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Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Is College Worth It?
This is graduation season, so we thought it was the perfect time to ask author/journalist Andy Ferguson (Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College) and essayist and former editor of American Scholar Joseph Epstein to discuss the origin and value (if any) of getting a classical liberal arts education.
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Published in General
One doesn’t get ahead in modern corporate America by reasoning well or wrestling with ancient, big ideas.
Hierarchical corporate culture postmodernist. Your objective achievements mean little to your success. The modern, competitive work environment is a war over the meaning of things. If you control the semantics, by socially constructing the meaning of critical events, you will always come out on top. Modern work, perhaps even most of modern life, really is postmodern in this sense.
The liberal arts will give you a sense of truth. You may even develop a firm believe that truth cannot contradict truth. Even worse, a liberal arts education could lead you to stand up for honesty and consistency. Fatally, you might feel a moral obligation to defend people unfairly passed over by the postmodern system.
A liberal arts education really is a poor preparation for modern work. The liberal arts predispose you to dissatisfaction with modern work culture. They don’t prepare you for the postmodern war of semantics.
You should still get one, though. Would you rather be Jacob wrestling with the truth, or a typical business manager?
A “classical liberal arts education” like one might get at Hillsdale would be valuable as an undergrad for law or business, or for an aspiring pundit.
Six years of 12 oz curls and hook ups, gender studies, history of climate change, etc. is worthless.
Six years of 12 oz curls and hook ups, gender studies, history of climate change, etc. is worthless. ·0 minutes ago
Yep, a classical liberal arts education is a great thing. But the secret is that you really don’t need to pay much money to get one. Take a thousand dollars that you would have otherwise spent on tuition fees or a meal plan and put it towards a large collection of books on history, economics, culture, religion, math, the classics, and biology. You will be far intellectually and monetarily richer.
Today college isn’t worth the sticker price. After spending about 80 grand on a private, classical, liberal education (about half was covered by the GI bill and grants, but I account for all of it as “spent” money, even if I’m not on the hook for all of it) I’d say a liberal education is worth about 10 grand today. And it would cost that to boot if there was no such thing as a student loan and “education administration.”
I was pleased that my undergraduate major didn’t make the top 10. I studied Classics. At least I walked away from it with a real set of skills, reading Latin and Ancient Greek. Which, at the very least, is quite impressive, and I can go out and get payed to teach these subjects. But in retrospect I wish I had stuck to my original plan and gotten my BSE degree.
I dispute every single point about online education. Nearly every single one of those points has been and is being addressed. For subjects with no need to physically put hands on something, Online education is great new thing.
Another positive change is that testing is going away and we are seeing a return to ancient forms of knowledge verification. The project, the paper, and oral delivery.
For instance, at UNC where I am presently a student, this semester I have a major project due (on sunday), and on tuesday I have an oral delivery to my professor and class by whom I will be judged.
The fact that I am sitting in my office with a pair of 24″ monitors doesn’t mean that I am not interacting with 15 people.
I am also with Andy on what killed the liberal arts.
It was the social sciences and the conceit that man and the world is best understood by multiple regression.
Do you know what perfectly describes this view of man? The flats in Glasgow. Never is there a place where they purposely built shelves for things that poop. Nowhere is there any acknowledgement of the part of me that is I. All we are in this view is a thing that poops which has varying degrees of utility. How sad is the shelf for the thing with no utilitarian value.
RE: Sherwin Rosen
Not all deep minds are fast, and not all fast minds are deep. We refer to this phenomenon as “processing time” in the jargon of education. The slow but deep mind is capable of amazing insight, but a good teacher will allow such students time to think on the problem before posing a question. Generally a writing exercise is better than the repartee of classroom discussion for such students. The four types of minds are described as follows:
Fast and deep: Lileks, Steyn, and Klaven
Slow but deep: as described above.
Fast but shallow: AD/HD kids who spout the first thing that comes into their head, and are more likely to be wrong than right.
Slow and shallow: Are the lights on at all?
I believe that Ferguson and Epstein are a little too pessimistic on the opportunities offered to the Liberal Arts by the communications afforded by the Internet. How else would I have heard the above conversation?
The brain is not a muscle. Education doesn’t make you smarter. But good tools help a carpenter do his job better and faster. Education can provide you with thinking tools, but tools don’t make a bad carpenter into a good carpenter usually. Sometimes a tool can make a difficult job into an easy job, so a bad carpenter can do what only a good carpenter could do previously. But the good carpenter is still better. The gap is never closed.
People once said that a good liberal arts education was useful because it taught you how to function within an environment of difficult and important ideas. They also thought the actual skills acquired would generalize into the broader world of work.
I doubt those benefits apply much any more, certainly not outside academia. It seems like a B.A, M.A. or Ph.D merely opens doors in ones career. Sadly, many students agree and, accordingly, only pay lip service to the knowledge and skills encountered in a liberal arts degree program.
Once a graduate has used his credential to acquire a position, it seems that other factors determine his progress. Is it overly cynical to suggest that, in fields associated with a liberal arts degree, the ability to understand and navigate the political environment of one’s workplace is the primary factor in success?
Finally, does it make me a hopeless curmudgeon to speculate that reasoned, intellectually-grounded analysis and interpretation now play far smaller roles in most professional careers outside the hard sciences than they once did?
Yep, a classical liberal arts education is a great thing. But the secret is that you really don’t need to pay much money to get one. Take a thousand dollars that you would have otherwise spent on tuition fees or a meal plan and put it towards a large collection of books on history, economics, culture, religion, math, the classics, and biology. You will be far intellectually and monetarily richer. ·22 hours ago
Here’s the problem: is it really an education without formal teaching? I have a lot of sympathy for your view on this, and am inclined to agree with it (and I think technological/economic/societal changes are going to promote that view)… but…. this quote keeps coming back to me:
Is simply reading great works enough? Serious question.
Douglas, good question. Education certainly doesn’t have to exist in a vacuum. In addition to amassing and reading books, you should seek out book clubs, forums in which your views are challenged and critiqued, test what you read against your own experience, and seek out elders to bounce your ideas off of. I was disabused of a lot of idiocy by my elders who pointed out the more nonsensical things I was enamored by when I first began reading avidly.
BSE=bovine spongiform encephalopathy? Oh, you mean an engineering degree? Well, some might say there’s a bit of the -pathy to it.
Yep, a classical liberal arts education is a great thing. But the secret is that you really don’t need to pay much money to get one. Take a thousand dollars that you would have otherwise spent on tuition fees or a meal plan and put it towards a large collection of books on history, economics, culture, religion, math, the classics, and biology. You will be far intellectually and monetarily richer. ·17 hours ago
Yep. More and more people are coming around to that realization, it seems.
http://www.uncollege.org/about/
https://www.udacity.com/georgiatech
Jo Epstein wisely refused to call himself a better man for his Liberal Arts education. I would suggest that one is far more likely to have one’s character improved by being an apprentice in a machine shop surrounded by adults who have to provide for their families than studying the Western Canon in a faculty full of academics, no matter what their ideological proclivities.