I admit this leans into pedantry, but I think it's important not to conflate "amount of education received" with "amount of knowledge possessed". In the US our people are more educated than they've ever been, but I wouldn't say they're more knowledgeable than ever.
I completely agree that the more knowledgeable a society is the better off it is, but if the education industry is allowed to prop itself up with the widespread belief that more years of education necessarily result in a better-off population, you get the military-industrial-style propagation of institutions, loans, debt, and wasted time that we're familiar with today.
I don't think that's really a counterpoint. My point was that I get the impression that even those in the humanities seem to be losing familiarity with liberal ideas. So it's even worse now (or we've just lied to ourselves as we pretend to expand access to higher education).
Where do you get this impression from? Faculty? Published research? My observation is that people working in the humanities have a deeper and wider reading list than at any point in prior history.
If you are complaining about students then I don't see what the problem is with not having read these particular texts. The humanities is so incredibly wide and it is good that we have widened curricula to not just focus everybody down a particular reading list of western intellectual tradition. A humanities education isn't there to just pump out classical liberals.
A polisci major who studies ancient chinese politics or 21st century dictatorships is just as legitimate as somebody who studies Locke and western liberal democracy.
I'm mostly speaking to the students, but certainly there are faculty that would apply to as well.
If we're talking about some intangible benefit to society for having lots of educated people, I would interpret that as being in service to civic contributions, so yes I would expect that means a liberal arts education should teach Western canon, and certainly it should not undermine it. If not in service to economic utility or propagating our values and traditions, then why exactly would we support a large portion of the population to do nothing but pursue hobby study in something no one else wants for years? Actually it's not even clear that the students even want to do that study either, given the apparent mass cheating or AI usage. So who is it for?
What does it mean to undermine it? Is your position that no matter what the rigorous application of some research method produces that you should always come to a predetermined conclusion that some particular form of western liberalism fro the 17th century is the best? Or is it possible to place these texts in complex and even critical dialog with other texts?
Can you be specific about which "values and traditions" you need to see forcefully propagated through higher education? And are we to assume that a particular form of libertarian economic project is best for "economic utility?" And should we even be optimizing for economic utility rather than human flourishing?
Hobby study? Graduates in the humanities also consistently get jobs that require degrees and go into the work force.
I am curious how much time you've spent engaged with the college humanities departments of today.
You can place them in a dialog with other texts, but that implies that students are reading and becoming intimately familiar with the canon being critiqued. And generally speaking, I'd expect more of a refinement than a critique per se.
I didn't say we should forcefully propagate anything; I said we shouldn't fund things that aren't useful somehow. Some basic values would be that e.g. governments derive their authority from the citizenry, and should therefore always act in the interests of the citizens. If the citizens aren't seeing some benefit, then they shouldn't be taxed to fund a thing. Assuming people disagree on whether they want something, it follows that government should be as local as possible, so if we do fund such things, we shouldn't do so at the federal level unless there is widespread agreement (e.g. maybe we all agree to fund STEM degrees for their economic utility but there is disagreement on social science so those are done locally).
Or that as a high level idea, our entire system is predicated on the idea that people are qualified and able to define their own destiny and self-govern, which is generally in opposition to the idea that we are determined by various privileges and circumstances that require all sorts of compensatory adjustments. Basically, if you want to flourish, just go do that. Again, the books are all there. Most if not all of them are free. We already have 13 years of free, compulsory schooling to learn how to read them.
Or the idea that rights should be principled (e.g. carry some symmetry), not arbitrary. c.f. elsewhere in the thread about natural rights. And by extension, that some systems (e.g. ours) are better than others.
The context here is targeting programs that do not produce economic benefit, so that is hobby study, yes. There's nothing wrong with hobby study. I read textbooks all the time for fun. I think we should encourage everyone to do a lot more of it instead of e.g. Instagram. But I also have a day job.
I don't understand how the only use of the humanities is to teach people about classical liberalism. Surely my polysci friend who worked on 21st century dictatorships and my history friend who worked on early modern communication networks are doing something valuable too? You are begging the question here and just starting from a position that only your very narrow conception of the humanities has any value at all.
I don't think that your claim that "our entire system is predicated on the idea that people are qualified and able to define their own destiny and self-govern" is actually well supported by the evidence. You are excising nuance and evidence in favor of a top down constraint on allowable ideas. You are doing the thing that University of Iowa is doing now, which is insisting on coursework that explicitly teaches things like "capitalism is the best system" rather than being driven by expert analysis and research.
I also feel that my wife, also a historian, contributes far more to our society than somebody working at Instagram finding a way to make children look at more ads or somebody working at DraftKings find a way to get problem gamblers to restart their addiction. But those people have STEM degrees so they are automatically net benefits to the world.
