Posted on 01/09/2024 9:48:34 AM PST by SeekAndFind
For a long time now, the debate has raged as to whether it’s worth going to college anymore. The libertarian view on this question has typically been along the lines of… if people are foolish enough to waste money on worthless degrees, the world will soon enough teach them another lesson.
While valid, that view ran aground on the Democrat vote-buying scheme to insulate those with useless degrees from the consequences of their poor choices and indebtedness, with our tax money.
The cynical motives behind this ploy aside, I very much doubt many students enroll in college with the intention of eventually being bailed out by their fellow citizens. These bright, young minds have simply bought into the hype that a college degree, any degree, is the ticket to prosperity. That might have been mostly true, back in the day when the people who ran higher education actually focused on educating.
In the past, a degree could give someone who was willing to work hard a leg up on competition. Somewhere along the road, we lost sight of the fact that hard work was the not-so-secret essential ingredient, not that scrap of paper with the fancy calligraphy on it. Through greed and cowardly moral blindness, grifters who run our colleges have transformed these venerable institutions into the educational equivalent of shady time-shares.
Although the rot is extensive and accelerating, there are still college degrees which might be worth the time and money thrown at them—medicine, science, engineering, and a few others. Better learn fast though. These disciplines remain only relatively uncorrupted because they’re harder to infiltrate. In the spirit of the hard sciences, it’s informative to analyze which college degrees are the more useless, and why. Rational analysis, scorned as patriarchal, racist, and colonialist, comes in handy when exposing scams.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
How about literature?
“.... make education only about practical, calculable results .....”
I really don’t know how you can say that! Almost all leftists avoid any mathematics-oriented discipline like it has plague, dengue fever, Ebola & covid! They with all almost no exception emphasis emotionalism over rational thinking! So, they stuff the colleges\universities with unusable content free laughable courses. The former Harvard president but still well-compensated Dr (Ha!) Gay is a prime example!
People who got legitimate subject matter degrees will be able to teach school. Indeed, they'll do a better job. They'll actually know what they're talking about.
All that aside, I'm hearing an underlying suggestive voice that literature, humanities, and the liberal arts are useless. That illiteracy is OK and nothing wrong with that.
I used to see a bumper sticker: "If you can read this, thank a teacher".
Hmmm ... If you say so ...
Then I saw: "If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you can read this in English, thank a veteran"
Hmmmmm ... OK.
Thanks, Dad!
As a kid, I was interested in history, especially dark age history, in large part thanks to a book authored by Isaac Asimov.
I got separate degrees in History and Latin while an undergrad. I then got a master’s degree in medieval canon law at Columbia at the same time Barry Soetoro was allegedly attending. I wrote my thesis on the preface to the Pseudo-Isadorean decretals.
I enjoyed it. I still read a lot of history today.
And I got to spend a year in New York on Columbia’s dime.
Plus, it got me into law school.
What they don’t tell you! You can teach your four year-old child to learn to read a foreign language before they learn English (English will come by osmosis).
As currently constructed and taught they are useless!
Correctly taught they are foundational. However, that won’t happen for a long time. If one has a library card its one’s own laziness that makes them ignorant of literature and humanities. People self-teach themselves IT and other business skills all the time the same can be done with literature and humanities.
Here's my take on this. To learn a skill, you need a leader. For example, to excel in a sport, with an instrument, or with a craft, you need a master. This is true with language and literature. The little kid learns to read because Dad knows how to read. The poet Dante picked Vergil. There is a famous quote by Tarkovsky who directed the masterpiece "The Sacrifice" during his last remaining days. Tarkovsky himself, the master, is saying, "I'm looking for a teacher." I have to tell you, a teacher turns you around to see with new eyes.
Published once in 1996. Paper with the International Telemetry Conference. Had one misspelling in it.
Wrote hundreds of technical documents that were company
published, but not available to the general public.
Does that count?
No kidding ...
Dad wasn’t a “teacher” at the time. (He much later taught some engineering courses at the MS/PhD level).
He also wasn’t technically a veteran, on account of still being active duty.
Regardless, I hit first grade already knowing how to read.
You can teach a four year old ANY language, provided you know it. That foreign language is “domestic” somewhere ... (Latin is hard??? Ineptias! Roman children learned it!)
I agree with that as a general principle, but not as an absolute.
Awesome!
Colleges of Education are a huge gatekeeping scam. It’s Marxist theory up and down.
Yes, many, if not most humanities courses nowadays have been dumbed down and woken up.
One of mine had a job, a job, not an internship, an actual job with benefits at NASA two years before he graduated. The job covered all of his school expenses plus some.
One of mine had a job, a job, not an internship, an actual job with benefits at NASA two years before he graduated. The job covered all of his school expenses plus some.
“Transgender Underwater Basketweaving!”
back in the day, pre-wokeness, it was just “Underwater Basketweaving” ...
Lol. I made this argument many years ago at my college - part of a student uprising against foreign TA's that spoke no English. If a kindergarten teacher needs a degree and has to pass a certification test, how can colleges let non-English speaking grad students teach college math and engineering courses?
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