The Death of the Polymath

Don't know nothing 'bout Geography...

Ginandtacos has a piece about some wanker complaining about the quality of Rhodes Scholars candidates these days.  Because, yes, that's the problem with America right now.

There seems to be a broad consensus developing in the comments that one of the problem is that undergraduate education has become too pre-professional and the old liberal arts generality has died out.

I have no doubt this is true.  On the other hand, I can see from first hand experience that the high school I both went to and teach at has worked at creating a more varied curriculum.  Only a few super-bright kids took BC Calculus when I was a student.  Now we have kids taking it their junior year.  Some even take it their sophomore year, but they're east Asian, so we won't include them, I guess.

One of the trends I've noticed in our discussions about teaching, and one change I made in my own teaching since I came here, is the idea that "knowing things" is less important than "thinking."

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison could legitimately read all the important texts on political theory in a year (or less).  Today, there are books, journals, scholarly paper...and that's just on the American system of government.  Want to know the differences between Myanmar and North Korea?  Let's go to the Internet!

The idea that colleges are now just tracking people into pre-professional grooves is, I guess, a legitimate concern.  However, I think people are missing the fluidity of knowledge.  Someone who is a science geek in high school and goes on to be a chem major in college so that they can invent a polymer from soy that will replace petroleum based plastics is someone who has a certain way of thinking.  They aren't going to get much from a Comp Lit course.

Now, they should be - and likely are - required to take some general introductory courses across the curriculum.  But once they have slogged their way through their three English courses, and their language requirement, they will become immersed in a way of thinking that typifies the sciences in general and chemistry in particular.

No matter what they wind up doing the rest of their life, they will approach most mental problems from the perspective of a science guy.

To put it another way, my father and father-in-law are both litigators, and they seem to see most questions through the viewpoint of their professional mindset.  I see most issues as a teacher would.

This does not prohibit me from reading up on science or poetry or art.  But it does provide a filter through which I see the world.

There is too much knowledge in the world to be a generalist - a polymath - anymore.  Isaiah Berlin's idea of the fox and hedgehog is still valid, but foxes don't "know" everything.  They know a little bit about a lot of things.  Because that's the type of thinker they are.

Today's "foxes" will still have to declare a major.  They will still have to find a firm point on which to stand, a rock of perspective as the tides and eddies of knowledge swirl around them.

If we are going to lament the decline of the broad-based liberal arts education, then we need to surrender the internet, the human genome, smart-phones, smart-drugs and any other advance in human knowledge and content ourselves with the world of Jefferson and Madison.

You remember?  The one without antibiotics or electric lightbulbs.