Liberal Arts "Education"

I have been annoyed lately about the fact that a liberal arts education has, like so many other things, become simply a means to an end. So many employers these days like to see that a potential future employee is well rounded and is able to learn about many different things. I can certainly respect this outlook on the part of employers, but it bothers me that a liberal arts education has become so commonplace that it really means almost nothing now.

Now that a liberal arts education is almost expected from many employers and so many liberal arts colleges and university exist, the education itself seems to be much less impressive. Sure, we all still have to take a history class and a math class and a science class and an english class no matter what we majored in, but did anyone actually learn anything in those classes? It seems like the college curricula are now set up so that people can take the required classes, get through it with a descent grade, and still not really learn anything. What really bothers me about this is that people who do this get to claim they got the same liberal arts education that I did when, in fact, they didn't. I took all those classes and committed myself to getting as much out of them as I could. I actually did get a liberal arts education whereas many other people just get to say they did.

It also bothers me that we call the typical college education, an education. I know that this is being picky and most people will probably disagree with me, but this is my blog, not yours. :) What bothers me about the typical college experience being called an "education" is that it seems like the typical experience is really more of "technical training" than it is an "education."

Again, I know this is nit picking, but it seems an important distinction to me. When I think of "education" I think of people learning about something for the sake of learning about it rather than to meet some other end. The way college education is treated these days seems to be much more along the lines of technical training. People come out of college with a very specific set of knowledge based on what they want to do after graduation having either never really learned or at least not really caring about the other things they encountered during their education.

For the record, I have absolutely no idea what could or should be done to fix what I see as a problem with this terminology and such. I simply get annoyed about the way life is and the fact that nothing ever works out in an ideal manner. So many good ideas exist out in the world (like liberal arts education…….and communism) that never actually work in the real world (at least not long-term) because people find ways to corrupt everything good. Hmmm, this could probably move into being a rant about idealism and the corrupt fallen world we live in, but that's a subject for another day.

Basically, I hate it that I actually got a very well-rounded, liberal arts education and someone else can graduate and claim the same thing, when really all they got was technical training for their specific field of interest. (fyi, I haven't actually read the book shown at the right, but I like the title)

Literacy (re-)Defined

Definitions of many things change over time. Literacy is something for which the popular definition really has not changed much even though the academic definition has. I would wager that most people, when asked about literacy, think almost exclusively about reading and writing. Clearly, a person who cannot read is illiterate as is a person who cannot write and a person who can do neither is still illiterate. But what about a person who can read and can write? Is that person automatically considered to be literate just based on those two skills? And at what point in the development of these skills would a person be considered literate? Shouldn't our definition of literacy have something to do with the ability to communicate? And if so, why only include the two written forms of communication?

The traditional definition of literacy basically says that if a person can communicate through reading and writing, he/she is literate. If a person knows how to spell a lot of different words, but is unable to use that knowledge to communicate through writing, he/she is illiterate. This makes sense to me, but what doesn't make sense is that we traditionally only define literacy in terms of the two written forms of communication.

If literacy is a measure of a person’s ability to communicate with other people, then many different forms of communication should factor in which have not traditionally been thought of as factors of literacy. It seems to me that literacy is something more along the lines of the ability to understand various types of communication as well as the ability to articulate one’s thoughts through those forms of communication.

One thing I think of as a non-traditional form of literacy is something often described in terms of "social cues." I hear people described often as “socially awkward,” but I would be tempted to say that a better description of these people would be “socially illiterate.” People described as socially awkward are normally people who do not pick up on normal social cues and do not use those cues themselves. This, to me, is an issue of being illiterate within a certain subject area much as many people are scientifically illiterate.

With that being said, I'm now off to call the White House and let some people know that NCLB needs to be modified to include my revised definition of literacy :)

Model for Memory

Memory is like an infinitely large warehouse full of filing cabinets with a table in the corner that has a tray for papers and a workspace. The warehouse is your entire long-term memory. Things are put into different folders in different drawers of different filing cabinets throughout the warehouse. They may be placed so that they are in a logical location neatly ordered so that they can be found with ease when looking for them. Some things, however, are roughly shoved between two folders in an already messy drawer of one of 137 filing cabinets labeled “misc.” The information is in that warehouse, but good luck ever finding it back.

The table represents the combination of short-term and working memory. It has a finite, limited place that multiple things can be placed and held onto after being pulled from the filing cabinets or before being placed in them (or before being shredded). This area corresponds to the short-term memory of a person where things are held onto until they are either moved to long-term memory or forgotten. It also has a space so that a limited number of those things can be placed out and manipulated on a workspace. This space relates to the active/working memory of a person.

Social Inequalities

Racial inequality is not only a product of our current society, but the concept of race itself is a product of current and past societies. There is no fundamental difference between Caucasian Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans or any other Americans. The only differences that exist are the differences that people throughout the past have imposed on these racial groups. The problem is that because these differences have been imposed for so long, some of them have begun to take hold at least in superficial ways. Anyon points out very clearly throughout her book that the literacy levels, income levels, access to things like health care and healthy food, along with many other things, are just not equal between white and black Americans.[1] These differences in skin color really have nothing to do with it except that people with darker skin pigments were forced into bad neighborhoods, bad schools, bad jobs, etc. for many years and now that historical act has become a very difficult to break cycle. The fact of the matter is that bad neighborhoods produce enough bad kids to keep the neighborhoods bad and the same goes for schools and jobs. The problem we face is that now that we have already gotten this cycle going, how do we end it? How do we go about working to help the bad neighborhoods become good neighborhoods in a way that actually works?

The same problems exist with socio-economic inequalities. Our entire economic system is based on the fact that there are inequalities between people. People need to work harder to earn more money to buy more things to improve their lives. If there were no inequalities, there would be no motivation for any individual person to work hard or even work at all because everyone else will still work and we’ll all still be in the same situation anyway. It is precisely the issue of what went wrong with the socialist/communist movement in the USSR (obviously not the only thing that went wrong, but a major factor in why the movement ultimately failed). There were too many people who were dissatisfied at getting no relative gain out of working harder or even just pulling their own weight.[2] Socialism and communism are wonderful ideas in principle, but due to the corrupt nature of humans, it just does not work on a large scale.

Because of these issues I see with the ideas of many of the educational/social philosophers, I have a hard time knowing what to do, myself, about the social issues facing the educational system. I look at the ideas of people like Anyon, Greene and even Blomberg and I recognize the beauty and the virtue of their visions, but at the same time, I see them as far too idealistic to actually work in the real world. A big part of my problem with what I see as a kind of “call to arms” from these philosophers is how they interact with my view of human nature. Because I believe humans to be naturally corrupt, I do not believe that these idealistic visions for the future could ever be realized. I have no problems with people trying to implement plans to improve the inequalities that exist in our society, but I also have no faith that they will actually solve anything. Throughout the world, political and social reform rarely improves situations as a whole for any extended period of time. The inequalities of a nation or society do not go away after a revolution, they simply change and generally get more difficult to distinguish.

[1] Anyon, Jean. Radical Possibilities. New York: Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, 2005.

[2] Lovell, Tom. "The Fall Of The Soviet Union: Whys And Wherefores." The Raleigh Tavern Philosophical Society. http://www.raleightavern.org/lovell.htm.