From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com

Read this and work out how you would bridge this gap.

http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-05/new-age.html

If you have a quick formula that works, good. But how would you get someone to think that formula is a good idea and *want* to apply it?

Liberal arts education?

I got involved in an article that started out as listcruft--the list of the books used in the St. John's College "Great Books" curriculum--and I got drawn in. I've sorta gotten interested in St. John's and in Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan, the people who created it.

One of the things that really struck me is how, during the 1930s through the 1950s, there was serious concern about the rise of "the dictatorships" in Germany and Italy. There was constant discussion of "the democracies" vis-a- vis "the dictatorships." The title of Sinclair Lewis's novel, "It Can't Happen Here," expressed the common attitude in the U.S., while its content expressed Lewis's belief that it darn well _could_ happen here if we weren't careful.

I grew up thinking of "liberal arts" as a sort of gentleman's quasi- recreational curriculum, something that Ivy Leaguers studied if they weren't interested in anything real. But that's not at all how Barr and Buchanan saw it.

They believed quite seriously that the liberal arts curriculum was essential _in developing the spirit of free inquiry._ They thought that unless all citizens were educated in how to think, democracies would not be stable and would be subject to transformation into dictatorships. They didn't want to limit it to colleges.

Incidentally they were just as concerned about English majors not knowing physics as vice versa.

I have no idea whether they were right. Their achievements certainly fell very short of their ambitions. Certainly, the trends they feared have progressed. I think the majority of Americans now regard college as an activity that should be directly career-directed and that the status of the liberal-arts curriculum has declined.

I'm not sure to what extent educators feel tasked with the job of teaching critical thinking. Certainly in the public schools there has always been some ambiguity about whether their task is to teach critical thinking or whether it is to teach docility and obedience to authority....

I didn't get a liberal arts education, and I have a certain amount of inquiring skepticism about its value, but... just a (tangential) thought.