Why is a liberal arts education more difficult than a technical one and how to get the best

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

I think I was incredibly lucky. I still managed to get a Soviet technical education, which at the point of the change of eras I supplemented with a semi-Soviet-semi-perestroika - legal, and all this was polished from above with a purely bourgeois technical (quantitative risk assessment in London) and humanitarian (business administration - in New York).

And then, for 20 years, I tried to put into practice everything I got in theory, so I have the opportunity to compare, evaluate the necessity and sufficiency of both education for future life.

Technical education makes it possible to understand how a particular mechanism works based on a set of physical laws. We see the phenomenon - we remember the law - we identify the correspondences between what we saw and what we read, if there are inconsistencies, we correct it. Here is a very simplified diagram of how technical education is put into practice.

Technical education describes the "life of machines", which, whatever one may say, is much simpler than the life of humans. Relationships are mostly linear, dependencies, as a rule, are direct. Take the scheme - run your finger along it and see what in this scheme does not correspond to the natural mechanism. I threw out the unnecessary, left the necessary.

But the humanitarian disciplines relate to human relations. On the one hand, a person obeys the same physical laws, but a whole crowd of conventions and additions are added to them, where dependencies, as a rule, are indirect, and the connections between efforts and events are often nonlinear. And it doesn't work out just like that, "throw out the unnecessary, leave the necessary" if only because the "repairer" himself at any time may turn out to be "repaired" … In a word, the world of people is much more complicated than the world of machines, and in order to understand it, required:

1 Know all those physical laws and rules that techies know

2 To know a bunch of laws and rules that techies don't need to know at all

And all this for one elementary reason - it is much easier to carry out effective human-machine interaction than human-human interaction.

Comprehensively uneducated people. Who are they?

Somehow it turns out that in the humanities is the one who is not capable of being a techie. Mathematics does not go, I bark at physics, my head hurts from chemistry and in general from the exact sciences - I will go to the humanities. And at the same time, humanitarian diplomas are more prestigious than technical ones.

For some reason, the humanitarian Harvard is more prestigious than Michigan technological, Cambridge is more prestigious than CII, and MGIMO is more prestigious than MIPT. (Maybe something is changing now, but read the forums on the topic "where to attach a child" - there these ratings appear very prominently)

For example, a degree in economics and law is for some reason more significant for obtaining a well-paid, high-status position in management than an engineering degree, not to mention botany, although it is precisely botanists that agriculture is so sorely lacking, which is not even able to recreate the Soviet seed industry.

Have you tried to understand this paradox? Then try my version on a tooth.

The exact sciences and professions based on them operate with a limited number of tools, are able to influence a limited and very specific number of products, work according to verifiable formulas and algorithms, and obey very specific laws.

Anyone who wants to can, having studied these formulas, algorithms and measurement methods, control the process and check the result.

You can pretend to be a surgeon, but only until the first patient, pretend to be a mechanic - until the first engine breakdown. And then the harsh truth of life will clearly put everyone in their place, because there are clear measurable indicators for rejecting the "poor".

And something completely different - in humanitarian aid! She is constantly engaged in something elegant and airy, which does not have clear criteria, something that is not measured in any way, and the maximum is estimated by some experts who use their subjective “good-bad” and “many-little” as a measuring device.

Where this method of assessing the results of labor has taken root, such a phrase as "the art of management" could not but appear. And who measures art? Art is enjoyed, appreciated, and again not by everyone, but by a select circle of experts, whose performance cannot be measured at all …

All of the above ended today with the fact that the humanities have turned into a kind of priestly caste of "Brahmins" who look from the height of their immeasurable qualifications at the bustling techno-plebs and descend to the sinful earth solely for a drink and a snack.

And all would be fine, let them sit there in their "Olympics", doing "graceful and airy", and existing, as in the good old days, on the alms of admiring materialist patrons of art. However, they occupied not only art galleries, but also the corridors of power, trying to rule the material world, not even guessing by what laws this material world functions.

