What Liberal Arts Education Is For – Teaching – innig.net

In college, I took a religious studies class called The Letters of Paul. I took it for two very good reasons:

I was (and am) named Paul.

The prof, Cal Roetzel, was (and is) cool.

I didn’t figure it was an especially practical course. It was for fun, for the challenge, for the cultural knowledge, for the pleasure of doing it.

The class turned out to be more or less “A Letter (singular) of Paul:” we spent the semester reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, at a rate of about 3 sentences per week. Per week! Why so slow? Because we read multiple translations of each of those sentences, and multiple commentaries on them, spanning many centuries — plus a bit of social and historical context. Slow, diligent, careful. And…

We asked, over and over: What do we think Paul was thinking, given that he chose those words? What do we think each translator and each commentator thought Paul was thinking? Why do we think they thought he was thinking that? Does it really make sense for Paul to have thought that? For us to think they thought he thought that? A theory of mind hall of mirrors!

At the heart of the course was this question: What can we learn about what other people are thinking, about their mental models of the world, by paying very careful attention to the words they use?

I loved that course, but thought it had no particular relevance to my career as a software developer…until I started encountering text like this (from a presentation by Lenore Zuck):

Section 2.7.6: Security (~ page 10)

“If the system sends a signal hot then send a message to the operator.”

Section 9.3.4: Temperatures (~ page 150)

“If the system sends a signal hot and T>600, then send<br>a message to the operator.”

Summary of critical aspects (~ page 650)

“When the temperature is maximum, the system should display a message on the screen unless no operator is on the site except when TIt sounds precise at first, doesn’t it? Read it carefully, though. You’ll start to notice that it is unclear, even self-contradictory. It is unclear in ways that only authorial intent can resolve. Somebody wrote this. What did they mean? What did they want? What problem were they solving? A developer could resolve the ambiguity unilaterally by guessing what the words mean, and they could build something that way — but it’s unlikely it would be a satisfactory something.

When I’m on a software project, I try to listen hard to what everyone is saying, to the words they choose. “Don’t blame me! They asked for it!” is never good enough. I ask critical questions about what people are really thinking, what we’re all hearing each other say, from the start.

Why? Code is a whole lot easier to change before it exists.

I’ve saved many companies on many projects a whole lot of money (and heartache) by using the skills of close reading and critical questioning to nip misunderstandings and hidden assumptions in the bud early. Skills I honed in a Religious Studies course.

“Liberal arts” doesn’t mean what people think it means

Here’s the hidden truth of education: You don’t know what you’re preparing for.

You don’t know. Your teacher doesn’t know. Your school doesn’t know. Your future employer doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Not really.

Much of what you’re preparing for doesn’t even exist yet. We hope it doesn’t exist: don’t we educate students in the hope that they will make the world better by changing it? By creating new realities?

Doesn’t that mean education is impossible? Not at all! Because we’ve learned over time that there are kinds of learning that help people prepare for an unknown and unknowable future world. Not just specific skills or subjects, but kinds of learning: approaches rooted in curiosity, exploration, seeing closely, questioning, critical examination, taking multiple perspectives, using multiple kinds of tools, synthesis, communication, dialogue, relationships. Learning like that has a solid track record of mattering in the long term, often in surprising ways. We can do that learning with joy and confidence in its value if we accept that we will only understand its specific utility in hindsight.

Is a Religious Studies course “for” a software career? Well, is a Computer Science course “for” a software career? That Religious Studies course applied to my software career in exactly the same way that my Algorithms course applied: I rarely use (and have largely forgotten) the specific knowledge from it; I use its approach, its patterns of thought, constantly.

There is always a tension in education between teaching the knowably practical and the unknowably valuable.

That first kind of education, the knowably practical, we generally call “vocational education:” specific knowledge we believe students will need for specific reasons in a very specific future. That kind of knowledge is often the primary barrier around entering a specific career, solving a specific problem, or occupying a specific...