Have you tried a job search on dialup in the past, say, five years? Or accessing online banking? What about comparison-shopping for cars or living arrangements? Submitting a research paper online (even for an in-person class, as all mine always have been when I was an undergrad--professors still often required online submission)?
Which, of course, defeats the whole purpose of Wikipedia's open-content open-editing model, since now they're tucked away where casual readers won't ever find them.
There's a reason we don't use The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a textbook for late Roman history classes these days.
Just because the time period covered is over doesn't mean the state-of-the-art in our understanding of it is. This applies as much to art history as it does to any other discipline concerned with the past.
What, exactly, is "useless" about a liberal arts degree?
When you earn a liberal arts degree, you now have a better understanding of a given subject than you did before, and you also have better thinking and communication skills than you did before.
That's kind of the whole point, isn't it? Why does anything else matter?
I mean, after all, it's education, not job training.
Maybe students need to re examine the efficacy of getting an MFA in post modern Marxist-Anarchist-Lesbian critical literary theory when literally the only job they can get is teaching that to the next crop of like minded students.
People get degrees in that because it's interesting. Nothing else matters.
It's education, not job training. It's about learning for its own sake.
So much of the problem we have today can be attributed to people with ridiculous attitudes like yours who see education as some sort of financial investment or job credential when in fact it is properly understood to be anything but.
Time and money spent on optimization is time and money that can't be spent on other things.
With hardware so much cheaper than it was BITD, there's less of a need to optimize--freeing developer resources to be used on other things instead that they wouldn't be able to do if they had to optimize for optimization's sake.
It's better this way.
On the contrary, liberal arts programs are worth so much more than any other.
A liberal arts graduate:
Has demonstrated critical thinking abilities
Can understand the art and literature that make society worthwhile (cool gadgets, medical advances, and whatnot are merely tools--the means, rather than the ends. They're useful and make things easier, but they're ultimately not what really matters)
Is capable of making complex, nuanced moral judgments based on sound reasoning and taking into account all available evidence
Has demonstrated communications abilities
Can actually see beyond his own narrow scope of experiences and preferences
Is capable of learning anything outside what was covered in his education, and can learn a technical or scientific field on his or her own much better, more quickly, and more easily than someone educated in STEM can learn a liberal arts or humanities field on his or her own
The irony of this comment is that it is actually the liberal arts that require the greater degree of work. I say this as someone who has degrees in both Aeronautical Engineering and History.
The standards and work required for history are much higher than in any science/math/engineering field, simply because the less cut-and-dry nature of liberal arts means much more evidence and much more critical thought must go into proving a point with sufficient rigor.
I'm not sure I accept your assertion that the liberal arts and humanities are "soft." If anything, they're much more rigorous: since what constitutes a "correct" (or at least "valid") response is much less cut-and-dried, and rarely (if ever) speaks for itself, one must put much much more effort into explaining and justifying one's solution, and there's much more information and context outside the immediate problem that needs to be taken into account.
We need fewer engineering graduates, not more.
Engineering is easy. It doesn't require expert guidance to pick it up. If someone wants to learn engineering, they can do it on their own time. What universities need to focus on is the humanities and liberal arts. These are much more difficult and rigorous disciplines that require expert guidance--and they teach what really matters, which is the essence of what it means to be a human being. Engineering produces cool gadgets and all, but those gadgets are only a means to an end. The end is a better understanding of the human condition and a capacity for appreciating the full range of human emotions, in oneself and in others. This requires a liberal arts education.
Furthermore, a good liberal arts education enables you to pick up literally any other field on your own, especially one as comparatively simple as engineering.
The reason to read the works of (or paraphrases of the works of) ancient or historical thinkers is because they introduced new concepts and new patterns of thought. You can study these concepts and their relationships, and rehearse these patterns of thought, and increase your intellectual ammunition and versatility.
So I can parrot these guys? Become an unoriginal automaton?
The exact opposite, actually: so you can analyze them for their strengths and weaknesses, and adapt their strengths to make your own new discoveries and realizations.
To think you don't need to get deep into some of these areas, and don't need to take time to wander around in each area of knowledge with expert guides, because "there is a wikipedia page for that", is the height of pseudo-intellectual arrogance. You will know the stuff in the same way a parrot knows it. And it will be as much use to you as it is to the parrot.
Damn right there is a wikipedia page for that, information isn't hard to come by these days.
And yet, as your comment's parent points out, you will have zero understanding of the concepts involved: you can memorize and regurgitate facts, but that's it. And without guidance by a credentialed expert in the field, you will have no understanding of the scholarly context to put them in their proper place.
