It’s deeply ironic. We accept “teaching the classics teaches people how to be analytical” as a shibboleth to which we apply no scrutiny or analysis. Is there evidence showing that teaching classics helps with analysis more than say teaching math, logical reasoning, statistics? I strongly suspect that we would get better results if we replaced instruction on Greek myths with courses on Bayesian reasoning.
You may be right that the classics aren't necessary for critical thinking. To me, that's not even the main reason they're important. It's more about the type of questions we ask.
We study humanities to help us realize that the values we collectively hold didn't come from nowhere, and that those are the things we should really be analyzing and questioning. You don't get that in a statistics course. And through studying thoughts on the big questions of life from people in different contexts from us, we can gain power to decide for ourselves what makes life meaningful. Or is education only useful if it makes us a better cog in the globalized economic machine?
> Or is education only useful if it makes us a better cog in the globalized economic machine?
To the extent we require people to go to school for a big chunk of their life, and spend hundreds of billions of tax dollars per year on it, this should be the only function of at least a public education.
If people want to think about the “big questions” they should read the Iliad or the Bible or whatever of their own volition.
This is an idea that seems to be common among technically (STEM) educated people, among others, and it scares me.
I believe we end up with a healthier society if we teach people diverse topics and introduce them to new ideas in an intellectually safe environment. Contrast this with going to school to double down on whatever you thought in high school and I hope you can see a benefit beyond pure economic gain.
In a democracy everyone should think about the "big questions". If we optimize for brainless robot workers then why ask them for input on how to run our society?
> introduce them to new ideas in an intellectually safe environment
I do not think that means what you wrote. I've seen "intellectually safe", and it gets converted to "I accept nothing outside of my bubble". Worse yet, students get actively hostile to foreign ideas.
I think the better term is "intellectually rigorous". Let people have opposing views, but instead challenge them on logos, ethos, and pathos. That discussion is where the truth lies.
> I believe we end up with a healthier society if we teach people diverse topics and introduce them to new ideas in an intellectually safe environment.
That's great you have this "belief." But we spend $600 billion per year on education in this country. We make kids spend most of their childhoods chained to a desk learning about a variety of things teachers "believe" will help them that they'll never use in their lives. As a taxpayer and a parent, I want this whole expensive, time-consuming endeavor to be based on more than "belief."
Just watch a politician speak sometime: education is billed to the public as a way to help the economy and make sure people have jobs. If you told parents: we want you to spend all this time and money helping your kids learn "how to think" (oh and by the way, it will be based on vague humanistic values that may be quite different from what you would have taught your kids), then you wouldn't get very many people to sign up. And that's an incredibly dishonest thing to do.
How do you know that students will never use a given lesson? Which ones are they? In this case what you want as a parent (and taxpayer) is no more or less valuable than what I want as a taxpayer. This is all opinion.
What kind of a return do we get on that 600bn?
Personally I think part of the value of education is that it does teach students things their parents wouldn't. Why should children learn only from their parents?
You're going to have to be more specific than putting words in the mouth of a hypothetical politician for me to find your argument remotely compelling. As a member of the public and a consumer of public education I do not consider it to be only job training or a way to support the economy. There are less tangible benefits, especially in higher education.
I didn't downvote you for that opinion. But I could never share it, if for nothing else but personal reasons. I have a Comp Sci degree, but I credit the humanities professors in my public university for playing a big part in helping me be liberated from the prejudices ingrained in me by the community I grew up in. For that, I'm eternally grateful.
Anecdotally, I credit the humanities professors at my university for helping me tune my BS detector.
From my experience, I think it more likely that liberating a student from the prejudices ingrained in them by their previous environment simply opens the way for different prejudices to be injected into the void.
I am thankful that I was able to recognize the abuses of academia before allowing myself to get pulled into the Ivory Tower's stairmill-powered meat grinder. I still have to do stupid useless crap sometimes, but I actually get paid for that.
This is such a complicated statement to respond to! :) You could follow the thread of irony, of the kinds of abilities "analysis" is equivocal between, of what relevance evidence might have...what it might be applied against, what might even count as evidence, and, obviously, what results we even want!
Here's just one bigger picture thought to consider. For a reasonably motivated and bright person, it's pretty easy to teach yourself programming (I'd be willing to bet most people on this forum are self-taught). And, after you get some basics, pretty easy to teach yourself nice tidy applied math-y things like Bayesian reasoning. Likewise it's easy to teach yourself science. One reason why is that in every case you can self-correct: the program doesn't work, the calculation is wrong, the world says otherwise.
That simply isn't the case with the humanities. You need the guidance of an expert for a while.
I'll leave it at that for now, just noting that to the extent humanities help with "analysis" it's probably going to be especially beneficial with messy, open problems where even the criteria for success may be vague and shifting. Thinking critically about product design rather than improving an algorithm, to bring it into HN.
Well...the classics include logic and reasoning, or should. It is part of the Trivium (Classical Liberal Arts). The problem is that people only associate old books with a Classical Education when in reality Math and Science is indeed a great part of it. How can one be well rounded without math, science and logic - you can't be.
When a literature class reads a novel, the professor doesn't just teach students to accept the words as they are. The students are encouraged to interpret and to understand how the author's thoughts originated, and then to extrapolate how that might be applicable in a modern context. Even the worst literature classes I've taken were taught like this.
When a math class is introduced to a new theorem, a professor will often breeze through the derivation of it (if you're lucky). This just trains students to find the right order of manipulations that solves the equation, rather than to understand what the equation and its transformations really represent. Sure, some classes at some schools might be better than this, but there are plenty more who aren't.
I suspect that you're right about being able to teach analytic thinking better if we designed a cirriculum around things more directly relevant to that. However, liberal arts schools that follow the classical philosophy don't just teach mythology, they also spend a lot of time on classical texts in mathematics, philosophy, and logic. So it isn't completely without directly relevant courses.
Studying history, the classics, anthropology, etc may not increase analytical ability directly, but it increases the breadth of an individual's understanding of how human society got to where we are today, warts and all.
That knowledge is a very important input to any logical or statistical analysis, or resulting system, that affects people's lives.
It just may not be important for someone tasked creating a Bayesian model.
History is especially important for people to learn because without it, history can be (and is) used as a tool by those who have studied it against them.
Simply producing more STEM graduates does not necessarily lead to better results when so many of them sell out to companies with business models that are adversarial to humanity at large.
Perhaps reading Plato or Marcus Aurelius could lead those graduates to take a more ethical approach in their technological endeavors.
Teaching math, physics, and logic teaches you how to form and analyze, broadly speaking, chains of logical statements. This is an incredibly useful technical skill.
Teaching classics teaches you how to analyze writing. Writing written by people with a vastly different perspective, culture, and assumptions then your own. (This is also why I think that limiting it to Western European classics is bullshit.) We spend a lot of time reading and writing, and very little of what we produce or consume can be distilled down to chains of logical statements.
It's not going to help you derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion, or figure out how to use the new flavour-of-the-week web framework, and that's fine.
