Dammit, I *like* my sissy school!
I want everyone on my flist to read this absolutely brilliant entry on Katrina, Fundies and the Liberal Arts, or why anti-intellectual politicians are destroying democracy. No, that's not overstating the case.
I go to a liberal arts school, and during freshman orientation week we all had to read an essay by W.E.B. DuBois called "The Wings of Atalanta." (I think; it's been a while.) The essay basically talked about the pitfalls of seeing education as primarily practical--that you should go to school with intentions more noble than just getting a well-paying job. All that week and into our first semester we rehearsed a list of reasons why the liberal arts were a good thing, and why making business majors take an art class and English majors take physics had intangible benefits for all of us.
And this semester, two years later, I'm starting my JINS class--a required interdisceplinary course that counts naught for anyone's major in a literal sense. And what we've discussed all week (mostly because I'm taking the class with the head of interdisceplinary studies) is why interdisceplinary thinking matters; why the hell are we going to put ourselves through a semester of drawing and literary criticism (or cooking and chemistry, or philosophical speculation on genetics) when the course is deliberately constructed to have little or nothing to do with our majors?
The answer ties back into something I talked about some weeks ago, about how science is a verb. The answer is that majors and disceplines and jobs are really ways of thinking, and interdisceplinary study makes you a better thinker, because it broadens your thinking, makes you more mentally agile and creative even if you won't end up getting paid for it. If good thinking wasn't important, we'd all major in business; instead, we go to the physical sciences for their method, the social sciences for their probabilistics, and the humanities--most important of all, the profitless humanities!--for the most important skill of all: the knowledge of how to make (and break) an argument.
That's the sort of knowledge no authoritarian wants you to have--not the fundamentalist preacher, not the robber baron, and certainly not the politicians who thrive on keeping "the base" ignorant, scared and amenable to empty promises and ideologically-sound noise.
I go to a liberal arts school, and during freshman orientation week we all had to read an essay by W.E.B. DuBois called "The Wings of Atalanta." (I think; it's been a while.) The essay basically talked about the pitfalls of seeing education as primarily practical--that you should go to school with intentions more noble than just getting a well-paying job. All that week and into our first semester we rehearsed a list of reasons why the liberal arts were a good thing, and why making business majors take an art class and English majors take physics had intangible benefits for all of us.
And this semester, two years later, I'm starting my JINS class--a required interdisceplinary course that counts naught for anyone's major in a literal sense. And what we've discussed all week (mostly because I'm taking the class with the head of interdisceplinary studies) is why interdisceplinary thinking matters; why the hell are we going to put ourselves through a semester of drawing and literary criticism (or cooking and chemistry, or philosophical speculation on genetics) when the course is deliberately constructed to have little or nothing to do with our majors?
The answer ties back into something I talked about some weeks ago, about how science is a verb. The answer is that majors and disceplines and jobs are really ways of thinking, and interdisceplinary study makes you a better thinker, because it broadens your thinking, makes you more mentally agile and creative even if you won't end up getting paid for it. If good thinking wasn't important, we'd all major in business; instead, we go to the physical sciences for their method, the social sciences for their probabilistics, and the humanities--most important of all, the profitless humanities!--for the most important skill of all: the knowledge of how to make (and break) an argument.
That's the sort of knowledge no authoritarian wants you to have--not the fundamentalist preacher, not the robber baron, and certainly not the politicians who thrive on keeping "the base" ignorant, scared and amenable to empty promises and ideologically-sound noise.