I have just been reading Sean Gabb's one hundredth Free Life Commentary, which is called The Value of Education and is about the importance of an all-round education of the "useless" variety, as opposed merely to the acquisition of marketable skills.
I know of schools that teach information technology but not history. Again, I do not dispute the value of technical skills. I am proud of my ability to build computers and to make software work: my own website is almost entirely crafted by hand in HTML. But history also is important. An accountant who is ignorant of the French Revolution, or cannot recognise sonata form, or knows not a line of poetry, is nothing more than a skilled barbarian. In a nation where only a small minority is truly educated, legal equality becomes a hard concept to maintain, let alone political equality. In a nation without even that minority, public life must inevitably become savage and arbitrary - a thing of wild, inconstant passions, led by those unable to perceive or follow longer term goods.That is where, I think, we are now fast approaching. We have a Prime Minister who cannot spell, and is not ashamed of the fact. We have a political class in general that lacks nearly all skill of persuasive speech and seems ignorant of the past. Of the first Ministers appointed to serve under Tony Blair, apparently, the majority listed football as their main hobby in their Who's Who entries; and not one listed any humanistic pursuit. I doubt if the Conservatives are much better. Perhaps the Judges and permanent heads of department will soon follow the trend. Little wonder our freedoms are being given up, one at a time, to moral panics and appeals to administrative convenience.
That catches the drift. I remember having a similar argument at my school, with a Latin master inevitably. He spoke of Ovid's writings about bees, claiming that to have read this was to have learned something useful. So my school was already rotten with the importance of being useful, or he would have found a quite different way to defend Ovid. However else you sell it, you can't sell Latin as better science than science.
Sean's piece doesn't convince me of much, but it is, as always, beautifully written, and Sean does at least explain nicely why such a thing is good to have. It makes your own company more pleasing. A liberal education – in the sense of lots of interesting things to think about and the habit of thinking intelligently about them – is accordingly an economic benefit every bit as palpable as an education in html or accountancy.
The availability of such writings as Sean's on the Internet illustrates that a liberal education is now easier to obtain then ever before. And even if the Internet didn't exist, there are all the newly liberated TV channels, a few of which provide quite cultured stuff, in among all the rubbish, that is to say in among all the stuff I don't care for. And then there are the remainder shops, which are now an amazing source of wisdom and learning.
As to the loss of our freedoms, would a different educational syllabus during the last few decades really have made that much difference? They had philistines in the nineteenth century. They may have known more Latin than the present cabinet does, but they were philistines nevertheless. And by the same token there are plenty of widely read people now, who acquaint themselves with many different things, but just with different different things to their grandparents. There's a certain sort of person – Sean and I are two such, although our preferred fields of study are not at all the same – who pride themselves on the broadness of their reading and thinking. Such people will always dig beneath the surface of whatever they learn, useful or useless, to the deeper meanings and profundities of their civilisation, and of other civilisations. Even if our exam results driven and vocationally obsessed schools stop bothering with such things, they will still continue.
Insofar as our bit of civilisation does need its freedoms rescuing, such a rescue is far more likely to come from the philistine USA than from the educated elites of continental Europe, whose critiques of American culture - i.e. lack of culture - Sean partly echoes. Those vulgar Americans seem to have at least as firm a grasp of our freedoms and their tendency to get lost as any product of Balliol or the Sorbonne. And the texture of their civilisation isn't that bad either.
I'm tempted to observe, so I will, that a liberal education is merely the mastery of a few techniques which happen to be obsolete, like sonata form or composing Latin verse, plus some history of a sort that has now been updated out of regular existence with the passing of time. Why concocting appalling poetry in a dead language is any better for your mind than playing adventure games on a computer or training to be a surgeon I truly do not know, and learning about sonatas dates from the time, now gone, when if you wanted to listen to music that was even adequately musical without going to a rare and expensive and probably hard-to-get-to concert, your, or your wife, or your friends, or your servants, had to make it for you. Knowing sonatas used to be a skill as relevant to enjoying life as knowing html or how to set the video is now.
I dare say that in centuries to come, people will not be considered truly educated unless they have a smattering of at least two obsolete programming languages.
But please don't let me put you off reading Sean's piece. No doubt many readers of this will agree more with him than with me about these matters.
Fascinating topic, regret that I don't have the time to respond at length, but please allow two comments...
