Part of the problem for arts degrees is their low credentialing value. My two degrees in history provided a sound base for the work I did in my career, but they were never a required credential for any job I ever had, and the number of jobs for which a history or English degree is a hard credential are very few. Thus there is little external pressure on what the arts faculties teach.
Another part of the problem is that, back in my day at least, the arts, English and sociology in particular, were considered the "bird courses" -- the degrees you took if you were not particularly interested in anything and just wanted an easy path to a degree. You certainly could get a good education in the arts in those days, but you could also avoid getting one while still taking home a degree.
And this, of course, only served to further weaken the value of an arts degree as a credential. And today, of course, an arts degree is an even easier path to a degree, as all you have to do is express the correct opinions, and you are through. Which has brought us to the point that an arts degree has perhaps become a negative credential.
So, yes, Ben Shapiro is probably right that an arts degree today is useless *as a credential*. This is a very different question from whether a good arts education is useful, if you can get one. Clearly, it is useful. The challenge, more than ever, is to demonstrate it.
And it is because of this difficulty in demonstrating the value of arts instruction that the field was wide open to takeover by the left. On what basis could their credentials to teach be questioned if their own degrees had no credentialing value? If there were a way to make an arts degree a genuine functional credential, the leftist lightweights would swiftly be driven out. But how you determine or measure the value of an arts education for specific social roles remains a problem. The connection is there indisputably, but it is only demonstrated by success. The degree in itself is no predictor of success, which is what we want from a credential, and it is hard to see how to make it so.
Pell grants are not going away and should be housed in a more appropriate place like the Dept. of Treasury.
While I agree that degrees in English, history, et. al. are important for a number of reasons, the question we need to ask is, what is the role of the federal government v state government, esp. as the USA is headed towards bankruptcy with 36+ trillion dollar debt, surpassing our GDP.
I don’t know, there’s a whole generation of older Americans who haven’t been in school for four or more decades and yet have been thoroughly brainwashed. You can’t blame the E.D. for that.
History major, here, at a fine college, for which superior liberal education I am thankful and grateful every day of my life. Credentialing is not, and never was the purpose of a liberal arts education. So the arguments of how “useless” it is are beside the point and highlight the degree to which the critics could themselves have benefited from some of that “useless” education.
Spending four years of your young life developing your mind and character is tremendously worthwhile and also has a lot of practical benefits like learning how to think, criticize, and write. The downside is that it is not for everyone, and it is also expensive if it’s worth anything. There just is no way around these two things. So I’m scratching my head over what sort of public purpose argument could be made for encouraging or subsidizing this kind of education with public money.
Maybe the best we could do is to have a more structured approach to moving from liberal education to training and credentialing. You shouldn’t have to make a decision to be a doctor or an engineer at age 18 or else have to start over after graduation, doubling the cost burden. Just as there should be more trade and apprenticeship education for people who shouldn’t be forced to go to college just to get their resume seen, humanities kids should not be left in the wilderness with the choice of dooming themselves to eternal poverty and debt just to get a chance to spend a year or two exploring their love for English literature. That should be manageable. Maybe if the humanities fields were cleared of those who are looking for the easiest ticket to punch, the humanities degree might come to be seen as an unusual but interesting choice that says something about that person.
An additional problem with pushing more students into STEM is that it compromises the standards of STEM programs, at least where students pay their own tuition. Under such a model, the relationship between student and university transforms from pupil-teacher to customer-vendor-- and you don't readily expel paying customers that aren't up to snuff. This has plagued undergrad-level STEM in the US for years now, and is a major reason why the standards have largely fallen behind Europe and Asia. If more students are pushed into STEM because of its overvaluation as a "useful" cluster of disciplines, the degradation will continue.
I agree woth your premise that making (affordable) student loans only really available if you're going into a STEM field is a bad idea, I also dream of getting rid of the Department of Education (and a bunch of other Departments, too, but let's focus on just that one for now).
There are two issues here: First is college becoming stupid expensive, and the second is the humanities' complete self-immolation, leading to large swaths of people decrying the concept of a liberal arts education.
For the first, I agree with conservatives that the federal government needs to get out of student loans. Their guaranteed loans are by far the largest contributor to rising tuition, because if you're a university and are guaranteed to all of the money no matter what happens, of course you're going to charging more so you get more money. While that's obviously not an easy fix, because it would require the government to actually do its job and pass a law, it's easier than the second issue.
