So what would be the harm in teaching them how to think WHILE teaching them something useful?
I'm not saying let's ditch chemistry for chemical engineering, let's ditch gender studies for public policy majors, not even let's ditch classics for.... (well, couldn't we just ditch Classics?). I'm all for the argument that you can learn how to think while learning something you just plain want to learn. But the economy is in the toilet, we produce nothing, and we all bitch and moan that college isn't for everyone, though there is no way we'll ever convince our students (or their parents) of that. So if we sincerely believe you can learn how to think, while learning anything, why do we find "useful" majors so objectionable?
Are we really self serving ivory tower dwelling ruiners of society brainwashing our students into learning what we like because we're afraid that teaching something (hypothetically) better might threaten our field or somehow push us out and make us have to learn what they might want, or that we (as in civilization) might need?
So the questions at hand are (answer as many or as few as you want):
Q: Is your subject currently "useful" for anything other than learning how to think? (what?)
Q: Is a major in your field required for any career path other than becoming a professor in your field? (what?)
Q: Is there a related field you fear because it could push yours out and you would be either unable or unwilling to assimilate? (what field? unable or unwilling? why?)
Q: Is there a way that good old fashioned "critical thinking" educations and career readiness paths could co-exist in the same institution? Is there a way we can convince the students we have in mind when we say "college isn't for everyone", that going to Devry isn't beneath them? Is there a way to marry Devry and Sarah Lawrence?
Q: Is it important to keep numbers in your department for a reason other than keeping your department alive? Or are new students just the next tier in a dressed up ponzi scheme?
Q: How would society be worse off if students majored in _______ instead of your field?
That's a lot of questions. Do we need to know all these for the test? The other teacher only gave us one question.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome to ditch Classics, as long as you don't think that it's important that anyone understand the roots of the civilization in which everyone posting here participates, or the languages spoken by all those people.
ReplyDeleteIs it important that everyone go on to graduate school in Classics? Hell no. Is it important that some of us do? Yes. We need people who remember, preserve and do our best to understand our common past, its history, material culture, languages and literatures.
What about all those other people who go through in Classics? Is "learning to think" good enough? What's specific to Classics that makes it so hot? Well, everything I've just said above, but if I had to single out something in particular, it is the languages, which provide a window on the world - and a rigorous grammatical training - that training in modern languages doesn't provide (because they're taught differently).
Is "learning to think" good enough generally? Or, to rephrase your question, is there any damn reason at all that students should waste their time and money in Humanities when they could be learning to weld and pulling down a decent wage making useful stuff?
Yes, it turns out, for a couple of reasons. In the rapidly changing economic circumstances we all face now, most people are not going to hold a single job all their lives. (Not even welders.) Most of us are going to have to change jobs several times. And it turns out that one thing Humanities grads are really much better at is flexibility. We find it easier to shift from one career to another as circumstances change.
The second reason is straight return on investment. Humanities grads first jobs out of university are on average lower-paid than sciences grads. But we advance faster and top out as high as sciences (etc) grads. The result is that over the course of a lifetime we pay as much in taxes as sciences and other technical fields. But of course we are very much cheaper to train; all you need is a blackboard to teach a Humanities class. So the best return on investment a government can make is to fund Humanities educations; we pay as much in taxes but didn't cost nearly as much to educate.
It is true that students in STEM fields learn to think too; of course it is. I think math ought to be a required course for any student, no matter what their major; and no one should be able to graduate without learning a language and taking a humanities class, either. But people in STEM fields learn to think differently, and about different things. We need everyone, from all the disciplines. To subtract one discipline is to lose a vital perspective on the world.
Oh, and everyone should learn Latin. It wouldn't kill you to know some fracking grammar. It's not like I'm asking for Greek.
An afterthought: you seem to be using "useful" (as in "useful knowledge") to mean "something that makes money". Why is that the only meaning of "useful?" Why don't we even ask that question anymore? Shouldn't "useful for what" be the question we start with?
