Comment by calinet6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calinet6 | Hacker News Reader

"To complete the education of young men and women and permit them to think."

Yes. Perfect. This is important, they're doing it right. I would venture to say that the specialization of the US education system, and the increased specialization especially in Engineering and Computer Sciences and in the sciences in general, is one of the largest problems in higher education today.

It's so important to learn how to think, to learn how to learn, to learn how fields are connected and interrelated even in indirect ways, and simply to learn that knowledge you cannot directly use still has value in its ability to train your mind to think about problems and make connections in new ways.

I am supremely thankful for my Bachelor of Arts in Comp Sci, for it gave me the freedom to take classes outside Engineering, in the arts. This liberal (aka comprehensive, varied, generous) arts education makes my computer science education flourish, and I believe has made me into the well-balanced person I am today.

What we need today are not people who can think intensely about one subject—we need people who can think about how to think, and apply that to anything. Well, we need both, surely, but we need some more generalists, or perhaps specialists who aren't myopic. We're getting overspecialized in the US, I think.

En d'autres termes, bonne travail France!

This is totally anecdotal, but isn't the US (especially at the college level) more focused on a "broader" education? My cousin got a BA in international relations in the US and then went and attended school in Spain. Something like only 1/4 of his credits counted towards his degree there even though nearly all of them transferred. His explanation was that they expect less of a broad education and more specialization.

Recalling my own experience I got a BA in political science and I spent something like 30 hours in my major, and 90+ in general education.

It seems as though many people on HN (and in general) talk about how we need more STEM majors, but then complain that a degree that's very highly technical isn't broad enough. If you want people to graduate in a reasonable amount of time than it almost has to be one or another.

My experience with public research universities would say that yes, in general you are required to take quite a few courses in many fields that may be outside the realm of your major.

I'm an Information Systems major (BS) and I took two philosophy and two psychology courses, plus archaeology and a bunch of other things in other subjects.

I agree with you: that's about the best you can do if you want to graduate in 4 years.

At least at the universities I know of, majors being too specialized isn't really considered an issue.

My Informatics degree (also BS) required 1 philosophy and 1 psychology. The philosophy course was focused on ethics, and the psychology course on business relations, though they were both professor-dependent (the topic changed with different professors). They were part of the "human-centric" track of the curriculum.

It depends on the school, and even further the major and sub-department.

For example, at Berkeley the L&S (Letters and Sciences) department was in charge of Computer Science (hence the BA) while the Engineering department was in charge of EECS (the more technical CS/EE major).

The Engineering department is one-track technical with very few outside electives, almost pure specialization. The L&S department was extremely broad and had great depth as well. I greatly enjoyed the latter, but both had great reputations.

I think diversity is important—some individuals will want to specialize, and the best you can do is offer them opportunities to branch out. Some people will naturally generalize. Encouraging a good variety of education is important and I think extremely valuable, but it isn't the best path for everyone. However 18 year olds aren't always the best ones to make decisions about their education and/or future ;)

US education seems to be stuck between traditional university and job training.

Traditionally, University exposed you to many things, various schools of thought and diverse subjects. The idea was to create an intelligent, rounded individual that could go out and become useful in a great many things. This worked when it was expected that the specifics of any job would be learned on the job.

Employers now however, don't want to do any training at all. They expect everyone, including new grads, to come in knowing everything they'll need to know. This is turning higher education into simple job training. They drop anything not directly related to whatever monkey position the school has decided to target you for.

My experience is that the US system is very much focused on a broader education- when I was at university in the UK I did not have the opportunity to take classes in different disciplines then choose my major. I applied to study International Relations, and I studied International Relations, and came out with a degree in International Relations.

After studying in both Spain and US, I can only say that this is correct (even though I did undergrad in Spain and grad studies in the US I think I have a pretty good idea of how the undergraduate studies work in the US).

Spain has a (more) specialized system in the undergraduate studies, even though it has been shifted lately (with the much hated Bologna process) to a brad system. Prior to the instauration of the Bologna process, an undergraduate student in Spain had two options:

- 1st cycle: 3 years of undergrad. I would say that it was pretty much equivalent to the undergrad in the US, but focusing only in courses relevant to the major. - 2nd cycle: 5 years of undergrad. This is (at least in STEM, the area I know) similar to a undergrad+master in the US (Even though in the US are only considered as a normal undergrad).

It depends on the university; some have a small number of credits that you can/should spend on things separated from your major (even in some cases sports), other have nothing similar to that and 100% of the credits are relevant.

Currently the educational system in Spain is slightly different after trying to merge it with the rest of the educational systems in Europe. In most cases the change has been seen as a shift into an educational system where students are less prepared and have to pay a more expensive Master (after the undergrad) to receive the same education they received with an undergrad years ago.