For the second, it would require a complete change of guard of professors at universities and a cultural shift in univserities to not allow what happened to the humanities to happen again. I think that is close to impossible, unfortunately.
A citizenry well educated via a liberal arts education is one of those "it would be incredibly beneficial for everyone, both individually and nationally" things, but it's benefit wouldn't be apparent until decades down the line, which completely flies in the face of our current, "money is the only important thing and if you value something else, you're stupid" collective national mindset.
If the concern is that too much is spent on student loans, it seems that the more effective approach would be to closely scrutinize the institutions that have high student loan default rates and low post-graduation employment rates. It may be that some of these institutions should not be eligible for federal student loans because of the low quality of the education they are providing. That being said, I don’t know a lot about US federal student loan policy - it may be that the truly low-quality institutions are already filtered out.
The problem in the humanities is in the highest quality institutions. The benefit-cost test fails there, because they aren't expecting a positive ratio, it's a colonized sinecure for the "right" people. It's not a coincidence that those institutions have such a high proportion of full-price self-pay international students. There aren't enough Americans to take that deal.
My three years studying for an English Language and Literature degree gave me many gifts. Amongst them: - learning how to separate the wheat from the chaff - literature I may never have known - the chance to try many things, from debating, through journalism, to art appreciation - friends from different backgrounds. Most of all, as my tutor predicted, we learnt how to think. And that gift led to my career.
We're going through a period of restructuring and reevaluation. The humanities departments have indeed become misguided and ideologically corrupted and, worse, corrupting.
There's simply no getting around the fact that some period of disruption and “house cleaning” is required. It will be painful. But necessary.
My background is in both Applied Mathematics and English. We need both the quantitative and the qualitative in order to think clearly, as you have done here by discussing the quantitative topic of budget. They both require each other.
I think cutting funding will help the problem but I agree with your general point. Ironically, it's similar to a criticism I've made of the left: don't just purge, 'dismantle', and trust that your radical and untested looniness will somehow make everything better. BUILD stuff! If you want to live in a socialist society, buy a bunch of land and be socialist (see below)! If you want to empower women, start a female-centered corporation, rather than taking over mine. If you want to increase the representation of black people in elite colleges, improve black K-12 education. Quotas and speech codes and bullying are easy and emotionally satisfying but they solve nothing. The left is terrible at building things, probably because they don't have any business owners (or immigrants, or veterans, or... ) in their ranks.
Alternately, while I do want trillions of dollars to stop flowing out of Arkadelphia, AK and Wilkes-Barre, PA in order to outfit luxurious student gyms and segregated dorms on the Stanford or Berkeley campuses, that won't fix the problem. To heal academia you need to create structures and institutions which reflect your values. To heal the practice of therapy you need to train working therapists in the language of virtue and discipline. To heal K-12 education you have to create not just schools which reflect your worldview (which they've done) but teacher's colleges and curriculum and credentialing organizations. The right is good at building certain things, but public institutions aren't among them.
Buil, build, build. It's hard and it's risky but it's ultimately the only reason humans exist, I think, and it's incredibly fulfilling. That and raising children. And writing.
I think the priority of STEM is actually a cause of some of the decay that Liza attributes to ideology. Why? Because STEM champions a kind of systematic, scientific knowing that is at odds with humanism and with all kinds of ordinary experience.
A major reason for the popularity of critical theory and the like was that it offered a research program with the expectation of new, scientific discoveries, or failing that, a scientific critique of the sciences that could prevent them from lording it over the humanities. All of this was to be as far removed as possible from the “obvious” and “tedious” and “unscientific” traditional study of human life and feeling.
The more everyone thinks everything should be like STEM, the more the advocates of things that are not STEM, that cannot be STEM, such as humane learning, will feel compelled to lie and to disguise themselves in order to receive funding. It is this bad faith for the sake of funding and acclaim that I think explains bad learning. This is an entirely different problem from deeply held convictions about the political good.
You make a good point. I think this emphasis on system in STEM is culturally risky in promoting One Truth thinking, to which humanities has until recently been an antidote.
"Shapiro has disparaged the English degree in the past—a degree that, though ideologically charged today, has provided me, a recipient of two Ivy League English degrees, with an invaluable foundation that has allowed me to out-earn many of my peers in STEM through starting a business of my own and creating a robust social media platform to promote the literary arts."