ReplyDeleteI’m uncomfortable with encouraging the university to contract. Isn’t it doing this by itself fast enough? What you’ll get is a society less well educated, and in fewer topics. If it’s innovation we need, I think the last thing we need is to have everyone thinking alike, because they’re all so narrowly educated.
ReplyDeleteI’m particularly queasy with putting the power of a science education into the hands of anyone not well grounded in the humanities. That way, at best, you get consumer products that don’t sell because they’re ugly. You could also get far worse.
I teach both physics and astronomy, so I constantly straddle the practical and the esoteric. I’ve done so all my life, since the typical reaction of a relative to a child interested in astronomy is one of horror, with the old, “What are you going to do with THAT?”
I get plenty of students interested in astronomy. I give every one “the talk,” about how it is an intellectually very lively field and a great way to spend one’s life, so much so that there are far more people wanting to become astronomers than there will ever be jobs for them. Wouldn’t they rather do the world some good, by taking an interest in renewable energy? They’d make a whole lot more money that way, too. Not a one of my students has ever listened to this. In fact, they are sick to the teeth of hearing me talk about it.
Whenever I get obvious losers, I do my best to steer them out of astronomy, into more practical fields. This isn’t as simple as you might think. I certainly do not want them going into our medical physics program, or into science teaching, where they could do serious harm.
I’ve been thinking about turning my own work in more immediately practical directions, such as starting up a course on computational physics (that our physics department still doesn’t have one is a gaping deficiency in our curriculum), or research into fusion energy. My department chair and dean hate the idea. They want me to keep doing the astronomical research in which I’ve been successful at involving students. They even want me to start a course on that antithesis of practicality, cosmology. (That’s the study of the origin of the Universe: it has nothing to do with haircuts or makeup, that’s cosmetology.)
Sarah Lawrence + DeVry = Steve Jobs.
ReplyDeleteHere are my answers:
1) Not really, and that's OK. Without critical thinking, content and skills are useless; that's why computers don't run the world all by themselves.
2) Nope. It's not even required to become a professor in the field. Plenty of undergrad majors in other fields go to grad school in English.
3) Nope. If anything, English has gobbled up a few related fields.
4) Probably. My institution has an Ag school, a school of Engineering, and many career-oriented majors like nutrition, alongside of a college of Letters and Science.
5) We actually know that our major is important. Many of the existing jobs now won't exist in 25 years; new fields and technologies will have emerged. But with a good liberal arts background, people have the flexibility and creativity to change careers (see Merely Academic's point) .
6) If everyone majored in Engineering instead of in my field, I daresay the bridges would be safe, but the human ability to empathize with another and to imagine worlds beyond one's immediate existence--and thereby imagine social change-- would be greatly diminished.
My particular subject area (hamster fur weaving) is one of those odd beasties that’s firmly entrenched in the humanities but doesn’t fit the classic “learning how to think” model. Instead, it’s very much an applied humanity that requires producing useful artifacts--kinda like studio art courses that demand production, but without the flake-ass artsy factor. In fact, a lot of what I teach is along the lines of “here’s how to think about weaving hamster fur, now apply yer brain and weave something useful, fer chrissake.” In that respect, it’s a lot like what you’re asking about combining DeVry and Sarah Lawrence.
ReplyDeleteHamster fur weaving also has avoided the trap (thus far, anyway) of becoming a self-serving, self-perpetuating entity. As a separate field of study, it’s new enough that we’ve only seen the first wave of former majors enter the PhD track, and a degree in hamster fur weaving should prepare students for “real” jobs at commercial mills, so we’ve been sending out grads into the workforce.
That being said, we’ve got two problems as a field. For one, a degree in hamster fur weaving isn’t required for employment as a hamster fur weaver. Folks who majored in all sorts of other fields can learn to weave hamster fur while on the job, so while we have what I think of as a pretty nifty balance between critical thinking and practical job training, it’s not a must-have degree for anything in particular.
