University is a total racket. We pay these institutions to be treated like their low level employees to provide job training for companies. Corporations have successfully offloaded their training responsibilities onto a process that used to be much broader than vocational training.
And if you try to study some of those broader topics, you're a sucker - don't study philosophy when an extra accounting or STEM course would be a "better" use of your time. So you super specialize and then after 4 years of college and 5 years in industry you're burnt out you have few other skills, so the only option is to get back onto the education treadmill to bet on another highly specific vocation where you once again start your career as a junior.
Most STEM courses aren't vocational training and aren't super specialized. I think you might have a biased negative view for what STEM courses are?
Edit: Let me state it a different way that might shed more light on my point. A CS major can pass all of his/her classes with a perfect GPA and still be incapable of writing software ready for a production system (even at small scale).
The STEM degrees emphasize fundamentals that are rarely (if ever) used in day-to-day "real jobs".
For some value of 'super specialized' you are correct. For a value that includes the bigger perspective on our culture and what it means to live a good life, an exclusive focus on STEM is indeed 'super specialized'.
>For a value that includes the bigger perspective on our culture
Sure
> and what it means to live a good life
That's just self-aggrandizing bullshit. There is no class that will tell you what it means to live a good life. Anyone who thinks so is dearly lacking perspective.
>an exclusive focus on STEM is indeed 'super specialized'.
An exclusive focus on STEM will include the philosophy of science and what it means to seek truths about the physical world. IMO that has immensely more value in a philosophical sense than you seem to imply.
I believe you are proving my point. For example, the goal of much ancient philosophy was exactly what it meant to live a good life, and the theory of such was very well developed. Most of the culture you take for granted as 'common sense' is directly based on this philosophical development.
STEM at best tells you how to do something, but can never tell you what to do, or why to do it. For that you need philosophy, much more than philosophy of science.
This is a very pessimistic world view. I found in the engineering faculty that the subjects we were taught were very broad. However, I continued to learn on my own in my free time after I got my degree. I've been doing this consistently for the last 8 years or so. I now have completely new skills and much more depth on knowledge on CS topics than I had coming out of university.
The point is that while for you it is your choice and pleasure to spend your free time doing something with a direct career benefit, for others, there are often other valid and important uses of their free time and so there is a cost to that.
The question is if that cost an individual occurs if they choose not to spend their free time on career-related skills is ethical or good for society.
I believe this is the crux of the problem - it favours people with minimal external life factors or responsibility, and they’re quite often the ones to rise to power, therefore creating a “well it was good enough for me” sentiment lacking empathy.
While by contrast, there are some people who want to kick back and simply collect a pay check, there is a whole segment of people in the middle ground who are hungry to learn, but are stretched so thin that they can’t outside of work — a whole segment that isn’t being catered for, and therefore an opportunity exists to tap into this.
It's not realistic to expect to go to school for 4 or 5 years and then work for the next 30 without learning anything new. Or rather, not if you care about advancing and making more money. Maybe I'm lucky that I actually enjoy it, so it doesn't feel so much like work to me.
I'm a bit confused what you're arguing against in my point - you continue to super specialize in your off time. If you wanted to switch vocations from something in the CS domain, how much of what you now know and have self-taught would apply?
At my university engineers were offered two elective courses in the faculty of arts or sciences. That's not a particularly broad education.
A B Eng covers so much "basic" knowledge that you never really have time to specialize at anything. Doing physics and math courses is hardly becoming specialized in SE. It takes a long time and years of work afterwards to become specialized at something.
The good news is, you can do it without going back to school. IMO an SE will get little benefit out of going back for another degree. You'll get much more ROI spending your time contributing to OSS projects and making a name for yourself.
I think this is really dependent on your choice of field to enter into. In the tech space, so many engineers didn't major or necessarily even take CS courses in college. I have interviewed and hired plenty of people with diverse colligate focuses.
Sure, CS or STEM courses are probably really solid to pair with a non-CS major because it teaches you stuff that helps extend your abilities in your own field. So I can see why my friend that was going to school to be a nurse might have wanted to take a CS course or two instead of minoring in sociology.
CS, being still a bit of a wild west, still has flexibility, but you definitely couldn't take some nursing courses (which, let's be honest, aren't even offered) and switch to that after burning out in comp sci.
The courses I took were the same that anyone getting a major in that field would take, and I was required to take them beyond just an introductory level.
