Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

education

On the Liberal Arts

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I’ll say more about this topic later.

Articles periodically pop up about why it is still important to major in the liberal arts and not bother with STEM fields. And then other articles will pop-up saying that liberal arts degrees are stupid and essentially put the individual student in debt without concern for said student’s future employment prospects.

To these claims I say, “Just shut up.”

Neither side ever means “the liberal arts.” They just mean “STEM or non-STEM degrees.”

The liberal arts, minimally include training in these seven skill sets (yes skill sets, not mere knowledge):

  1. Grammar – the art of understanding and constructing thought in language. It includes reading, story telling, riddles, memorizing, etc.
  2. Logic/Dialectic – study of the relationship of facts and propositions to other facts and propositions. Basic logic includes both classical deduction as well as the numeric version of categorical/inductive logic known as statistics. But logic is also the study of philosophy, discussion skills, question asking, dialogue, internal monologue, etc.
  3. Rhetoric – the art of discovering and using that which is persuasive. Rhetoric also includes the study of the human emotional life and politics thought/praxis.
  4. Arithmetic – the art of number or basic mathematical operations
  5. Geometry – the art of number in space and the proofs pertaining thereto (logic applied to arithmetic)
  6. Music – the application of number to the human passions.
  7. Astronomy – the art of geometry over time,  since Newton/Leibniz this has included the Calculus.

If one has a liberal arts education, then they have the basic skills for any other education. These subjects are not mere subjects. They are skill sets and even mindsets. Understanding rhetoric is like defense against the dark arts in Harry Potter. Understanding logic is not only helpful for writing papers, but for fixing cars and being a detective.

Anyway, I’ll probably do a series of posts on this in the future. But one does not need a degree in anything to have their mind transformed by a liberal arts education and one does not understand the liberal arts just because they have a degree in a non-science field.

New Job or Learning by Doing

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I recently got a job as a software developer/computer programmer.

This is weird for several reasons. One of which is that when I was in high school, one of my goals prior to being thirty was to become a computer programmer to pay for seminary. I just did it in reverse. The programming I’m doing is pretty top level, but it’s all new to me and in many ways is more frustrating than some of the “harder” stuff I learned in college.

Anyway, I basically create UI tests for laboratory software. In the very brief time I’ve done this job I’ve learned:

  1. A handy version of git
  2. Way more C# than I would have covered in any college course (I was hired only knowing C++, Sci-Lab, and Mat-Lab).
  3. Selenium
  4. Way more HTML than I ever cared to know.
  5. And I’ve learned to use the laboratory management software for which I’m creating tests.

There is a great deal more to learn. But this reminds of a time when I was younger and I went down a water slide and my aunt realized I was struggling to swim because I panicked. It was really weird, I still remember wondering, “Why am I not swimming like I normally do.” She said, ‘Do or die, Geoffrey!” So I paddled to the side of the pool and she or my grandma yanked me out.

This job is like that. It isn’t like being in a college class. That can be motivating because I’ve paid for it. But it has the limitation of being easy to make second place to my other job (teaching). Getting paid for this requires me to learn a great deal at a fairly quick pace or I have nothing to produce and thus no money to make.

Anyway, for folks who wish to learn new things I recommend reading up on it for a while and then jumping into it. Nothing helps you learn like sitting and staring at something until it hurts with no answers in sight. You’re forced to be creative, ask good questions, and fail. Such events force us to learn.

Epistemology and Practice: Thoughts

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One of my chief interests in philosophy has always been epistemology. I even wrote a really bad paper in high school about whether or not one could know religious truths (it has thankfully been lost to the sands of time). For those who do not know, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines epistemology as

Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief.

While epistemology has, in many ways, been and probably will remain fun to study, one of the aspects of it that troubles me is that it often ends up fruitless. The arguments end up confusing practical people who use know-how in their careers and hobbies. On top of that, the arguments often seem never ending for the philosophers in question. Note, I am not claiming that they are fruitless, they only seem that way.

Personal Speculation

As an educator, I’ve come to view epistemology from a more pragmatic perspective (not like William James though). Epistemology, by nature, should outline the varieties of evidence and habits of reasoning that justify claims to know. In this sense, epistemology is a piece of pedagogical theory. So, the study of epistemology is ultimately and ideally the study of not only how one comes to know, but how one imparts knowledge and skill to others. This is important because it ends up connecting back to Aristotle’s rhetoric and dialectic distinction, the relationship of practice vs theory, and the fact that some people have differing levels of evidentiary rigor.

For instance, a deductive geometry proof will be absolutely demonstrative, for students who know logic or who have an intuitive grasp of how it functions. On the other hand, for students who do not grasp logic, a geometry proof will tell them nothing until A) they learn logic or B) they use the theorem in the physical world and then attempt it on paper.