For two (and this is the really infuriating problem), many students who major in hamster fur weaving can’t weave hamster fur for shit. Why? Because former yak herders and herpetologists who changed profession run the majors, and most of them haven’t bothered to keep up with the field. They’re putting students to work on the steam-powered looms that they used when starting to weave hamster fur, while professional weavers have moved on to the Hamster-O-Matic 3000.
If we hamster fur weavers ever manage to displace the yak herders, then yeah…there’s hope for a good critical thinking/practical preparation blend to exist in our field.
I think we are looking at an economy that is currently service-based but becoming increasingly service-based over the internet.
ReplyDeleteMaking money and having a career is going to undergo an enormous change over the next 20 years, just because of the increasingly pervasive nature of web-based obligations.
Therefore, we need the tools of communication and practical design. Computer Science could do this, but when it comes to content -- increasing content all over the place on every single subject -- you need the humanities.
Sure, maybe we don't need Jane Austen studies in particular, or the history of that one very small thing in Revolutionary France, but we need wide-ranging, relateable material that creates thinkers who are able to communicate clearly. Classics is boring as hell, and I'm not sure how it still survives, but those who learn about philosophy, history, and literature are also writing and thinking and these kinds of skills are increasingly useful (practical) in an online world.
We're all losing the idea of a career though. That's gone. So if by "useful" you mean "making money" then the answer is only going to be "CEO school."
Classics is not boring! Classics may be boring TO YOU. I strongly suspect that whatever your discipline is is eye-crossingly boring to me. But Homer, Sophocles, Vergil, Caesar (an odd taste, but I've always loved him) and Ovid, and a hundred other authors, and the cultures that produced them, are anything but dull to those who study them. That's why we do.
ReplyDeleteAnd we need that range of perspectives. Just because something happened a long time ago does not mean it is either dull or unimportant. You don't have to study it, but be glad someone does.
But I suspect Classics in particular - of all of the similarly old and weird things to study - gets singled out for special derision because the study of Classics has, or used to have, a social function in marking out the upper class (hence the term "Classics", which a lot of places no longer use).
Just put down Sophocles myself. (Oedipus at Colunus and Antigone)
ReplyDeleteOH MY GOD SO BORED!!!!!
I suspect the reason Classics is perceived as boring is that it has been around for so long that no one believes anything new or interesting can come of it. Students are attracted to more exciting fields. And, apparently, Classics professors see all other fields as "eye-crossingly boring", so students quickly realize the myopic view that Classics breed.
ReplyDelete@Merely: I was always partial to Martial myself--can't get enough of those epigrams. But that may be TMI, as the kids say. De gustibus non disputandum, I suppose, but I'm baffled by the notion that classics is boring. If you like good literature, how can you not love Classics. But then again, I grew up in a country where learning those dead languages was a mandatory part of the secondary school curriculum.
ReplyDelete@The main thread: I guess my answer to the thirsty is: please define "useful." It is an almost pointlessly slippery term in this context. I'm assuming that what Wombat means is actually "applied," in which case almost all of us here are basically fucked. Because it ain't just the humanities that don't meet that particular definition of utility. Most science majors learn little that is actually "useful" in some eventual career. Truly "applied" disciplines like engineering are excellent preparation for very specific careers, and fuck knows we need good engineers. But we need a lot of other things too, and you aren't going to get them without those other disciplines in the humanities and traditional sciences.
Of course the currently "useful" major du jour is bidness, and perhaps all those undergrad business majors are feeding a demand for mid-level paper-pushers out there in the great corporate beyond. But the best companies still keep their best jobs for the students who didn't major in something "useful." As I think I've said before in here, one of my best friends out there works for one of those companies all our kiddies dream of working for, and when he and his colleagues hire new people, they file all the business and other "useful" degrees (with the exception of the engineers) in the "round file."
