For all the importance of learning science, technology, engineering and math,
there's nothing like a good, squishy liberal arts education to get you thinking
about things you otherwise wouldn't
If you’re looking for someone to solve a problem, pick the most disorderly
thinker in the room. The slightly sloppy mind is also the very elastic mind—the
one that rounds corners, hedges conclusions and can adapt to a changing set of
premises. And for all the importance of learning science, technology,
engineering and math, there’s nothing like a good, squishy liberal arts
education to get you thinking about things you otherwise wouldn’t.
At TIME’s Education Summit on Friday, a panel of academics addressed that
idea with a straightforward question: “What is an educated person?” We think we
know. Putting in the years, piling up the credits, accumulating the degrees
certainly get you most of the way there. But does everyone have the ability to
make the most of that?
Cathy Davidson, professor of interdisciplinary studies—and much more—at Duke
University, thinks of the period from 1875 to 1925 as the world’s first great
information age. “Books became widely available,” she says. “Educators developed
a range of tools and ideas that remade the university—the concept of IQ, the
beginning of the SAT, the creation of majors and minors in university
curricula.”
Educators in the current information age, she worries, haven’t yet figured
out how to optimize what they have in quite the same way. The result is that for
all the attention that goes to maximizing our ability to work in the digital
age—which means promoting the science, technology, engineering and math fields
hard—we have left some things out. Human resources departments in large
information age companies like Amazon.com, Davidson says, thin out their massive
herd of job applicants by running their resumes through an algorithm that
eliminates candidates with liberal arts or community college degrees. Great, so
they’ve guaranteed that they get the most technologically savvy workers. “Then,
however, they complain that the employees they have can’t master critical
thinking,” Davidson says.
During earlier sessions of the Summit on Friday, participants floated a
possible solution to that problem—and the anti-liberal arts bias that gives rise
to it. Numerous speakers made the point that a culture with a short attention
span must acquire the ability to think long-term when it comes to basic
investment in R&D and experimentation. If you expect an immediate payoff,
you’re always going to be disappointed. The same is true for certain kinds of
education.
“A liberal arts degree traces an arc that few people will be able to
anticipate when they embark on it,” says Pauline Yu, the president of the
American Council of Learned Societies. “We have to instill patience in the
public mind.”
That pays big dividends. It’s fine to be digitally literate, to have access
to massive—indeed unlimited—amounts of information. But you still have to know
how to apply it.
“For that,” says Yu, “you need historical literacy, global literacy. You need
to know a second language. You need to be able to get inside the head and the
skin of another person—the kind of thing that comes from studying literature.
Most important, you need to understand ethics—what it means to be a citizen of
the nation and the planet.”
This makes you not only a more aware person, it also makes you a flexible
person. Marcia McNutt, the editor of Science magazine and the former head of the
U.S. Geological Survey mentioned that one thing that struck her in her time in
government work was the number of people who had held their jobs for a long,
long time. “At the USGS, we had more people with 50-year pins than in any other
part of the federal government,” she said.
So that’s bad, right? A result of bureaucratic tenure that could only lead to
ossified thinking? Maybe not. ”They had at least five careers in the time they
were there,” says McNutt. “The things that they came in working on were nothing
like the things they’d have to do later, so they had to reinvent themselves
again and again.”
Maybe the USGS employees were a rare and uniquely flexible group. Certainly,
that kind of nimbleness is not what’s typically associated with people studying
the Earth sciences—a field in which things literally move in geological time. No
matter how they came by such flexibility though, there are ways for institutes
of learning to help everyone acquire it. Encourage students to study overseas,
to learn a second language, to get outside their comfort zones. If you’re
majoring in physics, minor in literature. If you major in literature, study the
sciences too—and in an economy that does tilt toward workers with particular
talents, think about sticking around a while and picking up a Masters degree in
teaching or a technical skill.
The mind that’s too oblique, too non-literal, can be poorly disciplined. The
mind that’s all discipline is too brittle. Science and math can brace the
liberal brain—and liberal arts can anneal the technical one.
Time
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기