Today's Author Spotlight is on Robin Sloan, representing the folks at Snarkmarket and all the creative forces behind New Liberal Arts, a collaborative "book of ideas" aimed at reinventing an old school curriculum for the next generation. A project many past and present Humanities majors (yours truly included) will see as a long time coming, we're happy the capable hands of Snarkmarket have taken it on.

The limited print copies officially sold out in 8 hours(!), but you can download the PDF now. We'll also have a review here on Ypulse next week. In the meantime, we sent Robin a few questions to pique your (and our) appetite…

Ypulse: Why do we need a new liberal arts?

Robin Sloan: The old liberal arts are ancient — and the fact that they've stood the test of time is part of their appeal. But, life in 2009 presents new challenges — and, more importantly, it presents new opportunities, new capabilities. We kept circling around this theme on our blog, Snarkmarket, and finally just decided to organize a more coherent examination, and print a book while we were at it.

I want to underscore it's very much a brainstorm — we're not saying, "a-ha, these are THE new liberal arts!" but rather, "if there were going to be some new liberal arts… what might they be?"

YP: What was the process of collecting ideas and narrowing them down to those that made the final cut?

RS: It was very collaborative, very "bloggy." We put a call out to all the people who read our blog, Snarkmarket and asked for short pitches: just a few sentences describing a prospective new liberal art.

We picked our favorites out of those and signed people up as contributors — basically they were agreeing to work with us to expand and polish their pitch into something we could include in the book.

YP: What is your personal favorite "new liberal art" and why?

RS: Personally, I like "video literacy," because I think it video is such a crucially important medium, but it's still approached with such fear and tentativeness by people who are otherwise incredibly fluent and well-educated. I think that today, with the tools at our disposal, not being able to make a short video ought to seem as strange as not being able to write a few paragraphs.

I also like "journalism" as a new liberal art. The entry in the book ends up defining it as "the art of the now" — it's a really fresh, lucid take on what journalism means, and who needs to know about it.

YP: Who should [download] this book?

RS: Anybody involved in education — either as a teacher or a learner. Anybody interested in the future. Anybody who feels an affinity to the old liberal arts. Anybody who hated the old liberal arts!

Really, the book casts a wide net, and I think there's something here for almost everybody, both in terms of content — the new liberal arts themselves — and style — some of the writing is really elegant and fun to read.

YP: Will there be a sequel to replace today's high school curriculum (please!)?

RS: There are definitely some interesting candidates for curriculum-building in this book. In particular, I think of the entry on "home economics," which reframes it in terms of ecology, sustainability, the politics of food, and so on — without losing some of the appealing practical angles, like being able to make your own food, mend your own clothes, etc. I'd love to see high school home ec reimagined along those lines.

There's an entry for "marketing" as well, and I think that's really important for students. School is such a strange environment: Someone is paid to pay attention to you and give you feedback, and you learn that work generally gets evaluated on its merits.

This isn't much like the real world, especially where the web is concerned. Before work can ever get evaluated on its merits, it has to get evaluated at all, and that means people have to see it. You can't take that step for granted. I'd make a rigorous, hands-on intro to the basics of marketing — marketing a product, marketing a brand, marketing yourself — part of every high school curriculum.

But overall, I'm really curious to hear from educators! Is this a set of ideas that's interesting and useful to them? Does it map to the kinds of things that are being talked about in high schools today, even if it's mostly hypothetical at this point? I'd love to get in on that conversation.

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Categorized under: Author Spotlight, Books & Print

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