The myth of critical thinking from liberal arts

Ten years ago I wrote the keynote address for the Colleagues in Jesuit Business Education conference in Milwaukee, written at the behest of Tom Bausch, and presented to a somewhat skeptical audience in Milwaukee. The file submitted for the presentation and the PowerPoint presentation follow below.

CJBE2010LiberatingartFINAL.pptx

Download PPTX • 92KB

My fundamental position is that business schools, especially Jesuit business schools with a grounding in values, i.e., philosophy and theology, provide what best fulfills the conceptual definition of a liberal arts education, addressing the basic questions to be answered in college: Why am I here? What is my role in life? How do I make a difference in the lives of others? Basically, what do I value and how do I add value to the world?

Liberatingart2010.doc

Download DOC • 62KB

I often charged my students with a challenge for their college time: Find something you're good at doing, something you enjoy and something that will pay your bills. The 'privilege" we hear of today best describes students in college having a relatively unique privilege to a tiny percentage of people in this world, namely the opportunity to pursue these almost magical possibilities, three things that most people most often have no chance to pursue, not a single one.

In any case, the real myth is the claim that college students learn critical thinking from their liberal arts courses. Here are the arguments against that claim: First, critical thinking is a skill and the liberal arts is primarily about knowledge, not skills. Second, the liberal arts today, dominated by 'progressive' faculty on the far left, most often provide a distorted if not dishonest view of the way of the world. In their value systems, capitalism, markets, family, and traditional values are anathema, while equity, inclusion and diversity have permeated more angles and elements of the liberal arts than they deserve to be. Third, the skill set of most PhDs in the humanities does not include a practical, realistic, grounded view off the world. The ivy of the liberal arts covers a tower that has lofty yet half-crazed "ideals" that better represent virtue signaling and posturing, not practical education for life.

Bottom line is that an education needs to leave the graduate employable. A well-educated graduate should merit a well-paid position. And education with excellent employability is an expensive misallocation of four years and often well over $200,000. This does not mean that the graduate must seek lucrative employment; it simply means that the graduate merits an offer for lucrative employment. A life of learning without a meaningful future is likely to produce a cry of desperation, not inspiration.

Here is one good essay on the problems of elite academics abandoning any critical thought in deference to 'experts.' Two brief excerpts:

More broadly, if you express doubt about the idea of ‘systemic racism’ – perhaps because six or seven of the 10 most financially successful ethnic groups in present-day America are not white – you will no doubt be reminded to read famous books arguing that severe racial oppression is everywhere, like Ibram X Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist or Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.

Similarly, should you criticise modern gender theory or the bizarre idea that human biological sex is complex and hard to define, you will inevitably be referred to an authoritative-sounding article, packed with data and infographics, like this one in Scientific American.

*****

While I may be more attuned to this phenomenon than most, as the author of a book called Hate Crime Hoax, it would be hard for any competent observer of American mass media not to notice that major recent stories about Jussie Smollett, the Covington Catholic boys, Kyle Rittenhouse, Erica Thomas, Michael Brown, Jacob Blake and (more broadly) the Black Lives Matter movement have turned out to be complete bullshit.