Steve H. at Hog on Ice has an excellent rant on what it means to be a Liberal Arts Major in these days. Not much it seems...
The other day I was talking to someone--Mox, I think--when I went off on a rant about the uselessness of a liberal arts education. I think I'll repeat myself here, to see how many people I annoy. I believe that if you went to college and majored in something like English or Art History, you received absolutely nothing of value, and your parents should be allowed to sue you for the tuition. I know the English majors will start whining now, from their computers at the companies where they work as cab dispatchers and office managers. And I suppose some smart ass will remind me that "liberal arts" is supposed to include math and music and some sciences, even though no one uses the term to include those things now. Put a sock in it. As usual, I have made up my mind. Columbia University solicited an application from me because I did real well on the verbal SAT. Sorry, I mean "I done real well." Once I got there, I thought for a while that I might be an English major, but then I got distracted by architecture and biology and also beer. The English degree never panned out. But I did take a few literature courses. What a laugh. You read five books--or the Cliff's Notes for five books--you take an easy exam in which you remind the professor how right his opinions about Dickens are, and you get either an A or a B+. Meanwhile, what are REAL students doing? Learning calculus. Working on Rachmaninov preludes. Building circuits. Developing the ability to read and write foreign languages. But don't feel bad. At a party, when you're fifty, you'll be able to tell people what your professor thought of Chaucer and pretend you came up with it all by yourself.A bit more:
Look, any person of substance reads. In the ten years following college, you should end up reading more fiction than you would have in school, had you become an English major. And unless you're in a coma, you'll form your own opinions. Total cost? Maybe five hundred bucks. Compare that with paying a hundred thousand to have some pathetic old hipster doofus reward you for regurgitating his opinions. If you really want to know what educated people think of the books you read, buy the Cliff's Notes and read literary criticism. It's insane to pay someone an amount that would make a great down payment on a house, just so he can tell you things you could easily learn on your own.And what got Steve onto this train of thought?
I was thinking about this in connection with Ward Churchill. This boob knows absolutely nothing you can't learn on your own in a month of reading, yet he gets a hundred grand or so per year to "teach" kids. And universities are packed full of people just like him. People who teach courses on TV shows and comic books. Film professors. Gay studies. Women's studies. I think these people are all parasites. And the more of them we hire and support, the more liberal B.S. goes into our kids' heads. One thing I loved about studying math and physics was that when you were right, you were right, and it didn't matter whether you kissed the teacher's ass or baked him cookies or went to see him in his office and pretended to be his friend. And I actually learned. I got value for the money I paid.There's more -- check it out... Hog on Ice is one of the blogs I check out every day -- with good reason...
