Cerulean Cordillera

Posts Tagged ‘Readings’

Originally posted on Wednesday, February 25, 2009

First, a little note: I will upload photos of the last two days of my cruise trip soon. I won’t have a blog post about them because both days were merely spent on the ship as the ship made its way back to Miami. Both days, I studied OS throughout the day, went to dinner, and watched the evening shows, and that was it. The towel animals for the last two days was a snake and a valentine heart thingy, and you’ll see them when I upload the pictures. Meanwhile, there’s something I feel like writing about today.

The New York Times has an article today that talked about the decline of humanities in postsecondary education in recent years. The problem is well-known, that liberal arts education, which focuses on topics like languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy, and religion, are not exactly considered useful in that they don’t directly prepare students for vocations that are becoming increasingly specialized these days. As a result, there is a general push from parents, educators, and the students themselves, to stay away from these and instead spend most of education learning technical knowledge in math and science-related topics.

Not surprisingly, hardcore humanities enthusiasts are panicking, and now some of them are considering abandoning the “old Ivory Tower view of liberal education” and instead, they would market the humanities subjects based on its practical worth. For instance, they might focus on the importance of writing in just about all careers, or the importance of having a well-developed sense of morality when handling stem cells in some lab. These are clearly some practical benefits of the humanities, but it is also rather absurd because humanity courses don’t teach you how to write or teach you morality – in humanity courses, you gain writing skills and critical thinking skills indirectly while analyzing Shakespeare, or discussing the importance of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, or pondering whether Kant’s method for rationally supporting absolute morality really has any merit. Meanwhile, if you want to learn about writing, take a few training sessions specifically for writing. If you want to learn about critical thinking, take a few logic courses. If you want to practice them, there are endless occasions in everyday life for their application. A blog like this, for example.

See, we don’t take humanity course because they are useful; we take them because they are interesting and they are fun. Meanwhile, humanity courses are never necessary, since most of the useful side effects of liberal arts education can still be obtained just as well by merely living a conscious life. The lure of humanity courses are merely that they talk about cool and fun subjects, you get to learn to satisfy your curiosity about human history and human condition, and, in some cases, it gives you an outlet for expressing your own thoughts and see how they weigh compared with the thoughts of others.

Now, I’m beginning to suspect that part of this has its source in my own values and thus isn’t representative of the entire population. If such is the case, then I will shift the tone of this article to first person, and you guys will see how much you agree.

Personally, I like the idea of humanity courses because it’s interesting and it’s awesome. History is vast and complex and filled with passionate and impressive moments. Philosophy is intriguing for it deals with so many unanswerable questions that are still important to us at a fundamental level. I place less value in literature, because it seems to me that formal literature either means writing for writing’s sake (which seems absurd) or just philosophy with a mask. To me, the more relevant side of literature is the ability to write captivating stories as that would be a piece of art on par with a captivating musical piece or a captivating landscape painting. Geography and cultural studies seem very interesting to me because the world is a collection of places and cultures, and thus as a result I get the feeling that I “gotta collect’em all!” The same can be said with religion, although in this context, it’s another aspect of culture.

So, my general outlook on humanities isn’t bad at all. I find most of it very interesting, so then what prevents me from taking humanities courses? Well, the first and foremost problem is my program. UofT’s ECE program allows me to take 36 slots of Engineering courses and only 4 slots of non-technical complementary courses throughout the four years. This notion of “four years” is the major problem.

Why is it, that as time goes on and more and more knowledge is accumulated by human beings, as an undergrad degree requires more and more skills and knowledge to be gained in classes, the duration during which we must gain them still remains to be the same? In the early 1900s, an Electrical Engineering degree from MIT had 5 core courses and roughly around 8 fourth-year electives, with a total knowledge that can probably be taught by modern-day UofT in a year and a half if it really wanted to. Today, 90% of the courses you will ever take in this ECE program will be technical, and even if you have done so, the technical courses you took will only be a small fraction of all courses offered by the department. It’s not surprising that we don’t find the time to take humanity courses even when they are way more interesting than number crunching and solving integrals.

However, there is another, more important reason why I am not maximizing the amount of humanity courses that I can take. What do I hope to gain from a humanity course? In a humanity course, I want to be able to write papers of my own views and compare it with the views of others. I want open communication, a shared space that I can contribute to and get feedback from, and thus learn along the way. I want to be an original source. If it’s a philosophy course, I want to write down my views and call it my own regardless of whether it coincides with the views of some ancient philosopher, and I want to argue it and discuss it with others who hold different views and has different answers to the same question. I want to produce writings, I want to compose music, or invent my own method for analyzing music, and I want everyone else to create their own too so we can learn from the progress of each other. When I finish the course, I want a sense of accomplishment from the fact that I’ve participated in the field as an actual generator of ideas, and not merely as someone who analyzes the works of others.

Note that this only applies to topics that are more value-based, like literature and philosophy. For these topics, I believe they can easily sacrifice some readings and promote more original writing and idea sharing, although I do admit that it would make assignments more difficult to mark, and I’ll get to this later.

For something fact-based like history, merely a good lecturer who doesn’t rely on the textbook would be enough. For instance, the third lecturer from my Intro to East Asian Studies course, who talked about ancient Japanese history, was such a good lecturer that he was able to turn the complex religious, economic, and family dynamics of pre-Meiji Era Japan (several hundred years of history) into something that sounds like a rich and intriguing story, without sacrificing the technicality of the facts. If all history courses are like that, then I’d be taking history courses left and right (although the first two lecturers on China and Korea makes me think that this Japan guy is the exception). Yet still, why is it that I don’t ever hear of a history course where the only evaluation during the course is an assignment that asks you to compile a detailed history document with your recording of what happened, your analysis of why they happened, and your own take on their importance? This sounds like such a fun assignment, such a fair assessment of my ability to understand history, and after I finish, the amount of things that gets deeply engraved in my memory would be so much, and I’ll get the document as a souvenir afterwards!

The answer, once again, is that it’s difficult to mark, it’s difficult to prevent plagiarism, etc… It kinda makes me wonder whether it’s possible for them to just give up on the marking system, and come up with something else. But again, this is the bigger reason, at least for me, that’s making humanities look bad. On one hand, if I take humanities, I have to worry about its GPA, and on the other hand, the fact that I’m getting a grade for the course is forcing the course into a “gradable” structure that I don’t particularly find rewarding. I feel that if I take some humanities course, I will get a lot less out of it than I would like to, and that in the end, I waste my time only to lower my GPA.

There’s the argument that I only feel this way because I am too lazy to spend months reading in every word of the recommended readings and fully comprehend the details a humanity course could offer. But that is a misleading argument. Remember that humanity courses are not necessary, and that the reason why I would take one would be for fun and fulfillment. If I spend too much effort on a course, the net result is that the course would not feel fun or fulfilling, thus rendering the whole thing a failed attempt. Maybe the smart thing to do for those in the humanities field who are lamenting the popularity of humanities, is to try to make their courses more fun and less pressuring. I recall the Kansas State University professor Michael Wesch (the guy who made the “A Vision of Students Today” video) giving a presentation about some of the experimental education he was attempting. You may find the video here. It was amazing, and it makes you want to be in his classroom because that would be such an awesome environment for learning and participation. Now… if only more professors would start to try it in a widespread manner… maybe then humanities would be more popular. Remember that students don’t learn humanities because it’s useful, they learn humanities because it’s interesting, and that because it’s interesting, therefore the learning can actually be enjoyable.