The result is a guaranteed mutual irritation of the “physicists” who observe attempts to ignore the laws of natural science, and the leaders-lyricists, who are cramped in the material world, which operates according to incomprehensible rules and is filled with boring formulas devoid of imagination.

And this is exactly the case when it is necessary “to fix something in the conservatory,” because humanitarian education today has nothing to do with the word “education.” The humanitarian sphere controls relations between people, but people still exist in the material world. This means that humanitarian practice can and should be built on top of technical one, while humanitarian education simply must be a continuation of the technical one and cannot exist without it, just as the medical profession cannot but be based on the study of chemistry, biology and anatomy.

The technical sphere, in comparison with the humanitarian, can and should be simpler, because it operates with a much smaller number of variables and constants. But the laws that operate in "physics" also work in the "humanitarian". “The force of action is equal to the force of reaction”, “You can rely only on that which resists”, “Chaos is the most stable state” and so on, so on, so on …

I think to become a “lyricist” you must first become a “physicist”. If we assume that "physics" is the first year of the university, then the "lyrics" should begin on the second - after studying and mastering the first.

In order not to burden the text, I omit the prepared examples and analogies, and go straight to the summary, which may look like this:

1 The humanities study the hard-to-measure sphere of human activity and human-human relations. They are more complex than technical ones, but they are based on the same principles and obey the same laws.

2 The humanities are still in the process of formation (and are generally not sciences in the classical sense of this term) and they cannot reach the scientific level until (hopefully temporarily) the natural sciences and technical knowledge are ignored as an obligatory, basic, integral part of the humanities.

3 The education system that will change the current state of affairs and take this step will very soon create a powerful competitive layer of managers who can easily solve systemic problems that seem insoluble for managers with a classical liberal arts education, completely devoid of natural science …

Natural science is a body of knowledge about natural objects, phenomena and processes, a theoretical basis for industrial and agricultural production. technology and medicine; natural science foundation of philosophical materialism and dialectical understanding of nature.

Pseudoscience, to which most of the humanitarian disciplines belong today, cannot do without pseudo-education

The aforementioned natural science does not at all fit either with the Bologna educational system in general, or with the birthmark of this system - testing, that is, “guessing”, which is so actively propagated today in all countries and at all levels.

After all, what is a "test" with pre-prepared options? This is agreement with those answer options that were found and formulated by someone, refusal to search for other options, from non-standard (heretical) ideas, on which and only on which technological progress has always been based!

Recently I read the story of an engineer who still received a Soviet education, and, due to his duty, has been forced to undergo testing annually for 20 years. After such many years of "brain training", when he got to the exam, where he had to formulate the answer himself, and not choose a ready-made solution from the list, he noticed that the brain flatly refuses to do this, stubbornly searches for a clue and painfully gives in to the simplest tasks that it should a student to decide.

“Guesses” have already led to such a massive disease as functional illiteracy, that is, the inability to understand complex texts, generalize and analyze, think logically, in a word, think. A functionally illiterate person knows letters, but when there is a lot of bukaf, he loses the thread of reasoning, panics and perceives the text as a personal insult.

A delightful example of functional illiteracy was given by Irina, the director and owner of a private school that bears her surname “Lando”: “When the company was divided, the minority partner was offered one-sixth of the shares. It seemed to him too small a share and he demanded … one eighth … Of course, his demand was instantly supported …"

Why such a system is being stubbornly implemented is understandable. A "specialist" trained on tests is ideally suited for external management, since the habit of agreeing with someone's developed solutions turns him from a homosapiens into a homoeletoratius, unable to generate his own ideas, which means that he is doomed to eternally chewing on other people's thoughts that were sent to him from Olympus by patricians …

The material has already come out extensive, and I would also like to at least touch the edge of the question: "Who should determine what is needed, what is not needed, give an assignment and accept work from the education system?" And the question is not so much in the number of lyric physicists, but in the quality of both … If the topic interests you, we will definitely return to this issue. Until then …