contrary is better, to be told what to do.

Unless we respond to this, our human side, our efforts will always fall dead.
We can't construct a society that doesn't acknowledge our humanity and expect
that people will want to live in it.

------
evtothedev
I feel like everyone in this thread is willfully misunderstanding this
article.

Her argument is that it's inherently democratic and leveling to teach the
humanities to all students.

Moreover, the humanities contribute to a stronger democracy, whether it's
through the development of empathy, or whether it's in the ability to read an
argument and understand the writer's point (such as in this article).

And it is the poor students, particular though push into pre-professional
degrees, that miss out on this sort of education.

------
romaniv
_> Now, universities by and large do not attempt to "prepare people for
citizenship and democracy." Instead, they educate them to be members of a
"docile, most skilled, working class."_

You need to go to liberal arts college to be prepared for citizenship and
democracy? Really? If by the time you get to college you're not interested in
"humanities", you're very unlikely to get interested after being forced to
listen to some mediocre lectures. And make no mistake, that's exactly what the
wast majority of students will get.

------
cafard
'The original rationale behind an American liberal arts education – to play a
vital role in democratizing privilege – "is under attack, or is being
forgotten," Robinson said. Now, universities by and large do not attempt to
"prepare people for citizenship and democracy."'

I would like to know what "original" means here, other than "what I think it
should be". Harvard was set up primarily to train clergy. The University of
Pennsylvania seemed to teach pretty much everything from the start (if I
remember my reading correctly). I would very much question whether Thomas
Jefferson had the democratization of privilege in mind when he founded the
University of Virginia.

------
mori
IMO: teaching people to appreciate culture or be good citizens is something
that is nearly impossible (at least with the tools we have now). As it stands,
it'd be a waste of everyone's time and money.

There is a lot of talk about how good it is to do this- yes, of course. But
there is little talk of whether it is possible or how to make it possible.
Comprehension of, say, math: that's something that can more-or-less be
measured by a test. How do you measure someone having the attitude of a free
thinker? Until practicalities are talked about, I can't see any of this as
anything but posturing. There should be pushes for investigation like CFAR
does.

~~~
rquantz
That's silly, of course it can be taught, and it can even be measured if
that's so important to you. Can this person read a text and understand the
arguments that are being made? Can this person tease out subtexts and
narratives and ideologies in the world around them? Can they write and make
themselves understood? Can they follow an argument to its logical conclusions
or pick apart failures in an argument? Can they recognize aesthetic and
technical choices, or stylistic and intellectual affinities within a work of
art? These are all skills necessary to be engaged in civic and cultural life,
and they can absolutely be taught.

------
mucker
You can't require everyone to go to college and then also have it be an
academic paradise. People "need" college now to work on Starbucks (which is
beyond ridiculous). We've bought into a social narrative where college is a
magic wand that makes everything better. Well people want you to _wave the
damn wand_ so they can move on with their lives.

------
utefan001
"Water the desert a little bit and then see what they become"

This many not be the type of watering she is referring to but if you are
interested in helping people gain marketable skills I can say from experience
it is very rewarding. I recently posted my availability as a mentor in the
software job category on Craigslist ($35) and have found 3 great people that
are financially poor, but rich in work ethic and motivation.

We have only connected via email, but have already started to make great
progress towered their goals. Many of us on this site have great knowledge
that might be taken for granted. If people don't have experience many
employers will not give them a chance. Being a bridge between the job at
Walgreen's to their first industry job is a joy to be a part of.

------
candybar
I don't have the numbers handy but I'm reasonably sure that more people are
studying liberal arts as previously defined than ever before in history. I
think there are really two large phenomena that underlie the apparent decline
of liberal arts education:

1) More and more people are attending 4-year colleges due to inflation in
expectation without necessarily any fundamental change in demand for skills
which means 4-years colleges are increasingly forced to perform the roles
previously filled by vocational schools and community colleges.

2) As our understanding of the world increases and our technological
capability expands, more and more things are brought under the umbrella of
STEM. A lot of what counts as science (social sciences, for example) for
example would have counted as liberal arts going back a few hundred years.
Even much of computer science as we know it today would've fallen somewhere
between math and philosophy. Study of languages at one point was an extremely
liberal-artsy pursuit, but Linguistics is a quantitative discipline with
strong connections to math and computer science. Likewise political science
had its roots in political philosophy and humanities but now it's a discipline
strongly influenced by statistics, economics and even game theory.

------
littletimmy
The amount of sheer ignorance in this thread is astounding. The political-
myopia of tech culture is on full display here...

What is being argued here is that there should be more to an education than a
vocation. The purpose of a higher education is to make one a thinking, learned
human being. It doesn't matter if you're Knuth when it comes to CS, if you
don't have a working knowledge of history and philosophy and political theory,
you're uneducated.

Another theme I see is that people have to earn a living so they must learn
ONLY STEM. That's false for 2 reasons. The first is that one can do non-
utilitarian study in philosophy, for example, while also learning CS to get a
job. It is also wrong because it is a reflection of the high cost of an
American education that forces people to think about "return on investment".
That is the very notion that is being criticized here! Education should not
calculated solely in economic terms because there are social returns to it.

The fact of the matter is that it is absolutely disastrous - morally and
culturally - to uncritically accept the views of our neoliberal system. The
humanities and non-utilitarian education helps you examine the system. That's
what ultimately makes the world a better place.

