TITLE: Learning To Do Things, and the Liberal Arts
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 23, 2012  4:06 PM
DESC: 
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Last summer, I wrote an entry,
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2011-06.html#e2011-06-17T12_28_19.htm">
   Failure and the Liberal Arts</A>,
which suggested (among things) that the value of a liberal
education lies in the intersections between disciplines
and ideas.  This contrasts with the view seemingly held by
many people that a liberal education means to study the
"liberal arts", mostly the humanities and arts.

The traditional liberal arts education faces a lot of
challenges in the current cultural and economic climate.
As colleges and universities cope with rising costs,
increasing competition for students, and
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2011-07.html#e2011-07-15T16_25_44.htm">
   an unbundling of the university's products</A>
engendered by technology, undergraduate degrees filled
only with history, literature, and upper-class culture --
and no obvious preparation for economic life after
graduation -- creates another barrier to making a sale to
prospective parents and students.

The goals of a liberal education are laudable.  How can
we craft undergraduate experiences that help students to
develop broad skills in reading, writing, and thinking?
Isn't that what the traditional liberal arts do best?

Timothy Burke nails the answer to these questions in
<A HREF="http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2012/01/09/brinkmanship/comment-page-1/#comment-8548">
   this comment on his own blog</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
... a person becomes most skilled at creating, making,
innovating, thinking, in ways that have value in
existing professions *and* in life through indirect
means.  Studying communication doesn't make you a
better communicator, studying entrepreneurship doesn't
make you a better entrepreneur, and so on.

But this has huge, huge implications as a perspective
for the content and practice of "liberal arts" as an
educational object.  ...  Maybe learning to do things
(creating, innovating, expressing, etc.) isn't
advanced by anything resembling intensive study of a
fixed body of knowledge, but by doing.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I couldn't agree more.  This idea lies at the heart of
my blog, in both theme and name: knowing and doing.
Learning to do things is best accomplished <B>by
doing things</B>, not (just) by studying a fixed body
of knowledge, however intensive the studying or
valuable the body of knowledge.  Sure,
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-04.html#e2010-04-22T20_36_56.htm">
   at some point, you gotta know stuff</A>,
and intensive study of a domain is a useful and
valuable enterprise.  But we learn best by doing.

My compilers students will -- if all goes as we plan and
hope -- learn much more this semester than how to write
a compiler.  They will learn things that I can't teach
them directly with a lecture.  And even when I could
give them the lecture, they would not learn it in the
same way as when they learn it on the ground, in the
trenches, one shovel of dirt at a time.

Liberal arts colleges -- and universities with liberal
arts cores and general education programs -- would do
well to take this lesson to heart sooner rather than
later.
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