Posted on 01/26/2022 1:56:29 PM PST by karpov
Two thousand twenty-one was a hard year for colleges: admissions are down, revenues are diminished, and four-year degree alternatives are achieving greater market recognition. In such a climate, colleges need to answer the question increasingly asked by high school students and their parents: why should one attain a college degree? To thrive in the coming years, colleges need to recover an ability to articulate how collegiate study can existentially transform the student.
College is worthwhile, and the traditional, residential, four-year degree can be worth the cost if the goal is personal transformation. College is not ultimately about the degree, though the degree plays a goal-orienting role. The goal of collegiate education, as Hillsdale College history professor Dr. Mark Kalthoff explains, is freeing the soul from ignorance. Education prepares the graduate to step into a world of practical realities and urgent choices after having completed a final season of leisured study which results in perceiving deeper meaning in the world. College is about personal transformation, about becoming the person who sees more in the world. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, in Either/Or, describes this kind of existential change.
Kierkegaard focused on the human experience as subjective. While we live in an objective reality, Kierkegaard argued, humans experience that reality subjectively. As such, the most important human capacity is that of making real choices. Through choice, the person forms himself into who he is becoming. While Kierkegaard focuses on all of life as the place where choices occur, his argument about perceiving “the choice” parallels the kind of perception formed by rigorous collegiate study.
In “The Balance Between the Esthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality,” Kierkegaard contends that few people realize that they form themselves through choices. In perceiving this capacity, the individual acquires a moral responsibility for self-development.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
“is freeing the soul from ignorance”
There’s a lotta truth to that statement but should it take 4 years? A college industrial complex-parents are guilty of continuing. High schools don’t help at all.
Confine K-12 to reading writing and arithmetic. 3 hours a day. Afternoons can be spent on other learning endeavors of the student’s choosing. Community Colleges should be on the trimester system allowing serious students to get to work earlier with more shills.
Universities. They’re good enough to free the soul from ignorance but not these days. Confining it to 3 years would free the graduates to earn a years worth of more income.
I have a STEM degree and some graduate credits in Physics.
It was a hard road to travel. But I know things that people are willing to pay me for, because they didn’t want to do that work. Although being a plumber, or an electrician isn’t any different.
Learn a trade. be it engineering, boat building, plumbing, or whatever.
SJW degrees aren’t worth the time it takes to insult them.
Agreed!
Degree in Electronics and 40 years experience now makes me in huge demand.
In 40 years, I was only out of work for 4 months and that was to train myself in a new design tool.
If you want to see what a SJW looks like when they retire, they are all sitting looking for handouts on the Berkeley city curbs.
Why?
If you have not mastered reading in a year, writing in two and arithmetic in four you have learning problems or horrible teachers.
No way it should take 13 years to master those subjects.
When they’e able to read “War and Peace” I’ll agree with you. If it’s at age 10 that will be a good problem to have. One size fits all ain’t working but it sure helps the slow ones by holding the smart ones back. With CRT we are ripe for big-time change that can only be done by steamrolling the opposition. Who takes the lead?
I have 4 kids—now all teens and older-I required them all take “zero period” in high school, so they always took 7 classes instead of 6. Not necessarily AP tough classes, but not just “study hall” or “TA” either.
That was the only way they could learn a variety of subjects and interesting electives like philosophy, debate, moot court, physiology, journalism, drama, etc.
Six classes isn’t enough.
War and Peace contains subjects that are a bit advanced for a ten year old’s brain. Now the fourteen year old can handle it but reading certain things goes far beyond vocabulary.
War and Peace is in my bucket list. Start them out with Atlas Shrugged? I would start them out with classics just over 100 pages. Animal farm comes to mind. Then there are a series of mind control subjects like Fareinheit 451, The Giver, and Brave new world.
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