Meet Verlyn Klinkenborg.
In a recent editorial in the NYT she says
What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their
professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most
fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is
clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature.
Frankly, I am sick of this shit.
The reason I curse is because no non-cursing language can convey how utterly sick and tired, not to mention, angry I am with shills and whores of Big Education desperately trying to;
1. Rationalize their own stupid decisions to major in worthless subjects
2. Continue to vampire off of naive young 17 and 18 year old children by making them pay inflated prices for worthless degrees so the legions of aging worthless humanities professors can avoid having to work real jobs in the real world.
The Education Bubble is bursting, just like the housing bubble. And you David Lereah's of the education industry are being exposed for the shills you are.
Do you even listen to yourselves???
"The gift of "humanities is the gift of "clear thinking, clear writing, and a life-long engagement with literature?"
Really?
So, then we could agree to eliminate all humanities and liberal arts departments from all universities because there is a cheaper alternative called "the library?" And since you academian leftist jounralism types care soooooooo much for the "chilllllldreeeennnnnn" you would in all intellectual honesty say, "hey, don't spend $50,000 on a degree when you can get the same thing for free at the local library AND HAVE THE EXACT SAME EMPLOYMENT PROSPECTS?"
Or are we going to go the same old boring "education is an experience, it isn't all about the money" route?
You might as well say "housing prices always go up."
The only thing saving you now is the naivety and ignorance of the average 17 year old who has been indoctrinated and brainwashed by ass-kissing, brown-nosing teachers and parents who have convinced them they are great and can do no wrong. That "follow your heart and the money will follow." Not to mention you've convinced these undeveloped minds they're entitled to an education, even if it is in Transgendered-Ethiopian-18th Century-French-Poetry-Studies, and even if it will cripple them financially for the rest of their lives.
The only thing worth less than the degrees in the humanities are the whores, charlatans and scum pimping those degrees in academia, quite literally parasiting off of the children they so hypocritically claim to be helping. They're no different than the bankers and mortgage brokers scum we've all been told to hate who brought the housing bubble.
So do America and the children a REAL and GENUINE favor. June is Worthless Degree Awareness Month. How about you fight back and buy "Worthless" for either a loved one about to attend college, yourself, or hell, if there's any foundation or conservative institution that really wants to implement some change, how about you spend a little bit of that money on buying an entire high school or school district copies of this book? How about flooding a high profile college campus with copies of it? You want to undo all the socialist brainwashing these kids get and are going to get? How about you start at the source and launch an all out campaign where the left is weakest? Their liberal-voter factories - academia.
"The gift of "humanities is the gift of "clear thinking, clear writing, and a life-long engagement with literature?"
ReplyDeleteI agree with the premise, however, this is not what I noticed when earning my humanities degree. The first two years of college were indeed what you would expect for the humanities, studying religion, literature, history and art via the great contributers of society from Plato, Aquinas, Milton so on and so forth. There was the occasional outright leftists class but for the most part it was pretty good. However, once I became an upper classman it became nothing more than advocacy of socialism classes.
I sometimes wonder if the bubble will pop when truly gifted associate professors realize that they would be better off striking out on their own to teach their subjects. I do see value from recieving instruction, even in the humanities, by another individual. But that value depends on the knowledge and ability of the person at the rector. It sure as hell isn't $ 20,000 a year per student.
Let's just say that she would be telling the truth if she weren't knowingly, deliberately and maliciously implying that college professors know or care how to teach their hapless victims how to think clearly or what to read to understand the world better. They don't. In fact they know that in order to keep their jobs they have to prohibit any literature that might get too near the truth.
ReplyDeleteAs you say, though, for now, books that tell clear truths are available in libraries and online. God knows how long that will last.
What really makes me laugh (or spit) is that "clear thinking, clear writing" line. Most of the drivel I read from people with degrees in the humanities is little more than long essays of the same liberal talking points by people that have lost the ability to think (e.g Huffington Post). The intention, at least when politics and social issues are involved, seems to be to obscure facts not make them clear. It is on conservative/libertarian sites, radio and magazines one will find straight talk and thinking.
