“Education, especially classical education that focuses on teaching how to think about problems, has always been a privilege, and to a certain extent the exclusive domain of the relatively rich. That hasn’t really changed, even though we often like to pretend otherwise.We saw a demand for education, and in turn for universities, because the economy increasingly needed skilled workers for an information economy, as opposed to the trades. But this demand for training has been conflated with a demand for a classical education, and the increasing number of students desiring training and credentials for a job has been mistaken for an increasing thirst for education in its ideal form. And so universities that traditionally provided the latter are falling over themselves to provide the former, because that’s where the students are coming from, and we’re mourning the diminishing integrity of a classical education, all the while neglecting the question of whether or not one institution can or should provide both types of ‘training’. Not everyone who studies the humanities has to become an academic, but so many BAs are going into grad school because they simply don’t see any other options for themselves. And furthermore, the people who aren’t interested in being scholarly need to feel free to choose that without any stigma.”
Commener on Metafilter thread about the student debt crisis, Bad Education
Leave a Reply