Does the Life of the Mind Lead to Escaping Poverty?

As I read this op-ed by Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, at the Washington Post, urging students to take “impractical humanities courses”:

But the case for the humanities can also be understood in less transactional terms and more as a foundational preparation for a life well lived. Since Socrates, thinkers have extolled the vital role a humanities education plays in encouraging citizens to lead an examined life. It cultivates critical thinking, self-reflection, empathy and tolerance, the usefulness of which only becomes more apparent as one navigates life’s challenges.

I couldn’t help but think he’s suffering from a fundamental misconception. Higher education may serve serve different functions for several different groups of people. For the lucky few it leads to a richer, happier life. For others it enables them to meet other people of their social class, contacts that will last them for a lifetime or find and marry suitable partners. For most it is vocational training and, if I had to give an estimate, I would guess that two-thirds of students look at it that way to the exclusion of all else. What else would you expect when you make higher education a prerequisite for any job with more responsibility than bagboy?

To point out, as he does, that individuals whose parents earned upper middle class incomes and who have IQs northwards of 130 will lead richer, better lives if they immerse themselves in knowledge of a broad-ranging sort is blithe but unhelpful. Most students aren’t trying to be Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom dropped out of college because they didn’t think that Harvard was more capable of helping them lead richer lives than they were themselves.

No, most students are trying to avoid poverty and they see the way to do that as being as qualified in their chosen fields as they possibly can be and to the exclusion of all else. Put in another way, would you rather be treated by the physician who majored in 18th century French art of the one who majored in biology?

A lot of students, realistically, see their competition as Indian or Chinese students who weren’t hounded by academics into pursuing courses of study outside their career area.

Mr. Daniels’s argument isn’t actually with students. It’s with employers and with the federal government and he should target his arguments more narrowly to those audiences. Google: stop quizzing your prospective employees on their programming ability. Ask them about Kant instead. My understanding it is that Google is actually starting to do this, likely a sign of a company that has lost its bearings. Johns Hopkins med school: ignore your candidates’ MedCats. Take their knowledge of Anglo-Saxon literature more seriously instead. Legislators: stop putting our young people in competition with the best, most focused students in the world.

13 comments… add one
  • Guarneri Link

    Kind of in a funk now. It’s terrible to wake up one day and discover that you can’t critically think, self-reflect, empathize or tolerate because you didn’t major in humanities.

    I’m sure he is correct though. In viewing the current environment on college campuses one can certainly see those traits bursting from humanities departments, illuminating and elevating thought and public discourse like a lighthouse through the fog.

    Perhaps we should thank Mr Daniels for his understated contribution to our collective wisdom in his Spartacus moment.

  • Ben Wolf Link

    I’m honestly not sure of your point, Dave. Education is for the purpose of making us a better person. Anything that is to prepare us for a job or career is training. A society that requires us to forgo the former to survive considers us to be no more than a machine.

  • Andy Link

    Humanities course were some of the most helpful as an intel analyst because they taught me to think, to be more introspective and to consider alternatives contrary to my own biases.

    Also, not all the humanities are equal – I think history and philosophy are more important general subjects applicable and beneficial to a number of fields compared to specialized fields like linguistics are art history.

    Additionally, hyper-specialization has its limits. If you need someone to do little else than sit quietly in a chair and code all day, then the Indian and Chinese students are the obvious choice. If, however, you also need coders who can lead teams, supervise, manage projects, work well with a team, then you need someone with a much more rounded set of skills and experience.

    Finally, from my perspective, I see a whole raft of highly intelligent and educated specialists who don’t understand basic epistemology, even in STEM fields. If one can get a degree in science or engineering without any grounding in a general theory of knowledge, then that’s a problem IMO.

  • sam Link

    J. L. Austin, one of the great Anglo-American philosophers of the last century served with distinction in British Intelligence in WWII and is reported to have made crucial contributions to the intel underpinning the D-Day landings.

  • Ben, my point is that higher education has gone seriously off the rails. Offhand I’d say that 90% of those seeking college educations today see it purely as a means towards getting a job. That is to be expected when every payroll clerk or auto salesman needs a college degree and the jobs as mechanics, on assembly lines, and blue collar and brown collar jobs generally have evaporated.

    The maximum percentage of the population that could actually benefit from higher education as anything other than training, as you put it, is probably about 35%. The typical pre-med or pre-law student is in that 35% and has little interest in anything other than training. Don’t blame them for it. Blame the society.

  • PD Shaw Link

    I’ll just note that I don’t believe studying humanities necessarily cultivates “empathy and tolerance.” No doubt its in the brochure, but a lot of humanities programs have implied lists of who deserves empathy and tolerance, and who does not.

  • PD Shaw Link

    And cost is an issue here. If getting a humanities degree was the equivalent of a new car loan, it would be one thing. Kids can live at home for a few years to pay it off, or ride public transportation for a while. But back during the occupy movement days, the NY Times highlighted a theater student with a six-figure student loan from a semi-exclusive liberal arts college complaining that she had been defrauded and in no way was going to be able to get a theater job that would pay for the loans.

    What am I supposed to do with this information? The kids need to be warned. And some working in academics are going to like that.

  • PD Shaw Link

    . . . are NOT going to like that.

  • steve Link

    Andy mostly beat me to it. Some of my guys with pure science and engineering backgrounds are super smart and have great board scores. Most of them can hardly write, have mediocre leadership skills and we have to actively work with them to make them work well within a team. I do have several people with a degree in the humanities. They took enough science courses to be good at what they do, and they can actually write in coherent sentences and work well with other people. I find that we do well by having a mix of people, heavier on the STEM types, but we do better if we have some of the humanities people too.

    I also think it probably matters what humanities courses they took. Majors that emphasize writing and a least some kind of analytical thinking seem to help people. Never had an art major or language major. So for science/math majors who are going into medicine, I highly recommend that if they have their basic sciences requirements met they consider taking a literature, history, religion or philosophy course.

    Steve

  • Guarneri Link

    The mistake being made here is defining people or their capabilities with far too much emphasis on a college curriculum being the determinant. That’s just silly. I know, I’m sure we all know, plenty of people of all stripes who fit or don’t fit the stereotypes being bandied about so cavalierly here.

  • Gray Shambler Link

    I had to go to Wikipedia to remind myself what studying the humanities meant. That was in my only year of college, cultural anthropology. All I remember is the word I learned , ethnocentrism. Meant that all of us in the class of White farm kids were bad people for not knowing that all cultures were of equal value and worth, period. No discussion. Objections were met with sneers from the Prof or Grad Assistant. Still have a bad taste in my mouth.

  • bob sykes Link

    The old liberal arts were aimed at the Ruling Class and were intended to produce a cultured elite. Critical thinking was never the goal and seldom achieved.

    That form of education has not existed anywhere since the 1960’s, and Daniels, assuming his is honest, is simply deluded about the current state of affairs. Today’s elite schools are reeducation camps designed to instill a single doctrine and viewpoint in the minds of its young victims.

    It is still possible to acquire a liberal education, but it has to be done outside the schools. That many students seek only training is actually a good thing. At least those students, but not the ones in the humanities, will be productive, happy citizens.

  • Andy Link

    Based on the comments, I would say this:

    Stovepiping and narrow education is not ideal. I’m a big fan of a diverse, generalist education which probably puts me in the minority. Of course, one has to concentrate on something to get a degree, but too much concentration, at least in my experience, is sub-optimal.

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