AC10 said:
University is really not the place to learn how to function in society. You already have society for that, and being in it you will one way or another learn to function in it. Furthermore, society is not a place you can just walk up to and interact with. Society is not even just a collection of people with ideas. It's a collection of groups of people. So long as you interact and function within your group, why do you need to change?
Furthermore, while it's commendable that the theologian in your example would try and understand the scientists point of view, it's often just not feasible. I'll have a degree in computer science (in the math faculty) in 2 months. People here are different than anything you would think of. I remember one case, for instance; some sly talking arts student tried to hit on a math girl and she shot him down. Told him to his face that he just wasn't smart enough for her and that continuing the current discourse would lead to nothing but boredom on her part. When he persisted she tried to describe to him simplistic ray tracer theory, but he couldn't grasp any of it and left broken and ashamed of himself.
This is, of course, expected. Someone in fine arts would need years of physics (optics), math, programming, algorithm and data structure theory to grasp details of a basic ray tracing system for implementation. What I'm trying to get at is that things are not both ways in this world. Someone who has a degree in 19th century English would be hard pressed to educate themselves informally in the realm of the maths and sciences without an immense amount of work. On the converse, reading a philosophy text is quite simple in respect (I'm a philosophy minor, I would know).
This is the reason society deems engineers, scientist and mathematicians as "smart" because they've devoted time studying things out of the grasp of most people. A chemical engineer could take and do very, very well in a film study class but the converse is entirely untrue.
Hmmm...well I'll come up with a personal example that relates to your film/engineer analogy. I'm considered skilled in art by my peers. However, I regularly pull As and Bs in the humanities/social science as well as in math and physics. However, there are those amongst my peers who can best me in debates that come down to theoretical physics or mathematics above my level of understanding. Yet, they cannot grasp--which is second nature for me--the execution of value, negative space, perspective, and contour lines. They can talk intelligently about them, but when it comes to the actual practice, they cannot. Going along that string of logic, I can have an intelligent conversation in U.S. Healthcare Debate, but I would not consider myself an expert by any means. I would thus argue that your film or art student would be perfectly capable of learning about mathematical concepts if he were to put the effort in an seek the info, but that would not make him effective in executing them. I would also argue that the engineer could talk about film study, but would be inept in the actual implementation of film-making. When people see me drawing or painting, they almost always say "how do you do that?"
How indeed? The simplest way I can put it to them (especially if they are a friend who got into an ivy university for excellence in science) is that I invested time in it--countless hours, in fact, since a year before kindergarten. I want to take away the class and grading structure for a moment and just deal with the skill itself, b/c I have significant qualms with understanding and application being graded on the same basis in most schools (A,B,C,D, etc.). Different skills require different methods of learning and instruction. I'm not saying that the artist and engineer are interchangeable, nor am I saying that one can excel in the other's area of study without investing as much or more time than them. I'm merely saying that basic understandings are necessary for discourse (honing mostly in on the political) to take place. There's a difference between the artist and the art student, the physicist and the physics student and so on. Accepting that fact that you know very little, but are willing to acknowledge that, and maybe acquire something valuable is the most important detail here. In the larger scope of society, I'd say that my argument has little to do with functioning in society (because society can be corrupt and not function adequately in itself), but rather, it deals with the rational aspects of society. I'm getting lost here, so I'll just close off with you statement:
"reading a philosophy text is quite simple in respect"
Yes, but understanding and applying it is not. There is a huge void between the simple accumulation of knowledge and its application. Anybody can tear through the pages of a text. Understanding and then figuring out how to apply the text is a whole other matter. Your philosophy texts are a testament to that--humans trying, since the existence of thought, to make sense of the world and solve the fundamental problems of nature.
