Response to a friend's blog.

From a friend's blog (password protected for some strange reason). This is my response to his post.

WHat I think they (want to) believe is the following: studying literature/the arts/philosophy makes you a better person. This is total baloney -see the some of the highly educated and tasteful SS

One could argue a counter-point by saying that the “highly educated and tasteful SS” were in charge of the “highly uneducated and tasteless SS”. So… education makes one a superior being…? No, but it is the basis (unfounded in objective characterizations) for Western higher education along both the British and German models, which were highly influential in the formation of U.S. education through the 18th and 19th centuries. It is something that I also rail against when I am faced with ivory-tower intellectuals that tell me with a straight face that humans are “more evolved” than other animals, or that other animals “spontaneously appear” in places they weren’t before. AND THEY GET AWAY WITH IT! (I won't get into why these ideas are a patently false representation of the world, but "bleaugh!")

Of course, many people in academia in the United States see many benefits of having a liberal arts education. However, being within a liberal arts education system means that you might be biased in your judgments of it (conflicts of interest, anyone?). I personally feel that - although there are possible personal benefits gained from having students learn a variety of subjects - not everyone wants to be a renaissance-man. I have had many seniors in a freshman class because they waited until the absolute last minute to fulfill their distribution requirements. On yet another hand (I'm like Kali here), if universities in the US wanted to ensure their students were well-rounded, why not require them to take their distributions prior to becoming an "upperclassman". It is my experience that integration of information happens best when the information is present prior to integration. Therefore, if students were expected to take those courses that will make them a well-rounded student prior to traveling down the road of specialization (which is - in itself - a paradox of the US system of higher ed) that is what should (imho) be the distinction of being an "upperclassman", they will be in a position from which they can ruminate upon their prior knowledge sources and critically think (or not) about how different epistemologies inform the different points-of-view the student will inevitably come across in their future studies.

(On a tangential note, I think that it’s great that we use the ‘murican way of spelling when talking about how something is “full of baloney”. Saying that something full of crap is “full of bologna” would just be plain weird.)

There’s a deeper point there too: the current study of literature has nothing to do with the current practice of medicine.

I would argue that it never really did before, either. Oh, wait. That’s your entry's point. My bad

Why should I even think it possible to assign a compassionate meaning to a text written by the guy who also penned (or parroted rather) Bagatelles, and whose life story is less than glorious in many aspects? What makes those med schools admissions committees people think that reading literature written by a brigand could make me any more of a good person?

First of all, that statement made me LOL. Who thought that a metacritique of literature would do that to me on a Monday morning? (However, that should read: “…less-than-glorious…” The “Napoleogrammaniac” strikes again; yes, I made that word up for the use against someone who needs the application of a French version of "grammar Nazi", and yes you can use it too!)

they don’t give a toss about mentioning medicine in their literary work, because that’s not the point. … As I’ve maintained throughout my research in the humanities, literature truly has nothing to do with the world.

For more of this check out these sites: Uncertain Principles, Adventures in Ethics, Gene Expression. They are written by scientists who have come across similar POVs, and discuss them from their own side. (Uncertain Principles was that which started the ball rolling in the discussion, but the other two expand on it nicely.)

I’m writing this as an attempt to use a much-taunted method of getting past ‘writer’s block’, the latter being defined as the inability to write what you’re supposed (that is: expected) to. I’m afraid it’s not working very well.

First of all, did you mean “taunted” as in “to make fun of in a manner of teasing” or “touted” as in “to try and sell-off, usually used by itself to describe a person from the 19th century and before, who was in charge of selling off the services of prostitutes and child laborers – of course I could be stretching this definition a bit). Secondly, if you want to check out a very accurate scientific, peer-reviewed paper on the subject of writer’s block, then check out this article (don’t worry, it’s very short and to-the-point). I'm thinking of doing a follow-up study myself...

Role of Universities

One very interesting lecture presented was Jim Duderstadt’s presentation on the history of the institution of “the university,” the university in Britain, the early United States, and The University of Michigan. The concluding remarks about the future of higher education, as well as the Spellings Commission were also very elucidating.