A major difference is tiering in secondary education in Europe. There's not just a single "high school" degree, but there are vocational degrees (which you usually finish after 9th or 10th grade, after which you continue at vocational schools) and academic degrees (which you usually finish after 12th or 13th grade).

The academic degrees, since they only have to target a subset of students, can then be considerably more demanding than a more generally accessible high school degree (e.g., Calculus being a mandatory subject in some countries rather than the equivalent of an AP course) and you will cover a lot in school what in the US you'd do in the first and second year of college. For the same reason, Bachelor degrees in Europe are typically three year rather than four year affairs.

However, that is only part of the story, and a full undergraduate degree in the US (at a good university) will offer you a broader education than what you get out of most undergraduate degrees in Europe; if you want a broader education than what European universities offer, many European countries will point you to affordable continuing education. For example, if you want to learn another language in Germany, many Volkshochschulen offer courses for 2-3 Euro per hour of instruction (more if you need it to be credentialed).

Or, more simply put, while you can learn the same things in either the US or Europe, the educational content is packaged in somewhat different structures. And it isn't that one is better or worse than the other; the differences exist more as a result of historical accident or because of how education interacts with the rests of society's institutions and structures.

I completely disagree. If anything we are under-specialized. We are pumping out liberal arts grads who have no skills that can pay back their loans. We have created a culture of middle managers without people to manage.

I used to believe this under-specialisation was a good thing. That a more general college education was better. But as I see it now, a liberal education has mostly just given us liberally educated people, but not liberal learners. I'd say, if you think yourself intellectually motivated, eager to learn things outside your field already, then paradoxically you should specialise, for this innate drive to learn will not perish after uni, and IMO unlikely to be affected in any way by a liberal arts environment. Rather, go to someplace more focused, and if you are not American, perhaps consider other great schools in places that are not the USA.

Big money, big technology may be in the USA, but your average undergrad really doesn't need too much of that.

(Of course, America has the best schools. If you're going to attend one of those, by all means, and work hard!)

"a liberal education has mostly just given us liberally educated people, but not liberal learners."

I would argue this is a specific problem, and not the intention or desired result of a Liberal Arts education. The intention is as this article states: to learn how to think correctly across boundaries of fields and within them. To solve problems better, not just be more general.

Of course this is sort of a No True Scotsman, but arguably any kind of education isn't working if it's not creating a positive impact on the value and ability of the person being educated.

Is that a problem with the idea of liberal arts in particular, or a problem with higher education in general that happens to manifest itself most obviously in liberal arts graduates? In other words, is liberal arts a hopeless idea in the first place, or is it simply the way that American colleges teach it that is problematic?

There are plenty of colleges that offer a B.S. in computer science, for example, whose graduates can't pass the fizzbuzz test. Meanwhile, hundreds of art history majors go on to have productive careers. Specialization is orthogonal to competence.

>Specialization is orthogonal to competence.

Doesn't follow from

>There are plenty of colleges that offer a B.S. in computer science, for example, whose graduates can't pass the fizzbuzz test. Meanwhile, hundreds of art history majors go on to have productive careers.

Look at employment rates for Art History Majors vs. CS majors.

Look at job opportunities for the two. Popularity of field is in no way linked to competence of indivduals practising in said field.

We are pumping out liberal arts grads only in the sense of people having degrees. Most of them are not nearly so rigorously grounded as the kids taking the baccalaureate.

Wouldn't that be the same as saying that liberal art grads are too specialized in liberal arts?

Remember we're talking about high school (age 17-18), college is a different matter (and very few people study philosophy in college/universities in France).

These are two different problems. I believe your complaint is people are under-specialized in useful skills. For example, if someone was highly-specialized in middle eastern poetry during a small 30 year period, they would likely still not be able to pay back loans.

In the sciences, people are over-specialized. I run into scientists frequently who are quite smart, but lack understanding of statistics, math, causality, and philosophy of science. This might have been acceptable back in days before large data sets, but now the way we do science has changed considerably, and scientists are largely unaware of the philosophical implications of this.

"We are pumping out liberal arts grads "

You mean humanities graduates. The Liberal Arts is not about making better managers, that's what an MBA is for, the liberal arts is about exposing students to a wider variety of fields. We have way too many people majoring in fields like history or literature, without corresponding educations in math and science for them to be truly "liberally educated."

The point of education is only partly to prepare individuals for a specific career. (Technically, that's not even education, but rather "career training.") The other part is to give them the intellectual tools they need to be parts of society, not just as good worker drones, but as citizens and fully formed individuals. This is something the liberal arts does attempt to address, while specialized training does not. Having a strong knowledge of history really helps when it comes to voting, for example.

Even from a career preparation standpoint, however, there is a point to liberal, or at least multidisciplinary, education. That is having an understanding of multiple fields makes it much simpler for one to understand how one field affects another. Just about anyone with a CS degree can write software to a spec but someone with knowledge about both CS and accounting might actually understand the spec when it comes to accounting software and anticipate the needs of clients.

