Posted on 06/02/2015 10:27:42 AM PDT by pabianice
In recent months, Christopher Scalia in the Wall Street Journal and Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post have defended studying the liberal arts in college, primarily to confront advocates of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Zakaria’s article previewed his new book, “In Defense of a Liberal Education.”
From my perspective as a former engineer, two caveats arise regarding their pleas: first, “liberal” education that involves “critical thinking” disappeared decades ago, to be replaced by hyper-sensitive grievance mongering; second, the quantitative reasoning STEM occupations develops also facilitates the understanding of trade-offs people need to make rational decisions among myriad conflicting policy options. Liberals Have Killed the Liberal Arts
Political correctness has corroded the humanities and social studies, as recently noted by David Patten in The Federalist and last year by Harvey Silverglate in the Wall Street Journal. After rejecting their objective anchors in the academic canon of classical texts, these fields succumbed to passionate group thinking and sybaritic self-absorption. The arts have become a free-for-all, as witnessed by the plethora of departments categorized by identity politics and demands for “trigger warnings” for traumatized souls. (The offending list should include “eigenvectors” and “thermodynamics”—terms that strike engineering sophomores with utmost dread.)
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. STEM is becoming politicized too.
STEM is becoming STEAM.
A = Arts.
Which pretty much covers everything and renders the acronym moot.
Yes and then also I’ve seen “Social Sciences” bundled into the “S” of STEM.
All we have left now is the institutionalized grievance industry.
“It used to be that Liberal Arts prepared students to be able to read challenging material with comprehension, to write lucidly and logically..., and to be able to persuasively argue your opinions with data and logic.”
Yes! In short, to be able to think and seek Truth. Today, you can’t. As Bloom described and predicted, it’s the Closing of the American Mind.
I’ve got my own opinions on the whole STEM push. It’s great if the student is bent toward the technical field, but the untoward push for girls in STEM is kind of dumb.
I used to coach a high school robotics team. The girls on the team seemed to gravitate away from the mechanical toward the promotion and media end of the team. Realistically, it’s just as if not more important to the teams success.
To the authors point about the difference between STEM and liberal arts, my son is an engineering major. At most schools, students dread Calculus. At his school the dreaded class is an Arts class. They have to go to some galleries and an opera. These kids who live in black and white have a hard time describing the “feelings” of an artist who lives in the gray middle. It’s actually kind of funny.
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All the Liberal Arts Majors took Geology or Biology as their Science elective when I was in College.
I took Geology as I was considering Petroleum Engineering and wanted to see if I liked it.
The Rocks were NOT the dumbest items in the class.
If colleges don’t collect $200,000 from students to get a Women’s Studies degree WHO will be serving my coffee?
Coffee tastes ever so sweet when sprinkled with the tears of an unemployable social justice warrior with a massive amount of debt and a master’s degree.
What is actually being argued here is not any innate superiority of the engineering/science curricula, but the dilution and loss of rigor within the humanities curricula. That doesn't actually touch on which is "more important to society".
That dilution is pretty easy to restore, but not in the face of furious resistance on the part of politically inspired culture warriors who mistake rigor and academic discipline for social oppression. These are folks who not only couldn't pass freshman calculus, they're folks who resent being asked to. They don't do very well with Aristotle and Tolstoy, either.
In short, the liberal arts aren't dead, they're as vibrant and vital as ever. The people studying them may be worthy of the topic or not. The difference is that when that happens in engineering, they flunk.
Well you’ve gotta have someone to tax to provide gubbermint jobs for all of those Liberal Arts grads, dontcha now...
There will once again be a place for the liberal arts when they become less “liberal” and more “arts.”
I thought you were making a joke.
Ignores schools like hillsdale, christendom, etc...
Kind of like undefining the word “marriage”, eh?
That must be the math that actuaries for public employee pensions majored in.
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