ReplyDeleteI will add that I'm sick to death of the "you learn critical thinking, blah blah blah" crap.
ReplyDeleteI'm an engineer. We learn critical thinking, and practice it every single day to make sure the things we build don't fall down. People in STEM fields are probably the most critical thinkers because our decisions impact lives. Buildings, cars, you name it. I was an automotive engineer for almost a decade, and I assure you I had to make choices and decisions on things from brake assemblies to cooling units.
In university (materials eng for me) in the higher years, it's all about things like 'selection and design' and 'joining methods' where there's no singular right answer, only the right answer that meets all the conflicting needs of quality, cost, performance, etc.
Now I'm a Navy engineer, and same thing. It's all about thinking, analysis and choices.
To all those who think the humanities are the only path to 'critical thinking,' please shut up. You're wrong, and it makes you look petty.
"The only thing saving you now is the naivety and ignorance of the average 17 year old who has been indoctrinated and brainwashed by ass-kissing, brown-nosing teachers and parents who have convinced them they are great and can do no wrong. That "follow your heart and the money will follow." Not to mention you've convinced these undeveloped minds they're entitled to an education, even if it is in Transgendered-Ethiopian-18th Century-French-Poetry-Studies, and even if it will cripple them financially for the rest of their lives."
ReplyDeleteHaha! The classic excuse right there to let emotions completely cloud your judgement. Bad parents are part of the reason why there's such a undeserved entitlement in today's society. They act more like their childrens' friends rather than real parents and that contributes to the inferiority complex that eventually blocks all sense of reality and truth.
Another part of the problem is how so many people have bought into these lies about the college experience stuff and how living at home for even one semester of their long life means the end of the world and how anything that deviates from this experience is completely taboo and forbidden.
Getting a specific skill and working as an apprentice is even frowned upon. Mention that you're going to a tech school to the uninformed and you'll immediately be shunned and ridiculed right away as with my own personal experience. I'm hoping that getting the votech diploma and a specific STEM degree will only broaden my opportunities to earn a decent living for myself.
The one thing that will prop up this education bubble longer than you think is the same reason corruption in general continues to exist. It is the curse of credentialism. Think about how Snowden is looked down upon for his lack of credentials. You can't get a job without the credentials even if they're unimportant for the job. So you end up having to pay the bakeesh for the credentials that as you point out are worthless to even get in the game.
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't be so bad if they still gave a good classical education. But we can't be too challenging so let's just offer latin studies.
ReplyDeleteOn this, I have to agree.
ReplyDeleteMy freshman composition classes were, in large part, really worthless in learning how to write better. They didn't help in overcoming the trauma I still suffered from in high school, which was the product of an old-maid English teacher who insisted on the old way of learning how to write by doing note cards, making outlines, etc.
One assignment I remember clearly from the freshman comp classes was learning how to write a resume. The instructor was the wife of my psychology professor, who held some lower-level administrative job at the first college I attended.
Having never wrote a resume before, this was a challenge for me. I tried my best, then received a failing grade for it. Pissed, I marched to the office of the instructor and asked her, pointedly, why she gave me a failing grade when she didn't provide any of the students clear examples of HOW to write a resume, instead of just parroting instructions, which you could have easily gotten from a book. She initially was offended, but I managed to get her to give me another chance to write something on the basis of examples. I did much better.
But, despite that, college didn't teach how to write a resume, which would have been a valuable skill to learn early on.
Personally, I think one of the greatest advantages the worthless degree supporters have is that the vast majority of people only hear from successful people. The 1 in 100 humanities majors who end up being successful get to tell kids that everything will be fantastic if they choose the humanities, the 66% of humanities majors who can't find a decent job after graduation and settle for a job they were qualified for after high-school don't get to tell their story.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I think a lot of people would be willing to tell their story in a youtube series about how they were conned into higher education. I could be wrong but I suspect that 1 in 10 (or so) at a coffee shop or book store has a degree and is not entirely happy with how things turned out for them.
The Real Cause of the Higher Education Bubble
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lakeshorelaments.com/?p=17240
OK, so I read the article before I read your post, so I will reiterate the financial aspect.
