… essay by Peter Brooks in the New York Review of Books. But there’s something in his vague, high-minded tone that marks him as floating above the problems he claims to be taking seriously.
… essay by Peter Brooks in the New York Review of Books. But there’s something in his vague, high-minded tone that marks him as floating above the problems he claims to be taking seriously.
Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=29634
March 5th, 2011 at 4:31PM
Well, and sneering at “know-nothing Palinites” is hardly likely to diminish the sense of us v. them that makes a lot of these budget cuts psychologically easier for the public. (Incidentally, it’s the same mistake that teachers in WI seem to make in their PR campaign: “teachers work ever so much harder than anyone else in this world, especially you” doesn’t exactly endear one to the people who pay one’s salary, whatever the justness of the public employees union’s grievances.) The best arguments for the liberal arts don’t cultivate that preachy and condescending “We take your kids and make them better people, by which we mean better leftists” tone; they quietly point out that one could do worse for one’s kids than give them four years to think and talk about some of the best and worst ideas that have been bandied about for the past few millennia before they have to go out into the world and live and work with the other human beings.
March 5th, 2011 at 6:24PM
@shannon, I’m sympathetic to your better angels vs better than approach but if that’s the best argument to be made for the liberal arts than the writing is on the wall.
March 6th, 2011 at 1:36AM
I think the better argument is that people who didn’t take the liberal arts seriously in college often have a great desire to return to it once they’ve worked at something a bit more applied for awhile. I’ve always wondered if education isn’t wasted on the young, and if our model for delivering it wasn’t based on some archaic and romantic ideas about what sort of people can and should go to college.
If you’re looking for the systematic argument–one that I don’t really have space or time to lay out here–Martha Nussbaum’s a good place to turn. I haven’t read the book mentioned in the article that UD linked to, but Love’s Knowledge was a solid case for the realist novel as intrinsic part of modern epistemology.
I think you could probably make a pretty good argument for the liberal arts in the age of the internet, too, as a way of learning how to understand claims and rhetoric–an important tool of discernment when there are a lot of people talking at once.
March 6th, 2011 at 8:42AM
I think that liberal arts as continuing ed. makes more sense, St.Cavell has noted that philosophy is for grown-ups. Certainly there are different kinds of literacy that informed citizens need to make sense of, sensibly participate in, our increasingly complex world but to provide such would be a pretty major overhaul of most of higher ed. When I was an undergrad at SUNY SB there was an excellent class on the technologies that are part of our everyday lives which was not only well attended but made the kind of thoughtful connections to lived experience that one might hope for and which would have made John Dewey proud.