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I received a BA and MFA in small, idiosyncratic arts programs even more niche and unmarketable than puppetry. After graduation and realizing I'd never be employed, I set off taking free online CS courses and programming tutorials. In hindsight, I really wish I would have done it exactly opposite. Study computer science in college and take a couple of arts classes as electives or pursue it as a part-time hobby. It all worked out, but it reminds me how many of these arts and humanities programs are legacies of a bygone economic era. They are also a product of credentialism, in which it becomes difficult or impossible to demonstrate your knowledge in Literature, for example, without having the degree.
the argument for liberal arts education I always heard goes like this: "college is not to learn a specific skill, but more to better yourself for the real world" and I can't help but think how devoid that is from reality today. Maybe back in the 60's and 70's you could go to college to "broaden your horizons" but today only the wealthiest can afford to do that, everyone else needs a "reason" (that is what sort of job are you getting on the other end).
I think those classes are from a bygone era of when college was affordable and you could take a course "just to learn". Higher ed today is very different, I almost look at colleges are higher level trade schools if you're in CS, Engineering, etc.
I am not sure it's that much different. Back then - when vastly fewer people went to college - the degree itself was the credential for a professional job, but it didn't much matter what you'd studied. That may still apply for the "top-tier", most-prestigious institutions: I know a Harvard literature grad who walked straight into an executive-track role at a company you've heard of, because Harvard. That probably has more to do with networking effects than anything else, which arguably was true then, as well.
The current situation - colleges as trade schools, as you aptly put it - suits educational institutions quite well. Businesses like it, as well, because they can outsource early-career job training. It's only for, you know, actual people that the system doesn't work anymore.
I think at this point, the world is probably too complicated in many ways (even comparing to 50 years ago) that the best way to “learn about the world” is probably to pick your corner of specialty and start from there.
In other words, I don’t think that “broaden your horizons” is the issue. But rather that liberal arts education is not the way to do that.
Depends on your social class. In UK wealthy families don't learn skills, they are above that already. They learn history, literature, rhetoric.
They won't need to "do", they are here to "be".
> I could fill Volumes with Descriptions of Temples and Palaces, Paintings, Sculptures, Tapestry, Porcelaine, &c. &c. &c.—if I could have time. But I could not do this without neglecting my duty.—The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts.—I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine
John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 1780
> it reminds me how many of these arts and humanities programs are legacies of a bygone economic era
Ah yes, that bygone economic era of prosperity. In it's place today, a shrinking economy, one must posit from your comment? Surely current economics show a great decline in prosperity?
My friend was an accounting major with a $75K/yr internship who spent his every free moment in art studios. His parents were worried it was a distraction, but it was actually the mental wellness support he needed to pursue accounting.
Life is about balance, and while I can quibble over the last part of your statement, I do agree that more needs to be done to expand student access to non-program classes. Even students within a college or school don't always have access to every course being taught if it's outside of their chosen track, and that siloing isn't good for producing well-rounded, interdisciplinary-minded people.
Everyone knows that Cormac McCarthy wouldn't have gotten anywhere in the literature world without all his advanced degrees in literature.
English Lit and Creative Writing are usually not the same programs or degrees. The point being, if you don't have a marketable product (like a novel) and instead only have papers you wrote in school, the degree is your marketable product.
Not everything that we learn has to be learned in college. Not sure if 100% accurate, but a quick google search shows WVU tuition is about $9k for in-state, $25k out of state... does it really make sense for someone to spend $100k (or $36k, for West Virginia residents) to learn puppetry? If that's your thing, great, why not go apprentice yourself somewhere to learn that skill instead?
Or offer a class or two in puppetry, that someone as a theater major can take. Not everything that isn't STEM is "liberal arts" - as this article says, puppetry by itself is pretty niche, and the point of liberal arts is to be more broad.
>Not everything that we learn has to be learned in college.
This honestly is the crux of the issue with higher education. In fact, most things we learn outside of STEM in academia can be learned elsewhere - literature, languages, arts, etc.
I'm 100% for the humanities, and majored in them myself. But they shouldn't cost a fortune to study, nor should they really be in a narrow results-focused academic environment. Now, are they worth learning? Of course they are, and I think they make us better human beings. But spending dumb money to learn something niche that can be learned and practiced on one's own time is probably not a great use of time nor money.
