Posted in the dunk tank because I expect to be dunked on.
So I got in a discussion with a friend that someone they knew was hardworking because they were doing a degree in music theory on a PhD track while also juggling multiple jobs. I was impressed with all the jobs this person was doing, but I said that music theory as a degree is absurd and most liberal arts degrees are related to professional bullshitting (re: writing useless essays about a specific quality of something) than they are about something socially useful so I didn't find that aspect impressive at all. In my eyes, the socially useful thing about a music theory degree would be applying this idea to make good music, or to teach others about it. Notably, music theory is not about engineering a stage for good acoustics, nor is it about building instruments. It leads to nothing tangible, but rather is a sort of meta-analysis of music as a whole. Its possible to receive a music theory degree while making bad music. And bad music and good music is wholly subjective, its possible to put on a very musically skillful display and have no one like it, or not be interesting enough that a good swath of people enjoy it.
Compare this to, say, an architecture degree. There can be artistic expression in architecture, but its incredibly important to put people through a degree program for rigor to avoid architectural deficiencies which can kill people. The point here is that any sort of rigor drilled into someone in a music theory PhD pipeline has questionable benefits, and is likely a waste of time and labor. However, it is possible that it would be useful to have music theory certifications that are relatively quick, cheap, and potentially free to get to help teach musicians music theory to improve their art, maximizing social benefits. And I think that is something that can be applied to a lot of liberal art degrees.
Maybe this is colored by the way my grandma taught me about Socialist Czechoslovakia. There were benefits for artists, but people could only get free/subsidized degrees if they went to do something very practical such as architecture, engineering, science, and so on. Which is why so much socialist art is baked into something practical, like housing.
So, before college degrees became nothing more than a prerequisite for getting a job that paid more the starvation wages, the idea behind the liberal arts was to provide someone with a well rounded education in a variety of subjects. Not to produce a technical expert who was good at one thing, but to produce a person who knew a little bit about a lot of things and had developed the skills to pursue further education. Whether you think that's valuable comes down to whether you think a good general education improves people in a good general way. I think it does, and I think literally every single person should be able to get a free four year degree in whatever they want because the end result will be a much wiser, much smarter society. And every single person should be able to follow up with graduate courses in whatever they want because people who understand history will make better political decisions than people who don't, and people who understand art theory can meaningfully contribute to discussions about what mural to paint on the side of the building, and people who understand musical theory can teach kids not just how to play an instrument, but break down the mathematics and theory behind music in a systematic way. And so on and so forth. A liberal arts education gives you context to so many things you would otherwise never learn. It's a running joke that engineering degrees and other highly technical fields produce the dumbest smart people in the world, because they're taught how to do a specific task but never taught why to do that task, or how that task has been done in the past, or what the consequences of that task might be.
So I think your argument is generally well reasoned but I wanna point out this. Its possible to have someone 'understand' history but a lot of this is propaganda. Honestly with history degrees I have an even more negative opinion of them than a music theory degree. Its a bit like a degree in economics in a capitalist system, it is merely being rigorously taught apologetics for capitalism. Obviously, in a socialist society one should teach history for propaganda purposes to reinforce the socialist system, and the actual study of history would be looking for ways to do this. I see it as no different from being a propagandist, which I do consider socially useful for a socialist society.
My history professors were crusty old African Marxists and angry Jewish socialists. One of them met Thomas Sankara. There are lots of bad history teachers, but the solution to that is good history teachers, not refusing to learn history. Hell, look at the war in Ukraine. To even begin to understand what is happening and why you need to understand the entire Cold War, and WWII, and the history of Ukrainian Fascism, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a dozen other things. Having a skilled teacher of history makes learning these things much easier than if you were to try to bumble through it on your own with a library card. A professional historian will reveal questions that you would never think to ask, and provide context and depth to events you'd otherwise never have heard of.
The discipline of studying how history is written is called historiography, and one of the first things I learned in historiography is that every single author of history had a bias and an agenda. No one wrote things down "as they were", everyone was trying to achieve something. So you can never just trust that a source is absolutely accurate in what it's saying. You've got to look at other contemporary sources, other documents, archeological evidence, and all sorts of other things. And then you try to piece together something like the truth from all these different sources. For me, this was a complete game changer. History went from being a list of facts in a dry old text book to a series of mysteries that had to be investigated critically. It's entirely the reason I broke out of capitalist propaganda and became a socialist. Learning history, and how to evaluate history, helped me realize that not only were the narratives I was taught in highschool wrong, they were deliberate lies. And studying history gave me the tools to recognize those lies, study where they came from, and read between the lines of those lies to try to tease out the truth.
And I want everyone to have the benefit of that. I think it's really valuable, and I think if we took full advantage of automation and structured the economy on socialist lines everyone would have plenty of time to study whatever topics they found interesting.
