A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education

Diogenes said:
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Thats the saddest part of all, that highly intelligent and education people have succumb to leftist ideology. Its as effective as using guns to make people comply. Probably more so because if they shot you you wouldnt have to listen to them anymore but this way the threat is constant.
 
Yakuda said:
That should have read "educated" they are "educated" ....to fear going against the leftist narrative. Bill Bennett used to say, the most important part of education is whats being taught and who's teaching it.
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Bill Bennett was wrong, IMO.
 
Yakuda said:
That should have read "educated" they are educated ....to fear going against the leftist narrative. Bill Bennett used to say, the most important part of education is whats being taught and who's teaching it.
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What is your objection to liberal arts education? There are a lot of liberal arts colleges across the country.
 
Hume said:
Okay, I misread you.
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Thank you. Im not opposed to liberal arts education but when the definition of a word, which is early elementary education, cant be expressed by people with much higher levels of education, then something has broken down in my opinion. In my opinion its not an education problem its a culture problem.
 
Yakuda said:
Ok. How and why?
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Bennett was right that content and teacher quality were neglected for decades. He was wrong that they are the most important parts.

Parents dominate the variance. Bennett himself said the parent is the child’s most important teacher. The Coleman Report and decades of follow-up work keep finding the same pattern: family background, home language environment, and parental expectations explain more of the outcome gap than curriculum documents or the adult standing in front of the room. A strong teacher in a weak home still loses more often than a mediocre teacher in a strong home.

“What’s being taught” is not self-executing. A content-rich sequence (the thing Bennett spent years promoting) only works if students retrieve it, apply it, and care enough to persist. Knowledge that is never practiced or connected to prior knowledge evaporates. Pedagogy, feedback loops, time-on-task, and classroom order are not secondary details; they determine whether the content actually lands. Hattie’s syntheses put teacher-student relationships, formative assessment, and student self-efficacy in the same high-impact range as “who’s teaching.”

Teacher quality is real and hard to scale. Value-added studies (Chetty et al.) show large long-run effects. That does not mean we can simply identify the bottom 5 percent and replace them at will. Measurement is noisy, political resistance is high, and the supply of high-value-added teachers is limited. “Who’s teaching it” therefore collapses into recruitment, training, working conditions, and retention—none of which Bennett’s two-factor slogan addresses.

The “what” is contested for a reason. Bennett wanted a specific canon plus character. Others want different canons or no canon. Declaring content “the most important part” simply relocates the fight to who writes the scope-and-sequence. It does not settle it.

A more accurate ranking, consistent with both the research and Bennett’s own fuller writings, is roughly: family and student variables first, then school ethos and safety, then teacher quality and curriculum implemented together, then everything else. Compressing that into “what’s taught and who’s teaching” is useful rhetoric. It is incomplete analysis.
 
Hume said:
When you look at a culture, and you want to ask yourself: “Well, how did we go from Weimar Germany to Nazism?” Obviously, education is going to be a part of that, but it’s not in any way going to be the whole of it.

I don’t buy that Nazism is proof that higher learning doesn’t work. The point of fact is that the Nazis were very much against higher education in many ways and wanted to constrain and control it.

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I.

Making the case for a “useless” education.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Help me understand the argument here.

Nazis don’t like liberal arts but they are ok with say STEM or business degrees?
 
Diogenes said:
Bennett was right that content and teacher quality were neglected for decades. He was wrong that they are the most important parts.

Parents dominate the variance. Bennett himself said the parent is the child’s most important teacher. The Coleman Report and decades of follow-up work keep finding the same pattern: family background, home language environment, and parental expectations explain more of the outcome gap than curriculum documents or the adult standing in front of the room. A strong teacher in a weak home still loses more often than a mediocre teacher in a strong home.

“What’s being taught” is not self-executing. A content-rich sequence (the thing Bennett spent years promoting) only works if students retrieve it, apply it, and care enough to persist. Knowledge that is never practiced or connected to prior knowledge evaporates. Pedagogy, feedback loops, time-on-task, and classroom order are not secondary details; they determine whether the content actually lands. Hattie’s syntheses put teacher-student relationships, formative assessment, and student self-efficacy in the same high-impact range as “who’s teaching.”

Teacher quality is real and hard to scale. Value-added studies (Chetty et al.) show large long-run effects. That does not mean we can simply identify the bottom 5 percent and replace them at will. Measurement is noisy, political resistance is high, and the supply of high-value-added teachers is limited. “Who’s teaching it” therefore collapses into recruitment, training, working conditions, and retention—none of which Bennett’s two-factor slogan addresses.

The “what” is contested for a reason. Bennett wanted a specific canon plus character. Others want different canons or no canon. Declaring content “the most important part” simply relocates the fight to who writes the scope-and-sequence. It does not settle it.

A more accurate ranking, consistent with both the research and Bennett’s own fuller writings, is roughly: family and student variables first, then school ethos and safety, then teacher quality and curriculum implemented together, then everything else. Compressing that into “what’s taught and who’s teaching” is useful rhetoric. It is incomplete analysis.
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All that guides whats being taught and who's teaching it.
 
You know many of the low IQ see liberal arts and the bugs in their brain begin to scatter around damaging the few brain cells that actually work. A liberal arts degree usually demands a lot of reading and writing. With new ideas and subject one might not normally read. Discussions that demand critical thinking skills. Exposure to new ways of thinking and new ideas about old subjects (cue the low IQ to say programming the marxist ideololgy) College demands organizational skills to go along with all the other skills regarding examing texts and different opinions. I can see that transfering to many jobs that demand leadership , cooperation and decision making skills Worthless degree? Nah just anti intellectualism drop outs to imagine something that rarely exists.......
 
cawacko said:
Help me understand the argument here.

Nazis don’t like liberal arts but they are ok with say STEM or business degrees?
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No. Hume like most leftists thinks republicans are Nazi. Hume claims here Nazis didnt like liberal arts education therefore Republicans are Nazis
 
stephenPE said:
You know many of the low IQ see liberal arts and the bugs in their brain begin to scatter around damaging the few brain cells that actually work. A liberal arts degree usually demands a lot of reading and writing. With new ideas and subject one might not normally read. Discussions that demand critical thinking skills. Exposure to new ways of thinking and new ideas about old subjects (cue the low IQ to say programming the marxist ideololgy) College demands organizational skills to go along with all the other skills regarding examing texts and different opinions. I can see that transfering to many jobs that demand leadership , cooperation and decision making skills Worthless degree? Nah just anti intellectualism drop outs to imagine something that rarely exists.......
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Conservatives do not like critical thinking.
 
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