Also, a humanities education is not typically built from textbooks.
I'm not making nearly that strong of an argument, and indeed neither is the regulation under discussion. They need to demonstrate that it's somehow beneficial on average to economic outcomes. That could mean:
* You were able to apply that knowledge to something someone wanted.
* The experience somehow inspired you to find your own path to success.
* Your degree helped convince someone else that you're a generally intelligent or knowledgeable person and therefore more valuable to them.
etc. I added on top that as a liberal society, we could perhaps agree that being well versed in liberal tradition is itself valuable.
I take your friends' work to mean they're in some academic position? Because funding some small number of those is a different proposition from funding a significant portion of the population to study whatever.
Though actually if we back up a bit here, my original point was more that I doubt people are even learning things. e.g. if your history friend is unfamiliar with important parts of their own country's history (stuff that might even be expected in high school or earlier, but people don't do the readings), I'd be skeptical of the value of their program in the same way that I'd be skeptical of an engineer that doesn't know the difference between an ionic and covalent bond, or Newton's laws, or some basic programming, or RLC circuits, or other basic things that someone technical should know.
Self-governance and self-determination are the founding assumptions underlying our democracy. This is pretty clearly stated in our founding documents. This has nothing to do with capitalism.
I agree that people at Instagram and DraftKings are negatives to society, and probably they also failed to obtain their liberal arts education. Largely I think people with these things on their resume should be blacklisted by others as they proudly wear their lack of morals, and we should do more to regulate such things.
Maybe my wording was off; by textbook my meaning was more along the lines of treatise, i.e. not casual.
> They need to demonstrate that it's somehow beneficial on average to economic outcomes.
Well we can demonstrate conclusively with data that people who get a humanities education have lower unemployment and earn higher wages than people without college degrees. What else is needed?
> I added on top that as a liberal society, we could perhaps agree that being well versed in liberal tradition is itself valuable.
I do not agree that being well versed in liberal tradition is more valuable than being well versed in other humanities domains. The things that a humanities education teaches that are good for society are not adherence to libertarian philosophy.
> Though actually if we back up a bit here, my original point was more that I doubt people are even learning [these] things
And I asked where you are getting this conclusion from. This is a pretty strong claim given that you don't seem to be engaged with humanities departments in a meaningful way.
> I agree that people at Instagram and DraftKings are negatives to society, and probably they also failed to obtain their liberal arts education. Largely I think people with these things on their resume should be blacklisted by others as they proudly wear their lack of morals, and we should do more to regulate such things.
Why then can we assume that a STEM education is good for society in ways that you insist we cannot assume for a humanities education? If this education can be actively harmful to society then surely we need to apply your same concerns there.
> Maybe my wording was off; by textbook my meaning was more along the lines of treatise, i.e. not casual.
Usually "monograph" is the term used for academic books in the humanities.
People earning higher wages as the result of their degree are explicitly and exactly not the topic of discussion. The discussion is about funding for programs that measurably do not produce economic benefits, and some supposed intangible benefit to just being educated.
I get the conclusion from having been a student, having socialized with other students, observing discussions from teachers online and seeing that things are either the same or worse, and observing my fellow citizens. It's like asking how I know most young people in the US have premarital sex or how I know the obesity epidemic isn't actually a bodybuilder epidemic: because I live here. If studies said otherwise, I'd have to assume the study was wrong.
STEM education is easy to demonstrate the utility of because it shows how to make things that improve our lives. People working at Instagram should face criminal stalking charges, and gambling (or at least advertising it) should likely be made widely illegal again. That doesn't mean people programming inventory management systems or ensuring bridges have adequate safety factors and avoid catastrophic resonance aren't directly providing value with skills they learned.
I don't understand what you mean by "do not produce economic benefits" then. So you say STEM majors do this and that humanities majors do not. But I truly do not understand.
I really do not think that your understanding of a modern humanities education is correct. I get my conclusion by being married to a humanities professor and friends with a lot of humanities professors. I also get this from reviewing syllabi at large universities. The idea that there is some widespread project to deliberately undermine texts that are part of the western canon because of some bias against them is just simply not based in reality.
What would be an example of a piece of evidence that you see that you find compelling here?
> The test itself is simple: If an undergraduate program's graduates don't earn more than workers who never went to college, that program could be cut off from federal student loans. The same goes for any graduate program whose graduates earn less than someone with only a bachelor's degree.
I'm not going to go so far as to claim that there's a widespread project to undermine our society (as opposed to individual indifference or disdain), but you yourself demonstrated the issue: when I express my doubts that supposedly educated Americans have ever actually read their own constitution, you ask why that's an issue an why we should privilege that above other reading. Ancient Chinese political theory is neat and all but how about knowing the basics of our own country?