~~~
DaveWalk
Your points are well-argued. They remind me of an article in Harper's, "The
Neoliberal Arts"[0] which had a similar effect on me.

Allowing for just the possibility of non-financial rewards of an education
shows how shallow our "return on investment" culture is. When we see no value
in learning about art, philosophy, history...what does that say about our
values?

[0] [http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-
arts/](http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/)

~~~
wbillingsley
No, all of society (including the most free-market of conservatives) sees
value in learning about art, philosophy, history -- in fact every single one
of them at some point will have paid to learn about art, philosophy, history
etc (even if it's just going to the theatre or buying a book).

The debate from their perspective is simply that you only seem to see value in
learning about art in education if someone else pays for it for you, but not
enough to pay for it yourself.

The question of "the value of your education" can never win the argument
against privatisation/optimisation of education, because the more "value"
there is the more the consumer ought to be willing to pay for it.

The reasons for keeping education largely public and unoptimised are outside
of that -- avoiding competition on price (richest-student wins), that the
lecturers have a by-product that is useful to society (mulling problems where
we don't yet know whether they have value or not and the market cannot price
them), getting students from multiple backgrounds to bounce off each other
(avoid social silo-isation by discipline) etc.

~~~
littletimmy
There is no reason to apply economics to education. "Value" is not only
monetary. Your post is a prime example of someone who has absorbed the system
to an extent that it becomes the very backdrop against which to analyze
everything else.

~~~
maxerickson
Economics is happy to consider value that is not money.

It's a lot harder to deal with, but it isn't somehow excluded from the purview
of economics.

It's probably even necessary to make economic considerations when it comes to
education. Given limited resources, choosing to put them towards things that
return more value probably makes sense.

~~~
littletimmy
Doing something because it provides a higher "return" is exactly the sort of
utilitarian thinking this article is arguing against.

You should really try to see this from a non-monetary, non-utilitarian
perspective.

~~~
maxerickson
I'm not demanding a cost/benefit analysis, I'm simply pointing out that there
are real actual resource limitations involved, and that different sorts of
education will have different outcomes.

For example, if your desired outcome is self discovery, some education based
on indoctrination probably isn't going to work very well. That's a silly
example, but choosing between methods and selecting the one that best delivers
the result you desire isn't real distinguishable from making an economic
choice.

~~~
littletimmy
Think of education as an end-in-itself, rather than a utilitarian thing that
delivers certain outcomes.

I don't know how to make you stop thinking in a utilitarian way. There are
other philosophies, you know?

~~~
maxerickson
I'm pretty sure it can't coherently be an end in itself and deliver no value.

I responded to the juxtoposition here: _There is no reason to apply economics
to education. "Value" is not only monetary._

I'm not insisting that you view education through the lens of economics, I was
pointing out that what you said about value was not an argument against
economics (because economics doesn't care about what form value takes).

You keep looking for a word other than value to describe this thing that you
think should happen because then I can't point out that you can analyze it
economically, but this is not a way to argue that education should not be
analyzed economically, it is a misunderstanding of economics (it was really
clear when stated as _" Value" is not only monetary_, but "we should do it
just because" is still an imputation of value...).

