NEWS: Notes on the Death of Liberal Arts

yeah, fuck liberal arts.

i had to go to a community college because my state stafford loan allowance couldn't pay for anything else. my parents made too much money when i was in school for me to be eligible for pell grants, but not enough to pay for college, since thehouse was already twice mortgaged.

at age 18, i couldn't get a job to pay for anything but gas money and insurance and my car payment, since i didn't have a college education.

so community college, in my town, required speech and psychology and english comp and arts and humanities and basic windows 95 and how to type in MS word, and after a year and a half of bullshit electives i finally got to the actual classes and because i was working a night job to be able to afford the books and part of tuition and car payment and gas and insurance, i slept through half of my classes and failed them miserably.

i ended up dropping out after three years and no two-year degree and i had probably only gotten to take maybe two or three actual web design related classes in that three year period.

if i had been able to just take the courses i needed to get a degree in web design, instead of dicking around with classes i had already taken in high school (and it was a SMALL school so the class choices were limited, but i STILL had taken all the elective classes in high school form), i could have gotten a degree, not had to max out credit cards to pay the bills, and not be in the debt and credit predicament i am in today.

in a few years, when i pay off the last of my student loan and credit card debt, i'm going back to school for a music major, and i will only be taking the courses related to the major. if i want to take a history course or an art elective for personal interest, i will. but a college is into making money and does not necessarily have my best interest in mind when its staff tells me i an required to take an english comp course i took in sixth, eighth, 10th and 12th grades, and excelled in all.

so i reiterate: fuck liberal arts. that shit has been in need of 86 for decades now. good riddance to bad college course policy.

Oh boy...at risk of veering slightly off topic and arguing with a student from the school that invented Core Studies, I'm not entirely sure it's a good idea to dictate a canon of liberal arts "disciplines" that are forced on students across the board in hopes of making them well rounded. I just don't see it working and in fact, I think that it isn't really different from the business/trade school model of education.

Liberal arts fields (like sociology or psychology) and crafts fields (business, finance, law) all fall under the banner of what the Greeks would have called techne, applied practical fields or technologies. Rather than open a student up to the wide world of human possibilities, liberal arts programs seem to teach a series of crafts and standards. Here's how we do history, now here's now we do anthropology. And here's political science. It's really no different from business school, except that it claims to be something other than what it is.

Ideally, one of these things will stick because it appeals to the student's innate interests. As for the rest, people claim it rounds out the student. I think it does worse. Einstein once said that:

"It is little short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not already completely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry…. I believe that one could even deprive a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness if one could force it with a whip to eat continuously whether it were hungry or not."

Maybe I'm an idealist, but I've always thought that a passion for learning is all that's needed for a single individual to explore their own unique interests and through that exploration have the wide world of other areas open up to them. When done right, science is history is psychology is everything that once sprouted its branch from philosophy. Liberal arts programs, I think, fail to provide this kind of learning. Many, if not most, are just a buckshot spray of indoctrination into an isolated fields in academia. When it comes down to it, is it really all that different from business school?

[Edited to add: I hope it's clear that I didn't mean this to be a fuck you/good riddance to liberal arts, but more a fuck you/good riddance to maybe... 90% of it or so]

[Edited on Nov 23, 2004 by Pav]

Good riddance.

I'm curious if people's theoretical background shapes their view of a liberal arts education. Perhaps people who come from a trade background are burned on the fact that they have to "go through the same crap they did in high school" or if maybe tech (web building, computer repair) is the new mechanic school of the world (not to knock mechanics or make a value judgment in anyway.) Is the higher education system in the U.S. shifting itself to resemble Germany's?

I think there are definitely "tracks" in American high schools much the same way that there are in Germany, the difference being that here theoretically you pick whatever you want; you're not being steered in any particular direction. However, especially if you're on the "college prep' track, there usually isn't room in your schedule to take random, interesting classes without missing out on advanced biology or AP ceramics or whatever.

And while I am a fan of the liberal arts, and well-rounded education for its own sake, if eliminating the distribution requirements would empty interesting LA classes of the bored morons who are only there because they need the credit, then I would be all for it. The practical side of me, though, says there aren't enough people like me to support a department like East European Studies if nobody took their classes to fulfill gen ed reqs. Everyone would rush off to take Practicum on Psych Research and Intro to American Advertising, and there would be three people in my Balkan Studies class.