Honest question: what did you gain (intellectually speaking, not credential-wise) from your English degree that you couldn't have gotten with a library card and free time to read? My guess (again, let me know if you disagree) is that you gained nothing, and that you would in fact have been better off with a library card and free time. (Once again, intellectually speaking. I realize that an Ivy credential is valuable even if you majored in complete-nonsense-but-I-was-smart-enough-to-get-into-Columbia.) At this point, I'm inclined to think that English literature cannot be reformed into a rigorous academic discipline worth studying on its own. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but the more I read/hear about the matter, the more convinced I am.
BTW, as you might know, in Slavic countries, degrees in the national literature typically contain a fair amount of linguistics and also (*gasp*) Old Church Slavonic. Now sure, you could ask: Why do people interested in Russian (Czech, Serbian...) literature need to know Old Church Slavonic? Reasonable question. One possible answer is that it helps weed out the dim and the lazy from the program.
What you gain is a rational, informed critique of your conclusions, something no library card can provide. Of course, today you can also receive a critique of your conclusion on Substack. But how do you determine which parts of that critique are rational and informed? You need to have received sufficient rational, informed critique of your conclusions before you develop the ability to detect rational, informed critique in the wider world. That's what universities are for, what they can provide that libraries can't. Whether they are actually providing that today is, of course, another question.
It's hard to stay focused and keep things in a big picture when you're struggling on alone (this is why autodidacts are so remarkable). The process works better in a community, which is what the college or university used to provide. Which is a valuable human experience in itself.
"What you gain is a rational, informed critique of your conclusions..." That's an important part of it, yes. There's also direction and guidance to fill in the gaps in your experience, the requirement to learn authors and genres you might have missed, and a comprehensive view of the historical context of literature. My own experience is with Chinese literature, which I read a heck of a lot of doing a linguistics BA, for which primary and secondary concentrations were required; my secondary was comparative literature, which was basically an excuse to read lots of Chinese literature and do three years of independent study in classical Chinese (I did Mandarin as part of my primary concentration, languages). The regular coursework involved lots of reading of translations in different genres from a historical perspective as well as for content; it was much like the survey courses in English literature curricula, similar to BA-level work. The independent study was much more detailed, closer to MA-level work, and involved filling in all the gaps in the regular coursework, as well as a fair amount of contemporary lit-crit blathering in addition to several of the most important classical Chinese texts in literary thought (the Wen Fu, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, A New Account of Tales of the World, and so on--though these I read almost entirely in English translation, which is less than MA-level work). In short, as the essential benefit, it took a structured approach that aimed at a comprehensive view of the subject from which I knew where to turn when doing anything on my own, and that ensured I didn't miss anything important through just browsing the library.
"Whether they are actually providing that today is, of course, another question."
Well, there you have it. And how do you get from here to there, pragmatically speaking? Because as far as I can tell, what English majors are trained to do is to look for any signs of queerness etc. even when none is there. That's how you make someone a *worse* reader and writer than he or she was before. And how are you going to fix it?
When I think about it, the answer I keep coming back to is "we're going to focus on old literature, because Chaucer, to say nothing of Beowulf, is legitimately hard and requires expert guidance." Fine. So the English degree becomes classics-lite (Anglo-Saxon and Middle English instead of Greek and Latin), but remains a reasonable academic pursuit. Is there any point at all, though, in teaching Amy Tan's novels? (Not picking on Amy Tan in particular. It goes for pretty much any contemporary writer.) I mean, it's fine for English majors in China, given that their main goal is to learn the English language. For native English speakers, though?
Well, yes, it will be difficult. So then the question becomes, is it worth doing? To which I believe the answer is yes. Not just for the better appreciation of old books but because it provides a better calibration of the mind to reality and a better calibration of the reason to sound argument.
See, it's not obvious to me that it's worth doing. Why try to rescue the English major in particular? Why not "train the mind" via (say) philosophy or classics? Philosophy is explicitly about evaluating arguments, and classics requires learning a dead language or two. When it comes to (say) 19th century literature, you could obviously teach some of it as a part of a history degree, in context.
"Art teaches by experience." Yeah, that's the problem. I mean, why does literature move you? Probably because it causes you to empathize with a character (or loathe a character). Now go ahead and write a paper in which you explain that you sympathized with Lydia Bennet because she reminded you of your cousin Ashley, and like Lydia, Ashley was/needed blah-blah-blah. It may all be true, but an academic argument it is not. I don't see how you turn it into a rigorous academic discipline. Are you supposed to figure out how to talk about your cousin Ashley without mentioning her? And otherwise, it becomes "in the context of England circa 1800, Lydia Bennet blah-blah-blah." See? History.
