This is true, and I agree with almost everything the author says. The best politicians and scientists and engineers are ones who can contextualize what they do on a day-to-day basis with critical...
The point was never the answers, but the skills you gained finding them.
This is true, and I agree with almost everything the author says. The best politicians and scientists and engineers are ones who can contextualize what they do on a day-to-day basis with critical thought, ethics, and foresight, and who can properly express this contextualization in speeches, documentation, and obviously practice.
But while his argument is convincing to me, it does absolutely nothing for the STEM-ites who are inordinately obsessed with their numbers and objectivity and capitalist mindset of economic progress. They will always find some way to weasel around the author's very legitimate argument; if it's the skills that are important, why not cut history and literature from the curriculum and focus on logical theory alone? Why bother reading fictional books if the only real-world impact of literature is analysis of non-fiction?
Obviously this is a ridiculous assertion, and you can come up with any number of valid rebuttals without batting an eyelash. Trying to study a method without ever applying it (in history, or whatever else) is generally extremely boring and strips the discussion of tangible concepts that are necessary to bring these things down to earth. Many theoretical ideas about identity, humanity, and interaction expressed in fiction simply do not exist in non-fiction, or have little effect. Nevertheless, many of my classmates felt this way in high school, and every single time it was because they personally happened to dislike history and literature—not because they actually thought that a logic class or whatever would be better for their education. They were bad at these subjects because they didn't read a lot of books as kids, or they didn't like what they were reading, or the teacher was focusing too heavily on fact regurgitation over method, as the author puts it. Or quite often they were just too lazy to actually do any of the work, and floundered for that reason. These very same students also complained about the International Baccalaureate's "theory of knowledge" course being "useless." The irony was lost on them.
I believe that we should continue to support the humanities in whatever ways we can, but there is a certain subset of the population that simply has no interest in such things because they were raised in a way that discourages methods and encourages results, status, and wealth, which are typically more easily attainable through STEM. So this is as much an economic issue as an epistemological one. Addressing the root of that is an impossibly large problem that I don't know how to address.
I thought the essay was pretty good, but there is a flaw in the argument: a scientific paper is a form of persuasive writing. Scientific arguments are made with words, not just numbers. If you...
I thought the essay was pretty good, but there is a flaw in the argument: a scientific paper is a form of persuasive writing. Scientific arguments are made with words, not just numbers. If you want leaders to have practice in reasoning and persuasion, it seems like it might be a good idea to choose subjects where arguments can be made using words and charts and graphs, depending on what's appropriate?
That doesn't mean getting into abstract math or specialized techniques, but being comfortable with statistics and its many limitations seems as important for well-rounded reasoning as understanding logic, and the replication crisis seems relevant to the interests of philosophers and historians. Also, many metaphors are taken from math. Can you understand 2020 without knowing about exponential growth?
This is true, and I agree with almost everything the author says. The best politicians and scientists and engineers are ones who can contextualize what they do on a day-to-day basis with critical thought, ethics, and foresight, and who can properly express this contextualization in speeches, documentation, and obviously practice.
But while his argument is convincing to me, it does absolutely nothing for the STEM-ites who are inordinately obsessed with their numbers and objectivity and capitalist mindset of economic progress. They will always find some way to weasel around the author's very legitimate argument; if it's the skills that are important, why not cut history and literature from the curriculum and focus on logical theory alone? Why bother reading fictional books if the only real-world impact of literature is analysis of non-fiction?
Obviously this is a ridiculous assertion, and you can come up with any number of valid rebuttals without batting an eyelash. Trying to study a method without ever applying it (in history, or whatever else) is generally extremely boring and strips the discussion of tangible concepts that are necessary to bring these things down to earth. Many theoretical ideas about identity, humanity, and interaction expressed in fiction simply do not exist in non-fiction, or have little effect. Nevertheless, many of my classmates felt this way in high school, and every single time it was because they personally happened to dislike history and literature—not because they actually thought that a logic class or whatever would be better for their education. They were bad at these subjects because they didn't read a lot of books as kids, or they didn't like what they were reading, or the teacher was focusing too heavily on fact regurgitation over method, as the author puts it. Or quite often they were just too lazy to actually do any of the work, and floundered for that reason. These very same students also complained about the International Baccalaureate's "theory of knowledge" course being "useless." The irony was lost on them.
I believe that we should continue to support the humanities in whatever ways we can, but there is a certain subset of the population that simply has no interest in such things because they were raised in a way that discourages methods and encourages results, status, and wealth, which are typically more easily attainable through STEM. So this is as much an economic issue as an epistemological one. Addressing the root of that is an impossibly large problem that I don't know how to address.
I thought the essay was pretty good, but there is a flaw in the argument: a scientific paper is a form of persuasive writing. Scientific arguments are made with words, not just numbers. If you want leaders to have practice in reasoning and persuasion, it seems like it might be a good idea to choose subjects where arguments can be made using words and charts and graphs, depending on what's appropriate?
That doesn't mean getting into abstract math or specialized techniques, but being comfortable with statistics and its many limitations seems as important for well-rounded reasoning as understanding logic, and the replication crisis seems relevant to the interests of philosophers and historians. Also, many metaphors are taken from math. Can you understand 2020 without knowing about exponential growth?