The Merits of a Liberal Education

I read this and this on Friday, got distracted by some beers on Friday and a number of things on Saturday, and then actually spent a couple hours writing a blog post about it (as opposed to my standard practice, which is to type mindlessly for twenty minutes), and the wily internet promptly destroyed the fruits of my labor like a callous son of a bitch.  The moral of the two links is that degrees in the humanities don't financially compensate you the way you think they will, and that the commoditization of everything in America is making college increasingly expensive while lowering the quality of education and limiting the job opportunities that pay a living wage for academics.  


The tendencies described by the aforementioned articles exemplify what Bernard Lonergan described as a bias towards common sense.  Philosophers have a tendency to divide knowledge into techne, technical or practical knowledge, and sophia, which is the sort of pure, abstract wisdom that philosophers are perpetually questing after.  The common tendency among the philosophical sort is a prejudice in favor of sophia; the popular laity favors techne because of the practical fruits that it obviously and immediately bears.  From either party, the tendency is to treat the two as separate entities that are unrelated to each other.  


This artificial division is the source of the problem, and both parties are equally culpable in the degradation of society.  Techne and sophia are engaged in a constant dialogue, and the more dynamic and active this dialogue, the better the civilization.  Taking the Enlightenment as one example, the noble philosophic rhetoric about the rights of man and the democratic state only occurred after improvements in agricultural technology made it possible to grow the surplus food required to support a strong urban class, improvements in military technology gave the masses real military power (as opposed to aristocratic heavy cavalry), and the proliferation of the printing press made it possible to spread the word about liberty and democracy.  


Physical circumstance as driven by technical progress set the stage for the philosophy of liberty by turning the masses into a dynamic physical force, and then technical progress spread the word.  Techne determines the manner in which things are accomplished, the how and what.  Sophia determines the goal at which we aim.  Without sophia, there is blind technical progress but no social progress.  


Accordingly, the degradation of education as it regards sophia, the social fabric, and those abstract ideals that gives humanity its merit, should be of concern to us all.  Our public education system is increasingly failing us, and our college education increasingly fails to inculcate the requisite skill set for wise prudent discourse.  


This failure occurs for two reasons:  the tendency of existing academics to cloister themselves and deal with the world as if the are above the every day hustle and bustle, and the consistent failure to accompany the humanities with actual economic incentives.  For current academics, their publications need to be made more easily available, especially if they regard domestic policy and international relations.  


For the future, we need to invest in our teachers at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, as well as professors for undergraduate education.  At present, teaching is a low-paying profession with little job security, in some states with no ability to collectively bargain, and it is difficult to get into due to ever-shrinking state budgets.  This is not a way to attract quality individuals to the profession.  


We are systematically destroying our future.