The money flows to curriculum development companies, test development companies, text book designers and SEL/DEI development companies. The DoEd gets to decide from which vendors districts can purchase. Everyone likes to say that the Fed Gov't has NO control over curriculum....but it does!....by funneling education tax dollars into those private companies and then making the states pick from those designated vendors. Public education (k-12) was much better when teachers were paid to develop curriculum for their own districts under the guidance of State DoEds. Before DoEd there was HEW (Health ,Education, Welfare) and they dealt with the loans and other NECESSARY issues, so we can absolutely get rid of the Dept as a whole (it's pretty small) and preserve what is needed. The people who will be hurt the most are those downstream in the private sector (Consultants, Developers, Vendors)....and I think the private "education" industry needs to be thrown out with the dirty bathwater. Just imagine if all of that $$$ actually made it into schools and to pay teachers a decent salary?
I appreciate the perspective but don't agree with the premise. Parents and their kids need to make decisions that will make them successful after college. Being saddled with debt because you're a philosophy major is not a byproduct of what the government funds or doesn't fund. It's byproduct of our own agency/decisions we make. A base understanding in Civics, Literature, Philosophy, etc. should be required in General Education but the idea that getting rid of the dept of education negatively impacts this is off-base. If Liberal Arts programs have already seen diminishing returns w/ enrollment than the issue isn't with dept of Ed. Other trend lines and external factors have impacted this.
Do you know about Chloe Cole ? She isa victim of the Education deptsrment. California has alwats had definded schools and only rich places like Lafatte have $ . Vouchers are fair . Democrats are full of men who lie and doctors who lie.
Part of the problem for arts degrees is their low credentialing value. My two degrees in history provided a sound base for the work I did in my career, but they were never a required credential for any job I ever had, and the number of jobs for which a history or English degree is a hard credential are very few. Thus there is little external pressure on what the arts faculties teach.
Another part of the problem is that, back in my day at least, the arts, English and sociology in particular, were considered the "bird courses" -- the degrees you took if you were not particularly interested in anything and just wanted an easy path to a degree. You certainly could get a good education in the arts in those days, but you could also avoid getting one while still taking home a degree.
And this, of course, only served to further weaken the value of an arts degree as a credential. And today, of course, an arts degree is an even easier path to a degree, as all you have to do is express the correct opinions, and you are through. Which has brought us to the point that an arts degree has perhaps become a negative credential.
So, yes, Ben Shapiro is probably right that an arts degree today is useless *as a credential*. This is a very different question from whether a good arts education is useful, if you can get one. Clearly, it is useful. The challenge, more than ever, is to demonstrate it.
And it is because of this difficulty in demonstrating the value of arts instruction that the field was wide open to takeover by the left. On what basis could their credentials to teach be questioned if their own degrees had no credentialing value? If there were a way to make an arts degree a genuine functional credential, the leftist lightweights would swiftly be driven out. But how you determine or measure the value of an arts education for specific social roles remains a problem. The connection is there indisputably, but it is only demonstrated by success. The degree in itself is no predictor of success, which is what we want from a credential, and it is hard to see how to make it so.
Pell grants are not going away and should be housed in a more appropriate place like the Dept. of Treasury.
While I agree that degrees in English, history, et. al. are important for a number of reasons, the question we need to ask is, what is the role of the federal government v state government, esp. as the USA is headed towards bankruptcy with 36+ trillion dollar debt, surpassing our GDP.
After squandering over a trillion dollars on the DOE, we must admit that the DOE has been an utter failure and America’s children have become dumber and more brainwashed with each decade since the creation of DOE in 1980. The DOE needs to go: https://open.substack.com/pub/lizlasorte/p/government-too-big-will-fail-part?r=76q58&utm_medium=ios
I don’t know, there’s a whole generation of older Americans who haven’t been in school for four or more decades and yet have been thoroughly brainwashed. You can’t blame the E.D. for that.
History major, here, at a fine college, for which superior liberal education I am thankful and grateful every day of my life. Credentialing is not, and never was the purpose of a liberal arts education. So the arguments of how “useless” it is are beside the point and highlight the degree to which the critics could themselves have benefited from some of that “useless” education.