All that said, one really needs to differentiate between the liberal arts and the humanities. The humanities are set of disciplines such as history, philosophy, art, etc. which alone, have limited practical use but have a long tradition of being studied in western society. The liberal arts is an approach to education that seeks broad exposure, including the humanities but also including disciplines such as math and science. This term dates back to the reign of Charlemagne, FWIW.

Well, for those of us who are specialized, perhaps something like philosophy would be a valuable addition? A combination of very high-level and very low-level skills can compliment each other well.

I have a philosophy degree (BA and MA). I work as a software developer. Not to brag, but I could wipe out my student loan debt in three months of gross earnings.

Of course, running in parallel to doing my degree, I spent an enormous amount of time coding, going to tech/geek events, reading documentation and so on.

I value my formal education. It's taught me to think widely about a wide range of things including the nature of language, the basis for politics and the state, religion and the good life. (Plus, a thorough knowledge of Kierkegaard is kind of sexy to the sort of person I'd want as a boyfriend.)

Yeah. Where, oh where, have all the slaves gone? Why, back in the day, you could get yourself a whip and some shackles and you'd be set for life. Now these goddamn lowlifes have choices and the law agrees with them. Why, they can walk off a job for mistreatment and still be paid for it! WELFARE. Big, crowding, intrusive government getting all up in my business.

I don't pay you trash to think. I pay you to work at scale!

As someone who has observed European education from afar, my impression is that the Bac (more like a high school diploma in the US) is broad, but their college is very specialized. This is true in both the UK (from the source of the admiring article) and France.

This isn't to say better or worse - it's just a tradeoff.

Today I believe we stand on the edge of a new age of synthesis. In all intellectual fields, from the hard sciences to sociology, psychology, and economics—especially economics—we are likely to see a return to large-scale thinking, to general theory, to the putting of the pieces back together again. For it is beginning to dawn on us that our obsessive emphasis on quantified detail without context, on progressively finer and finer measurement of smaller and smaller problems, leaves us knowing more and more about less and less. - Alvin Toffler

Reminds me of my university (Stellenbosch University). Also had an odd combination.

Started studying a Bachelor of Commerce in Computer Science (lots of maths, financial stats, etc). Then I switched to a Bachelor of Commerce in Socio-Informatics and Marketing (less technical programming, more applied work). However, socio-informatics is actually an Arts degree (it includes courses such as management theory and systems design).

So during my time at university I did science (maths, computer science, stats, programming), finance/business (accounting, financial planning, marketing, entrepreneurship) and arts (philosophy of systems, sensemaking, organization theory).

Loved it!

While I have no issue with this in younger students, forcing some folks to continue to study subjects in which they have no interest, would simply have driven us round the bend and made us lose interest in education entirely.

I specialised to mathematical and scientific subjects exclusively at the age of 15, and would have it no other way. Cultural learning I can pick up informally as and when I want to.

Yes, this is certainly the route some people will follow, and we need you to! People studying specific subjects at great depth is still entirely necessary. I just think it's ultra-common and over-encouraged these days, so we should tip the balance in the other direction. Or at least provide the opportunity and encouragement to those for whom generalist knowledge is an appealing route.

We have the specialists. We need the generalists to make sense of them.

I always find that "learning how to think" idea as an elusive concept. It is being a skepticist? An ultrarascionalist agent? A relativist?

In general it is a paradox, because educational systems would try to teach you how to think and at the end you realize that there was a hidden agenda that makes you think and combat them. While others combat you too.

You're looking at the "learning how to think" problem from a specialized viewpoint, trying to define it and pin it down. I don't think it works that way. It's hard to define, but it's more about understanding how to learn and how to be productive with your brain. However you do that is fine by me, as long as you're using your brain to its full capacity and creating value from it.

I recognize greater value in people who focus on a field and have a diverse and broad knowledge background than in those who are specialists alone. Surely the depth of the specialists is required, but the adjunct skills of the generalist turn out to be more important for knowledge work such as software and business, and important in unmeasurable and undefinable ways. They are all around more productive people, better problem-solvers, better learners, more collaborative, more well-rounded, and many more buzzwords which actually turn out to have true meaning in this case.

I highly recommend this book: http://www.sunypress.edu/p-2237-educating-the-democratic-min...

*"bon travail" :)

Ahhh desolée! Vous avez trouvé le française d'un Américain. :)

Le Francais (je n'ai pas de cedille sur ce clavier)

le français (though in English it's always upper-case, in French it's only when talking about the people)

Ce jeune Français parle français.

Err... I am French, but haven't written in my mother tongue for sooo long... The GP wrote "le francaise d'un Americain", and that's what I wanted to correct.