I studied multiple languages, and while they are incredibly useful and absolutely worth learning, academia is not the place to do it. While I did do the Middlebury intensive program (which is hard, and the results were great), I improved the most when I actually went and lived in a country that spoke the language I wanted to improve at. Some of the best speakers of a foreign language that I know got so good by having a girlfriend who was native to the language that they wanted to learn. No formal education needed.
If I wanted to learn puppetry, I'd use YouTube to learn the basics, and then perhaps even document my progress through making videos of my own. I'd probably make a few bucks on it too. People do the same thing for learning animation, acting, music production, video production, etc.. why can't puppetry be the same?
> In fact, most things we learn outside of STEM in academia can be learned elsewhere - literature, languages, arts, etc.
Why specify STEM as being an exception to that rule? Are people unable to learn programming or math outside of academia? It's a shame the arts aren't seen as valid jobs and so are unworthy of investment.
This is critically important, because in my experience it can work both ways.
Sure, you can learn writing and exposition on the side, but you'll learn it faster to a greater precision in good courses. You can also learn math and computer science, or whatever "on the side" through research projects and work. It might take longer but it can happen.
It always strikes me as strange to see all these postings to open STEM coursework, but then this idea that someone who is really bright who just didn't happen to major in a STEM program can't pick up a lot of STEM experience through non-coursework experiences.
I know of someone who had history undergrad and grad degrees, for example, but who became heavily involved in computer science and imaging research because of some project involving imaging some artifacts or fragile records (I don't remember what, although it was in north/east africa). It launched a new line of work that was pretty much all computer science and image processing. I suspect by the end of it, which was years, they were probably comparable to someone with a comp sci bachelor's degree in their knowledge. I certainly got the sense they were more competent in computer science by the end of it than some of of the CS bachelor-level graduates I've worked with.
Stuff like this happens all the time. I'm not saying that there's no value in a STEM degree, but there's this weird fixation on certifications in general that's grossly inaccurate. My sense is it happens to make HR departments' jobs easier, nothing more.
We live in this world where it's assumed competency is equal to test scores on a general achievement test, and skillset is equal to degree or certificate. It leads to these gross distortions and over and underemployments — not only in the sense of who is being hired as an employee, but who is being recruited to accomplish tasks and solve problems in professional capacities in general.
Depends on the STEM. A whole lot of experimental science depends upon lab equipment that is either too expensive, too dangerous, or both to try and self-learn. Or it might be totally inaccessible no matter what. If you want to be an astronomer, you're gonna need time on one of the 4 meter scopes that is on top of a mountain that they don't just give public access to. Even if you had the billion dollars to build one in your backyard, the light pollution would make it useless. Wanna do medical research, you can't legally except under the supervision of somebody who already knows what they're doing and has access to a clinical population.
Programming and math are probably the two you can reliably self-teach, but probably the only two, and "programming" in at least some contexts might also benefit from extremely high performance or large capacity equipment you're not gonna find in a typical homelab or be able to afford renting from a public cloud.
I think STEM is suited to academia in multiple ways: first, the chances of success at learning it seem to be higher in a structured, rigorous program compared to independently. One of the problems with online universities is that they don't apply enough deadline pressure so in many cases only 20% of students who sign up for a course even finish it. If you want to put four years into something and reliably get somewhere then an academic program still seems like your best for that. The other piece of the puzzle is that a STEM degree is a useful credential that can help substantially in the job market compared to being self-taught. Furthermore, most STEM fields have job markets where salaries that can realistically make getting a degree a worthwhile investment are obtainable. I think it's this combination of good way to learn, valuable credential and decent cost/benefit that make STEM degrees make more sense.
A lot of STEM requires expensive equipment that most individuals cannot afford with either money, space, and time to operate safely; though they are exceptions.
Also when a history major forgets a fact or two in their realm, it’s not as catastrophic as an aerospace or civil engineer forgetting a key fact in their domain. The gains from STEM are also more concrete and immediate compared to the liberal arts.
Some parts of STEM are very accessible outside of an institution (math, CS, theory) but for many fields of engineering and hard sciences you need expensive equipment and materials that may also be hazardous to work with if you’re untrained. Even for fields that are mostly done on computers, there’s still the issue of the software used being too expensive for a typical individual to purchase.
The advantage and disadvantage of an apprentice system is that practitioners cannot massively scale up their pupil count (at least normally).
This implicitly aligns incentives to a static arrangement where apprentices are training to replace their masters. It is immediately obvious to everyone which fields either can’t afford to pay their apprentices - or which fields have exceptionally long times until the apprentice can work independently. Practitioners are also strongly incentivized to only accept strong pupils who they expect to work with for many years.
