Japan to close humanities departments.

[think positive]

[pietillidie]

Beyond the Tony Abbott university wars, don't forget the brain is an idea production machine. If sprinters train to sprint, and footballers train to play football, then idea producers should presumably train to produce ideas.

I get the impression a lot of people misunderstand the importance of idea production and expression. Some people simply don't know much about the world, and can't express new thought combinations very well. That makes them poor thinkers, problem solvers and communicators.

The humanities at their best excel in oiling the creative idea machine. The notion of arts/business degrees, or arts/law degrees, was put forward twenty years ago to take advantage of that.

This thread seems bereft of both technical knowledge on the subject, and serious reasoning.

Five minutes ago, Wokko told us scientists couldn't be believed. Now, he's telling us the humanities are a waste of space. The common denominator here is probably not science and humanities, but rather whatever seems to be getting in the way of the latest weirdo conservative American political fantasy.

No one has even bothered to define the supposed problem with humanities. Just what is this problem, where does it exist, and what is the scientific evidence for it?

Being Tony Abbott in the student union trying to win "but mummy-told-me-I'm-the-best" wars is not the same as analysing something, and certainly not something important.

Random, non-scientific declarations based on blog debates with angry feminist versions of Tony Abbott in the student union just don't tell us anything useful. Actual scientists would cringe at what is barely afternoon tea gossip.

All I can say is that despite my interests moving to the social sciences and the sciences now, I really gained a lot from my history, rhetoric, English literature, philosophy, ancient history, Classical Hebrew literature, Classical Greek literature, and Classical Hebrew language classes.

And I can clearly recall people sooking back then about the same things.

Universities forever and a day have been inhabited by religio-conservative foot stompers, conspiracy theorists, "the world is going to hell" old fartists, dumb please-the-professor regurgitators, pseudo-communists, and political correctness OCDers. My guess is not much has changed except for the "menace" of choice and access being extend to the riff-raff.

But none of that tells me anything about how important or otherwise the humanities are to society. That requires hard evidence, research and a depth of understanding about human cognition and learning, and its role in knowledge production and collective intelligence in complex societies.

[think positive]

[David]

[Wokko]

I was in the middle of my Arts degree, majoring in Philosophy and History when I had to leave to look after my daughter full time due to my partner's health issues. I was in my 2nd year and receiving good marks. The progressive group think is subtle and seeing as it would be confirming your already held beliefs it's no surprise to me you either didn't see it or chose not to see it. I took a history subject about immigration and it may as well have been written by Sarah Hanson Young. I did my part to be subversive by writing a piece about Malcolm Fraser and the Liberal party being the main driving force behind Australia's humanitarian Vietnamese refugee policies rather than the tokenism of Whitlam.

My Philosophy lecturer was quitting due to progressive bullshit, and I actually dropped a class because of the 'Men are to blame for everything' crap that popped up in a lecture (walked out on it). Sociology was interesting as my tutor was very progressive but was happy to engage with a well thought out 'conservative' view point rather than shout it down or ignore it. Again I wrote on Adam Smith to stick it up them a bit.

This was La Trobe Uni. Maybe when I go back I'll try ACU or something

[think positive]

[Morrigu]

All I know is whoever dreamt up " reflective journals" should be smacked in the head with a shovel - what a load of clap trap and a total waste of time ( yes I appreciate some people may get benefit from it - fine let them do it don't foist it on everyone!!!)

I made up every single word of every stupid one I had to do the night before it was due!

Much prefer bioscience, chemistry, physics etc that don't waffle on with abstract bollocks!!

[David]

[Mugwump]

^ bit harsh, TP. I don't think David's saying manual work isn't important, just that it is not the only kind of work that can have value, and that we would be poorer without historians, economists, music theorists etc. i can agree with that. After my garbage has been collected and my car serviced, I'd rather read a good history than a balance sheet, so I want people who can write those. And the fact that 2008 caused much less misery and unemployment than 1929 owes much to the work of good economists. It helped that Ben
Bernanke was an economic historian of the Great Depression. So the humanities, practised by very talented people, can be terribly important in the real world.

