Posted on 10/30/2002 8:03:45 PM PST by cornelis
It is not so obvious that physical scientists need a liberal arts education, rooted in the study of language. They themselves assert that they have no time for it. They have insisted on the abolition of language requirements in almost every university graduate program in America. This development is directly related to the massive amount of fraud which now typifies scientific publication in this country. This scientific community has lost track of the historical and ethical roots of our civilization, the only civilization which has fostered the scientific ethic and considerable scientific research and discovery. Increasingly young men enter the sciences who do not understand that science is not a given, but an achievement, a tradition of research and discovery which si the hard-won accomplishment of one culture, fostered carefully and slowly for millenia until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scientists have lost touch with their own culture. They live without a narrative structure which frames and makes moral sense of their lives. They seem to belong to no culture and feel the claims of no cultural norms, claims that would be introduced and reinforced by a rigorous study of their own cultural traditions over the past twenty-five hundred years. For such people the borderline between fudging, misreporting of results, and outright fraud becomes as unclear as their own cultural heritage. All too often it is those who report or investigate such fraud who find themselves de-funded by the "profession." The attainment of truth is possible only within a tradition, as Alasdair MacIntyre has suggested. A rootless, traditionless, monoglot scientific elite has lost the basis of discovery, in science or any other area. Since they cannot discover truth and will not live without grants, they must lie.Recently conservatives have talked much of valuing creativity and an openness to the real world. If such an attitude is to be more than talk, we must face the fact that creativity is not found in every tradition. Ours is one of the few creative ones and we must work to re-establish our children's direct contact with that tradition, which is their own, after all. Despite all the changes recent decades have seen, culture is still transmitted primarily through language. The essential works necessary for understanding and transmitting our culture were written in Greek and Latin. Translations are marvelous tools, but no translation can be safely used or taught except by one who knows the original tongue. An educational curriculum founded on Greek and Latin gave us Jefferson and Adams, Burke and Samuel Johnson, not to mention Copernicus and Newton, Luther and Calvin, Michaelangelo and Bach. Educators have developed curricula and texts which can teach these languages on any level from pre-school through college. Most subjects that are important for formative education can be be taught through and with these languages. The materials are out there, lying in the warehouses of the Cambridge and Oxford University Presses. We have in our hands the making of a reactionary revolution of excellence. The questions we must ask ourselves are the following: Do we have the will to give our children their own culture back again? Do we have the courage to restore meaning and creativity to our nation?
Help me out here. What does that have to do with the subject at hand? Do you think that because they don't have to take any hard science classes, you should not have to take any humanities?
After adjustment, all 4 of us got over 110% in one course. It turns out that science majors get a lot more experience writing material that is graded than many social science students: 4 x 3 hr labs a week, each requiring a written report, gets your thoughts organized. Otherwise, you will be "Darwined" out of the program. I even had an old British prof that refused to award an A if a report contained poor grammer and excessive spelling mistakes, but was otherwise great on a technical level. When students complained, he simply said they had graduated high school and are expected to know how to write properly.
I will also admit that the publish or perish mantra of grad school in the hard sciences is very real. Even small universities are pressure cookers from the competition for grant money. Professors learn how to break research down into the "least publishable unit" in order to pad their C.V.'s.
First, they tried to emulate, but that required intellectual disciplene, which is hard to develop without algebra and geometry taken at an early age. SO the next natural step was to declare themselves being at par with natural scientists. But that required evidence, which was hard to come by: consider, for instance, that economics is as old as discipline as physics, yet it can barely make predictions in the small (one individual) or in the large (economy), whereas physicists can see galaxies billions of light years away.
So, next one had to deconstruct, negating the truth itself and what is knowable. Now the parity is achieved: "I admit I do not know much," says the social scientist of 1990s to his "hard science" counterpart, "but you do not know anything either."
This idiotic vitriol is nothing more than "science envy." THe author would be well advised to read a bit on the lives of great scientists and then assess the breadth of their knowledge. He could also benefit from meeting a few livign scientists. Finally, he should ask himself whether they know more about society than he about nature.
Possibly yes. The point of an engineering student taking humanities is not to have them excel in the arts, it's to ensure they get enough education to be reasonably well versed in these areas. As an engineer you will need those skills to function effectively.
An important distinction will be useful here. I quote again,
"Education is the study and mastery of a body of knowledge which is formative in character. Training involves learning information which is instrumental or banausic and which serves to solve some immediate problem or accomplish some specific goal. Both training and education are important for a society. Anyone, however, can be trained to do something. (Naturally the complexity and difficulty of the jobs will vary from being a short order cook to being a brain surgeon.) Fewer can profit from education. The goal of education is to produce thoughtful people capable of judging matters of general importance in a disinterested manner, with maturity, with a wealth of general knowledge, and with the courage of the commitment (a condition which is both intellectual and moral) to face facts. A society without trained workers will not get its work done. A society without educated citizens will collapse in times of crisis and will wither away in times of ease and prosperity.
And again, those who build bombs are not exactly the same who say when to use them.
On that note, fraud of a lesser degree is often never caught. Instead, it winds up in dusty, old journals and are never cited. They are forgotten after others, in vain, tried to reproduce or expand on those erroneous papers and then moved on to more prosperous projects.
I'm a physics major at the U of TN, Knoxville. I thought of taking the Engineering Physics path for this very reason. UT doesn't force nearly as much stuff on engineers as they do on the so-called "pure sciences" like chemistry, biology, physics, etc. The College of Engineering makes their own graduation requirements and takes care of their own pretty well, while physics got cubbyholed into the College of Arts and Sciences, which requires this stuff.
Hey, we technical types need to unite, can't let the man keep us down, eh? :o)
Just a suggestion. When you are taking the humanity courses, have some fun (you have to take them anyway). There will likely be a bunch of half witted feminist wannabes grouped up in the back giving any man death stares that they view as hostile to their brand of lunacy.
Start an intellectual fight in class over some silly prose that the man hater clan has just deconstructed into some Marxist anti-capitalistic gibberish. Have fun with them. They won't like you anyway. It worked for me.
Where on earth do you get such pearls? Is putting all smart words in one sentence supposed to make it deep?
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