Where is technology in a liberal arts education?

When Steve Jobs announced the iPad in January 2010, he said Apple stood at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.

What he didn’t realize, though, was that such an intersection no longer existed — the two streets had already converged to create a single superhighway with no speed limits and no exits.

Like Jobs, most liberal arts colleges and universities have yet to catch on to this convergence. Their curricula, which are supposed to supply students with a well-rounded, holistic education, instead provide students with an antiquated view of the world where technology sits within its own compartment, separate from the “more important” core subjects like math, science and English.

Most of us here at IU are very familiar with the requirements for receiving an IU degree: We all need to take a composition course like W131, we all need to take M118 and we all need culture studies classes, A&H classes, S&H classes, N&M classes, a couple of foreign language classes and an intensive writing course.

But what about a computer science course or some other course that educates in contemporary technological developments and processes?

The average adult spends seven hours a day using technology — almost half of the 15 hours and 45 minutes we spend awake on an average day — yet most of us are uneducated as to how these technologies work.

Many students, unless their specific major requires it, don’t know how Google spiders crawl the Web to provide users with their search results. They don’t know how information is calculated in spreadsheets, and they don’t know how to set up something as simple as a home network.

We use these technologies every day, and they are an integral part of everything we do. There isn’t a department at IU that doesn’t use technology or the Internet in one way or another, yet a student can go four years without being required to take a single course explaining in depth how any of these technologies work.

Even if your major places a lot of emphasis on the use of technology, you can still find yourself behind the times. I am a student in the School of Journalism, and after almost four years, I am shocked by how little I’ve learned from the school regarding modern technology.

It’s no wonder the journalism industry continues to hemorrhage money: The schools that educate the workforce are inept at adapting to the digital revolution. It’s not enough to teach a journalist how to use a Flip cam and a digital camera.

That isn’t educating for the future.

Educating for the future means teaching journalists about text and data analysis, yet there aren’t any classes in the school that teach students how to develop a spreadsheet and use SQL queries to discover interesting information across a number of databases. There aren’t classes to teach students about text analytics and search engine optimization.

There is only one class every semester, open to only 18 people, that teaches students about Web development and no classes that go in depth to explain how social networks can be integrated into a newsroom operation.

Hell, it has been three and a half years, and I have yet to learn something as simple as how to set up a newspaper page (although I was told I was supposed to be taught that in J210 — I was not).

With the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds at 16.7 percent, and with tech companies continuing to be the engine for growth in the United States, it would behoove universities to incorporate tech training into their core curricula.

They might even want to consider allowing classes in programming languages to count toward the foreign language requirement. Long ago, liberal arts schools scratched Greek and Latin from their core curricula because they were no longer necessary to become a well-educated person.

It is now time to make a similar transition, this time to include more classes that educate in modern technologies. IU President Michael McRobbie has a history in this field and is perfectly positioned to make the necessary changes.

The question is, will he?

­— nperrino@indiana.edu