The perfect representation of everything that is wrong with education today...

[triphicus]

http://www.holytaco.com/2008/06/03/the-10-most-worthless-college-majors/When did the noble goal of education, that is, of expanding and enriching one's mind through the study of great works of literature, science, and philosophy, become reduced

Comments

[aileen8aalien]

When Universities became big business is when degrees became about practicality. And as tuition soars, outpacing the cost of living, can we really expect people to not think in terms of value at the end of four (or increasingly, five) years? My idealism was chipped away long ago and I've, as a result, changed my pedagogy drastically to make my students see the practicality of the humanities. Telling them it'll expand their world vision or make them better thinkers just doesn't cut it when that student is sinking in debt.

Plus, I argue that the Humanities in general haven't done a real bang-up job of staying current. I think, as a teacher of an intro to humanities class, that we stay too far in the past and don't often bring the past far enough into the present. We are all aware of our students, the Millenials as they have been coined, and how material needs to be made relevant to them, to their now. If you can't make them understand how influential Kant is TODAY, they aren't going to care. It's not pandering, it's making those critical connections we always harp on in the classroom.

I can't tell you the number of lit courses I took as an undergrad, grad, and then again in my PhD program that just ended around 1969, as though nothing of real importance had been published after that arbitrary cut-off date. And I say this as a holder of a PhD in English Literature.

[triphicus]

I guess I wasn't clear enough in the OP, but I am by no means arguing that practical matters should not be taken into account at all. Rather, I am disturbed at what seems to be an entire reduction of the goal of education to pragmatics. I don't understand how we have come to a point where practicality is so entirely divorced from overall benefit. As many people have pointed out in this post (and you especially), there is practical value to the humanities disciplines that is in no way less beneficial than that which we would find in the more specialized technical degrees. Perhaps I would be going out on my own limb, though, in arguing that they are even more beneficial in many cases, simply because they aren't so entirely based on pragmatics.