The Two Cultures
Why I’m grateful for my education in Singapore, worth all of two cents
This was just recently posted on Hacker News. TL;DR It’s a Wikipedia article on an influential lecture delivered in 1959, about the over-emphasis of the humanities in education over the sciences.
I figured that the good people (e.g. this man) who ran our government more than three decades ago had chanced upon transcripts of this lecture. They might even have sat in on it personally, though I highly doubt it. And in agreement, they might have formulated a plot: they decided that Singaporeans were to be educated with the broadest of scopes. Many of us spent our school periods being drilled equally on the fundamentals of arithmetic, calculus, trigonometry, algebra (stop now, before my brain explodes), without neglecting the significance of events leading to WWII, with a side of poetry and prose. I think it’s easy to take for granted that just half a century ago, such equivalence in how our time in school was to be spent may not have existed.
What’s more, I had the privilege to have attended a school steeped in Chinese tradition. In the same day I could be regaled in broad strokes by tales of the extreme steps the first Qin emperor had to take to unite a China fractured by warring states, then spend another hour meticulously mixing solvents in precise drops to deduce their chemical contents. We were given ample opportunity to roam both realms, albeit at a reluctant stage in our life. I, of course, much preferred the comforts of computer pixels, rocket launcher in simulated hand, to the tired pages of those stacks of textbooks. (i.e. “Blast that drone with your railgun!” vs.“Blast that teacher’s incessant droning!”).
Sometimes against their very will, reluctant pubescent scientists had to chow down on their mandatory diet of art and history and drama. And the literarily-inclined luddites never stood a chance against the long arm of the laws of Newton and his esteemed colleagues (backed by the more imposing authority of the faculty of course).
(Side note: I was in a class of high achievers. Oftentimes I found that those great in math and science excelled in the humanities as well. Without the least bit of effort. It was hugely frustrating for someone of a more common ilk like myself).
And lo behold, the new age of technology arrived. Steve Jobs credited the beautiful typography on the Macintosh to his calligraphy lessons at Reed College:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country…
I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
…
But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
From “You’ve got to find what you love”, Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech, 2005 (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html)
And Tony Hoare read Classics at Oxford University before eventually inventing the Quicksort and the programming language ALGOL. I do not claim a scientific link between an education in the humanities and a propensity for Turing-award winning work. But aren’t we all, our present selves, the sum total of our experiences?
(You could also claim that had he read Physics, he would not have invented the null reference, but that’s enough conjecture for one blog entry. Give the man a break, for crying out loud. He won a Turing Award! You try winning one of those nowadays with an education in Classics).
Many have said that creativity is the ability to relate ideas and concepts. My education in Singapore, despite often being rote and regurgitative, has allowed me the means to acquire ideas. Not all of it has sunk in of course and our passion to reach for more of it might have been doused in the process. But we were offered opportunities many that came before us were not. There’s potential there. And for that I am thankful. All we Singaporeans might just need is a bit of a nudge to reach out and “connect [those] dots”.
