the new liberal arts [warning long post]

“What does the class of the 21st century need to know?” – rAchel

as someone who cannot decide what on earth i’m going to study at university but wants to learn many things (tags: non-science-related, liberal arts) which sadly don’t always coincide either, even at American universities (where no. of interesting courses > no. of courses that can actually be taken), the snarkmarket project on what the new liberal arts of the 21st century could be is brilliant, highly relevant to the 21st-century-er and would be such a pain for people like me who can’t make decisions and indeed can’t even give straight answers to questions. there is no yes or no. there is an IDK. (as evidenced by those who know me. “i don’t knooooooow.” -shrug- to the frustration of many, no doubt.)

http://snarkmarket.com/blog/snarkives/books_writing_such/a_snarkmarket_book_project_the_new_liberal_arts/

there are over a hundred comments on that post, mostly admirable and interesting – imagine a course on “identity management” (the finer points of filling out profiles, to put it bluntly) or writing a thesis on blogging. except that it could be a looooong post on blogging. and multitasking! to make that course really useful, it could be taken in tandem with 2 other courses so that what you learn might be implemented in the course of learning. (the call for “a moratorium on the liberal arts” amused me very much.)

a couple of thoughts on these new liberal arts:

1. these new liberal arts, i observed, are highly dynamic in nature – things like programming, (micro)blogging and the like – the changes in technology render last week’s discoveries obsolete, and to draw up a course would be time-consuming, difficult, etc. how to have a course, except as an introduction to the topic at hand? i suppose it would involve a lot of your own research, and i suppose that’s where internet curating (another suggestion) would come in very handy as resources for these potential new subjects…

2. a lot of these “new liberal arts” are highly vocational – journalism, as opposed to English – and while they are useful skills to learn, i’m not sure whether they’ll make for very flexible graduates. that’s me being traditional.

3.  i am also thinking of, particularly, vocational GCSE and A-Level subjects such as Floristry, Leisure and Tourism and Hospitality. students who take these subjects on the whole, bluntly said, suck at what you’d think are basic subjects – Math and English.  now i’m not saying that exam grades are determinant of what students are good at and what not. but i do think that when a whole nation (here, England) where less than half the students manage passes for these subjects – their mother tongue no less – and a fair few of those students who “suck” at Maths and English take these “soft options”, and that the standard of exams in the UK is, imho, very low… there is something to worry about.

maybe it is because education is a merit good, maybe it’s because for the most part, it’s a government-supplied service. but because these new liberal arts are so dependent on what a person is interested in, it comes to a point where the basics (here i am being traditionalist) are more or less ignored. my uneasiness with the new liberal arts therefore lies less with the fact that they are so groundbreaking and specific and gosh darn it just so brilliant, but rather that it will become the sanctuary of those who “suck” at the basics but are good at things like manipulating photos. is this necessarily a bad thing? i would say that if you can photomanip something to high-heaven but can’t communicate that you can do that through an interview (in English), then having that skill is worth much less.

and what of the updating of syllabi? (i love that word) case in point would be ICT, which is frankly a joke. learning how to make something bold or make a database using clunky and confusing Microsoft software with bad interfaces (sorry big sister numero uno) like Access. it was probably designed to give students basic knowledge of ICT, but because of less-than-scintillating and obsolete, rarely-updated content (read: boring graphs, Jaz disks – JAZ DISKS! – how old are those things?) students are more or less turned off by it. (i was.) it is difficult to update something like this on a large scale due to the dynamic nature of the subject itself, and even harder to come up with an exam that people can pass without having to be seriously innovative or critical thinkers (unfortunately). and so, if these new liberal arts could be made available to more people and made part of a bigger curricula, would it degrade the value of what they learnt because of grade-obsession?

[on a similar topic, i really am less than impressed with British culture and how little emphasis there is on education. not for lack of funding, methinks, but in that a) students don't care b) teachers can't make them care. ]

in slightly-short, my worry would be that these new liberal arts (if implemented), while groundbreaking and relevant, would fall prey to the rigors of academia, which is to say that people would soon learn to jump through hoops for exams by exam boards which are officious, stuffy and bureaucratic.

the main aim of taking any liberal arts, i think, should be to make people quite simply be better and nicer people, more aware of everything around them and care about a little more than grades or the new trend in shoes or whatever it is that the common teenager is looking at. to train thinkers.

for the class of the 21st century, it’s not enough to be good at school, but you have to be good at life. which is why everything more or less lies in the implementation of things, and if school was really school as it should be (preparing one for real life) and not about rewarding participation for the sake of CVs, biased moral censorship, jumping through exam-hoops or getting that extra * in your A, and there were teachers who were truly passionate about their teaching and unhindered by the restrictions of the examination boards, well, liberal arts wouldn’t be soft at all. especially not in tandem with equipping students with an ability to communicate in and appreciate the global language of communication, English, damnit.

i can dream, obviously.

and i don’t have a suggestion for a new liberal arts that someone hasn’t already said, but i might find one.

favourites on the list: Negotiation/Cooperation (by Matt Penniman), Rhetoric, Lifehacking, Internet archivist, Effective Plagiarism (extreme <3 – i am so guilty of all of it), Urbanism & Cartography, Silence (by Bo – v. intriguing), Remixing Classic Texts (not because I would take it, but because I want to see what comes out of that), Media Literacy, Esotericology

on another note, i stumbled across a mention of “Six Sigma analysts” in one of those comments and after skimming the wikipedia entry i am more or less quite disgusted. i’m not a fan of corporate organisations in the first place, but that whole concept just seems kind of goofy and full of bad jargon. CTQs, anyone?

“Hey guys, I’m a Black Belt analyst!”