~~~
littletimmy
This has turned into a last-word-mine argument, so I'm out.

------
afsina
>Now, universities by and large do not attempt to "prepare people for
citizenship and democracy." Instead, they educate them to be members of a
"docile, most skilled, working class."

Is she complaining that universities stopped being indoctrination machines and
do their actual job as to create professionals?

------
mariodiana
Allan Bloom was lamenting this more than 25 years ago, when college was
already not like it used to be:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind)

~~~
eropple
Thank you for this. More people should read Bloom; I was pointed to his work--
by a Ph.D. in political science, as it happens!--and it crystallized a lot of
my own severe misgivings about the way we teach (and don't teach).

~~~
wyclif
It's an excellent book and hasn't dated much at all.

------
DennisP
For at least as long as we keep bundling diplomas with large amounts of debt,
this trend will continue.

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sopooneo
Imagine if everyone knew a bit of serious first aid. That would be good for
society. But if a given person chose not to learn, it probably wouldn't hurt
them or those around them at all. I look at general education from this angle:
it is for the benefit of society, not just the individual. A critical mass of
the population having a grounding in "the arts and sciences" makes us richer
as a whole.

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glxc
tl;dr colleges are more focused on getting students employed

~~~
anigbrowl
...to pay off their massive college debts.

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timtas
This is not a new argument. It certainly goes back even before conservative
Russell Kirk's 1957 classic, The Inhumane Businessman [1].

It seems to me quite obvious a that the waning of liberal [2] education is a
bad thing. But these fashionable leftist laments miss the point and fail to
recognize some obvious causes of their own making.

In Kirk's time as now, the motivation to gain immediately marketable skills is
a strong one. The difference is that elites like Robinson see such motivations
as base and immoral, whereas Kirk saw them as deceptively un-utilitarian.

To the degree that ROI is a driver, the decline in general ed is certainly
accelerated by massive price inflation of that last few decades. But there's
another reason. The fact is liberal education in most American universities
has become a shoddy product. In many, it's become quite illiberal.

This is not abstract for me. I recently helped my son decide on a college. It
came down to two: School A, a school that's focussed on more practical topics
such as business and engineering. Scarcely one-fifth of the coursework is
general social sciences and humanities. And School B, an old and venerated
bastion of liberal ed. Both are top 40 national universities.

Now, we had already weeded out all the schools that have entirely thrown over
the western cannon for ideologically driven grievance-based curriculum. In
other words, our list was pretty small. The last step in our decision process
was to visit School B. I was hopeful because I want my son to go deep into
great ideas, for the very reasons that Kirk gives.

Then came the orientation. Announcement: we have a new core curriculum.

Wha...?

Students, it turns out, will no longer choose from among courses in history,
philosophy, literature, phycology, economics, etc. Now they will all be
funneled through a few newly developed "integrated" courses. Courses where
Greek classics are compared with Harry Potter. Classes that focus on the dying
American Dream. Courses where science and history are now a branches of
climate change activism.

No thanks. School A please.

This is what the market looks like when it's working.

[1] [http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/detail/the-inhumane-
busi...](http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/detail/the-inhumane-businessman)

[2] It's worth pointing out that "liberal" here means classical liberal, which
is nearly the opposite of "liberal" in the context of American politics.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It's worth pointing out that "liberal" here means classical liberal

No, it doesn't, though if you squint really hard you can see a _very_ loose
connection between the "liberal" in liberal education and the classical
liberalism.

> which is nearly the opposite of "liberal" in the context of American
> politics.

No, its not. Both "liberal" and "conservative" in contemporary American
political terms have roots in classical liberalism (and both have elements
that are hard to reconcile with it).

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jwatte
"Utilitarian" is a trend in all of society. We're all choosing a society that
grinds us down, one step at a time.

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calibraxis
> To "water the desert a little bit and then see what they become," Robinson
> said, is the "whole project of American education."

That's always been under contention (in probably most of the world) by
competing movements.

The talk of "citizenship" and "American" is also disturbingly nationalistic.
(To those lucky enough to have an awareness of nationalism.)

------
nickysielicki
Maybe I'm just a person with a very pessimistic outlook on the future of the
US and our economy, but I think articles like this are going to be laughed
about in 20 years.

Oh no! An faltering economy is emphasizing specialization! The horror! The
kids won't discover themselves!

