Posted on 03/12/2023 8:44:13 AM PDT by karpov
You’ve heard the complaints: When am I ever gonna use this? How is this relevant to the real world? How is reading Shakespeare going to make me a better banker?
I don’t run into this kind of thinking as frequently in the economics classroom, but I hear my students’ complaints about their other courses pretty regularly (and maybe professors in those courses hear students’ complaints about mine). Why, they wonder, are they expected to study art history? Or biology? Or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? Or Mesoamerican mythology? When are they ever gonna use this stuff?
My answer? Literally every time they make an important decision.
The ideas you encounter, consider, and adopt shape the kind of person you become. Liberal education is not about helping you sound impressive at snooty parties. It’s about you becoming a particular kind of person: reflective, analytical, and capable of sound evaluation and sound judgment. To this end, college means a few years marinating in the best that has ever been thought and written by the greatest minds our species has produced.
That is the ideal, at any rate. A lot goes sideways between vision and implementation, and it’s the rare person who makes the most of a golden opportunity. Some of us find ourselves lamenting, with the bald man telling George Bailey to kiss Mary in It’s A Wonderful Life, that “youth is wasted on the wrong people.”
But we all have time to repent and turn from our wicked ways. College students have more of it. The book of Proverbs implores its readers to surround themselves with wise counselors offering wise guidance.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
It was a good lecture, much like the one in Second Hand Lions.
> But if you know only STEM you will never be more than a worker drone. <
I’m a STEM guy, and I agree. That’s why the old “distribution of studies” idea was so good. I majored in chemistry. But I was forced to take credits in the humanities. I’m better off for it.
The problem, of course, is with majoring in the humanities. I saw college is a trade school. Go there to learn a way to make a living. You can’t make much of a living as a History of Ancient Greece major.
Haven’t donated in decades.
After 1st-woke president Sullivan (IIRC) had the Christian cross removed from the W&M chapel so that “no one would be offended,” I wrote a blistering letter to the alumni association condemning the policy, informing them to NEVER contact me again.
My class Baccalaureate service was held in that chapel. It was active as a church once a month.
“They” hate us. Face it.
You need a “Knowledge Portfolio”, be knowledgeable in several unrelated things so that as times change, you can adapt.
Colleges are pricing themselves out of the market. I don’t blame students for asking why they need to pay for stuff they don’t value. Plus, wokeness has ruined the liberal arts anyway.
Perfect tagline for the times.
Hubby is a Physicist. Our very first conversation was long — about the danger of China and their stealing of tech, etc. It wasn’t a party, though — church. That was in 1994.
There’s going to be a lot of suddenly this week and this year.
Yeah... I recall those days in high school and university where it was the same discussion... “how on earth is ____ relevant to my future life?” or “how will this help me to get a job in the field I want?”
I have a friend who went to high school in the 1960s.... a really bright dude who had great self-learning skills and he was always ahead of the teachers. In grade 9 high school, a ‘typing course’ was mandatory for anyone in the arts and science programs. As things unfolded, my friend became an independent computer specialist and as he often says, his grade 9 typing course became the most valuable thing he learned in high school.
Probably the most memorable line Hemingway ever published.
Student: “I’m never going to need to use this math and physics stuff”
Teacher: “True, but the smart kids will”.
Nothing could be FARTHER from reality or reason
I the book on the Trivium, by Sister Mary Joseph.
It is something that every serious student should read, and every interested adult.
Check it out and see if you’d like it.
Was a chemistry prof for 42 years. It is possible to get a good education at most colleges, but it is not necessary in order to get the diploma. A savvy student can learn and enjoy a lot. For most paying customers, the best rationale I have heard recently came from Sylvester Stallone as Dwight Manfredi in Tulsa King:
The whole point of a college degree is to show a potential employer that you showed up someplace four years in a row, completed a series of tasks reasonably well, and on time. So if he hires you, there’s a semi-decent chance that you’ll show up there every day and not **** his business up.
Movies are terrible these days because all the current writers know about are comic books and video games. They are literary imbeciles.
I’m a stem and I am like the totally bestliest talker
Today we have virtuous students graduating who are not educated to know their virtue is a sham.
Classic academic rigor, when exercised through traditional rote memory and critical thinking curriculum, builds a solid foundation of disciplines to develop
High level vocational skills. A well rounded and alert citizen is also the product of such discipline.
I successfully resisted typing class, and still became a software engineer. I am incredibly fast and hunting-and-pecking.
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