Posted on 11/28/2017 6:37:36 AM PST by Kaslin
that’s an absurd generalization.
Here’s another one. Majoring in the humanities is a statement that you come from a wealthy class that does not need for an education to be “practical”. Humanities degrees (and that’s what we’re talking about here, not “liberal arts” that of course includes physics, math, biology and chemistry) are training for being in the ruling intelligentsia and it’s something people are born to. If you need for your degree to lead to a specific job in a specific field, don’t major in History. If you will need in your life to make big decisions, and in doing so it will help to understand how society and civilization function, do major in History.
A well rounded education includes liberal arts courses. The problem with today’s liberal arts is that they do not create a true thinking man.
At the same time most STEM programs as well as the liberal arts programs do not create what made this country great a ‘renaissance man’ that is acquainted with multiple areas of endeavor and able to use that wide range of knowledge to apply various solutions to difficult problems.
Some of the most intelligent people I have met in my 50 years of world travel - work with their hands and read, read, read.
Libs don’t want you studying humanities because that can lead to an appreciation of the heritage of Western civilization and the fundamental elements that underpin it.
With online webinars allowing real time participation why would you even need to attend a college for liberal arts?
You could say that for much of the STEM courses...though maybe science, tech and engineering classes require physical (hands on) participation in a lab setting. Chemistry, electrical circuitry, materials testing, soils engineering/testing...these classes require hands on participation.
One point not considered, many colleges expect the professors to offset their salary and equipment costs with research grants. The dirty little secret is that a social scientist might earn that grant doing some stupid survey and compiling the results in a paper. Meanwhile, just getting a grant in the hard sciences (from the Navy say, as professors I remember in engineering) is a significant hurtle followed by a lot of work.
I honestly don’t have any respect for the 14 hour per week social science professor preaching Marxism to students that will spend 20 years paying back loans that fund the professors near useless existence.
Are they required to read Romeo & Juliet as I saw on a syllabus at Princeton? When I was a youth, that was freshman high school. In NYC in the 60s and 70s,Chaucer, in middle English, was required of high school students. I wonder if these STEM students are reading Civilization and Its Discontents which was required when I was in college. Considered the “easiest” of Freud, lol!
Liberals have found a way around that problem. If they teach the classics at all, it's with an ideological twist: as case studies illustrating the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the unenlightened past. Otherwise, they neglect the classics altogether in favor of contemporary trendy and politically correct pop culture and ham-fisted PC propaganda.
I was a Music major, and I had to take an Acoustics class. It was an actual PHY Physics class, taught by a Physics professor. Lots of math, lots of formulas.
What I was really speaking to though, is that someone who takes, 'political science' (a term that contains at least 2 lies), or say, just about anything that ends in the word 'studies', is very likely to take very minimal actual hard science courses, except possibly as electives.
Thanks Kaslin. All funding for so-called community arts organizations should be stupped immediately, same goes for PBS and NPR support.
Do you know what Romantic poetry is??? It’s not Rod McKuen, I can assure you.
True, Western culture from Aristotle to Shakespeare functions as an antidote for this palpable nonsense, which is precisely why both of those luminaries are under attack as well. These are now derided as white, male, and irrelevant - note that it is not for what they say but who they were. This is a cheapening dilution of the sort of mental discipline that the liberal arts faculties used to pride themselves on teaching. Those who now do so are the exceptions, and they're a dying breed.
The university at which I used to work allowed its last Classics professor to retire without replacement, and now that program is closed down. In its place, I am informed by a relative who attends classes there, is a history professor who announced that the Romans built roads in straight lines due to toxic masculinity. I swear I am not making that up. That Classics professor, who was a friend of mine, would be shrieking at the insanity, but he's not there anymore and she is. It isn't a good trend.
The notion of STEM graduates being unquestioning button-pushers is not one that stands up to any particular scrutiny. On the contrary, that is the last redoubt of reason, the last stand of the idea that the laws of nature are not mutable through politics or social convention. When that idea returns to the philosophy faculty, call me.
Well said!
I'm embarrassingly ignorant of Romantic poetry, which was my intended point, but even I wouldn't expect McKuen.
“I reject your premise.”
I simply ask them to defend their premise, which ties them into rhetorical knots. Lost a few friends doing that.
The Romantic poets were Byron, Shelley, Keats, etc.
I like that even better - it REALLY puts them on the defensive.
Sissyboy stuff. It's one of the things that would have got you beat up on sixty-seventy years ago if you expressed a liking for it.
You were right about that!
A true liberal arts education serves an important function. The problem is that what seems to pass as “liberal arts” in most schools is neither liberal nor art.
A liberal arts education including western civilization, philosophy, fine arts and music enriches the life and contributes to making one a “whole person.”
“Womyns studies,” “Black studies,” “Queer studies,” etc are NOT majors in a REAL liberal arts education.
Mark
NP: check out why FR is turning into one of the stupidest sites on the internet.
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