Posted on 12/16/2010 4:52:16 AM PST by Kaslin
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?
BA English Comp, minor in psych here.
Working on MA in Technical Communication.
I have a well-paying, non-management job, no debt, a house, a paid-for car, and I am working on getting married.
Liberal arts degrees are not occupational death sentences. I am an engineer with no engineering education, and I run circles around the engineers with degrees in engineering.
Hard science and math degrees only mean you can manipulate numbers. Writing and communication is infinitely more important to an employer. I learned all of my engineering skills on the job and through reading.
Liberal arts education is important, but not as a major, unless, of course. one intends to teach liberal arts courses in college.
Advocacy courses - black studies, women’s studies, etc, should be dropped.
When I was in college, back in the stone age, I had to take courses in Western Civ, English, Literature, econ, political science, sociology, psych, in addition to those in my major. I’ve not been sorry to have gained those insights.
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.
Most schools that offer Liberal Arts degrees have only a very debased and politically correct notion of what constitutes Liberal Arts and confuse the “Liberal” in Liberal Arts with Liberal politics and cultural manias. There are schools who do the job properly as it was once done and a graduate will be prepared for most anything with a LA degree from any of several small private Catholic colleges like Thomas More and Thomas Aquinas. You can’t go wrong at Hillsdale either. There are more such places, some Protestant ones, too. Somewhere there is a list with descriptions of good real Liberal Arts schools. Most of them are less expensive than the Ivy League or even most of the State Us.
Back in that stone age was when colleges were about Education and the roots of civilization. Now most of them are, as are the antecedent public schools, about Revolution and Collectivism and Political Correctness.
Excellent points. I still wonder what many think they are going to do with that degree or if they even have a plan.
True, if you can comprehend the numbers you manipulate.
And now they're running the country. (Do I gotta name names?)
Most universities have general education requirements that apply to all majors. The problem with liberal arts is that the colleges have done a poor job marketing their product and, in many cases, have been taken over by activists. Students don’t want to spend four years being lectured by aging hipsters who still talk about Woodstock or the day they burned their draft cards.
Attitudes have also changed. In the past, college was the place for a young man or woman to “find himself while broadening his horizons”. After four years, they go to law school, med school, MBA or other education.
Today, students enter college with the goal of getting a degree that will land them a well paying job upon graduation. Henry V is nice, but neither the play nor the king will go as far as top skills in PowerPoint and Photoshop when applying for the entry level position at an marketing agency.
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 learned how to think and communicate in college. How to work, I learned by doing the work.
I could have done much worse.
Drop all of the hyphenated crap majors and supply a traditional Euro-centric liberal arts curriculum supplemented by technology and personal finance. A few courses on entrepreneurship and required Constitutional study and everything is solved . . .
A course in liberal irony should complete the experience!
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.
Liberal Arts were destroyed by Marxists, without a peep the media. Once noone wants to take Marxist courses, now the media complains.
Cool!
How do you say "Seekers of the Red Mist" in Latin?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.