Ethics
My sister is a senior at a "leadership academy" high school for kids who have had behavioral problems. Seniors have to write a senior thesis on ethics, which my sister is working on while she's home for break. This has led to two entertaining ironies:
1. She doesn't see a problem with leaving ethics books all over the living room floor where people could trip over them, and
2. She's coming to me for help in structuring her paper, and I'm starting to get a sense of how hit and miss her curriculum is. On the one hand, she's relatively well versed on Kant vs. Consequentialism, but on the other hand she just asked me what capitalism was. She's nearly 19. She also didn't know what feudalism was. She's been taking ethics classes for two years and they seem to be treating it in a philosophical vacuum. I wasn't a fan of most of the core classes I took at the University of Chicago, but I did like the way Sosc in particular treated anthropology, philosophy, religion, psychology, and ethics as interrelated ideas. How the hell does anyone think you can look at ethics in modern society without learning how modern society works?
edit: My mom points out that it's always possible that they are teaching it, and she's just not paying attention, which is certainly a possibility, but she's getting good grades in everything but math and it should not be possible to do that at a decent school while being that under-informed. Also, she has no idea how to structure a paper. She'd actually written four pages of a 19 page paper without coming up with a thesis statement. She was just going to write one page on each of 19 ethical theories. Even at a second-tier state school, she is going to get creamed in college.
1. She doesn't see a problem with leaving ethics books all over the living room floor where people could trip over them, and
2. She's coming to me for help in structuring her paper, and I'm starting to get a sense of how hit and miss her curriculum is. On the one hand, she's relatively well versed on Kant vs. Consequentialism, but on the other hand she just asked me what capitalism was. She's nearly 19. She also didn't know what feudalism was. She's been taking ethics classes for two years and they seem to be treating it in a philosophical vacuum. I wasn't a fan of most of the core classes I took at the University of Chicago, but I did like the way Sosc in particular treated anthropology, philosophy, religion, psychology, and ethics as interrelated ideas. How the hell does anyone think you can look at ethics in modern society without learning how modern society works?
edit: My mom points out that it's always possible that they are teaching it, and she's just not paying attention, which is certainly a possibility, but she's getting good grades in everything but math and it should not be possible to do that at a decent school while being that under-informed. Also, she has no idea how to structure a paper. She'd actually written four pages of a 19 page paper without coming up with a thesis statement. She was just going to write one page on each of 19 ethical theories. Even at a second-tier state school, she is going to get creamed in college.