I'm a big fan of weighted liberal arts in schools because I think they serve an immensely important purpose. I realize that critical thinking isn't the exclusive property of the liberal arts, but what liberal arts--and only liberal arts--can do is teach you perspective.
I think I heard it called "sociological imagination" once. It essentially means living with an understanding of where one fits in the greater pattern of history. You say science and math taught us we're nothing in the last fifty years? Shit, existentialism has been around long enough to grow a beard. Our nothingness is nothing new.
You think the average Joe shopping at Wal Mart doesn't care about history and philosophy? Perhaps not. But that's a problem to be remedied, not an antiquity to get rid of.
Science and math give us a way to do things; the liberal arts give us a reason to care.
Moreover, the liberal arts provide us with a vital compass to inform our behavior and decisions. I'm going to totally pirate Michael Crichton here, but didn't you ever read Jurassic Park? In it, a mathmetician says, "You all were so concerned with whether you could make a dinosaur that you never stopped to think whether you should do it."
Actually, there's an entire discussion in Jurassic Park that's a pretty good read--about how science is nothing without ethics. Which is another nasty little liberal arts class that some will undoubtedly find boring.
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Date: 2005-12-07 08:26 am (UTC)I'm a big fan of weighted liberal arts in schools because I think they serve an immensely important purpose. I realize that critical thinking isn't the exclusive property of the liberal arts, but what liberal arts--and only liberal arts--can do is teach you perspective.
I think I heard it called "sociological imagination" once. It essentially means living with an understanding of where one fits in the greater pattern of history. You say science and math taught us we're nothing in the last fifty years? Shit, existentialism has been around long enough to grow a beard. Our nothingness is nothing new.
You think the average Joe shopping at Wal Mart doesn't care about history and philosophy? Perhaps not. But that's a problem to be remedied, not an antiquity to get rid of.
Science and math give us a way to do things; the liberal arts give us a reason to care.
Moreover, the liberal arts provide us with a vital compass to inform our behavior and decisions. I'm going to totally pirate Michael Crichton here, but didn't you ever read Jurassic Park? In it, a mathmetician says, "You all were so concerned with whether you could make a dinosaur that you never stopped to think whether you should do it."
Actually, there's an entire discussion in Jurassic Park that's a pretty good read--about how science is nothing without ethics. Which is another nasty little liberal arts class that some will undoubtedly find boring.