If that is the test then it is plainly obvious from the data that humanities majors earn more than workers who never went to college. Where are you getting this idea that this isn't happening?
In my state the text of the constitution is taught in 8th grade civics as part of the mandated state curriculum. How is this tied to undergraduate education? You immediately expanded this to "liberal ideas" and then "western canon." Are you just talking about the constitution or are you talking about reading Locke and Shakespeare?
I didn't say humanities majors don't earn more. People who earn more with their degree aren't the contention. The contention is the nebulous, intrinsic value of a "more educated society", c.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48880930
The constitution might've been mandated as part of the curriculum. That doesn't say much. The question in this subthread was about the relation between "education received" and "amount of knowledge possessed", to which I replied that I doubt most American college educated adults have actually read the constitution.
To illustrate, I had never actually bothered to read the constitution at the time that I got a 4 on the AP US History Exam. It is not hard to pass tests without reading or thinking about the material, and when it comes to what's part of state standards, we all know it's nearly impossible to fail US K-12.
So I am talking about all of those things; the constitution and Locke and Shakespeare and Homer are all supposed to be on the curriculum. How many people actually read them? To what extent is even more education a delusion? If you don't need expensive lab equipment (and this includes some STEM fields like math/CS), do we need everyone going to universities? Or if you actually want to learn the material, can you just do so?
> I didn't say humanities majors don't earn more. People who earn more with their degree aren't the contention. The contention is the nebulous, intrinsic value of a "more educated society", c.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48880930
What? What is going on with this quote then?
"The test itself is simple: If an undergraduate program's graduates don't earn more than workers who never went to college, that program could be cut off from federal student loans. The same goes for any graduate program whose graduates earn less than someone with only a bachelor's degree."
> The constitution might've been mandated as part of the curriculum. That doesn't say much. The question in this subthread was about the relation between "education received" and "amount of knowledge possessed", to which I replied that I doubt most American college educated adults have actually read the constitution.
Up thread you said you doubted most college educated adults had read the constitution. You then repeated this. Now reading it isn't relevant? I have absolutely no idea what you are looking for here.
If your position is to simply assume that everybody is not doing any of the reading in a humanities class and then conclude that the classes must be useless then what can I possibly do here? We can have data demonstrating that humanities graduates earn higher wages than non-graduates. We can have curricula that include the materials you want people to learn.
> Or if you actually want to learn the material, can you just do so?
A university education gives you access to faculty members who are experts in the material they are teaching and who construct syllabi that are effective at teaching certain concepts and who can provide feedback on a student's analysis of those readings. They can also teach archival research skills that you'd never learn by just looking up famous books online. That is valuable.
----
I still am really struggling to understand specifically what you are frustrated by here. Can you give me an example of some specific interaction you've had with a person that you would attribute to the ineffectiveness of a contemporary humanities education?
Those texts were a standard part of grade school social studies when I was young, and my children read all in the course of a typical public education long before graduating.
They might be part of the curriculum, but apparently ~half the country doesn't know what we just celebrated[0], so I somehow doubt they actually did their reading. It's pretty easy to pass or even do well in classes without really engaging with the material at all, even at the university level. Like I got an A in a philosophy course by just reading the professor's notes on exam morning and spitting them back out on an essay. I've still never gone back and actually read Grotius.
Right but that's just it: it's barely the upper half (over 40% of young people now get a degree apparently[0]), and the age breakdown indicates that 40% is also apparently the proportion of 18-29s that know we declared independence 250 years ago. So assuming continuity and rough correspondence of the two distributions, that's approximately the level of knowledge at the threshold of degree holders now.
Actually the census data says ~43% get a degree and the article says 39% of 18-29s know what we celebrated, so presumably at least 4% (~9% of degree holders) are able to get a degree and don't know.
If this is our bottom end, I get the sense that even above-average students (even of liberal arts) aren't reading Montesquieu or whatever image people try to evoke about highly educated societies.
Absolutely agree, and if we could work up a way for there to be endless education, I'd be down for that (and would sign up in a heartbeat --- I'd love to have the wherewithal to pursue a PhD --- one of my most favourite books is Roger Zelazny's _Doorways in the Sand_ and a big part of that is envy for the protagonist's situation, his rich uncle's will provides for his full tuition, room, board, and a generous stipend for so long as he attends his uncle's _alma mater_ which he has been doing for decades --- naturally, the story opens with his having been assigned a special advisor whose assignment is to get him graduated).
Is it? We have piled on tons of new years of education, are we that much better off as a society, more cultured than, say, the French in the 50s when most people had like 8 classes under their belt?
I would also argue society is better if its people are more educated.