So take your utility and shove it, is my answer.
Classics is not boring. Unless you think life is boring. Because the one thing Classics will teach you is that there is nothing new under the sun. Read Hesiod. It's all in there. What I think when someone says that The Iliad or the Odyssey is boring is that the person probably isn't astute enough to appreciate them. Or they had a really crappy teacher.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm not answering all those questions because I don't feel like justifying my discipline right now, which is not Classics, but English. Think Chaucer and Beowulf and Shakespeare are boring? Then there's something seriously wrong with you.
I lurve the Classics, though I have never studied them systematically.
ReplyDeleteAnd Archie, as always, is right. My brother, a bigwig of capitalism, only hires liberal arts majors. He went to B-school after doing a liberal arts major himself, and said it was utter BS except for the network of contacts.
Useful = develops habits of mind that will serve a lifetime.
Yes, it is possible to learn something that leads to a career while at the same time learning how to think. In fact, what made the business college I adjuncted at NOT crappy was that the students were required to write in most of their classes and had to take a full course of Gen Ed credits. They sometimes hated it but their future employers loved it, and really liked our graduates better than other similar schools because they had studied a wide variety of stuff and did know how to think. Amazing.
ReplyDeleteBut that's a really scary line to walk. If we say we're all about getting the students a job, it would be really easy for assessment and cost cutting admins to, well, cut. And based on my experience above, that's a HORRIBLE idea.
Aside from that, students in my field, despite being liberal artsy, can get jobs if they so desire, that have nothing to do with teaching and research.
In any case, yes it is possible to marry a liberal arts education with a business related one. That school I worked at? The President of the College stood up in front of all of us and said he felt that learning to write well, at the college level, was one of the most important skills that a college graduate could have and backed that up with lots of money for development.
But let's be honest--how often does THAT SHIT happen? I'll probably die before I ever hear another Dean or President say that. Instead I hear "Why can't your students write?" paired with another budget cut.
I really liked Frod's answer, but WOTC's post is very true of a small corner of my department. We have two teachers who are only focused on student numbers (learning to think while learning a subject? I really don't think they care about either of these) and the problems they cause, well, yeah, Madoff is a good comparison.
ReplyDeleteWhatever and whoever we teach, pretending to give a shit about the lives of students in order to get them to sign up, is just wrong.
WOTC, thank you for this post!
Classics are not boring. Nor are studio arts classes filled with "flake-ass artsy" factors. Studio art, taught in its best form, can make your brain hurt as much as studying Latin declensions. And both types of mental exertion build stronger thinkers.
ReplyDeleteWe need more people in our society to think.
When the Academy starts attacking itself from within, pitting one discipline against another, we all lose.
I like how people keep jumping in to defend the Classics. THE CLASSICS PEOPLE. And I'm no novice on the subject either. But all of you are CRAZY.
ReplyDeleteDude, plays and Greek mythology have all sorts of interesting things to say -- I was just pushing you -- but you cannot say that there is "nothing new in the world" because the Greek playwrights thought of it all. I mean what the hell kind of claim is that? Show me the iPod in Prometheus Bound. Show me the steam engine in Caesar. Or, just look at the Oresteia, a cycle of morbid violence that has no relation to anything in modern life. THANK GOD WE'VE MOVED ON.
Or, we could analyze the BRILLIANCE of killing everyone off out of a crack-pot motivation of revenge and familial obligation that outstrips personal preservatio..
Stop. I have to stop there. It's just so FUCKING BORING.
Nobody has approached the initial question: are we better than Bernie Madoff? First, Christ that is one insulting question, and second, yes. Where else are they going to learn: Literature*, English, the Classics, Philosophy, Physics, Biology, Anatomy, Engineering, Music, Geology, Zooology, Library Science, History, various foreign languages, Social Science, Astronomy, Agronomy, and many other subjects? Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme, the professorate transmits knowledge to the next generation. There may be arguements as to what should be taught (CLASSICS! NO, F u C k THE CLASSICS!), the real question should be: if we get rid of a department, and things change for the better by some great miracle, how will we rebuild that department?
