Phillip's Triumphant Return

Phillip is a good friend of The Snod, and The Snod is pleased to present his latest commentary:

From http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2007/02/testing-texans.html:

“It is impossible to quantify critical thinking. The same critical thinking conspicuously absent in this latest rendition of No Pandering Politician Left Behind. Too many parents (i.e., voters) have a Pavlovian response to pretty numbers and consciously will themselves to believe these data mean something. A college education, especially a liberal arts education, defies such narrowmindedness. It embraces the uncountable and the abstract. This is what leads to innovation (good and bad) and challenges the feebleminded prescriptions of fools who have never faced the prospect of rewiring a gaggle of media-brainwashed frosh in a college classroom. College profs create independent thinkers -- the last thing a politician wishes to see.”

- A comment on an article about how standardized exit exams in higher education are a bad idea. The content of the article notwithstanding, I’m commenting here on this comment.

Welcome, readers, to another edition of my commentary. I’ve been away so long that I now have all-new email, which address I am not yet ready to publish, but I am not yet completely gone. Today’s topic is the viewpoint that liberal arts educations instill critical thinking skills in those students who receive them.

There are many who say this. “Oh, an English degree is a good and worthwhile thing to have, and it will get you a job because it shows employers that you can think,” they sometimes say. Without delving into the actual numbers of those former English majors who are currently unemployed, I disagree. My biggest problem with this statement is that it is generally implied that the English degree is the only degree which teaches these abstract thinking skills. Other degrees show that one is an expert in that field, but only the vaunted English degree shows that one is a good thinker. Bah. English says this because it is a dying field, and as I’ve heard, quite overloaded with baccalaureate holders seeking gainful employment. I once read that English staked out its claim to “critical thinking” when the teaching of English, especially literature, began to wither at the collegiate level. [A source, you ask? The Internet, I reply. Look it up there.] English may be dying because it increasingly focuses on very specific subsets of its wider subset of topics, and is focus-grouping itself to death while it simultaneously attempts to bore non-focus group students to death. And it may be dying for other reasons; I’m not sufficiently sociologically trained to know.

But the statement that English is the one over-arching field in which one must attain competence only encourages snobbery among English majors, and then confusion when no one else understands, cedes precedence, or offers jobs to them. But the real key to critical thinking is the realization that one has certain skills, and one may use these skills, but that one’s own skills do not address every problem ever conceived. For instance, an English major who supposes that his analysis of the language in a political speech shows the politician to be an utter idiot may well not recognize the sound economic policy which underlies the content of the speech. Nor, in fact, might the English major see the underlying social and psychological factors which motivate many of the language choices used in the speech in the first place. I myself cannot see them, as economics is no more my specialty than is sociology or advertising, yet I recognize that they are present. It is this facet, the recognition of my own limitations and the careful control which this provides over my personal-skill-based analysis, which permits me to call myself a careful thinker. Because I know the other factors are there, I qualify as a commentarist on the speech in general, but because they are not my sort of factors, I do not make a particularly excellent analyst in particular. (Yes, this is how I got my job at The Snod.)

But the idea that English majors are such great thinkers and that a liberal arts education provides such is wrong. See the quote above: A liberal arts education “embraces the uncountable and the abstract” and “leads to innovation (good and bad) . . . .” This is exactly the problem. In my experience, innovation can itself be abstracted and analyzed, and a procedure whereby good innovations can be allowed to grow while bad ones are pruned can be developed. But the key is that this process must include the necessary countables if it is to succeed. Timelines, statistical chances of success, and key measures of cost versus initial investment could well solve the English major’s problem of determining early whether an idea is good or bad, but the quote above indicates a lack of desire to do so. It seems to say that the great, big, broad, abstract ideas that sometimes bring success are the province of English majors, and let the foolish others decode the details and sort through the chaff. This is arrogant misguidedness. I often see where I am the benefits of applying numbers to the thoughts that engineers, economists, and business types have. And they have thoughts as abstract or more than any English major. Any who disagree are invited to come visit me and see for themselves. One might note, as well, that science has a pre-existing framework for the process of abstraction itself, as does math, and I have seen no comparable English equivalent to the many levels of abstraction and analysis one always see in math, science, and engineering.

So it is not just English majors who ever have abstract, critical thoughts, yet woe betide those who have no other objective skills on which they might fall back! Thus their quandary.

I have been referring to English majors when what I say might well be applied to any liberal arts major. I mean here the many disciplines of the humanities and certain social sciences as well as five of the seven traditional liberal arts (the two branches of mathematics, of course, being the exclusions).

I know of an anthropology major who might well agree with some of what the English major whom I discuss says. I also know of many who hope that their degrees will not land them in the projected position of the English major, yet I do not necessarily include them all in my statements. I persist in believing that any college major can be a path to critical thinking, and English majors (and others who may share their overblown opinions of their fields of study) are full of it.

And, yes, I am also very angry at all those who as undergraduates ever had time to go sit in a coffeehouse and discuss fluffernutters before partying late into the night with their friends, because I never did. I wasted all my time studying, and now I’m jealous. Oh, yeah, and the one overarching discipline which brings all others under its umbrella is philosophy, not English. But that, as my readers can guess, is a whole separate commentary in itself.