Fish, General Education and Structural Issues: addendum to “Towards a new liberal arts”:

I found Evan’s post on Stanley Fish’s “The Last Professor” article quite interesting and, surprisingly, agreed with the main thrust of it. This is quite the accomplishment in itself: if one follows my hauntings of the comment sections of Evan’s posts and my occasional ones, you would fine we very often disagree very much.

True to form, I have a disagreement, though it’s a minor one coming as a point of emphasis: where and how do we emphasize broad general learning?

Ww agree that the University system needs reform, and we disagree with Fish that broad general learning is over. I think the latter owes to our culture being in a strange place right now, as the result of a combination of the dominance of some odd ideas and some more or less related political-economic issues. The odd idea dominating our culture at present is a tendency to fetishize science and progress. We place an extremely high value on science, scientific progress and progress as a whole (often conflating the latter two), to the point that they nearly become ends in themselves, rather than subservient to societal/human goals. They still do, of course, serve these ends to some extent. The exact nature of the conflation, I think, is that development or introduction of new technology is assumed by default to be a good thing. In itself, this orientation does a lot to occlude the status of the humanities.

In turn, some factors possibly contributing to this orientation are:

1) The lack of what Howard Wilensky, professor emeritus of political science (public policy) at Berkeley calls a “framing effect” for media. Most social democratic countries have public or quasi-public structures where the biggest social and economic actors – big business, big labor, trade and farm federations, etc – are brought together to hammer out a common social-economic policy. While these interests are inevitably antagonistic in some degree, such an overall structure makes for more cooperative relations, especially between business and labor. In those countries, when economic times slow or business needs to cut costs, agreements can be worked out with workers for lesser hours, or a reorganization of workers, or some such thing. Even in the case of introducing new technologies to cut costs, labor has a say (and with some empirical data to back this up) and can help implement it in a way that is not only a better implementation (they have better hands on knowledge), but also leaves a place for workers to keep working. In this country, which has the least of these sorts of structures of any of its developed counterparts, introducing new technology (and thus/or cutting workers) is often the only game in town for cutting costs. Hence the reliance on new, new, new. (Incidentally, these structures also provide frame the media, along with tougher laws, preventing the mindless echo-chamber effect that dominates FOX espeically, but increasingly CNN and the others.)

2) Not knowing what exactly the humanities are – should they be done by the methods of the natural science (e.g. souped up versions of 19th century “social physics” like sociobiology), or should they have their own methods?

3) There is a very interesting thesis put forward by distinguished Berkeley anthropologist Paul Rabinow in his book Anthropos Today that we as a civilization have insufficient means to get a real handle the glut of information being given to us by science; in his words, tools to convert logos to ethos (basically ethical appeal) and pathos (emotional appeal). This is related to, but different from calls to give science a proper frame again. It is more about having some kind of cultural reference point that allows us to get a certain perspective (e.g., a tool) through which we can filter things.

4) Yale sociology professor Immanuel Wallerstein’s thesis that over the past 500 years, the input costs into capitalism have more or less steadily gone up. He categorizes input costs into 3 basic categories: labor, infrastructural, and taxes. As capitalism grows and societies increase their standard of living, the first two cannot but go up. The increases in taxes have been constant for pretty much all, and it doesn’t matter in the broad picture that it’s been uneven. They’re related to demands for increase in standards of living, and even if an anarcho-capitalist economy were possible and emerged, the input cost of taxes wouldn’t disappear. They’d just be absorbed into the other two categories. So these costs going up as they are, it’s becoming very hard for capitalists to raise the enormous sums of money needed to fertilize new industries, keep research going, etc. There have been technological breakthroughs (steam engine, electricity, Henry Ford-inspired mass production) through history that have temporarily ratcheted costs down, decreasing the slope of the rise, but not halting it. Faced with this reality, one could not help but try to design policies that would emphasize scientific/technical disciplines in hope of finding another breakthrough. Aside from the more abstract recommendations that could be pulled from some of the broader things here (the status of the humanities, the lack of any institutional framing effect, Rabinow’s thesis) a good place to start changing things for the better would be in our K-12. Our K-12 education is among the worst in the industrialized world – less intensive, more poorly funded, worse teachers, and the whole gamut. Putting more emphasis on K-12 would decrease the general education burden on Universities.

I’m also a fan in many respects of the trade school system typified by Germany but common throughout Europe, where students are funneled/choose a path pretty early on, around the time of middle school, of going to University or attending some more specialized school. I have to be careful how to word the following, but a lot of people here at universities and 4-year colleges in the US shouldn’t be here. This isn’t a knock against anyone. My best friend is a really bright guy, but he’s not an academic type: he’s better at learning by doing. He tried attending university for a year, but it wasn’t for him. In the time since, he’s become a fantastic musician, and taken well to recording classes at a community college. This specialization would benefit people who are going into similarly more concrete professions. Carpentry, construction, serving, and most of the jobs that people do, don’t really require a full university education. Funneling everyone towards a four year degree as we’re doing, I think, implicitly disrepects these professions, saying that only jobs (people) based on higher education, are really worthy and respectable. And from my admittedly short time living in Europe (about 6 months), I do think there is a somewhat greater tendency in the States to really laud only the doctors and lawyers.

This has its drawbacks: despite making the system more flexible in recent times, the trade school system may still be more restrictive in what people can end up doing with their lives, and we shouldn’t go on mucking up the wildly successful American system of Universities, as we have a huge number in the world’s top 100. I’ll keep tackling this subject, as it’s a pretty timely one.

On the longer term,  (in reference to #2) we’d be better off f0llowing philosophers who are trying to get rid of the idea that model of science can explain everything about the world, namely the entire domain of human meaning.  This would mean shucking people like recent UA lecture guest Daniel Dennet, and embracing people like Charles Taylor who point to the limits of mechanical social sciences.