The problem with the humanities is that they are not just about facts, but about the stories and meaning that can be woven around the facts. The portion of objective truth is relatively small, and in such a situation the only guarantee of academic rigour is free compeitition in the marketplace of ideas. It is the debasement of the humanities by well-documented bias and bullying in staffing processes, and the fact that the humanitiies have low entry standards amd attract ill-qualified candidates, that makes many of us question their overall value creation.

[think positive]

[pietillidie]

^My guess, TP, is that his disdain is for anti-intellectualism and the anti-humanistic development ideas which trap people in personal economic cycles which exclude intellectual development.

Work hard, come home knackered, watch telly, complain about whatever, gossip on facebook about trivia to relieve stress, have kids, work hard...never free up enough time and money for serious personal development...whinge about university students...increase fees to punish university students and those engaging in intellectual development out of envy and disappointment...

Also, on a technical note, "hard" work can actually damage the economy. Plenty of people in very poor countries work "hard". The important thing is "productive" work, and we know productive work is always associated with ingenuity, technology, complex idea integration, creativity, complex system knowledge and operation, and so on.

There is nothing wrong with any "work" per se; what is wrong is when "hard work" becomes a blind religion and an anti-mind-developing mantra. Remember, the brain is what separates us from the beasts; the difference between a HQ cabinet maker and someone who does a "job" is that the former uses his brain in two ways: (a) using ingenuity to solve complex problems and (b) using creativity. That's just one example, but it ought to be the itching goal of people "using their hands".

Of course, it's hard to escape the payment cycle and people have to survive, so no one is querying the obvious need to do that. They're querying turning that into a new religion and end in itself. Fine, if you're in the Great Depression; but intellectually lazy for everyone else. (Remember, when I say "intellectual" I don't mean "useless smart", I mean having sophisticated problem solving and creative skills, whatever they might be).

Teaching and developing people's minds and critical thought processes is the practical end that intellectuals should focus on. Unfortunately, in universities, they have become self-absorbed "publish-or-perish" machines due to idiotic university rankings obsessions, gross under-funding and career insecurity. If I were running a university it would be the opposite: Teach (in spoken and written form) and develop people or perish, and take time off periodically to write papers.

As ever, it's a vicious cycle: You can't fix the selfish focus on publishing papers for the sake of it without decent funding, so "getting revenge" on the system by de-funding it only makes the problem worse.

Some systems operate better *without* a market orientation because their benefits are far too complex to measure in the here and now, something I have argued also applies to fundamental social necessities such as public transport, many utilities, and certainly the Internet. Sane societies always apply it to the legal system, policing and correctional system and the health system. They used to apply it universally to the education system, too, which brings us to the main problem here.

Good education which develops minds also falls into this category, which is why all the fancy nonsense and new ideas under the sun people are crapping on about are not fixing education at any level except one: At the very, very top end where zillions of dollars in funding from rich benefactors and multi-millionaire parents can be used to overcome the multitude of problems.

But this just masks what is otherwise an overwhelmingly foolish move whereby incentives which work in other economic spheres such as industry have been imported into a context whose responsibility is to develop the individual's and society's ability to do two things: Solve problems and create new stuff. This can be achieved from within pretty much any discipline within a sane education system which matches the economic incentives to that system, rather than dumbly importing productivity economics from manufacturing in an act of religion

[think positive]

[Mugwump]

^ a nice post, PTID, but I've no idea what you are proposing - is it that tertiaty education should be freed of any market disciplines ? That we return to a 1970s-style model where the amount of spending, and accountability for performance, was delegated to the providers or bureaucrats ?

I can see the attraction, as market disciplines do not work well in (say) English literature : but any system which frees providers from strict accountability to consumers and those who fund them has broken incentives and interests - indeed, a kind of corruption - at its heart. I would not want to abolish the humanities, but I would like to see them effectively rationed and governed. And the start of that programme of effective governance would be to stop the discrimination against academics on the right, which commenced in the early Seventies, and allocating a relatively higher share of resources to the sciences and vocational subjects, where creativity and originality is no less prevalent than it is in the humanities.

[David]

Interesting piece from the New Yorker � "The year of the imaginary college student":

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-year-of-the-imaginary-college-student?intcid=mod-latest

[stui magpie]