Spending four years of your young life developing your mind and character is tremendously worthwhile and also has a lot of practical benefits like learning how to think, criticize, and write. The downside is that it is not for everyone, and it is also expensive if it’s worth anything. There just is no way around these two things. So I’m scratching my head over what sort of public purpose argument could be made for encouraging or subsidizing this kind of education with public money.
Maybe the best we could do is to have a more structured approach to moving from liberal education to training and credentialing. You shouldn’t have to make a decision to be a doctor or an engineer at age 18 or else have to start over after graduation, doubling the cost burden. Just as there should be more trade and apprenticeship education for people who shouldn’t be forced to go to college just to get their resume seen, humanities kids should not be left in the wilderness with the choice of dooming themselves to eternal poverty and debt just to get a chance to spend a year or two exploring their love for English literature. That should be manageable. Maybe if the humanities fields were cleared of those who are looking for the easiest ticket to punch, the humanities degree might come to be seen as an unusual but interesting choice that says something about that person.
An additional problem with pushing more students into STEM is that it compromises the standards of STEM programs, at least where students pay their own tuition. Under such a model, the relationship between student and university transforms from pupil-teacher to customer-vendor-- and you don't readily expel paying customers that aren't up to snuff. This has plagued undergrad-level STEM in the US for years now, and is a major reason why the standards have largely fallen behind Europe and Asia. If more students are pushed into STEM because of its overvaluation as a "useful" cluster of disciplines, the degradation will continue.
I agree woth your premise that making (affordable) student loans only really available if you're going into a STEM field is a bad idea, I also dream of getting rid of the Department of Education (and a bunch of other Departments, too, but let's focus on just that one for now).
There are two issues here: First is college becoming stupid expensive, and the second is the humanities' complete self-immolation, leading to large swaths of people decrying the concept of a liberal arts education.
For the first, I agree with conservatives that the federal government needs to get out of student loans. Their guaranteed loans are by far the largest contributor to rising tuition, because if you're a university and are guaranteed to all of the money no matter what happens, of course you're going to charging more so you get more money. While that's obviously not an easy fix, because it would require the government to actually do its job and pass a law, it's easier than the second issue.
For the second, it would require a complete change of guard of professors at universities and a cultural shift in univserities to not allow what happened to the humanities to happen again. I think that is close to impossible, unfortunately.
A citizenry well educated via a liberal arts education is one of those "it would be incredibly beneficial for everyone, both individually and nationally" things, but it's benefit wouldn't be apparent until decades down the line, which completely flies in the face of our current, "money is the only important thing and if you value something else, you're stupid" collective national mindset.
You'd really have to start up new universities - and that is being done. America is a big place.
If the concern is that too much is spent on student loans, it seems that the more effective approach would be to closely scrutinize the institutions that have high student loan default rates and low post-graduation employment rates. It may be that some of these institutions should not be eligible for federal student loans because of the low quality of the education they are providing. That being said, I don’t know a lot about US federal student loan policy - it may be that the truly low-quality institutions are already filtered out.
The problem in the humanities is in the highest quality institutions. The benefit-cost test fails there, because they aren't expecting a positive ratio, it's a colonized sinecure for the "right" people. It's not a coincidence that those institutions have such a high proportion of full-price self-pay international students. There aren't enough Americans to take that deal.
My three years studying for an English Language and Literature degree gave me many gifts. Amongst them: - learning how to separate the wheat from the chaff - literature I may never have known - the chance to try many things, from debating, through journalism, to art appreciation - friends from different backgrounds. Most of all, as my tutor predicted, we learnt how to think. And that gift led to my career.
Ending teacher’s unions is reason enough to shut down the DoE.
We're going through a period of restructuring and reevaluation. The humanities departments have indeed become misguided and ideologically corrupted and, worse, corrupting.
There's simply no getting around the fact that some period of disruption and “house cleaning” is required. It will be painful. But necessary.
My background is in both Applied Mathematics and English. We need both the quantitative and the qualitative in order to think clearly, as you have done here by discussing the quantitative topic of budget. They both require each other.
I think cutting funding will help the problem but I agree with your general point. Ironically, it's similar to a criticism I've made of the left: don't just purge, 'dismantle', and trust that your radical and untested looniness will somehow make everything better. BUILD stuff! If you want to live in a socialist society, buy a bunch of land and be socialist (see below)! If you want to empower women, start a female-centered corporation, rather than taking over mine. If you want to increase the representation of black people in elite colleges, improve black K-12 education. Quotas and speech codes and bullying are easy and emotionally satisfying but they solve nothing. The left is terrible at building things, probably because they don't have any business owners (or immigrants, or veterans, or... ) in their ranks.