A couple of points of interest that came up for me were:

· the continued desire of higher education to continue to require a liberal arts education;

· research universities teaching basic classes; and

· an (apparent) lack of connection between secondary and higher education.

With regard to the first point – the continued desire to teach a liberal arts education – is, I believe, one of the major points of weakness in the US higher education system. While this is usually seen as a major strength of the US system, I am cognizant of the continually quickening pace of the world’s economies. Students in US higher education are waiting two years – half of their potential time of training at university – to decide their major field of study. This is compared to students in the UK who are admitted directly into their majors, and take courses almost exclusively within it. In Taiwan – as far as I understand their curriculum – all students are required to take a series of “core” courses (“colloquia”), but then stay pretty confined to their disciplines.

The idea that the US-educated university graduate knows a little about everything, and more about their topic is a good thing to have, but I believe that there are enough students who are in the system that have little desire to learn outside their field. This leaves me at an intellectual fork-in-the-road situation: should students be forced to take courses they do not want to (and professors and lecturers teach courses to these students who do all wish to learn) in order to have a liberal education, or should the requirements of education be changed to be more in line with a different goal?

I feel that a student body should not be forced to take courses for the sake of broadening their education – that is what personal development (for which everyone has a whole lifetime) is for. Instead, the US university system should use the first two years of each students’ academic tenure to try and instill the traits they desire in their graduates. Hopefully, these would include a strong basis in ethics, as well as training in thoughtful reasoning, leadership, and cooperation, as well as the basic tools each student would need in continuing within their chosen field.

This last point brings me to my second point of interest: research universities teaching basic classes. Should UofM be offering classes in basic algebra, biology, chemistry, etc? What difference does it make for a student to take such courses at an expensive research university, as opposed to a community college? A lecturer at a community college should have as much knowledge with such foundational material as any professor, lecturer, or graduate student at a research university. Indeed, I would make the argument that a professor at a research university who is interested in the cutting-edge of science might be less inclined to be interested in re-hashing the basics of his or her field every four months. If this is the case, it makes little sense that such a professor would teach such a class, leaving it (or as much of the running of it as possible) to his or her graduate students – which is what happens in many of these introductory 100-level courses around campus. So why should a student (or the parents of a student) pay thousands or tens-of-thousands of dollars to learn material from a graduate student when they can pay a fraction of the cost to learn the same material at a community college? Although Jim didn’t go into it very much in his presentation, I subsequently learned from him that the original setup of the University of California system was set up to focus only on upper-level and graduate courses, but was eventually scrapped due to recruitment concerns.

Of course, this could potentially all be solved by having a much-improved secondary education system in the United States. The major gap was one of the major findings of the Spellings Commission (barring the meta-findings of political “tampering”). In the UK, there is a Department for Education and Skills which can set teaching (and presumably learning) requirements nationwide, and although many debates occurred in the UK about the benefits and pitfalls surrounding teaching to tests, during my time living there, I felt that those students coming into universities were of a greater level of academic maturity than many of the Junior Year Abroad (JYA) students from the United States. While there are definite problems with the British education system, there should be a greater emphasis on connecting the skills learned in secondary education with those of university. Potentially having upper-tier universities require certain prerequisites for entry, or have a “catch-up” year or semester for students who need one before starting in on their actual degree.

And this leads me back, full-circle, to the questionable insistence by United States universities to stick to a liberal arts education. I feel that the problems with holding onto this commodity – decreased specialization, recalcitrant students being taught by disinterested lecturers/professors, high financial costs to learn basic subject matter, etc – will outweigh the benefits of a broader education. A breadth of education should be encouraged throughout a person’s schooling and life, and not forced upon those individuals who choose to be specialists. At the same time, universities should strive to teach all their students a set of tools – thoughtful reasoning, leadership, cooperation, etc – to help study and solve field-spanning problems that we are beginning to see today.