All part of the zeitgeist I guess.
News is fake. Science is fake. Schools are barriers. Everything is subjective, objective reality is nonexistent.
How do we have productive disagreements going forward?
Funny you describe it that way. I'd argue that young people in STEM fields, including IS/CIS/CompSci undergrad programs, think everything can be objective when that clearly is not the case.
You don't need to go to college to press buttons, fill out spreadsheets, or input code until you get the output you seek. You need to go to college to make the subjective decisions, which don't have a clear right/wrong answer.
Why do you believe that college can teach making subjective decisions?
The humanities are glossed over at best in public high schools across the United States. I don't know of one that requires a PHIL intro course of students.
College is not vocational training (unless you're a law or medicine student), it's for learning how to think.
I'm not sure how much weight this argument holds.. The whole "gen ed" thing is a rather US-centric concept.
I don't know of any universities in the UK that require a PHIL intro course of students. When you go to university, you overwhelmingly study the one course ("major") that you picked beforehand. There's often a small amount of room on many courses for optionals from other fields, if you want to take them, but this is by no means mandatory and I'd say the proportion of folks doing philosophy modules studying a different degree at my alma mater was slim.
Yes, gen-ed is ubiquitous in the US. If you're in any humanities related program in the state I live in (Texas, so that's probably 25-30 large universities total), you'll have to take an intro PHIL course at least, which will probably be Plato and a random survey of 19th century European readings.
More is highly recommended for students looking for law school admission after their undergraduate degree at the state-owned college I attended.
The vast majority of philosophy classes are absolutely garbage at teaching either of those things. Sure, in theory, logic is part of philosophy, but in any of the philosophy classes I've taken, we didn't talk about logic. The things we did talk about were often examples of how not to think, yet they were presented as equally valid next to much more rational ideas.
For example, one of the things we covered in my ethics class was Kant's categorical imperative. The categorical imperative falls over instantly if you apply even the most basic logic to it, but no mention of this was made in any of the course discussion or materials. I'm sure lots of people walked out of that class thinking that the categorical imperative was a perfectly reasonable way to make ethical decisions. If this is the sort of "learning how to think" philosophy classes are doing, then I'd prefer we didn't--I'd rather let people figure out how to think on their own than to teach them unequivocally incorrect ways of thinking. Philosophy could be useful if these classes were taught as, "Here's a bunch of historical ideas, and here's how we apply logic to prove them wrong." But until that happens, I'd strongly oppose introducing any more philosophy to curricula.
Other fields are better-equipped to teach people logic and evidence. Science is all about evidence collection, and logically applying the collected evidence to the evaluation of hypotheses. Math, especially around proofs and derivations, is all about logic, and probability and statistics give you tools that are very broadly applicable. History, if taught well, teaches you how to logically analyze artifactual evidence and logically contextualize the present in terms of the past.
But, there are two problems: first, many college students don't focus much on these areas. And second, the parts of these fields which I mentioned aren't particularly well taught even by these fields. Many students get A's in science classes thinking that science is memorizing a bunch of facts about chemicals or living things, without ever having learned how to obtain new facts themselves. Many students get A's in math classes having memorized a bunch of formulas without being able to derive even basic proofs. Many students get A's in history classes having memorized a bunch of historical events, without knowing the difference between primary and secondary sources, and without ever considering that an author might have bias. Even the classes which do teach people how to think, to some extent, generally do a piss-poor job of it.
That's not to say that these fields (and other fields not mentioned) have no value. Even if you think well, your thinking is only as useful as the evidence you feed into it, and colleges do a very good job at moving vast amounts of evidence on a variety of subjects into people's brains. Further, colleges often do a lot of work getting people skills: lab techniques, using computers, effective communication, etc. You can argue that the purpose of college is learning how to think, but the implementation of college is much better at teaching people information and skills. Learning how to think would certainly be valuable, but de facto it's not what colleges are doing, and the things colleges are doing do have some value.
That said, modern colleges often put teaching of any kind behind profits, and that's not something I see any value in for society or students.
There is more to critical thinking than formal logic, I'd argue. The classroom format of a typical humanities college course has a lot to do with this. For example I would argue that a person without any background in the classics and some basic theology is going to struggle to get much from Paradise Lost. It's dense, difficult, and you have to know some things going into it to pick up on the nuances. But 30 people discussing it collaboratively 2 or 3 times per week, with the expert professor's guidance when they stumble on certain parts makes for a lot of interesting discussion. Thirty different people will pick up on thirty different bits and pieces in every classroom session.
I'd guess that a big part of the reason there is such a glut of humanities graduates who can't find professorships is that people simply enjoy the classes enough to keep going all the way through graduate degrees. You get discussion and debate in those classes that you can't find anywhere else.
