APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering 5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Here come the posters talking about how useless English majors are.
Heavy sigh...
Economics was dubbed "the dismal science" by Thomas Carlyle because the logic of free market capitalism argues against slavery. See Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question. There is nothing dismal about economics, unless you count the way economic concepts are twisted to promote government policies.
The title of Field’s column is the mission statement for ALL of public education, only culminating at university level.
What do we care though? We’ve got to go to work, make money and go shop. Who possibly can fool off time with their kids to teach them, or home school them? Who really cares what they don’t learn?
How about factoring in the immense costs of yearly tuition, living, predatory book costs, and then consider the strangling “STUDENT DEBT” that awaits them on graduation day.
No longer can the student hope to “work their way through college”. Such a plan would require work 34/7 (accurate type).
The accumulated debt REQUIRES the student to consider, on the first day of a college career, the burden of paying back those loans.
As far as the classics, one doesn’t need college to have the ambition and desire to be “educated”.
I think Ms. Fields is confused.
The classics were killed, but not by computer science. They were killed by political correctness, deconstructionism and multiculturalism.
When your society’s classics are evil, who would want to study them, and why? What is the point of learning about The Good when your professors insist there is no such thing?
But there is no reason for even those students who get a more technical education to not read the Classics on their own. Do they really need a professor expounding on the 'meaning' of what they've read? They could always read critiques, if they wanted someone to tell them what to think of the piece. They could also enjoy the Arts on their own, attending concerts, plays, etc, if they are so inclined.
When the price of a college education begins to fall, you might see more students spending more time on the Classics and the Arts.
An English program is a program for instilling hostilities against healthy behaviors. Masculine, healthy men are not allowed to graduate from English programs.
In all fairness, society and our culture only *need* and want a tiny number of people versed in “the classics”, and most of those only if their jobs require that knowledge.
A superb example of this was William F. Buckley, Jr., who just oozed pretentiousness when injecting some statement in classical Latin by Julius Caesar while discussing contemporary politics, even though only 1 in 100,000 of his viewers had any appreciation for Latin or Julius Caesar.
Did this indicate Buckley was smart? Only in so far as he spent a lot of time studying Latin instead of other things, and used it not to illustrate and illuminate his arguments, but to obfuscate them.
If you examine what in past have been called “the classics”, you also find some serious deficiencies. That is, that while they are *colorful*, and influential in history, today their relevance is minimal. Old ideas that don’t matter much anymore.
There are a number of avenues for learning about literature, outside the class room, at least for gaining some knowledge in the form of a general survey of (insert) subject, most dealing with the development of western civilization. There are open courses online, and also options such as The Teaching Company, et al, who present some very good introductory lectures which include many classics.
People like myself who have limited formal education, can with little effort, and money, get a thumbnail education, in the arts and humanity as well as other disciplines, all of which, I find quite enjoyable. However, I’ve learned that much of recent “educational” experiments have been targeted towards discounting traditional Christian ethos, by stripping the meaning from our very experience of life. It seems to me that, twentieth century science and political theory, is at the forefront of this philosophical change.
Anyway, this is my limited observation, I wish that I had heeded the words of my elders, who told me, that it was my responsibility to get good grades in school. However, I was very hostile towards authority and also stubborn, so I waited until I left school to begin learning.
Than to be force fed crap like
Maya Angelou
The English major in the sixties and even the early seventies was a decent major--you learned to write and think by studying great writers and thinkers. No point with what passes for the Modern Novel--I met an English master's degree a few years back…never read a play by Shakespeare--not one!!