I object strenously to the comment he made in his penultimate paragraph -- "But I have no doubt that Shiite theology and law were much closer to the humanistic ideal than the western sociology they replaced" -- I don't want to plead any case for sociology (leave that to the sociologists) but I do not think that a culture that so thoroughly represess women, a culture that creates a harsh theocracy, a culture that can send an army of children to clear a minefield for the combatants by walking across it while tied together (lest any attempt to escape) can be said to be in any way close to the humanistic ideal. That's the kind of outrageous statement that I would have thought could only be made by the kind of shallow intellect that it would seem he had been criticizing earlier in his essay. (Perhaps he has been spending too much time on Foucault, et al?)
Earlier in his essay he said "This is not to disparage purely technical or professional training" (which, of course, carries some implication that these kinds of training probably are deserving of disparagement) -- It's not quite clear if he has in mind specific vocational training (i.e., automobile mechanics) or education in technical or scientific fields (computer analyst, electrical engineer, etc.) [I am not the first person to make the following observation but it is certainly something I have seen time and time again.) Go to any university and you will be far more likely to find members of the math and science faculty attending a concert or a poetry reading or a lecture on Shakespeare than you would be to find members of the music or literature faculty attending a presentation about some topic in math or science.
I haven't read the article yet, but just some responses to Brian and Jim.
For one thing, I never had the chance at school to learn Latin, and very little chance to learn any language, and the older I get and the more I write the more I feel this, because so much English vocabulary comes from Latin or from Latin derived languages. English is a Germanic language, but a lot of the stuff in the language that does not follow what we perceive as "standard rules" is Latin derived, and I sort of sense that if I understood all this stuff, I could write much more elegant English. (The vast majority of people who have been taught Latin probably do not feel this way, but i personally would have liked the opportunity. On the other hand, the vast majority of people who have been taught calculus probably just see it as a chore rather than something genuinely useful, too. Once in a while I encounter someone who insists that calculus does not have any practical uses. I find this point of view mind boggling, but it is very hard to dissuade people of it).
I think I agree with your basic point, which is that people of a mind to become philistines will become philistines regardless of what they are taught, and people of a mind to get an education will get an education regardless of a lot of things too. However, the quality of that education depends on what people are given access to, and in what sort of direction they are given by their teachers. When I was a high school student I didn't get much direction - I think I ended up with a Ph.D. in mathematics because that was the only subject I studied that was ever taught with any rigor at high school, and the Australian university system more or less requires you to decide on a specialisation before you start your degree. And while I had access to information via libraries and such, in a lot of cases what I could learn was limited by what I could find in books that were aimed at high school students. That is, we were talking books full of generalisations and simplifications. What I wanted was details and specifics, and when I was 15 these were very hard to find. So what I could learn was limited by what I could find.
Which is where everything has now changed. With the internet it is possible to learn about a staggering number of subjects in a staggering amount of detail. It is possible to follow my curiousity about almost anything almost as far as I want to take it. It is possible for a 15 year old in a not very good state school in Australia to follow his or her interests practically up to the limits of human knowledge. That is staggering, and I would give quite a lot to have had access to that kind of thing when I was fifteen. Of course, discipline and direction are also needed to get a good education, which is why we need good teachers. However, I think that someone who genuinely wants a good education can today get one in a much wider variety of areas than was ever the case before.
I actually think I can see the effects of this in today's fifteen to twenty year olds. They are not smarter than my generation, but I think that the best of them are clearly better informed and intellectually better developed than the equivalent people of my generation were at the same age. Given that there are a lot of philistines in every generation, I actually think that the number of non-philistines is becoming greater, not fewer.
I took Latin and French in high school. (I hesitate to say I "studied" them because I was a terrible student who almost never studied or did homework.)
I don't know if the Latin actually provided any intellectual benefit (although I will always remember that Gaul is divided into three parts) and it seems as if what little French I learned had faded away by the first time I actually visited France many years later.
The first time I was in France, I was driving with a colleague from Nice to LaGaude and stopped at a little shop for some breakfast. I was struggling to put together a request in French for two coffees and two pastries when the waitress, a pleasant middle-aged woman, said in English -- with a very English accent -- "That's okay love, I'm British." The last time I was in France, by the time I had spent two weeks in a daily commute by car listening to a French radio station, I found that I understood much of what the d.j. was saying and what the commercials were attempting to sell me, but I am always hesitant to speak, knowing how badly I am going to mangle the language... and when I did begin to struggle with composing a French sentence, it always seemed to turn out that the person with whom I was attempting to speak was far more fluent in English than I was in French and they switched to my language.