I don't think the above is true of many other disciplines of study, with so many degrees offered being pitched for purely profit motive as job training, as you mentioned above.
I can't do a better job of describing this than this professor who puts his public lectures on youtube for free..
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpO_X3dhaqULiItXg84O9...
Well, if you look at literary criticism, there are a bunch of different ways to do it. The oldest ways, such as authorial intent or historical criticism, aren't that divorced from history as described in my previous post, or from just normal old formal logic. But a lot of the ways popular now, such as Marxist criticism or feminist criticism, are forms of reader-response criticism. In the worst cases, this sort of criticism can be used as a pulpit for professors to pass on their ideologies, which is deeply problematic--rather than teaching students how to think for themselves, it's teaching them to think like the instructor. In the best case, it can teach students how to evaluate literature in relation to their own goals--but I would argue that this is just an application of formal logic. The reality, in my limited experience, is neither of these extremes--classes I've taken and my friends have taken have mostly been "these are some of the ways people have thought about literature"--it's more about passing on information than about teaching how to think.
As I've said before, there's a lot of value in giving people information, I just don't think it supports the "college is about teaching people how to think" narrative.
That said, I'll give two caveats here:
1. My own formal training isn't in literary criticism, and beyond some general-ed requirements and second-hand experience from friends/partners in literature programs, I have very little experience here. My impressions here may very well be off-base, which is why I didn't mention literary programs in my previous post. A notable bias in my previous post is that I talked most about the fields I'm most familiar with.
2. Up to this point, I've basically been speaking about teaching facts versus teaching how to think as if they were two different, mutually exclusive things, but it's worth noting that that's not quite true. It's true that simply giving a student a fact doesn't teach them how to evaluate whether something is a fact, but if you give a student enough facts, eventually they come across discrepancies and begin to experience cognitive dissonance. Over vast swaths of facts resulting in a few discrepancies, a student will eventually begin to come up with their own framework for evaluating discrepancies, and hopefully that framework will look a lot like formal logic and evidence collection. I'd argue that this is a very, very inefficient way to teach students how to think, but eventually I think it does work.
I've read this a couple times, I'm curious about what you're saying here, do you mean that your class just reviewed some writing on the categorical imperative on its own, or read Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals?
The trouble, I think, is that making ethical judgements requires wrestling with ethical conundra oneself, and that is not something a professor with 300 undergrads to teach can provide any useful guidance to the majority of them for. The idea of accurately assessing performance is even more unrealistic. Maybe it's a function of the kind of university I attended, but the vast majority of my fellow students who were taking these 'subjective' courses were simply gaming a rubric in their writing. And this is true even of those who were genuinely interested in the subject matter, they saw it as a price of admission.
Which seems to me like an impediment to actually learning what was traditionally taught on more of an apprenticeship than an industrial model. If your own undergraduate experience was different, I'd be curious what your university did differently.
I don't remember a lot from my undergraduate course on Ethics, but I do recall that literally in the first lecture, the professor presented us with questions about things like how should one behave or treat others, and then presented us with "edge cases" that directly challenged what most of us had answered.
As a young person, it's very easy to think that our problems are novel and unique, and the ethics course very clearly showed that many of these problems are millennia old, with people having given names to better-realized versions of what most of us think of as the way we should behave, and that people have spent lifetimes of work writing and arguing about the ramifications and "edge cases" of such philosophy.
I feel like the biggest benefit from the course was not any particular ethical guidance, but rather the challenging of our beliefs, and the realization that these things _are_ hard, and are not something we can trivially answer with something that fits on a Hallmark card.
>Why do you believe that college can teach making subjective decisions?
Lol, most people actually believe that common-sense can be taught to people. I don't.
In the US, maybe. Do people take ridiculous loans for their degree outside of US? Some loans, sure, but loans that amount to 5-10x their future yearly income? I don't know...
[1]http://www.collegescholarships.org/loans/average-debt.htm
Yes. In the UK. I had a relationship with someone who specifically learned German in school, and went to Germany to tutor in a cross-education outreach program after she graduated to go scout for Universities she wanted to attend in order to avoid having to take out massive loans like her siblings did back home. Very smart girl.
She and I enrolled into online classes, I had already complete my Bsc but wanted to do this with her; but she felt she was missing on the 'campus life' part of the University experience and went into Pedagogy to the Masters level and now teaches back in the UK.
In a post Brexit World, that is just not possible.
The EU is still pretty favourable in terms of University costs being hidden and obfuscated via VAT for the students, but many Industries within it's local economy (PIIGS, Romania, Hungary, Slovenia in the Eurozone, and just about most of the periphery member nations) cannot provide adequate jobs let alone a career to its graduates within their sectors so they have to go to Germany, UK, Holland and as things have gotten worse France to a much lesser degree than when I was there.