Computer science is a subject they can easily learn on their own, if they're so inclined. It's certainly not essential to producing a well-rounded, knowledgeable individual capable of engaging in independent critical thought. Spend more time on the really important and much more rigorous subjects like history, literature, philosophy, and languages instead. Those are what are important, because they are what make us better [i]people[/i].
Actually, liberal arts degrees are the most valuable and worthwhile of all, because they equip you to understand the one thing that matters most: actual people as moral agents. And while simple topics like engineering and natural sciences probably can be understood on one's own, more complex, serious, and rigorous disciplines like those one finds in the humanities and liberal arts in fact cannot be understood without expert guidance to help you navigate the complex and interrelated web of interpretations and research in the field, to make sure you actually understand what you're reading correctly, to make sure you know what the competing interpretations are and their relationships, and to answer your questions.
I certainly haven't sold any of my undergraduate or graduate history or anthropology books. Mostly because they're monographs that contain original research and interpretations that are always interesting to re-read and re-examine (and which I myself cite in my own research from time to time), or are survey texts that are useful as a general reference.
I'm pretty sure I won't find, say, Heather Coleman's Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, William Edgerton's compilation of Tolstoyan peasant memoirs, Laura Engelstein's brilliant interpretation of Skoptsy ritual castration practices, and Glennys Young's Ph.D. dissertation in which, despite the comparative paucity of primary sources on the subject available to American historians before the Cold War, she presented a fascinating insight (that I wish she had expanded upon more) on how Russian peasants changed their interpretation of Jesus in response to the changing political situation in Russia from 1905 to 1927/8/9, on the Internet. But I certainly can at a university research library.
Where you can find a greater amount of peers with similar interests.
Not really, no. At least, not in serious fields.
With many levels of structure to match your own learning preferences.
"Learning styles" are mostly a myth. And you can't pick-and-choose what you learn--in any field, you can't understanding your specific interest without a comprehensive understanding of its context.
With actual experts amongst your peers in open source participation (maybe also in university but in colleges? no way).
In any serious field, nearly all the experts are either on a college or university faculty, or are retired from one.
It's not a "BS piece of paper." For most subjects, you simply [i]can't[/i] "learn stuff more efficiently" outside of an academic setting because you lack the guidance of someone who's already an expert in the field to provide you with context for weighing the importance of varying interpretations of a problem in the field...to find errors in your methodology that you would otherwise not notice...to keep you from becoming a "fanboy" of whatever happens to be the interpretation promoted by the first book you read in the subject without giving due consideration to other interpretations.
There is no substitute for a formal education in any serious field.
Granting doctoral degrees in these fields is meaningless. Having a Lit PhD or a Philosophy PhD doesn't mean anything. You just looked at your undergrad work and did the same thing for a few more years. You didn't contribute anything to the field. Ditch them.
Err...no. That is not at all true, not in the least. That you would make such a claim displays nothing but your own ignorance of those fields.
Not that that actually justified not paying for it, of course. No more so than leaving one's front door unlocked makes it okay for thieves to come in and rob one's house.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, we do.
Have you tried a job search on dialup in the past, say, five years? Or accessing online banking? What about comparison-shopping for cars or living arrangements? Submitting a research paper online (even for an in-person class, as all mine always have been when I was an undergrad--professors still often required online submission)?
Because I have.
Which, of course, defeats the whole purpose of Wikipedia's open-content open-editing model, since now they're tucked away where casual readers won't ever find them.
The problem with the Libertarian Party is that it hates freedom, as evidenced by its love of capitalism.
There's a reason we don't use The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a textbook for late Roman history classes these days.
Just because the time period covered is over doesn't mean the state-of-the-art in our understanding of it is. This applies as much to art history as it does to any other discipline concerned with the past.
Because it's interesting.
What, exactly, is "useless" about a liberal arts degree? When you earn a liberal arts degree, you now have a better understanding of a given subject than you did before, and you also have better thinking and communication skills than you did before. That's kind of the whole point, isn't it? Why does anything else matter? I mean, after all, it's education, not job training.
People get degrees in that because it's interesting. Nothing else matters.
It's education, not job training. It's about learning for its own sake.
So much of the problem we have today can be attributed to people with ridiculous attitudes like yours who see education as some sort of financial investment or job credential when in fact it is properly understood to be anything but.
Not all do. For that matter, not all Christians even believe in a god anyway.
Through serious historical and literary analysis. Tolstoy did a pretty good job of it.
Time and money spent on optimization is time and money that can't be spent on other things. With hardware so much cheaper than it was BITD, there's less of a need to optimize--freeing developer resources to be used on other things instead that they wouldn't be able to do if they had to optimize for optimization's sake. It's better this way.
The irony of this comment is that it is actually the liberal arts that require the greater degree of work. I say this as someone who has degrees in both Aeronautical Engineering and History.
