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?
Before you rush to criticise Boiler Plate so sarcastically and make a fool of youself in the process, read up a bit on the history of universities and stabilization of first curricula in them. BP was correct in his statement.
I agree with you there. It also seems professors outside of the engineering programs sometimes take a special joy in busting the chops of engineering students.
Ari, to make you an engineer is the task of a vocational school, not of a university. The university said that engineering is your major, not the totality of your education; it was honest in its advertising thus. Being an engineer you should know the difference: 60% is a major portion of something but not the whole of it.
That's why, while sharing FR's concern for media bias, I don't think the solution is to rail about the bias. Rather we need to educate ourselves, deprogramming ourselves from secular humanistic myths and brainwashing. This took me years of work personally, after a lifetime of indoctrination in government schools and media. I went from being a suicidal teen (albeit a National Merit Scholar, etc.) to a creationist and a Christian from the study of creationary and other biblical apologetics. They formed the foundation for my new, biblical worldview.
Our government today is corrupt because our society is corrupt. Men who deny God have no basis for recognizing something is "corrupt" (outside of meaningless personal opinion) unless they acknowledge a divine standard. That is what is missing in today's society. As Solzhenitsyn said, men have forgotten God. I thank God that He never forgot *me* and so richly blesses me and answers our prayers with such faithfulness as I could not have imagined!
So let us not curse the darkness, FReepers, but light candles with our own lives, and share the warmth of God's love and truth with others. Ephesians 2:8-9.
... Marathon!
cornelis I see you have been deprived. Sorry to hear that.
This betrays a bit of loss of logic on your part, doesn't it, Cornelis? C XIII asked why is logical thinking no longer a basic requirement; after all, Calculus I does not touch anything we learned since about 1800. That is, he questions why would non-engineers be so deprived.
In response you express, patronisingly, your regrets that he, Constantine III is deprived. Not much logic there; you must have flucked that Calculus I.
See my earlier post on penis... or so, science envy. YOu appear to be afflicted.
My HS chemistry teacher told a really funny story to us once. He and some of his friends had some left over sodium from a project and decided to have some fun with it. They took it out to a pond and threw it in--entertaing combustion ensues. Unfortunately, some ducks landed in the pond and tried to eat the stuff, and they ended up having to jump into the pond and chase them off!
Beautifully put, and true. Nobody gets an education at university anyhow, they only get a start at one, and the tools to pursue one if they're so inclined. The difference is that a liberal arts graduate who enters his job market asserting that he has a mastery of, say, cultural anthropology, will receive a treatment very different from an engineering or science graduate who has the temerity to state the same thing about his or her field. The latter, at the very least, will receive a boot in a rather sensitive area and an admonition to shut up and listen to someone who's actually done it.
There isn't much I really like about W.E.B. DuBois - he was a communist, a racist, and an anti-American emigrant, but as an educator he did get one thing really right, IMHO:
Our purpose is not to turn men into carpenters, it is to turn carpenters into men.
So let me lighten up a little - it is not impossible for anyone to obtain a well-rounded education with enough skull-sweat, but it is much easier for a physics graduate to grasp Aristotle than it is for a sociology graduate to grasp Einstein. Neither is easy.
History of Math
Math
Computer programming
Techniques of Analysis/Evaluation
History of Science
Quantitative Research Methods
BIO 103 and 104, or CHEM 101 and CHEM 102 or PHYS 103 and PHYS 104
I'll bet the LA majors dislike the last requirements even more that Engineering students dislike the LA requirements.
Those science and math courses that 'everyone' else takes are so basic, that they really are high school courses. And the amount of courses non-physical science students need to take are not equal to the number of course in humanities that physical science students have to take.
I remember the number of units I needed in order to graduate with a Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering. 210 units! There were 36 or so units just for 'fluff' subjects! The Liberal Arts or other students have to only get 150 or so units in order to graduate.
No wonder there is a shortage of engineers in this country. 210 units is 5.83 years of 36 units a year! Compare this with 4.16 years for a 150 unit degree!
Besides, I think it should be equal... they get 36 units, we get 36 units. Why should we spend the equivalent of 1 year of classtime in order to oogle at the pretty Liberal Arts majors and not get a date? They can spend the equivalent of 1 year of classtime being surrounded by nerdy engineers, and being asked by everyone for a date. :D
Now, the rest are usually science courses:
BIO 103 and 104, or CHEM 101 and CHEM 102 or PHYS 103 and PHYS 104
Usually, Phys 101-102 and 201-202 are a required three- or four-semester sequence for scientists and engineers. Phys 103 must be "Physics for Poets." It is, however, indeed a physics appreciation course: totally devoid of mathematics, it does not constitute a physics course per se.
I know of one college, which I respect greatly, that respects the fundamentals: St. John's. But in the area of science they go overborard: in their bookstore, I saw reproductiond of Newton's works required for some course. To study mathematics, you do not need to go to such sources!
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