The con of this model is that a great master can only teach a small number of apprentices - a great master may also be a terrible teacher.
Undoubtedly, there are some industries that should follow the apprenticeship model - however these industries also massively benefit from a university system which transfers the cost of training to the student/government. There likely should be some alignment between university costs and educational outcomes on a per major basis.
Your argument is not "this is a thing which should not be taught" but rather "the economic model of teaching this is bad".
And I agree. But I would also say that the economic model for teaching everything is terrible. So, improving that model will make everything better.
Attempting to special-case a field does not improve things.
> the economic model of teaching *this* is bad.
Looking at it "from a step back" -- from the perspective of any other product -- the cost is the teacher/facility/equipment and environment to support a touchy activity (learning) and multiple human beings attempting to do so at the same time. It's probably the most expensive way to transfer knowledge available to us and it's the default way most of us are taught.
In-person hands-on teaching falls victim to the basic problems of scale. Profits increase as the number of students per teacher increases but -- in most cases -- this negatively impacts the quality of the delivered education.
I don't think it's a "wild guess" to say that a lot of us meandering in the comments are self-taught. Sure, we went to college. Some of us even have advanced degrees[1]. But if you write software -- daily -- you've largely learned the details from somewhere other than a classroom. Most of the time it's been "for free" by reading others' code, online tutorials, actual documentation, etc. These are extremely efficient ways of both teaching and learning -- the single effort put into teaching is able to be consumed by limitless numbers of people.
There are many modalities to teaching/learning that are more efficient/provide for a better "economic model for teaching" than "traditional in-person education". One that we seem to have stepped further away from is apprenticeships. Puppetry -- though I have no experience in it -- is probably something that deeply benefits from in-person knowledge transfer and it seems like the kind of work that has probably only been taught via apprenticeship in the past.
[0] Love it when my kids do that ... "oh yeah, but what if ...?"
[1] That's not meant to imply anything negative about such degrees.
> why not go apprentice yourself somewhere
There has been a big push in the last 20 years or so to make sure that everyone makes a "living wage". This, in turn, makes it nearly impossible for people who want to learn a trade while making something (anything) from actually doing so. Their work and time is basically worthless. They can't be paid accordingly, so they just don't...
Unless you want to volunteer, but most organizations don't value volunteer time because it isn't "real work".
If you can take out a $100k loan and 4 years off work to get a degree then you should be able to do the same to apprentice somewhere. I get what you are saying, though.
Skilled trades apprenticeships in states with a sane labor culture are well paid and sought after positions.
> There has been a big push in the last 20 years or so to make sure that everyone makes a "living wage". This, in turn, makes it nearly impossible for people who want to learn a trade while making something (anything) from actually doing so.
Checking Austin IBEW, it goes from starting apprentice at about $17/hr+benefits and goes up every year guaranteed until hitting about $34/hr+benefits at base rate for a journeyman. "Living wage" isn't going to impinge on that except at the very bottom.
However, people don't want to do trades because it's really hard work.
Many people object to unpaid or minimally paid internships but that's pretty much the only option for many types of apprenticeships where the apprentice is learning but isn't really doing anything very useful.
The problem ultimately boils down to the 710% increase in tuition.
If college education had retained the same tuition costs as it did 30 odd years ago (increasing at the rate of inflation only), that puppetry major would have cost something like $20k over 4 years, probably been paid off by the student doing part time work at the library, etc. and the student would have graduated debt free with some party time work experience and taken a few years to see if they could parlay their experience into the next Muppets. If rent hadn’t blown up the way it has either, they would have supported themselves by doing a bartender’s job or server’s job, and as the thing wasn’t working out could have started doing some courses on the side, and a few years later either leveraged all their work experience or these side courses into a real job, or taken up a master’s and made a career switch while having given something really interesting and different a go, for which the entire world would be better off.
However, massive increase in tuition costs and rent with no corresponding increase in the safety net means risk taking has to pretty much been eliminated at the individual level which will cost society overall.
> does it really make sense for someone to spend $100k (or $36k, for West Virginia residents) to learn puppetry?
No. School should be free.
> why not go apprentice yourself somewhere to learn that skill instead?
Because schools should help set those internships and apprenticeships up.
> puppetry by itself is pretty niche, and the point of liberal arts is to be more broad
You have that strangely inverted. Because liberal arts are so broad as to include the arts and because the arts are so broad as to include puppetry, the point of liberal arts is to offer niche studies like puppetry.