They were total jokes at my (admittedly) second-rate-at-best state school. Most of the gen-ed courses failed to go beyond material we'd covered back in 10th grade or so. The English courses were probably the nearest to being remotely "serious" since they at least expected writing and critical reading on a slightly-above-high-school level, usually pretty early in the course.
Yes by ultra focus on tech, we can provide a decent living, but lack the bigger picture and become the peons of those who know better, and can articulate their view clearly and logically.
E.g. look at any PG essay that tried to talk about broader philosophical or political issues and you'll see this limitation. His frame of reference is stuck in a recent enlightenment framing of the world. Granted, PG is indeed a great communicator in technical fields.
We were supposed to take "History of Technology" which I guess is supposed to be the corollary to "Business Math" classes or whatever. I really enjoy the humanities so I took all the real electives I could.
I disagree. I went to a state University and it really made me a better person. I worked in groups with diverse group of people and while it was tough I enjoyed the experience. Plus, it wasn't really that expensive considering my income now and before.
However, I guess non-technical/engineering degrees have different results.
I had a good experience at undergrad, but that was due to its divergence from the norm. It actually gave me the broader perspective by having me read thousands of pages of the primary literature for the Western canon, along with in depth critical group discussions of the texts, and learning to write coherent papers. Nothing in my CS degree impacted my life, except making me marketable. Much of the CS I could have picked up on my own, and very little have I actually used in day to day jobs, except the programming experience. On the other hand, the literature program has indeed changed my life.
This seems to be a very unpopular thought within CS culture and I find that really unfortunate. It feels like people are rushing to reduce their education, their lives, to optimized market interactions and that's a terrible lens for a human life. There may be an argument that it's a method of successfully navigating our society, thus enriching one's personal or familial existence, but it seems to me that would just lead to a poor societal structure with few common bonds among the people within it.
It's a side effect of no safety net, knowing that the slightest mishap could put you into crippling debt. To stand still but for a moment is to be trampled by the masses.
By the time you are in a financially stable situation, old habits are ingrained.
I like how a liberal arts education is "divergent from the norm" now. The primary function of university is to make people read for four years. Business degrees, CS degrees, essentially job training programs are a bastardization of the institution.
I think the classic ideal of a liberal arts degree is awesome... as a second or mid-life degree. The option to read and think in-depth and breadth seems to have more potential once you've lived a little more than the average 18-yr-old, just because you tend to have more experiences and viewpoints than a high school grad heading to uni.
On the other hand, by that point, you'll have a bunch of habits and ways of thinking hardwired that you did not choose for yourself. It also becomes something of a Sapir-Worf dilemma, where it becomes very difficult to even realize one's thinking has been shaped in this way.
My experience of interacting with older, more stable 'intellectuals' who do not have a broad background of reading is an acquired indolence towards foreign ideas and older ideas, subsisting on a shallow 'tolerance' as a sign of their broad mindedness.
My particular liberal arts program is "divergent from the norm," including modern liberal arts programs. Just about all programs, liberal arts or otherwise, are completely framed within an enlightenment view of reality, largely due to dogmatic materialism. Classes that do diverge from materialism have lost a coherent way to talk about an alternate worldview, leaving their terminology sounding very wishy washy and illogical, like a woo woo Deepak Chopra.
Off topic but that still sounds like it's framed within the enlightenment period. If you're reading books and valuing literacy, (ie individual interpretations of texts, as opposed to being told what a book means) then you're still framed within the "enlightenment view of reality."
By 'enlightenment' I'm referring to a particular worldview perpetuated to denigrate the Western tradition and broader philosophical outlook in favor of a focus on empirical sciences and radically egalitarian social mores. The basic idea of 'enlightenment' is there is no objective and learnable purpose to the natural world and human society, and instead once we learn how to manipulate the natural world we can subject it to whatever ends we desire. In general it results in an implicit rejection of the ontology and teleology discovered by philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. This rejection may be valid, but students are not even given a clear view on the matter so that they know what they are rejecting. Instead, they tend to be educated in the criticisms offered by enlightenment writers, and filter the rest of history through that very limited lens.
It's strangely refreshing to see this particular criticism of the Enlightenment; I'm much more accustomed to hearing criticisms from the postmodernist direction. I disagree with your statement in a previous post that their arguments are incoherent, particularly the early exponents like Foucault or some of the Frankfurt school. I'd also point out that much of the Enlightenment tradition is not ontologically materialistic; in particular, German Idealism embodied in Kant, Schopenhauer etc. stands against materialism.
