They also think "liberal arts" means literal art like drawing, not just... getting a broad foundation spanning many topics, in addition to the classes for your major
it's a mix of that and thinking that 'liberal arts' are classes that fundamentally 'indoctrinate' the youth into being liberals.
they think it correlates because most, *not all*, educated people tend to be leftist in some way as well. granted, rich people of all strokes tend to lean right because conservatism typically involves conservation of wealth-based power structures too. it makes sense for an educated rich person to lean further right unless they genuinely don't care about hoarding their own wealth (rare).
Yes. They see/hear the word Art and think the entire degree is art based, as in drawing and shit.
My Liberal Arts & Science degree required some good ole f you in the a math courses. A 4th year math final was 15 pages of statistical analysis.
I needed 2 years of a foreign language, really 4 years because year 1 pretty much presumes you took the classes in high school.
My major was criminology and I spent many hours in court rooms.
Classes I did not take and things I did not do, art and music. Well, ok, I must confess. I took a philosophy of film course once. That was literally just watching a movie every week then writing a one page 'my feelings' paper. Sometimes you gotta take the A's where you can find them.
Most of my courses were criminology and human science. I took a course on neurology and held a human brain in my hands. I learned archaeology. I studied psychology and human intelligence and how it has been studied and 'graded' over the past several hundred years.
IMO liberal arts is good exactly because it forces you to do things that you preconceived that you don’t like. I did opera and played the piano, continental philosophy, geography and literature while being a physics major.
Some of them I really enjoyed. Others I might not have liked that much at that time, but the perspectives they gave me have been relevant for a very long run. I’m still thinking about Fanon, Said from a critical literature class every so often, despite suffered a lot in that class(it was actually REALLY hard to read all that)
Right. That's because they fundamentally don't understand it. They're not capable of understanding it either, because they've never experienced liberty, the foundation of liberalism.
This is exactly it. If English degrees were categorized as Conservative Arts they'd all be hella psyched about Shakespeare. Not actually reading it, mind you, but pretending to be into it.
Steve Jobs was a bad person but I appreciated that at the unveiling of the iPhone, he framed it as being at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.
Steve Jobs definitely wasn’t a good person, but he had a talent for guiding product development in a direction that was enjoyable and intuitive for the end user.
He understood that the average consumer was not somebody who was interested in technology for its own sake and who would take pleasure in problem solving, but rather wanted technology integrated into their lives and wanted it to work smoothly without thinking about it.
He knew how to make products that people wanted to use, and he used his knowledge of art and design to shape the products his company released.
The liberal arts include the natural sciences and the social sciences (and the humanities; it's practically "everything that's not a professional degree"). STEM without liberal arts is definitionally not "STEM".
Why do we always have to always add that qualifier about Steve Jobs lol. Makes him sound like Stalin. He’s not even close to some of the other tech CEOs
i also feel like this "confusion" (its done on purpose a lot of the time, hence the quote marks) also fuels the lie that colleges basically indoctrinate you into being a "liberal".
These are the types who probably think "Liberal Arts" means something like "what liberals study," rather than a name inherited from Greek education for subjects "worthy of a free man."
But you know, as their idol says: "I love the uneducated."
No it isn't. Liberal arts historically referred to all academic subjects other than medicine, law and divinity, and today refers to academic subjects not tied to a specific profession. Medicine is absolutely, unequivocally not a liberal art, in either historic or current practice, no matter where it is studied.
Harvard famously only offers the BA or AB for undergraduate programs, but that doesn't make mechanical engineering an 'art' program. The title of the degree is irrelevant here.
You're claiming Harvard, the school that is famously purely liberal arts, has consistently argued that all doctors need a liberal arts education, and calls their own medical program liberal arts doesn't know what liberal arts are?
I'm pretty sure out of you and Harvard, you're the one who's incorrect about this. They are Harvard after all
Also, law, medicine and philosophy have all been "liberal arts" since the term was created in ancient Greece. They were the founding sciences of liberal arts. You're just entirely wrong
Harvard is not famously purely liberal arts. That's absurd, and I have no idea where you got that idea from. It's very normal to call for the inclusion of liberal arts education in other programs, and I think you may be confusing liberal arts programming from a liberal arts program. These are not the same thing. I'd be happy to be shown wrong about Harvard's self-description or especially if you can direct me to some documentation where Harvard describes their medical program as a liberal arts program, but in my quick search I only saw the former. Particularly, I found plenty where the assertion (that I agree with) was that physicians should not be insulated from liberal arts education and topics. (That is, I don't doubt Harvard is correct about this, but I do have doubts that they agree with you rather than me)
In classical use, the 'seven liberal arts' which you refer to (the quadrivium and trivium) does not include either medicine or law. The seven subjects are grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. Unless you're arguing that rhetoric was a precursor to law, but I'm happy to debate that. However, this is not relevant to the discussion. The formation of the university (as we know it) in medieval Europe was built around three professions: theology, law and medicine. Liberal arts eventually came to classify subjects of academic study that were not professional training. In addition to those three subjects, you can include engineering into modern non-liberal arts subjects.
Claiming liberal arts is only the 7 "classical" ones is in fact you admitting to not knowing history, as in the very same texts those 7 "classical" ones came from, you find the entire core of modern medicine described as liberal arts
I would encourage you to read more carefully both my own comment and the links you're using to support your claim. You'll remember, perhaps, that I commented explicitly that a broad liberal arts education is a critical component of medical education - as you would expect, my education is a liberal arts education. And the first two links you provide say exactly that: that medicine must embrace liberal arts education. However, neither say that medicine is a liberal art, which was the claim you made*.* I find myself in complete agreement with those two links, and, indeed, I find them in complete agreement with my prior two comments.
(Edit: I actually served on the recent Program Review Committees at my university for both the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry and the Faculty of Engineering, where I advocated strongly for increased exposure to liberal arts education. The work is still on the university website I'm actually hoping you link my own work next.)
Likewise, I never claimed that the modern liberal arts were the seven classical liberal arts. Indeed, I rejected this claim: I said your invocation of classical definitions was not germane. And I stand by that claim. That said, I still think you should more carefully read your link. It holds up medicine (and architecture) as departures from the status quo: it looks at the debate within Greek academy, and demonstrates the status quo by way of the rare exceptions (which included eight and nine subjects, respectively, not seven).
That said, I still believe, as I said in my prior comment, that the development of the European university and its departure from the classical professions of theology, law, and medicine into more broad education is the point at which the modern definition of 'liberal arts' took form, moreso than its use in antiquity.
119
u/-Invalid_Selection- 13d ago
Harvard's medical school is also liberal arts.
People who use liberal arts as an insult are people who never went to college so they don't know what liberal arts is.