Alternately, while I do want trillions of dollars to stop flowing out of Arkadelphia, AK and Wilkes-Barre, PA in order to outfit luxurious student gyms and segregated dorms on the Stanford or Berkeley campuses, that won't fix the problem. To heal academia you need to create structures and institutions which reflect your values. To heal the practice of therapy you need to train working therapists in the language of virtue and discipline. To heal K-12 education you have to create not just schools which reflect your worldview (which they've done) but teacher's colleges and curriculum and credentialing organizations. The right is good at building certain things, but public institutions aren't among them.
Buil, build, build. It's hard and it's risky but it's ultimately the only reason humans exist, I think, and it's incredibly fulfilling. That and raising children. And writing.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/towards-a-democratic-socialism
I basically agree with this.
I think the priority of STEM is actually a cause of some of the decay that Liza attributes to ideology. Why? Because STEM champions a kind of systematic, scientific knowing that is at odds with humanism and with all kinds of ordinary experience.
A major reason for the popularity of critical theory and the like was that it offered a research program with the expectation of new, scientific discoveries, or failing that, a scientific critique of the sciences that could prevent them from lording it over the humanities. All of this was to be as far removed as possible from the “obvious” and “tedious” and “unscientific” traditional study of human life and feeling.
The more everyone thinks everything should be like STEM, the more the advocates of things that are not STEM, that cannot be STEM, such as humane learning, will feel compelled to lie and to disguise themselves in order to receive funding. It is this bad faith for the sake of funding and acclaim that I think explains bad learning. This is an entirely different problem from deeply held convictions about the political good.
You make a good point. I think this emphasis on system in STEM is culturally risky in promoting One Truth thinking, to which humanities has until recently been an antidote.
"Shapiro has disparaged the English degree in the past—a degree that, though ideologically charged today, has provided me, a recipient of two Ivy League English degrees, with an invaluable foundation that has allowed me to out-earn many of my peers in STEM through starting a business of my own and creating a robust social media platform to promote the literary arts."
Honest question: what did you gain (intellectually speaking, not credential-wise) from your English degree that you couldn't have gotten with a library card and free time to read? My guess (again, let me know if you disagree) is that you gained nothing, and that you would in fact have been better off with a library card and free time. (Once again, intellectually speaking. I realize that an Ivy credential is valuable even if you majored in complete-nonsense-but-I-was-smart-enough-to-get-into-Columbia.) At this point, I'm inclined to think that English literature cannot be reformed into a rigorous academic discipline worth studying on its own. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but the more I read/hear about the matter, the more convinced I am.
BTW, as you might know, in Slavic countries, degrees in the national literature typically contain a fair amount of linguistics and also (*gasp*) Old Church Slavonic. Now sure, you could ask: Why do people interested in Russian (Czech, Serbian...) literature need to know Old Church Slavonic? Reasonable question. One possible answer is that it helps weed out the dim and the lazy from the program.
What you gain is a rational, informed critique of your conclusions, something no library card can provide. Of course, today you can also receive a critique of your conclusion on Substack. But how do you determine which parts of that critique are rational and informed? You need to have received sufficient rational, informed critique of your conclusions before you develop the ability to detect rational, informed critique in the wider world. That's what universities are for, what they can provide that libraries can't. Whether they are actually providing that today is, of course, another question.
It's hard to stay focused and keep things in a big picture when you're struggling on alone (this is why autodidacts are so remarkable). The process works better in a community, which is what the college or university used to provide. Which is a valuable human experience in itself.
"What you gain is a rational, informed critique of your conclusions..." That's an important part of it, yes. There's also direction and guidance to fill in the gaps in your experience, the requirement to learn authors and genres you might have missed, and a comprehensive view of the historical context of literature. My own experience is with Chinese literature, which I read a heck of a lot of doing a linguistics BA, for which primary and secondary concentrations were required; my secondary was comparative literature, which was basically an excuse to read lots of Chinese literature and do three years of independent study in classical Chinese (I did Mandarin as part of my primary concentration, languages). The regular coursework involved lots of reading of translations in different genres from a historical perspective as well as for content; it was much like the survey courses in English literature curricula, similar to BA-level work. The independent study was much more detailed, closer to MA-level work, and involved filling in all the gaps in the regular coursework, as well as a fair amount of contemporary lit-crit blathering in addition to several of the most important classical Chinese texts in literary thought (the Wen Fu, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, A New Account of Tales of the World, and so on--though these I read almost entirely in English translation, which is less than MA-level work). In short, as the essential benefit, it took a structured approach that aimed at a comprehensive view of the subject from which I knew where to turn when doing anything on my own, and that ensured I didn't miss anything important through just browsing the library.