Based on what you're saying here, are you arguing for a kind of Scholasticism?
Finally, your criticism of a "radically egalitarian" view is somewhat perplexing to me. Would you mind expanding on that point?
In my opinion the idealistic variant of the enlightenment is conceptually not significantly different from materialism. The big thing is rejection of teleology, which also results in the radical egalitarianism since there is no longer a purposeful ordering to reality and no longer a natural law.
And yes, a teleological philosophy like scholasticism makes the most sense if we are trying to figure out the best way to live. Otherwise we just end up with the specious word game philosophy that everyone hates
That's sortof what the enlightenment was about... The enlightenment period was a decentralization of information caused by the reinvention and widespread use of the printing press in europe. During the dark ages europe's literacy rate was comparable to pre-mesopotamia. The fall of the roman empire lead to a fracturing of european civilization, the near-total loss of literacy, latin fractured into a dozen languages because priests wrote and read at a first grade level, misspelling words, reading with one finger slowly scrolling the text, mouthing each word phonetically...Ancient Greek texts were completely lost for a time...
Because nobody could read and copies the bible were sparse the catholic church was the single source of word of god. The printing press changed things. The bible became widespread and people read the bible for themselves. With that came an important shift, that one's own interpretation of a text was a valid interpretation. Tons of important literary works became widespread. The middle class valued literacy and saw it as a ticket to wealth and began teaching their kids to read and write competitively at younger and younger ages. They invented the education system we have today; the entire idea of a sequential learning system based around books, and becoming an adult when you could read at a certain level (as opposed to the catholic belief that you were an adult when you were old enough to fight at age ten), that was also the enlightenment and romantic period. Protestantism came about because people valued individual interpretations of the bible, which the catholic church had serious qualms with since that was their entire claim to authority...
So the fact that you grew up in a family which valued literacy, which sent you to a university where you spent four years reading books, and then came out of that with your own valid and rational ideas about what those texts mean, and your rite of passage into adulthood is based on your ability to read and write at a university level, that is still very much framed in the values of the enlightenment.
The precise narrative you just articulated is that of the enlightenment in the 18th century, which is a period much latter than the invention of the printing press and Protestantism.
A good book for you to check out is Rodney Stark's "For the Glory of God", written by a secular historian debunking much of the above narrative.
The fact that many educated today take your narrative for unarguable fact also illustrates the problem. The 'enlightenment' narrative is ironically very self limiting.
The brutality of the dark ages has been debunked. The timeline I just gave you about illiteracy, the printing press, the enlightenment, and our 400 year old education system remains in tact. Neil postman's a good source for the history of education (see "The Disappearance of Childhood") or you can simply wikipedia it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) There's some graphs that show how the enlightenment coincides an exponential growth in mass publication.
As far as protestantism and the printing press being invented prior to the enlightenment, yeah. Without widespread use of both you don't get the enlightenment for reasons I mentioned previously. And neither were really new ideas, either. Ancient greece had the printing press, high rates of literacy and a belief in interpreting texts for yourself, but these ideas were lost during the dark ages.
Hmm, I've received different information than yourself. There were more printed books, but that doesn't mean there was significantly less learning and literacy that came before, although a different proportion of the population was literate. And lack of general literacy does not necessarily entail lack of learning or understanding. For example, much of the iconography comes from that era, and the lay person was taught through imagery and liturgy, not necessarily to their detriment. As far as I know, the university system we know today came into being mostly within the context of Catholic Church's clericalism and much of the great philosophical synthesis came about during that time, especially with Thomas Aquinas.
At any rate, we are obviously referring to different things by the term 'enlightenment', definitely different historical epochs.
People going to university in order to get a good job are playing the wrong game. Anyone looking primarily at the "cost vs. future earnings" for any particular program or course in a university setting is
1. not going to find a good economic deal
2. not going to get any true value
3. not going to have fun
You're better to take a 2-year programming diploma or go into the trades if you want the highest short/midterm pay-off.
If you're playing a longer term strategic game and actually enjoy learning for the sake of growing (i.e. you do it on your own regardless) look at the career-long pay-off.
I went to community college but didn’t get my Associates because the final class was me paying to work in the computer lab. It was so mind numbing I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