Ah yes I confused genders yet again. Embarrassing. I'll just stop now.

I would hardly call sitting down and writing a 4 hour test "doing it right" when it comes to philosophy. In my opinion, philosophy is a mandatory subject but it should be focused on debate, not essay-writing.

The material is one thing, testing on it is another... a 4 hour test sounds bad, but one would think that if they're teaching philosophy in the first place, then they sort of know what they're doing.

there's nothing wrong with a 4 or even a 6 hours test for a subject such as philosophy! there's no point in adding time pressure to a philosophy test - the point is not to think efficiently (it's not math or science!), but to think deep, think wide/laterally and to be creative in confined area of thought and to express your thought in a finished and refined form. If you add time pressure, they will just memorize the "correct interpretations" for the test, the "correct way to talk/write about topic x" and so on, just to be able to do things in time (and those who don't memorize ...or cheat, will get worse test scores, so there will be no incentive do things the right way) nulling the whole point of it!

...otoh, having a "philosophy test" in school kind of kills all the use or fun of the subject, but if you do it, at least try to get something out of it by not adding unnecessary constraints!

> the point is not to think efficiently (it's not math or science!),

That's not the difference between philosophy and math. The difference is one of effectivity, not efficiency. Science adds real-world relevance, but substracts rigour.

Perhaps the French educational system teaches pupils how to write, something that seems to be missing from the US curriculum.

The US curriculum attempts to teach students how to write, they just don't do a particularly good job at it most of the time. Also, it's very frequent that highschool teachers will still give decent grades to poorly written essays and papers, which may give many students a false impression that they're decent at writing when they really aren't.

(Usually this illusion is shattered once/if they attend university, thankfully.)

It definitely focuses on writing a lot. The other thing to take into account though is that nearly every test in the Baccalaureat lasts 3 hours or more, including the science ones (4 hours for Maths and Physics, and 3 1/2 hours for Biology/Geology).

Not to mention the infamous dictée. See for example:

http://articles.latimes.com/1987-12-21/news/mn-20246_1_frenc...

The article is from 1987 though, don't know if you noticed that ;)

The dictée is not as prevalent today as it was 20 years ago, and I don't think I have done one after the age of 11.

Are you kidding? The US system is completely devoted to writing. All my English classes were centered around writing essays (usually about the books we read).

In fact, I'd argue the opposite. The French system places a big emphasis on learning grammar, conjugations, spelling and things like that - which frankly is a waste of time. I don't think I ever took a grammar course in the US. I couldn't tell you what a prepositional phrase is, but I can write a good essay.

> The US system is completely devoted to writing.

Writing, perhaps, but not good writing. Most of good writing is the ability to synthesize ideas and construct prose people want to read.

Nobody wants to read your average student's five paragraph essay. On the other hand, I spent a large part of the weekend bingeing on Michael O. Church's blog, because the dude can write.

I can write a good essay, too, but I don't really attribute that to my schooling. Learning to write a good essay has one essential ingredient: you have to care about what you're trying to express. If you're just writing to the specification, you won't improve at anything except creating filler content.

I learned how to write a good essay because I thought I had something to say and I wanted people to hear it and understand it. Same with other facets of communication, like public speaking.

My personal experience hasn't been the same. I used to be really bad at writing, but through the school system forcing me to write I got significantly better. I think I'm pretty good now-a-days, though I'm a bit rusty.

Sure you get better at things you actually enjoy doing, but sometimes you need to force yourself or - in the case of children - be forced to do something over and over to learn. I think teachers try to make writing more interesting, but it can be a pretty hard thing to do. Most kids will hate it no matter what they write.

I am from Germany, and philosophy was pretty much the main topic of the ethics class for the two last grades when I was at high school. We had debates of all sorts as part of the curriculum, but we had also learned how to collect and present our arguments in the written form. So I think writing an essay for 4 hours may very well be suitable for a philosophy exam.

The 4 hour test is usually a 4 hour essay , where you're expected to write around a 6 page dissertation on the subject. At least when I took it , there was also the option to read a text and do an analysis on that.

The problem with oral debate is that its too easy to fall into the "persuade" aspect instead of "convince". And the last thing we need is pupils yelling at each other all the time. By forcing the argumentation in a written form, you make it a lot harder to write fallacious reasoning without being called on it.

Also, it should be remembered that is a country-wide exam with a 2 or 3 months deadline for the marks (with of course, not enough teachers to do such a huge job), and the students are supposed to be evaluated equally.

That said, the typical dissertation includes a synthetic part where the ideas of the previous parts, which expose one thesis and its opposite. So there is a form of debate there, but again what is judged is the consistency rather than the opinions supported by the student (at least that's how it was when I took it, in the scientific-oriented version of the "Bac").

You're talking about rhetoric, not philosophy.

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