ReplyDeleteI feel that every student should be taught (beyond Marxism-Leninism) is a class on scams and how to avoid them. Besides the great student loan debate and how to deal with used car salesmen, maybe the students will learn to avoid "astroturf" frauds like the Tea Party. At any rate, the group the Right should be afraid of is the new Occupy Wall Street movement; there's no Koch brothers money going into that one!
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* Yes I know some of these subjects have been gobbled up by others, and a few are not taught at every school (Agronomy is more of a Land-Grant College thing), but they are taught in community colleges and universities.
While I'm happy to talk about (and teach) thinking/critical thinking/analysis/whatever we're calling it this year, I'm increasingly convinced that what we in the humanities (and the social sciences and some sciences and even business and some other "applied" disciplines) do is tell and evaluate stories. To take one example from the last week, think about the different stories that have been told about Steve Jobs. You have the one we chose to tell here: the inspiring creator of neat new stuff who changed our personal and professional lives in some pretty significant ways (and also, not incidentally, the husband and father). I've heard others elsewhere: the child of a Syrian immigrant put up for adoption because of his biological grandfather's prejudice against his father; the guy who didn't need to finish college to get ahead; the gifted marketer who somehow got credit for work that others did; the promoter of products produced by exploited -- in some cases, slave or near-slave -- labor. None of them are false, and none of them mutually exclusive, but which details you choose will depend on why you're telling the story, and what you think it says about the world in the 21st century, where we are, where we should be going, even who "we" is.
ReplyDeleteThe Greeks and Romans told each other stories about gods and mortals for much the same reasons, and studying either -- or anything in between -- will teach us something about ourselves and our world, and give students a chance to participate intelligently in the ongoing process of storytelling and meaning-making. This ability strikes me as all the more important at a time when people with differing views of the world are increasingly trying to shout their own stories over each other (or telling them only to sympathetic audiences) rather than talking *to* each other. Ideally, the humanities classroom is one of the places where such conversations can happen, and where students learn to have such conversations.
Also, anybody who needs to persuade anybody to do anything (and when you think about it, that's what a lot of knowledge work is) needs to be able to tell good stories, and it helps to be familiar with some of the ones that have persisted, either in their original form (the Classics) or through constant reworking and retelling (quest stories, the bildungsroman, the courtship plot, etc., etc.).
I also think it would probably be a good idea if my students who are absolutely fascinated (charmingly and understandably so) with playing around with genes, brain chemicals, etc., etc., had read Frankenstein at the very least, and probably Faust and 1984 and a few other thought-provoking works as well, and those who will be working with the sick, elderly, and/or mentally ill were familiar with Lear and a few others, and so on. The rising generation is going to face tremendous ethical dilemmas, and will need to have practice in thinking about issues such as what makes us human (and what makes humans worthy of respect), what responsibilities we as humans have to each other and the world, what purposes governmental, economic, and social systems do and should have, etc., etc. Knowing how to do something is worthless at best, and dangerous at worst, unless you also have some idea of why you're doing it, and under what conditions you should and would stop, or at least reconsider.
P.S. having written the above, I can't help noting that most of Bernie Madoff's victims were older and relatively well-educated, yet they did not notice the inconsistencies in the story he told them about what he was doing with their money. Nor, it seems, did he entirely admit to himself what he was doing. The depth of the human capacity for self-deception seems to be one of those stories we keep telling, but doesn't entirely sink in for many people -- perhaps all of us at some time or in some area of our lives. Still, we're better off telling it than not, I'm pretty sure.
