Hildegarde

Okay.  I slept in.  I made it all the way to six thirty.

My first instinct here is to start nitpicking, because, well, because I’m me.  I nitpick. 

And in nitpicking, I want to say that I never told anybody, Robert included, that people shouldn’t be able to major in history without taking “dance.”  Specifically “dance.”  I did say that nobody should be able to major in history without also knowing the history of art and ideas in the period they’re studying, but I feel the same way about literature–you shouldn’t major in literature without also knowing the history of ideas and events.

Dance is an unresolved issue for me.  The problem is that it is, like acting, a performance art.  And before the digital age, once the performance was completed, there was very little possibility to hold onto it.  You can have a history of painting because the paintings stand around for you to compare and contrast and put in order and classify.  Dance just goes away. 

I don’t think a history major needs to take courses in dance any more than I think he needs to take courses in painting.  The point of intellectual history is not to leap around a room or put oil paint on canvas.  It’s to see history from every possible perspective, not just the history of events.

The problem is, of course, that this is not just nitpicking, it’s beside the point.

To get back to the point:  Mary says she thinks it would be worthwhile for engineers to have a liberal arts background, and I agree.  I think it would be worthwhile for everybody to have a liberal arts background.

But I wasn’t talking about engineers, who tend to be already at a high academic level.

I was talking about people who want to be auto mechanics, radiologists, dental assistants–kids wanting to enter low-level practical fields of all kinds that, twenty years ago, required no time in college at all.

Why, exactly, are we requiring such people to get a “degree” and struggle their way through three semesters of English Lit, three semesters of “humanities,” etc, down the line? 

I do not agree with Robert that we should demand that some majors be required to prove first that they have a trust fund or a job before they can study.

I DO think that we should be upfront about what a liberal arts education–an actual college education–is. 

And that is not vocational.

The problem Sowell identifies exists not because we are producing a lot of pseudo-educated people with useless degrees, but because we have told those people that the degrees will be useful in a specific way:  in getting and keeping employment, and, what’s more, employment that is better than, and better paid than, what they could have gotten otherwise.

They feel entitled because we have told them to feel entitled.  We have said to them, “go to ‘college’ and you’ll have a career, you’ll be a success.'”

They don’t know what a college education is for, they don’t know why anybody actually studies the things an actual college education would make them study, they only know they are being put through a series of very expensive hoops on the promise that, at the end of it, they’ll get a “good” job.

When that turns out not to be the case, they of course resent it.  Why wouldn’t they?  Why shouldn’t they?

If we made clear that no such straightforward vocational link exists, we would have people–yes, even people without trust funds!–who want to learn what the liberal arts teach going to learn it and not worrying about whether or not it would be “practical” in the long run,  because the employment practicality of it would not be the reason they learned it to begin with.

Okay, that was a truly awful sentence.

And we could stop requiring people who want to do work that at most requires a short term of vocational training to get “degrees” that make no sense at all.

For what it’s worth:  Cheryl, in the US, the “proprietary schools” (the for-profits) mostly DO give degrees, usually BAs and BSs in things like business management, etc.

It’s our local community colleges that are giving out courses of study in things like auto mechanics and radiology.

There are a few for-profit vocational schools around–the oldest and largest are the secretarial schools–but by and large, in my part of the US, that kind of thing is the province of the local “community and technical colleges,” which are state-run.

My point, though, remains–somebody who wants to be an auto mechanic or a radiologist or a nursing aid or even a nurse shouldn’t be required to spend four years past high school in classes covering a smidge and smattering of philosophy and literature because they have to do that because…

Because it keeps the seats filled, and makes some institutions lots of money.

And as for the Sowell–no, of course I don’t agree with him.  But that was the point.

Tomorrow:  equality.

Or maybe tomorrow.

I have to go give a talk tonight.