Tech and the liberal arts

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 07:12:43 -0400

Last night, I gave a talk to this years HackNY fellows. It was a lot of fun. I was originally going to speak about liberal arts and tech education but I was asked to do something more on my professional journey as a teacher so I did that. Had a great time but figured I'd write about the liberal art stuff here anyway.

Over the last few months, I've noticed a surge in social media pushing the humanities in CS education. This has mostly been a reaction to the recent AI craze, chatGPT and related ethical concerns. This doubles down on the ethics based push for more humanities resulting from all of the plain as day ethic issues in the tech world.

I say surge but it's all relative. I haven't seen major initiatives to change CS programs or anything like that, just more buzz.

Personally, I've been on the humanities bus for a long time. Going all the way back to when I went to a liberal arts school as opposed to an engineering school. Here, I'm not going to talk about the humanities specifically with respect to ethics or ai, the issues du jour, but rather what I've always spoken out on - their value to a student following a tech path. I'm also not going to talk about the teaching side of things. I'll save that for another day.

On one side, a side that's been covered for years is the whole cross and interdisciplinary thing. Even before CS was big in K12 there were plenty of efforts of including STEM in humanities classes and the humanities in STEM classes. Makes sense. The whole silo thing that we've evolved into works in some cases but is lacking in so many more. For tech, the truth, contrary to most college CS programs is that most CS majors will apply CS to some other field and not go on to get PhDs. This means that having CS students with deep exposure to other fields is a good thing. It's also easy - opportunities abound just by choosing the right problems to explore. One I love is the termite gathering model in NetLogo. On it's own, it explores just that - termites gathering woods as an emergent behavior. Beyond that, though, I've read articles describing the same model as an exploration of things as widely disparate as galaxy formation and wealth distribution.

The other side, and more interesting one as far as I'm concerned is the value of a liberal arts education to a CS major ignoring the above interdisciplinary utility. Disclaimer- I'm going to talk a bit about the differences in a liberal arts education vs a more engineering one (for lack of a better term). This does not mean that individuals educated in one way are necessarily in any way lacking in the other. That comes down to the individual.

I was once talking to two of my closest friends, independently about this. Changing names to ensure privacy, let's call my friend educated in a liberal arts school Liberal Arts Larry and my engineer friend, Engineering Ed.

Talking about his education, Ed was able to pinpoint where he learned specifically useful things for his career. "I really got Fourier Transformations when a Took blahblahblah" or "automata really made sense after I took compilers."

Larry on the other hand described his experience by saying "I really can't say anything specific in any of my core (liberal arts) courses but as a whole they've shaped who I am today and at some fundamental level they inform so many of my decisions."

Interesting difference, at least between these two. Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Ed is very well read in the classics, and knowledgeable in music and the arts and on the other side Larry is as strong technically as anyone I know. At the same time, both were CS majors and both have been very successful over their careers.

We can drill down more on Larry's statement to really think about how liberal arts, if taken by a student ready for them, shine. High School students frequently tell me they want to work on games. They think they need all the science and math, and to a certain extent, they might, but I ask them, what is a game really? It's a story. Playing a game is being a player in a story. Every game I can think of, save one ¹ tells a story. Story telling is liberal arts. Other aspects that might influence a young individual embarking on their tech career? How about psychology - how people thing. Certainly a boon in understanding your users and pitching a solution. In a similar vein, anthropology. Okay, maybe not the bone digging side of physical anthro but certainly cultural anthropology - how groups of people live - customs, cultures, taboos etc. Understanding people is not part of a CS curriculum but it's layered all over the humanities. Of course literature and writing quite literally is story telling and art and related fields as well and even history, particularly if it's not just a collection of facts but more cause and effect based.

In short, at least in my opinion, unless you're really going down the engineering side rabbit hole a liberal arts education can be super beneficial to students moving into tech and so many dismiss BA offering schools in favor of a BS. This isn't even getting to the ethics and AI side of things but, as I said up top - that's for another post.

The catch with all of this, though, is that the student must be ready for a liberal arts education. Our society pushes really hard on the "college is for jobs only" button and while I've argued that a BA can in fact be better for a tech career in many cases many dismiss the idea. How many students look for the easiest distribution requirements and take their liberal arts classes in a vacuum - only about the class itself as opposed to how it can grow them as a person. In my experience, most colleges don't help matters with professors self silo-ing their subjects making matters worse. If a student doesn't approach a liberal arts education with the right attitude and investment, much of the value can be lost.

Still, I hope that the pendulum will swing and more people will see how a tech education without the humanities is only half an education. I've been talking about it for years. I hope others start to do the same.

Tetris

humanities on C'est la Z

Tech and the liberal arts