AI & Liberal Arts

In a liberal arts education, the student herself is the product. 

Instead of creating a product, humanities education is different. The students themselves are what’s getting created and recreated through the learning process.

A liberal arts education is to be personally transformative by cultivating virtues. 

Aristotle saw education as a pursuit that’s personally transformative. He believed the most fundamental goal was not just imparting knowledge, but cultivating virtues that make for a flourishing life. 

A product-based, utilitarian vision of college is inadequate. 

A college must be a place where the goal of flourishing lies underneath the assignments, the tests, the discussions, the feedback, the clubs, and the social structure. Using generative AI in the classroom threatens to leave out of the process something vital: friction. Cognitive automation threatens to minimize cognitive friction.

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What the Humanities are For

As one student said to his professor at New York University, in an effort to justify using AI to do his work for him, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?” It’s a completely logical argument — as long as you accept the utilitarian vision. The real solution, then, is to be honest about what the humanities are for: You’re in the business of helping students with the cultivation of their character. -Sigal Samuel writing in Vox

The Moment You Feel

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.  -ee cummings

Should Students Choose Higher-Paying Majors?

Pushing students from science into the humanities tended to decrease their later-life wages — that’s finding is not surprising. But the converse also appeared to be true: Pushing students from the humanities into science also tended to, if anything, decrease their wages. While there are certain very high-paying majors (like engineering, economics, and computer science) that increase students’ earning potential even if they would prefer to study something else, helping students to study their most-preferred major generally seems to provide long-run financial benefits even in the humanities.

Students should know that when it comes to choosing a college degree, small differences in average-wage-by-major statistics shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Especially when the average wage differences between majors are not very big, students should put their own strengths first and not let the statistics cloud their understanding of their own interests.

Zachary Bleemer writing in the The Chronicle of Higher Ed