Hacker News and puppetry, a relevant-to-me crossover I never thought I'd see, and here I am at the start of the business day with no time to really dig in, because of the day job.
"Two years ago, the number of students hovered near zero" - I get the larger picture, but any guesses as to what might have hurt attendance to a performing arts major in 2021?
Puppetry is everywhere once you pay attention, and the skills you learn in puppetry can go well beyond, you know, the entertainment industry. But arts and humanities in the American education system have been gutted over the last few decades, starting in primary education, and continuing up into higher education.
I stumbled across the puppetry community over a decade ago, and it's been one of the most enriching parts of my life ever since. It's a real shame how much of a struggle it is to get support for the fine arts in this country.
Edit: This is a really great read. Thanks for sharing!
> Puppetry is everywhere once you pay attention, and the skills you learn in puppetry can go well beyond, you know, the entertainment industry.
I am genuinely curious to hear where in the day to day of the tech industry you'd draw parallels to puppetry.
>I am genuinely curious to hear where in the day to day of the tech industry you'd draw parallels to puppetry.
The line you're replying to is more general purpose (puppetry as a vehicle for storytelling in television, movies, theater, parties, festivals, concerts, one-on-one conversation, etc.) however to address your curiosity, a few thoughts since I'm between meetings:
Puppetry involves problem solving and story telling. Maybe we start off with the idea of bringing the novel War Horse to stage - you can't teach a horse to act, so you've got to do puppetry.
You choose a framework: is it shadow puppetry? Rod puppets? Marionettes? Bunraku? Hand puppets don't scale, you're not going to do that. The technology you choose will shape the end result, and it's tempting to go with something flashy and huge, but a seasoned puppeteer can make you cry just by using a sock on their hand.
(see also: https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/news/war-horse)
Some styles of puppetry are going to need more skill in manipulation or crafting than others, which is going to affect what hiring looks like, and what training looks like. Some of the easier styles of puppetry are more popular, and certainly work on smaller projects like a puppet slam - but won't be as effective at getting results on a large scale production.
Putting on a puppet show involves project management and collaboration. Depending on the size of the production, it could be a one-person show, although even those often have one or two people helping to run, for example, light and sound cues. A larger scale production could have a director, a writer, multiple crafters, multiple manipulators, a project manager... These are almost direct analogies to PMs, engineers, developers, department directors.
Projects can be small scale - a more personal puppet slam piece performed in front of an audience of 50, and a talking monstrosity of a cake as part of a Saturday Night Live set piece might involve similar amounts of work, but one's going to pay better than the other. On the far end of the spectrum, you have projects like The Dark Crystal series on Netflix - which is analogous to an enterprise project. Multiple systems operating together, up against tight deadlines while simultaneously taking years to complete, compromises are made that few who see the end result will ever see or recognize...
And in both tech and puppetry, a lot of the people who put in the hard work never get recognized :D
The most widely used browser automation frameworks for scraping, end to end testing, and so on is literally called Puppeteer [1] :-)
WV is among the bottom 5 poorest states in the US, with West Virginia University critical for providing affordable in-state college education. WVU is urgently dealing with a $45-million budget shortfall.
I know two graduates of the Puppetry program, and neither of them work professionally in any puppetry-related career. They may as well have graduated with any liberal arts degree. The Puppetry major gave them a way to prove their "quirkiness" in college.
Here's the course requirements for the BFA in Puppetry: http://catalog.wvu.edu/undergraduate/collegeofcreativearts/d...
It looks like there are two puppetry-specific courses, with the vast majority of courses coming from the more general Theatre program with Liberal Arts core.
I don't know what the Puppetry BFA costs the university, but it's always been a joke to WVU students, and doesn't seem to serve West Virginia residents in a meaningful way.
(Source: WVU grad and local, who received an affordable in-state CS/Engineering degree, and now works in and supports WV's tiny but growing tech industry)
Like most of these humanities programs that are ridiculed as being superfluous, the name of the program only describes about 20 or 30% of the coursework involved.
The rest of it is going to be a fairly standard trip through most of the usual lower division classes required for any four-year, plus a number of courses that are not related to the core subject but from which the core subject, say in this case puppetry, becomes a kind of base camp from which your exploration of other more practical and/or conventional subjects (i.e. psychology or marketing or foreign relarions) is conducted.
These people aren't literally learning how to build puppets and put on shows everyday for 4 years.
