Hear hear!
BA in English/Classics, minor in French.
MA in Latin - emphasis in Late Republic, early Empirical poetry.
Super-size that for you?
;)
Just this semester it has become clear to me that even very bright students increasingly do not know how to use books and don’t give a damn that they don’t know how. They view the Internet as the Reality rather than as a message board on which materials that exist in reality are posted virtually. They have no concept that a book exists out there, was written, edited, translated, published by someone. They find it on the Internet and cite to the Internet as the reality of this piece of data.
They have no concept of the blood, sweat, tears that went into transcribing, editing, translating that work. To them it’s just one of billions of items in ether. They confuse a convenient medium for disseminating data with the data themselves.
Increasingly they have no concept of time-consuming, careful writing and crafting of communication. They view information as instantaneous.
But it’s not, at least not all of it. The more ephemeral produced-for-Internet stuff, yes. But they have little idea that much of what pops up in a Google search has a life of its own, sometimes a life of thousands of years, and that being carried on the Internet is just a mask, just the latest in millennia of media for transmitting information.
Am I wrong to think that the inability to distinguish the virtual from the real is a real loss to intelligent living?
The concept of a university education was that it acquainted its bearer with the UNIVERSE of human ideas, not just a narrow sampling of trade crafts. In an increasingly illiterate society, we need MORE time in the arts and humanities, not less.
My oldest daughter got a pure Liberal Arts degree at Thomas More College in New Hampshire and went from that to an LSU MBA. The education at TM was superb. She got intense Western Civ and the Founders, philosophical and political, of the Republic and of Christianity. She got the best of English Literature and of History and learned Greek(Latin, too but she had already got that in HS). She had a fine grounding in the roots of the Republic and our Culture and Nation. She was ready for anything and had a very successful, if short, career as a businesswoman, and she had no illusions about what governments can do for people and economies.
And now they're running the country. (Do I gotta name names?)
Send your kids to K12 schools that offer a rigorous classical curriculum. They’re popping up all over the country, usually as charters. Parents want this for their kids. They are tired of progressive indoctrination masquerading as education.
I love the idea of a true liberal arts education. At West Point as an engineering student, I was required to also study history, a foreign language, law, economics, and political science. Conversely, my roommates majoring in Arabic or history were required to take physics and engineering.
Yet I also believe that our society overrates college and undervalues trade schools. College is not the right fit for everyone.
But we need to rescue the "softer subjects" from the domination of Marxist professors who teach crap instead of teaching students to think.
The distortion and perversion that is taking place doesn't invalidate the legitimacy of stop signs at intersection; in fact, when used properly, they're a pretty good idea, and so it is with the liberal arts which, when properly taught play a critical role in transmitting and preserving western civilization. I suspect this is precisely why they have become deliberately infested and corrupted by those who would choose to destroy it.
I did two years at a school that proclaimed itself to be a “liberal arts school”, between my stints at community college and grad school. I was consciously taking two years to do what I hoped would further my broad education that I acquired being homeschooled.
I did not. Most places that claim to offer “liberal arts” miss the entire point. They serve up a listing of courses that look like liberal arts but teach them exactly the same as anything else. If the point is to learn “how to think”, they are missing the mark. I didn’t realize what they were trying to do until I started researching classical education in preparation for homeschooling my toddler.
Now, that said, I think classical/liberal arts proponents are usually missing a necessary emphasis on science, math, and technologies. As a software engineer married to a mechanical engineer, we want our kids to be well rounded thinkers, yes, but we are going to put a lot of weight on calculus and physics and encourage them to get a practical degree like engineering or medicine.
"Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it!" Georges Santayan
Plus, it is always nice to be able to communicate with the folks at Starbucks and McDonald's at their level.
...
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
The Liberal Arts were never intended to be vocational training.
Liberal Arts should be a part of the overall education, not the whole.
All the fault of Appius Claudius and the Decemvirs. Once the plebeians could read the Twelve Tables, it was downhill all the way. Unless he means the fifth century A.D.
And revel in the accomplishments of a creative genius who presents a urine soaked crucifix as art. Bah Humbug! ^3