The standards and work required for history are much higher than in any science/math/engineering field, simply because the less cut-and-dry nature of liberal arts means much more evidence and much more critical thought must go into proving a point with sufficient rigor.
I'm not sure I accept your assertion that the liberal arts and humanities are "soft." If anything, they're much more rigorous: since what constitutes a "correct" (or at least "valid") response is much less cut-and-dried, and rarely (if ever) speaks for itself, one must put much much more effort into explaining and justifying one's solution, and there's much more information and context outside the immediate problem that needs to be taken into account.
We need fewer engineering graduates, not more. Engineering is easy. It doesn't require expert guidance to pick it up. If someone wants to learn engineering, they can do it on their own time. What universities need to focus on is the humanities and liberal arts. These are much more difficult and rigorous disciplines that require expert guidance--and they teach what really matters, which is the essence of what it means to be a human being. Engineering produces cool gadgets and all, but those gadgets are only a means to an end. The end is a better understanding of the human condition and a capacity for appreciating the full range of human emotions, in oneself and in others. This requires a liberal arts education. Furthermore, a good liberal arts education enables you to pick up literally any other field on your own, especially one as comparatively simple as engineering.
The exact opposite, actually: so you can analyze them for their strengths and weaknesses, and adapt their strengths to make your own new discoveries and realizations.
And yet, as your comment's parent points out, you will have zero understanding of the concepts involved: you can memorize and regurgitate facts, but that's it. And without guidance by a credentialed expert in the field, you will have no understanding of the scholarly context to put them in their proper place.
Computer science is a subject they can easily learn on their own, if they're so inclined. It's certainly not essential to producing a well-rounded, knowledgeable individual capable of engaging in independent critical thought. Spend more time on the really important and much more rigorous subjects like history, literature, philosophy, and languages instead. Those are what are important, because they are what make us better [i]people[/i].
That you erroneously think it "worked" only demonstrates how inadequate your understanding really is.
Actually, liberal arts degrees are the most valuable and worthwhile of all, because they equip you to understand the one thing that matters most: actual people as moral agents. And while simple topics like engineering and natural sciences probably can be understood on one's own, more complex, serious, and rigorous disciplines like those one finds in the humanities and liberal arts in fact cannot be understood without expert guidance to help you navigate the complex and interrelated web of interpretations and research in the field, to make sure you actually understand what you're reading correctly, to make sure you know what the competing interpretations are and their relationships, and to answer your questions.
I certainly haven't sold any of my undergraduate or graduate history or anthropology books. Mostly because they're monographs that contain original research and interpretations that are always interesting to re-read and re-examine (and which I myself cite in my own research from time to time), or are survey texts that are useful as a general reference.
I'm pretty sure I won't find, say, Heather Coleman's Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, William Edgerton's compilation of Tolstoyan peasant memoirs, Laura Engelstein's brilliant interpretation of Skoptsy ritual castration practices, and Glennys Young's Ph.D. dissertation in which, despite the comparative paucity of primary sources on the subject available to American historians before the Cold War, she presented a fascinating insight (that I wish she had expanded upon more) on how Russian peasants changed their interpretation of Jesus in response to the changing political situation in Russia from 1905 to 1927/8/9, on the Internet. But I certainly can at a university research library.
Not really, no. At least, not in serious fields.
"Learning styles" are mostly a myth. And you can't pick-and-choose what you learn--in any field, you can't understanding your specific interest without a comprehensive understanding of its context.
In any serious field, nearly all the experts are either on a college or university faculty, or are retired from one.
It's not a "BS piece of paper." For most subjects, you simply [i]can't[/i] "learn stuff more efficiently" outside of an academic setting because you lack the guidance of someone who's already an expert in the field to provide you with context for weighing the importance of varying interpretations of a problem in the field...to find errors in your methodology that you would otherwise not notice...to keep you from becoming a "fanboy" of whatever happens to be the interpretation promoted by the first book you read in the subject without giving due consideration to other interpretations. There is no substitute for a formal education in any serious field.
I don't think this is at all relevant for a federal tax.
Granting doctoral degrees in these fields is meaningless. Having a Lit PhD or a Philosophy PhD doesn't mean anything. You just looked at your undergrad work and did the same thing for a few more years. You didn't contribute anything to the field. Ditch them.
Err...no. That is not at all true, not in the least. That you would make such a claim displays nothing but your own ignorance of those fields.
"Useful" or not is irrelevant. Knowledge, however specialized, is desirable for its own sake.
By Windows XP not supporting a technology that was not even around at the time it was released?
Not that that actually justified not paying for it, of course. No more so than leaving one's front door unlocked makes it okay for thieves to come in and rob one's house.