The ideal being landing a job in the US or China where they can make obscene amounts of money in certain fields like Tech or Medicine with little to no debt, and subsidized advance degrees. Which still opens it up to the work visa lottery, and uprooting your life during some the most critical years of your entire Life (late 20s to early 30s) in the hopes it pans out.
The best thing that can happen is to disrupt it entirely and level the playing field and re-structure it in such a way that its both affordable and accessible to all motivated to want to go in and meet its requirements. And incentivize them to stay in their home towns a build a solid community and tie it to the needs of its actual needed labor force: hopefully doing away with the notion of studying Civil Engineering for Oil Rig drilling if you're from Iceland kind of thing. As it makes no sense, and doesn't reflect the value system or the job prospects of your community let alone the job prospects of a Nation that is entirely dependent on renewable geo-thermal.
How exactly the Lab portion of STEM gets solved is still a mystery.
I propose the building auxiliary wet-labs in Libraries within their communities. The net benefit here being that students should be required to teach children and adults of their community the topic or subject they are studying as a graded portion of their grade for the privilege of having such a model and build community in the process. Or perhaps that should be the only real on-campus (at both Universities and Community Colleges) component to what is an otherwise entirely Online system?
Just look at this example, which having to attend my midterm and practicals during one of the largest fires in San Diego History (I was literately trapped in my car on my way back home to OC for 7 hours after they closed campus when we were sitting down for the exam as the classroom filled with smoke) and during my finals during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, I can understand this from both sides:
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/ucla-professor-suspended-af...
That hot button issue could be entirely mitigated, whether you're pro or against the BLM protests is irrelevant. On just a practical and logistical matter you could just overcome this with the current technology that we have and avoid the certain backlash to the professor, department because of it from the irate student body and opportunistic Media.
I saw a rant from a UCLA professor pretty much lining out how he, and his entire profession have not seen a single decrease in pay since he left University in the late 80s as a TA and saw how the CSU/UC extortion system was being assembled in what was once the envy of the entire US' university system--which followed the EU's model pretty well, and was low to no cost if you were local, but had the ability to employ its graduates as the California Economy could support it. Which was a net benefit that significantly contributed to CA becoming the 8th largest economy in the World.
I can't seem to find it and really wish I had saved it as the very employees in the system are to the point where they know it went too far. And are perhaps even afraid of what may happen at what an angry mob can do these days.
I think people like the one you're responding to would agree and increasingly think that association with institutions of higher learning send a strong signal to avoid dialogue. It doesn't necessarily look like anti-intellectualism to me, any more than filtering out people who didn't graduate high school is necessarily elitism. I could see myself rationalizing either, depending on the kind of conversation I wanted to have.
And at end. In my intention to post, I was solely being altruistic, informing whomever reading that if they were to read this article and consider getting a degree from U of the P that they should consider the risk. Just a gesture. However, I think my writing style might have been misunderstood as some semblance of pseudo intellectual attempt or such. Do know, for the record,that as the 1st to reply to the post, my intention was to inform.
But I am intrigued and inspired. How about we both try to post an article that invites our versions of intellectualism! Ready set go.
We are barely having any of those right now in the greater society. As long as we can't argue facts, objective-reality and do so without feelings, we'll continue descending into anarchy and divisiveness.
Some news is fake, some isn't.
Some science is fake, some isn't.
Schools are barriers, but for many elements of a school, the fact that it's a barrier is a good thing--we don't want ignorant people performing in roles that where knowledge is required. The problem is that many elements of schools are barriers which are poor at achieving their purpose, or are directly counterproductive to their purpose.
> How do we have productive disagreements going forward?
That's a complicated question, but oversimplifying the opinions of people we disagree with and then labeling it ("cynical anti-intellectualism") isn't the answer.
This is not objectively true but I understand what you're trying to say. I'm sad to hear that your experience of science and truth has been only that which society has given you, or at the least that you feel that others are only experiencing it in that way
The short summary is: Two people sitting in a bar, discussing how there is no objective truth, or that "science or truth exists only at the whims of the social order" and stuff like that, all day long. And then a third person comes along and smashes their brains with a barstool. In some variations, the first two people are a scientist and a priest. But the third person is just some dude with a barstool.
A lot of it is like Bostrom's idea of the decentralized electroshock dystopia: even though a significant proportion of people are witches, everyone's afraid of reprisal for not actively hunting witches, so the witches-in-hiding hunt their own when they're unmasked.
But this is the way of things; this wave will pass, eventually, as well. And like the soviet scientists who kept their heads down and mouthed the party line, the secret iconoclasts will survive till the current order is replaced by the next, with its own peculiar tabboos.