Liberal Arts Education In The 22nd Century

 

Russian State Scientific Center for Robotics and Technical Cybernetics ©Richard Anderson

Interesting story idea: 100 years in the future young people want to go to college for a liberal arts degree, to study philosophy, art history, and so on. But at that time it would be difficult to construct a liberal arts education because it would have gone fallow. Five generations had passed and everyone was out of touch with the humanities as they once were. Generation Alpha was very old, and the generation now in their 20s (2140s) would have to devise a new liberal arts curriculum built on a new foundation based only on the Remains from 100 years ago. They would be going back and learning how to play music from the late 70s and early 1980s for example (on the few instruments that still existed), and the film would have a 70s-80s soundtrack. But most likely, AI would hallucinate it, yet people would have a hunger to learn what it was really like. It would be about an "imagined nostalgia".

But it begs the question of whether people want the nostalgia, as it might be too painful to revisit 2025 for example. Svetlana Boym in her book, The Future of Nostalgia (2001) when the advent of the internet began disrupting culture in a big way: "With the waning of the role of the art and humanities, there are fewer and fewer venues for exploring nostalgia, which is compensated for with an overabundance of nostalgic readymades. The problem with prefabricated nostalgia is that it does not help us to deal with the future. Creative nostalgia reveals the fantasies of the age, and it is in those fantasies and potentialities that the future is born. One is nostalgic not for the past the way it was, but for the past the way it could have been. It is this past perfect that one strives to realize in the future." Or from A Primer For Forgetting: "Nabokov never indulges in fantasies of homecoming; nor does he suppose it better to avoid the pain of loss: "I wonder . . . whether there is really much to be said for more anesthetic destinies, for, let us say, a smooth, safe, small-town continuity of time, with its primitive absence of perspective, when, at fifty, one is still dwelling in the clapboard house of one's childhood."