I realize that I am drifting far off topic, and this question might better be placed in Michael's blog that in Brian's Education blog, but... My visits to France have been business trips to the south of France, I have never been to Paris other than changing planes at DeGaulle airport. I have been told that residents of Paris may not be quite as friendly to people who are not fluent in French, but almost all the people I met in the south were very friendly... especially to a foreigner who was badly mangling their language. I have been quite puzzled by the recent difficulties between France and the U.S. -- I mean I understand the politicians and the political corruption and even the influence of large muslim populations in the cities (if I remember correctly, the tv in my hotel had two channels in English and three in Arabic); however, I never saw any sign of the intense anti-American feelings that seemed to be displayed by the general public. Have things changed that much in the sixteen months since I was last there? Or is it merely that being in the south is more like being in Italy?
"An accountant who is ignorant of the French Revolution, or cannot recognise sonata form, or knows not a line of poetry, is nothing more than a skilled barbarian".
What ridiculously snobbish complete and utter rot.
There are a million different ways to be meaningfully educated. And there are far more important things in life than recognising sonata form. I don't think I would recognise sonata form myself anymore, although I can play a few Beethoven sonatas on a few different instruments, if you like. But music theory bored me silly, and I'm still not interested. And I got an A in A-Level music.
I basically agree with Brian except I would go a lot further. And I think I am qualified to judge, having been called a Renaissance woman on more than one occasion.
Indeed, Michael, the internet offered me a large amount of information when I was 15--it was something which got me very interested in number theory (via the great internet Mersenne prime search), though it can only take you so far. Eventually you have to look to books, though the internet helps with that too.
The problem of specialization is a perversely stated here. I've often been told that I specialize in mathematics too much, but I've found that English and music majors cannot carry on any kind of conversation about mathematics, physics or biology. It's really pathetic, though they claim that these fields fundamental to human knowledge of the world are largely technical in nature and not important to a serious education. I think that most people interested in a liberal education are actually hopeless ignorami, who have a very skewed view of what is genuinely important in the world of human knowledge. It surely isn't spelling!
>It's really pathetic, though
>they claim that these fields
>fundamental to human knowledge
>of the world are largely technical
>in nature and not important to a
>serious education.
A common attitude, and one that simply staggers me. However, getting back to a different one of Brian's posts, I think that the way mathematics is taught in schools (as a thing to be memorised and tested) is pretty much entirely counterproductive in getting the message across that mathematics is profound, beautiful, and central to the understanding of almost everything.
I agree that memorization is a terrible way to teach (or at least a terrible way to learn), but there's a difference between memorizing something and just not understanding it fully. For someone who is only interested in chemistry or engineering, I think that a fairly rudimentary understanding of calculus is all that is really required. Such a person only needs to understand how to compute derivatives, and that they are related to rates of change and such. The integral is the inverse operation of differentiation, is related related to area (or an analogue of area), and also how to compute them. This is approximately what is supposed to come across in calculus classes, though it often gets muddled in the technicalities of what's going on. A calculus class can be (and perhaps should be) fairly application oriented for people who don't care about math for math's sake. Showing how calculus is applied might show people that it's good for something--a problem you've mentioned several times.
Should such a person understand that the Riemann integrable functions are not closed under pointwise limits? No. That is totally unnecessay to most useful understandings of calculus, though it is absolutely essential to a mathematical understanding of it. I think that similar sorts of things might be seen at lower levels.
In any case, Brian's earlier post missed the point that teaching math in isolation is a good way to make people think that it's not good for very much. Teaching mathematics by applying it will give some people a much better understanding of it than they get out of schools now (which is, for most people, close to nothing). Theory is quite important, but Brian's current post makes it fairly clear that people who don't want to get theory won't get theory. People who do want to get it will get it if it's offered. I think it's better to instill some bit of knowledge than none at all.
I feel there is truth in both perspectives.
The traditional view that a person is only educated if they have had a "classical" education is plainly too narrow.
On the other hand, there is some truth in what Sean Gabb says. We all know of University "educated" people for whom a degree was simply a passport to a professional qualification and who have no knowledge or interest in any intellectual activity. I think it is fair to describe such people as "educated barbarians". They are formally educated in the sense that they have letters after their names but that's about it.
Julius