ReplyDelete1. “No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will.”
It kind of reminds me of a quote in the movie "Good Will Hunting" (I know, Matt Damon is scum):
"See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years you're going to start doing some thinking on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that. And Two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a f-ing education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library."
2. "The canon — the books and writers we agree are worth studying — used to seem like a given, an unspoken consensus of sorts. But the canon has always been shifting, and it is now vastly more inclusive than it was 40 years ago. That’s a good thing. What’s less clear now is what we study the canon for and why we choose the tools we employ in doing so."
Who is the "we" in "we agree are worth studying"? I was forced to read "Huckleberry Finn" as a kid and enjoyed it. Now it's presented as a racist text. Nevermind the fact the the book was meant as a condemnation of slavery and that Twain himself was a staunch abolitionist. I had to read "1984" and "Farenheit 451" - books that my nephew has never heard of. Instead, they cram Upton Sinclair down their throats. "The Jungle" is not a window into the plight of the poor and slaughterhouses in Chicago. It is more like the Communist Manifesto. Try reading "Oil" by Upton Sinclair. If you're not an avowed socialist, it is downright painful to read. I find the "we" in that sentence to be a red flag. "We" determine what's important, and "we" are in charge, and "we" mold young minds.
You are correct, but he fails even if you take his premise as sound. The humanities curriculum has been so hollowed out with feel good multicultural post modern B.S. that it simply *can't* teach students how to think.
ReplyDeleteSaid differently, it's so busy teaching them *what* to think that it doesn't have the time or inclination to teach them *how* to think.
What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature. [emphasis added]
ReplyDeleteThe bolded part of the author's assertion puts the lie to the "clear thinking" and "clear writing" parts of her assertion. One might think that professors capable of "clear thinking" and "clear writing" could communicate to their students the importance of studying the humanities, especially when said professors' jobs are at stake. One might think that, but one would be mistaken.
As an electrical engineer I use to think that such humanities studies were somewhat harmless except to the people who paid for them. I'm come to realize though that it hurts society in general because people with no exposure to a technical education (journalists for instance) tend to concede any quantitative argument immediately. This is hurting everyone in terms of policy regarding climate change, fracking, and nuclear power.
ReplyDeleteSounds like it teaches them to bullshit, but not very well...
ReplyDeleteSadly, you're right about most of my colleagues. Yes, I am an English professor and have devoted my life for decades to truth and beauty and suchlike out of fashion things. There are still a few old farts around, even reactionaries such as myself, though we're massively outnumbered and the evangelists of Marxism do predominate. Oh well, I'm saving all I can and am over 50, so I hope to be out of the system before it collapses.
ReplyDeleteCredentialism sucks. I person I worked with was laid off recently by one of the big medical device companies. (Thanks Obamacare medical device tax.). He was a technician for them for 20 years. Well, another position elsewhere within the company opened up but because he doesn't have a two year degree, they will not consider him. He's done the job for 20 years and did well! F#$$ Credentialism!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/27/us-usa-studentloans-rates-idUSBRE95Q11X20130627
ReplyDeleteShouldn't you have clear thinking and clear writing down by the time you finish high school?
ReplyDelete"The gift of "humanities is the gift of "clear thinking, clear writing, and a life-long engagement with literature?"
ReplyDeleteSTEM will give you more clear thought and precise writing.
Two options to approach the literature:
1. Self read as a study break working on a degree that you will benefit from, and contemplate. These books and writings were written to let you find your own truth.
2. Take them as an elective or as a minor if you really feel the need to study them formally. If it gets in the way of a worthy degree, drop the minor.
I did not do well in school. I dropped out of 11th grade a d never looked back. I passed those savings along to my customers.
ReplyDeleteI spent a lot of time in school staring out the window. They used to call that thinking. You see, when I went to school the only places you could find a screen was at the movie theater or on an exterior door.
The result is tat when I went to school I learned how to think.
Just remember that of all the people who want a good STEM job, most of them go into Biology because "math is hard".
ReplyDeleteBiology Majors are the WORST major to get, worse than any humanities degree.