News and Views- March 27th, 2018

The Importance of the Liberal Arts

Why do we need the liberal arts? What good are they? I will leave aside—for this week at least—the issue of their value in appreciating the “finer things in life” e.g., art/culture, and instead concentrate on their vital, and immensely practical value in our world. The reason they are immensely practical is because they provide us with the intellectual tools to reason across a vast expanse of subject area and the ability to identify and use principles in a systematic manner.

(Note: prior to the 1960s when our public universities were taken over by postmodern philosophy and the doctrine of political correctness, liberal arts graduates were in high demand. Innovative and creative companies knew that liberal arts graduates had learned how to think, and graduates that knew how to think could eventually learn anything they needed to excel in their professional capacities. One of the last prominent throwbacks to that earlier era was Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard, whose college  major was medieval literature.)

Examining the activity of Tech Titan Bill Gates and his attempts to reform public education provides an example of why the liberal arts are much needed in our world. Although Gates has amassed immense wealth as part of his efforts in the field of technology development, in important ways he is utterly clueless. He has pushed the disastrous program of Common Core into America’s public schools, one that even he has had to admit has been a complete failure.

The blueprint for Common Core is full of vague goals without the faintest idea of how to achieve them. It presents testing and data collection as essential elements in an education but says nothing about how a child accumulates and uses real knowledge. As Lisa Van Damme indicates in “Thoughts on Common Core” (https://www.vandammeacademy.com/thoughts-on-common-core):

“Educational reform requires a sea change, not a sprinkling of standards over the entrenched body of educational practice. And until we see a sea change, a shift in the basic educational philosophy guiding practice in our schools, we can expect more failure, more frustration, more initiatives – more and more of the same.”

What a genuine liberal arts education provides–such as the one available at the VanDamme academy (vandammeacademy.com)–is the ability to reason and develop a hierarchy of knowledge and reasoning power that can be applied to any topic. Gates on the other hand immersed himself in technology at a very early age and learned a great deal – about that particular field. His methods and approaches in technology are not readily transferable without a great deal of principled thought which he clearly has not done.

Gates means well in his efforts to reform education, but “meaning well” when you are taking actions that adversely affect other people’s lives, such as the Common Core program, is not enough. This is why celebrities and those in the public eye such as Gates need to take a look at the liberal arts and learn more about methods that are more universal than their current approaches before they start throwing their weight around and acting as if celebrity is a substitute for being an informed individual. A good start toward understanding the value of the liberal arts would be to thoroughly study the methods and curriculum of Lisa VanDamme and her academy (vandammeacademy.com).

Economic Growth vs. Industrial Waste 

   A recent LA Times editorial gives us an opportunity to check the premises and assumptions behind some popular perceptions, something a liberal arts graduate prior to the 1960s would be well versed in. In this case, the perception to be checked is the idea that economic growth and production are somehow poisoning the “planet.” (“GDP, the yardstick of economic success, is choking us and the planet,” http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-pilling-gdp-20180225-story.html, February 25, 2018.)

According to the author, 7.6 billion people churning out goods will cause the world to choke in trash with the air becoming more toxic and its forests depleted, etc., etc., etc. The unspoken assumption behind the essay is that economic growth or human flourishing destroys environmental quality, because lots of waste must be harmful.

What might the author be missing here? Here are a few items for starters:

• Doesn’t what comes from the earth go back to the earth? For example does the waste from your pets pile up in your back yard, or does it break down and become incorporated into the soil?
• Where is all this trash we are supposedly drowning in? The industrial revolution began over 250 years ago and has produced millions upon millions of tons of waste over the years. Why aren’t we already drowning in it?
• Might science and technology be our “friend” and be able to solve waste disposal problems where they are identified?

These are valid questions to pose to the author of this essay. The truth is, we are not drowning in waste because much of it naturally degrades and what does not degrade on its own can be isolated and treated in a modern sanitary landfill. This has been occurring for many years and I have personally worked on and around many landfills in my days as a geologist. The technology and the science behind modern sanitary landfills is well known and works very well.

The types of dire predictions present in this editorial have been occurring since at least the time of Thomas Malthus and Jean Jacques Rousseau, two of the most well-known opponents of the dynamic period of history known as the Enlightenment era. The LA Times author is repeating the mistake of Malthus and Rousseau: fearing the dynamic changes of a free enterprise economy and failing to realize that the creativity and human ingenuity in our world are more than capable of addressing the resource depletion and waste disposal issues he fears.

For those wishing to hear a different view on such topics, one which understands and expands upon the creativity of the human mind in resolving these sorts of issues, I highly recommend the work of Alex Epstein, his organization the Center for Industrial Progress (industrialprogress.com) , and especially his wonderful book: The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.

Summary

In this issue we have discussed the importance of education in public discourse and above all checking the premises and assumptions behind proposals in that discourse. Using thinking methods gained in a liberal arts education are a proven means for identifying premises and assumptions behind arguments in cultural issues of the day such as environmentalism.

In issues to come, we will continue to focus on how to raise the level of sophistication in our public discourse via education because if we are to restore the republic in America, then improving education in the U.S. will be a fundamental part of that effort.