"Whether they are actually providing that today is, of course, another question."
Well, there you have it. And how do you get from here to there, pragmatically speaking? Because as far as I can tell, what English majors are trained to do is to look for any signs of queerness etc. even when none is there. That's how you make someone a *worse* reader and writer than he or she was before. And how are you going to fix it?
When I think about it, the answer I keep coming back to is "we're going to focus on old literature, because Chaucer, to say nothing of Beowulf, is legitimately hard and requires expert guidance." Fine. So the English degree becomes classics-lite (Anglo-Saxon and Middle English instead of Greek and Latin), but remains a reasonable academic pursuit. Is there any point at all, though, in teaching Amy Tan's novels? (Not picking on Amy Tan in particular. It goes for pretty much any contemporary writer.) I mean, it's fine for English majors in China, given that their main goal is to learn the English language. For native English speakers, though?
Well, yes, it will be difficult. So then the question becomes, is it worth doing? To which I believe the answer is yes. Not just for the better appreciation of old books but because it provides a better calibration of the mind to reality and a better calibration of the reason to sound argument.
See, it's not obvious to me that it's worth doing. Why try to rescue the English major in particular? Why not "train the mind" via (say) philosophy or classics? Philosophy is explicitly about evaluating arguments, and classics requires learning a dead language or two. When it comes to (say) 19th century literature, you could obviously teach some of it as a part of a history degree, in context.
Because those disciplines teach by proposition and art teaches by experience.
"Art teaches by experience." Yeah, that's the problem. I mean, why does literature move you? Probably because it causes you to empathize with a character (or loathe a character). Now go ahead and write a paper in which you explain that you sympathized with Lydia Bennet because she reminded you of your cousin Ashley, and like Lydia, Ashley was/needed blah-blah-blah. It may all be true, but an academic argument it is not. I don't see how you turn it into a rigorous academic discipline. Are you supposed to figure out how to talk about your cousin Ashley without mentioning her? And otherwise, it becomes "in the context of England circa 1800, Lydia Bennet blah-blah-blah." See? History.
But if Secondary Education spending only accounts for 7-14 percent of the ED budget, where does all the money go?
Back into the pockets of the DNC.
The money flows to curriculum development companies, test development companies, text book designers and SEL/DEI development companies. The DoEd gets to decide from which vendors districts can purchase. Everyone likes to say that the Fed Gov't has NO control over curriculum....but it does!....by funneling education tax dollars into those private companies and then making the states pick from those designated vendors. Public education (k-12) was much better when teachers were paid to develop curriculum for their own districts under the guidance of State DoEds. Before DoEd there was HEW (Health ,Education, Welfare) and they dealt with the loans and other NECESSARY issues, so we can absolutely get rid of the Dept as a whole (it's pretty small) and preserve what is needed. The people who will be hurt the most are those downstream in the private sector (Consultants, Developers, Vendors)....and I think the private "education" industry needs to be thrown out with the dirty bathwater. Just imagine if all of that $$$ actually made it into schools and to pay teachers a decent salary?
I appreciate the perspective but don't agree with the premise. Parents and their kids need to make decisions that will make them successful after college. Being saddled with debt because you're a philosophy major is not a byproduct of what the government funds or doesn't fund. It's byproduct of our own agency/decisions we make. A base understanding in Civics, Literature, Philosophy, etc. should be required in General Education but the idea that getting rid of the dept of education negatively impacts this is off-base. If Liberal Arts programs have already seen diminishing returns w/ enrollment than the issue isn't with dept of Ed. Other trend lines and external factors have impacted this.
Tanya is my friend and is smart knows when the brain developed not 12 for GAC
Do you know about Chloe Cole ? She isa victim of the Education deptsrment. California has alwats had definded schools and only rich places like Lafatte have $ . Vouchers are fair . Democrats are full of men who lie and doctors who lie.