A Primer on a Liberal Arts Education

One of the latest conversations in the Business Intelligence space falls around education.  Education is hot anyway – you need it, of course, but what makes a good and valuable education in this space?

Andy Cotgreave, Michael Correll, and Ben Jones took this conversation to the interwebs.  I blame them for this post.  It’s just easier this way, kids.

Andy includes liberal arts as part of some of the trends in BI.  He read The Fuzzy and the Techie, a book he loves and one that makes me angry.  He showcases Melissa Cefkin, an anthropologist who helps Nissan integrate self-driving cars with humans.  We’ll likely revisit Fuzzy and Techie, if not here, then somewhere.  I’ll probably also revisit Ben’s ideas, but he was nice enough to dust off his blog and write.

Michael Correll touched on one part that has not been discussed NEARLY enough in this space, the history of a liberal education.  He had this wicked awesome slide, which I’m stealing.   He highlighted this education as “…the things you needed to know in order to be a participant in free society…” and gave us these beautiful words: Quadrivium and Trivium.  These are fancy ways of grouping things.

Michael highlights how both philosophy and mathematics exist as parts of an education that is liberal.  And this is where we turn right and go deep into the woods.  At least I used my turn signal today.

As an Education for Democracy

One of the coolest sets of books I’ve gotten to see, let alone read parts of, comes from the 1950s.  No joke kids.  Back then, Mortimer Adler and others decided to put together a collection, Great Books of the Western World, which showcased what Mortimer and co felt made a good liberal education.  They avoided anything from their century and Mortimer did express regret later that Equality (and Civil Rights) was not selected as part of this work and later published more for that that concept.

These books, however, showcase roughly 102 topics and include a wide number of authors, philosophers, and practitioners.  As Michael highlighted, the argument about and for a liberal education is that this knowledge is what makes a good citizen of democracy.  It’s not that you agree with everything – it’d be impossible since there’s loads of conflicting view points included – but that you know what was said and argued.

These books include philosophy, history, religion, math, science, and – wait – all things listed in Michael’s slide!  The point of a liberal education was to create a well-rounded person well versed in all the thought that was considered important at the time.  Here are some big pieces to the puzzle:

• History
• Philosophy
• Science
• Mathematics
• Literature and Art
• Religion

You can lump some of these together however you like.  Most academic schedules in a liberal arts degree have some way of grouping these and defining a “well-rounded education” based on some combination and balance of these.  And the balance is what’s critical.

We often mistake liberal arts as being “arts” or the academic flavor of hippies.  The bigger takeaway – or at least what was pounded in my head during my liberal education – is that people like me walk away with a greater understanding of the history, thoughts, and ideas that got all of us to where we are today.

An Education for Thinking

I struggled at first in realizing my education would be “liberal”.  It really has some bad connotations out in the world (at least in my circles).  STEM degrees seem rigorous – their quantitive natures supposedly measurable by various benchmarks.  And Michael discussed how easy it was to interview from a technical side.  As someone who’s done hiring, I agree – on the surface, you check some boxes and you think you’re squared away…or not.

Here’s what’s hard to measure: the way a person thinks, solves problems, and addresses potential conflicts that arise from that solution.  We can see the results and make assumptions.  But we have no real insight into what happened.  A part of this comes from a liberal education.

John Locke – The US Constitution owes him a debt.

When we know the history, we understand the cycles the world makes.  No, kids, we are not unique.  Every generation thinks they’re on the precipice of something special.  It was eerie reading a book from the 1950’s that shared the same concerns I did about technology, how the world was changing, and how different we were.  So many lines, with maybe a few word changes (oh, epoch, how I’ve missed you) would fit right into a journal today.

The art and literature piece probably gets the most attention in these discussions.  We know color is important, that we create a narrative, and that our voice is in this.  I’ll let this point slide for now. Same with math and science.  Which leaves us this last point…thinking. 

When we know the history, we understand the cycles the world makes.  No, kids, we are not unique.  Every generation thinks they’re on the precipice of something special.

When we identify the philosophies and theological base for our thoughts, we understand what lens we’re using and where we’re shining it (Ben touches on this as Data Journalism).  We realize that, hey, this isn’t the whole picture that needs considered.  Even this book line, admitted by the editors, missed things.  Despite spanning 54 volumes, 102 topics, and a sundry of authors too long to list.  Daniel Kahnman discusses thinking fast and slow, and where we struggle today is that slow part.  A good philosophical base and practice can hone this, along with allowing the time.  Philosophy was alluded to briefly in the webinar as ethics.

I love ethics.  They sit somewhere between morality and philosphy and are fuzzy as all get-out.  They torture developers, sometimes without realizing it, and drive the conversations we should be having.  But, often, we don’t.  We lock in on the job and say it’s not our fault.  And that, perhaps, is the biggest takeaway from a liberal education.

An Education for Exploring Beyond the Task

Now we get to one of the reasons that The Techie and the Fuzzy made me angry (besides the fact that every “techie” seemed to be male while the fuzzies ran about 50/50): that the focus is still heavily on the task and the technology being “easy enough”.  The “easy enough” makes me mad.  But, also, we allude to, but rarely say, the word ethics.  And this makes me furious.  In American Sign Language, it shares a root with rules – no one likes rules either.

Ethics are a practice, not a set of rules.  They require an ability to see the constellation of demands – what all is involved in this situation.  To do so effectively means an understanding of history, hard science, math, and all these soft sciences often associated with a liberal education.  That’s why an anthropologist is in charge of ensuring self-driving cars play nicely with humans.  It’s not that she lacks the hard skills – nope, not at all – it’s that they’re balanced with this other piece – the piece that is debated so much.

When we put things out in the world, they have ramifications.  Sometimes, we see them.  Other times, they are invisible and undetected until implemented and used for some time.  Michael mentioned the “ratchet effect”.  As makers, we’re optimistic about our creations.  It’s why we create – we think we’re adding.  We need that counterbalance, that person to pull us back and make us think, look at this history, and ensure we’re not rushing carelessly into the future with no thought to where this puddle spills.

Newton would say, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  Chief Seattle says that “we’re all connected to the web of life and what we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”  We need both narratives to truly and understand the world.

What I hope you walk away with from this post is that a liberal arts degree contains art, but its larger focus is thinking, rationalizing, and doing so within the contexts of history and both the hard and soft sciences that I hope we’ll one day celebrate equally.

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I thrive on people smarter than me.  Philosophy images borrowed from Curiosophy.  More fun illustrations there.