Oh, and one more thing; I don't think the current educational model in universities is particularly good. I think teaching professors should be allowed to teach and research professors should be allowed to do research, and that if a professor does want to teach they should have to learn some pedagogy. I don't really like the "Teacher talks students listen" method of teaching, and I find the socialist model of teaching used by communists in rural areas of China or Vietnam really inspiring.
FIVE BIGGEST LIES IN HISTORY
GO
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Remember the Maine
Haymarket Affair
Gulf of Tonkin incident
Dreyfus Affair
Sorry that they're all American or Eurocentric I'm sure there are some great deceptions in Chinese history but I'm just not that familiar with it.
does a phd in history help you teach it, though? seems like it helps you become a good historian but teaching is a different skillset that requires background in the subject, yes, but way more specialized training in pedagogy and effective communication. we devalue teachers by assuming anyone who's really smart in one specific field is qualified to teach it.
I totally agree that teaching professors should be trained in pedagogy, and I think the way we currently do things where professors are not required to have any training at teachers is a huge disservice to students. The best professor I ever had taught kindergarten, grade school, and high school before he became a professor. He didn't have a PhD and he knew how to communicate his teachings better than any of the dozens of other professors I had.
how do they do it?
No disrespect meant but I strongly disagree with everything you've said in this thread. But more than anything else, there's a huge disconnect in this whole discussion: the US is a place of extreme abundance, much more so than socialist Czechoslovakia.
I wanted to write more but I have to go, but really my take boils down to this: if your country is in crisis, then yes you need to focus on building infrastructure / food supply etc. But the US is rich as fuck, if we stopped spending money on wars we could basically fund every professional musician with a living wage without even noticing.
And on that note, many musicians thrive in the academic environment. Music PHDs are filled with bullshit you have to deal with, most music PHD people I know would agree, but they would also agree that they're only bullshit because of capitalism and all its loopholes. In a country of abundance such as the US, everyone should have the right to educate themselves in whatever they want. We can afford it, basically.
There's simply no sense in your kind of austerity politics in the modern west, neither is there ever going to be a political path forward for it.
Disclaimer I am saying this as an overeducated musician, so feel free to dunk on me for that.
But why would you do that? There is poverty in America, and even if we have houses to give people that are empty, there are other forms of poverty to address. It is not a simple thing to solve, that is why it has never been solved, and it requires a lot of science and engineering to fix.
And why does there need to be a PhD program? I keep asking and no one explains. Why spend 10+ years to study music rather than actually making it which is a social good? Studying it does not produce anything, unlike say an architectural program, where studying architecture can produce safer housing.
I'm a bit confused by this - aren't we both in agreement that poverty in the west is primarily a policy choice? That's what radicalized me to begin with, at least. That this poverty is totally unnecessary. So I disagree, it's truly not as complicated of a thing to solve as it's made out to be.
I'm glad we at least agree that music is a social good. My personal view is yeah, I don't need 10+ years of study, 4 is enough for me. But I do know music PhDs, and they all make incredible and unique music, fueled by the research they did. The studying was part of the production process, in shaping them to be the composers they are now. I don't know how to explain this to you. Some musicians just need 10+ years to truly flourish as the musicians, teachers that they are. Also, music research isn't just people studying Bethoven, there's so much more going on. Just because you don't consider it a public good doesn't mean it isn't helping to advance the arts.
I think there's still some disconnect here - what exactly is your view of music in your socialist utopia? Because in mine, we first reorient productive capacities to the public good instead of for profit - and then we have some sort of large organized workforce of musicians who have some degree of freedom in their labor. Is this not your image?
It actually is complicated, actually. I implore you to look into China's poverty alleviation efforts. There are many kinds of poverty and each adjustment can only help in a certain way, and there are some forms of poverty that you need to be very careful when solving, such as geographic poverty, because you could accidentally do genocide with that one by separating endangered culture groups into smaller divisions. For example, China straight up gave people free condos in a better location once, the people used to live in literal mud huts. Huge improvement. However, this did not solve their poverty because they were still practicing things like farming and manufacturing in ancient ways that cannot be produced to scale. So you need to re-educate people that have no framework for learning that was developed from childhood. And this sort of thing is absolutely applicable to many parts of the West, and don't act like it isn't.
Like I listened to a Chinese guy explaining to other rural Chinese people about the benefits of toothpaste and they greeted him with skepticism. The education issue is dire in many places. So we're talking wounds that can't be mended easily for an entire generation of people.
Word thanks for that perspective. That's interesting I really should read about China's poverty alleviation efforts. My first instinct is to think anything negative I read about AES poverty eradication is a minute detail / side effect that US friendly media harps on, outweighed by the actual experience of the masses. But yeah obviously it's more complicated how I made it out.
Still, I can't help but feel you're under some capitalist realism thinking. It seems like we both want 'bread' but we disagree on how many 'roses' we could get if we were in power. Anyway good talk.
when I studied engineering we were taught how, how it's been done in the past, and that it's bad to kill people through negligence/murder