Recently I was part of a dinner conversation attended by a range of leaders in the tech world, from people running incubators and accelerators to ad agencies and 设计 studios. 嘉宾名单中包括来自脸谱网的代表, 中央理工大学, BetaWorks, 视频, 和益普索.

尽管他们的头衔和技术性质, this wasn’t a crowd of computer-science majors and engineering minors: Every person invited to this dinner happened to have a liberal-arts degree.

Many tech-sector folk have made arguments about the irrelevance of liberal-arts education. According to the late director of the Cato Institute, Andrew J. 库尔森, “The traditional association of liberal-arts education and four-year colleges was already becoming an anachronism before the rise of the World Wide Web. 它现在是一个摇摇欲坠的化石.在共和党初选期间, candidate Marco Rubio falsely stated that welders make more money than philosophers. And tech investor Marc Andreessen thinks that 英语 majors will just “end up working in a shoe store.”

But there may be a correlation between professional success in the new STEM-focused economy and training in the liberal arts.

文科的领导人

Many of America’s top traditional business people have liberal-arts degrees. 事实上, literature and 哲学 majors often turn up in the profiles of tech entrepreneurs: LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman attributes his success in part to the masters in 哲学 he completed at the University of Oxford; the founders of Flickr and Hunch—Caterina Fake, 英语文学澳门合法赌场官网, 和她的搭档斯图尔特·巴特菲德, who went on to develop Slack—have both a BA and an MA in 哲学; angel investor Chris Dixon also has a BA and an MA in 哲学; and the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, 你的澳门合法赌场官网是历史文学吗. 即使是马云, the CEO of one of China’s—and the world’s—most successful e-commerce platforms, 阿里巴巴, 我是英语澳门合法赌场官网的.

With leaders as impressive and successful as this cohort, 为什么我们仍然忽视这种学术努力?

The perceived diminishing value of a liberal-arts degree is likely fueled in part by the rising expense of higher education, which puts tremendous pressure on families and students to justify education in immediate remunerative terms. 如果你学的是计算机科学, you can graduate straight into a six-figure starting salary—or you can spend just as much money studying 英语 literature and be lucky to land a $32k starting job as an editorial assistant. 你选择!

Society has therefore devalued the study of literature, 历史, 政治, 哲学, 社会学是浪费或无意义的. Many suggest we all just should 学习 skills such as coding, 数字营销, 取而代之的是网络开发.

但这不是世界前进的方向. Professional requirements are changing so quickly in the real world that lessons deemed relevant in the first year of college are barely relevant upon graduation—and much less early into one’s career.

A strictly technical education may carry a short-term promise (a job), but it also carries a long-term peril of not being well prepared for ongoing change. 而不是教学生狭隘的技能, 我们需要让他们具备思考的技能, 沟通, 合作, 设计, 创造他们的未来，也创造我们的未来.

The frothy period of tech is settling into a profound shift in the way we live and interact. It is becoming increasingly clear that the skillset gathered through both informal 学习ing and a broad-based education will provide the necessary abilities and knowledgebase to perceive the path forward in this emergent socio-technical landscape.

传授知识，而不是技能

We are in the midst of a socio-technical transformation. 因为机器学习的出现, AI, 生物技术创新, our understanding of what it is to be human is under scrutiny and reevaluation. Reflecting on these questions raises another challenge: not just to preserve humanity, 而是反思它的新形式.

Our ability as a society to comprehend the implications of what is happening around us is undermined during these times. It’s not only hard to keep up—it’s particularly difficult to understand the implications of what’s happening. 什么是时尚，什么是变革? 应该采纳、调整或反对什么?

The most critical issues we face are not the latest breakthroughs in technology itself, but rather thinking through the implications of these breakthroughs. A liberal-arts approach to 学习ing engages with the broader human questions of this rapid transformation.

最严肃的问题往往问得太晚了. 人工智能将如何改变我们在世界上的存在方式, 并决定我们如何(以及是否)工作, 学习, 一起生活? 这对城市和农村生活意味着什么? Will it change how we receive basic services and how we actually experience the world around us? Those in STEM fields may be studying how to create these technologies—but people in liberal arts fields are 学习ing about how to live with them.

The capacity to understand the constraints and opportunities that are presented during times of transformation is key. 这需要洞察力, 的角度来看, 自我反省, and an entrepreneurial sensibility—all qualities taught in liberal-arts education. 识别政治的能力, 社会, 历史, and philosophical implications of contemporary experience is not only the hallmark of a liberal-arts education but also the trick of life-long 学习ing.

This makes liberal-arts education not just a museum piece—it’s a living form of 学习ing. Technology is changing so quickly that relevant skills need to be accessed in a real-time training model. 知识, 然而, is best suited to the challenge of 学习ing about what it means to be human today.