Classics lover,
ReplyDeleteno no; I was simply responding to the comment that Classics was 'deadly dull'. My point was that we each choose the discipline we love. My discipline may be eye-crossingly boring to you, but that doesn't mean that it is to me; and vice versa. I'm a bad example of that however, because I'm a classic (heh) dilettante; I love all literature and rather wish I'd studied economics too instead of just slavishly reading Paul Krugman now. And I started out in sciences. A lot of my colleagues in Classics have similarly broad interests. So your discipline might be "eye-crossingly dull" to me, but unless you're studying the mating habits of banana slugs I'm probably interested. (Actually, you could probably give me an argument for that too.)
It seems to me that "useful" depends on what you want - what you value. A hammer or a fishing rod might be useful depending on whether you want to build a house or catch a fish. If useful is defined as 'getting a job', then what is useful will depend on whether the economy needs houses or fish and trying to predict the economy is a mug's game.
ReplyDeleteI suppose universities themselves are only 'useful' if people value knowledge, and depressingly few seem to value knowledge these days. In addition to its intrinsic value, knowledge itself can be 'useful', but in frequently unpredictable ways. So yes, I could inclucate critical thinking skills in a traditional career preparation format, if only I could predict what preparation future careers might need (and Lord knows I have no desire to teach 'Hospitality Management')
None of which is to deny the frustration of students who just want to be employable at a decent wage, and have been told that university is the key. What's particularly troubling is the university marketing propaganda, that promises 'critical thinking skills' but tells proffies to inculcate these skills in lecture halls with scantron tests. That's the Ponzi scheme that invites the comparison to Madoff.
First off, there's plenty to keep me amused for hours in both the Classics (Aristophanes!) and the mating habits of banana slugs (in which both often chew off each other's penises).
ReplyDeleteSecond off, great questions and great thread. I agree with many that "usefulness" is best defined broadly, but my discipline does apply to many careers other than academia (which to me includes both higher education and museum-based education).
1. Anthropology -- particularly archaeology, which my parents were sure was useless -- is currently "useful" for plenty of jobs in the public and private sectors, albeit less so in the current economy with less new building than usual. In the UK, this includes archaeologists at National Trust properties; in the US, at national and state monuments, parks, and forests; at military installations; and in highway departments.
2: Rescue archaeology is required by law in many nations. Cultural anthropology is not "required" in most non-academic fields, but is very useful in any career that involves more than one culture or subculture (e.g., NGO administrator; diplomat; teacher; social worker; detective; and yes, marketer). Biological anthropology and archaeology are essential for criminal forensics.
3: "Ethnic Studies" has been pushing anthropology out as a liberal arts requirement. Its major difference seems to be a focus on subcultures of the U.S. rather than global diversity of cultures. I'd be fine trying to assimilate it into anthro, but good luck with that.
4: Sure, "good old fashioned 'critical thinking' educations and career readiness paths [can] co-exist" in the same major. In assigning my students to analyze Pyramidiot web sites for logical and factual errors, I'm teaching the former; in noting which specialties are hot and in posting current job listings, I'm helping with the latter. These are not incompatible goals of higher education.
5: If students majored in psych, sociology, or ethnic studies instead of anthro, they might think that Western cultures are actually diverse. Ha!
Oh! As for what we teach that is not "useful"? We feed our students' hunger for knowledge about their own origins. They come in with vague, often erroneous beliefs but great enthusiasm after watching the Discovery or National Geographic Channels. We send them out with specific, somewhat less erroneous beliefs and, I hope, greater understanding of the messy, imperfect but ultimately self-correcting nature of science. That's as central to informed, compassionate world citizenship as reading Chaucer or Shakespeare.
ReplyDeleteIt scares me to think I might one day live in a world where education is solely judged by how much $$ it will bring instead of by its own intrinsic value.
ReplyDelete@Academic Monkey - We may have new technology, but we're still the same people...
"Too good for DeVry?"
ReplyDeleteFolks, until DeVry gets its proper certification from recognized accreditation bodies (as opposed to accreditation mills), everybody is too good for DeVry.