I think the local culture or lack thereof is an important factor to point out. It's got to be incredibly challenging to encourage creative young liberal artists to move to West Virginia for any period of time. "The real estate is cheap" only gets you so far - speaking generally, puppetry jobs are in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta to some extent, and... abroad.
I live near another university with a puppetry degree (University of Connecticut), and while I’m well past undergraduate, having gotten my doctorate from a school that has a bagpiping major, the presence of a puppetry degree has made my and my family’s lives richer.
There’s definitely a place for fine arts such as puppetry. It has made me wonder about difficult topics (not all puppetry is for kids), laughed during musicals, explained difficult concepts to kids, and most importantly brought joy into the world. However, we just haven’t figured out how to financially support it as a society. I’m glad that Connecticut continues to support such a program.
Has no one ever seen The Muppet Show? Seassame Street? Farscape? Labyrinth? The Peawee Herman Show?
It's important to preserve these academic programs, with Theater Arts, and the Humanities in general. The real problem is with the outrageous cost of higher education. The time has passed when people could get an eccentric degree, and get a good job right out of school based on simply having a degree.
With that said, the reality is that the times have changed. It's not worth it in the long term (at least to me) to graduate with a bunch of debt and no concrete education towards getting a job.
Yes it blooming well should. Culture is important. Not to mention puppeteers will be in demand in an age of VR chat and avatars.
Nobody wants to attend. It serves no critical purpose. Axe it.
> It serves no critical purpose. Axe it.
Well, there goes pretty much everything interesting in college.
Engineering and sciences are super interesting. Heck, puppets sound sooo boring. Literature sounds incredibly boring. Theatre? So boring professors had to give extra credit so people would attend.
Meanwhile our robotics senior project had a huge portion of the school watching because we were shooting projectiles.
(but really my favorites were chemistry lab, and quantum chemistry(PChem2), maybe my programming classes too)
I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm.
This...
> Heck, puppets sound sooo boring.
...followed by...
>Meanwhile our robotics senior project had a huge portion of the school watching because we were shooting projectiles.
...sure says a lot. You can draw a direct line from the art of puppetry to the evolution of robotics.
My degree is in computer science, I wrote code for ages, now I'm a presales engineer regularly meeting with C-suite types and their engineering departments. Nearly every year for the last decade, I've also on staff at the annual National Puppetry conference (as a musician) where I get to work with some of the quick-witted, talented problem solvers I've met.
Working in puppets means working in costume design, set design, creative writing, storytelling, engineering, lighting design, sound design, project management, the whole gamut. I credit the experience I get working with puppeteers for helping advance my career as a 'computer nerd'
What I find bizarre is that we're in such a consumer-driven culture, but taking humanities out of focus in education has changed how people perceive creativity. The most boring people in the world are talking about using AI to create derivative art, while ignoring centuries of history around training for the arts.
>Literature sounds incredibly boring. Theatre? So boring professors had to give extra credit so people would attend.
To each their own, but oof.
I seem to recall one pretty famous CEO talk about how their company was successful because "it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing". But yeah, let's throw all that liberal arts shit overboard - who needs it.
Different people find different things interesting. Literature and theater can certainly be interesting even if some tech people find anything outside of STEM boring. Never personally had anything to do with puppetry but found plenty of stuff outside of engineering/sciences interesting (and did basically no programming in college).
Robotics also sounds cool, but while I'm sure the showy performances for the students were interesting, the nitty-gritty of programming and fine detail probably wouldn't be. Whereas in literature, it is the deep analysis of a text that brings greater richness and makes it more fully satisfying to read, the pleasure is not necessarily from the spectacle but its careful consideration.
Borges is an author who many of my friends in the sciences enjoy. He explores ideas that you may find interesting; try The Library of Babel [0], its very short and easy to read (like most of his works). Another novel which you may find perversely enjoyable is Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel, which contains a series of descriptions of strange and fantastical machines in fine detail, each associated with a different and increasingly deranged tale.
You might also be interested in the intersection of literature and computer science with Sanskrit, the first formalized language claimed to have been made "context-free" 2500 years ago (though I wouldn't say so), which has a rich literary tradition deeply intertwined with its structure and logic. There are many other examples of literatures you may find interesting, but I'll leave that pursuit up to you!
[0]https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
>... my favorites...
Ah, therein lies the rub. Your post reads like you're applying your own tastes/interests to, well, everyone. You are not everyone else.