I am learning way more through internet discussions and self-directed book learning than in college

[unusualmusic_lj_archive]

Educating ourselves into Oblivion

It's simply not enough to prepare students for a job: We need to prepare them for life, while challenging them to think beyond the confines of their often parochial and provincial upbringings. (As a child of the working class from a provincial background, I speak from experience.) And here's one compelling lesson all of us, students and teachers alike, need to relearn constantly: If you view education in purely instrumental terms as a way to a higher-paying job—if it's merely a mechanism for mass customization within a marketplace of ephemeral consumer goods—you've effectively given a free pass to the prevailing machinery of power and those who run it.
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Three Realities of Higher Ed

What do torture, a major recession, and two debilitating wars have to do with our educational system? My guess: plenty. These are the three most immediate realities of a system that fails to challenge, or even critique, authority in any meaningful way. They are bills that are now long overdue thanks, in part, to that system's technocratic bias and pedagogical shortfalls—thanks, that is, to what we are taught to see and not see, regard and disregard, value and dismiss.

Over the last two decades, higher education, like the housing market, enjoyed its own growth bubble, characterized by rising enrollments, fancier high-tech facilities, and ballooning endowments. Americans invested heavily in these derivative products as part of an educational surge that may prove at least as expensive and one-dimensional as our military surges in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As usual, the humanities were allowed to wither. Don't know much about history? Go ahead and authorize waterboarding, even though the U.S. prosecuted it as a war crime after World War II. Don't know much about geography? Go ahead and send our troops into mountainous Afghanistan, that "graveyard of empires," and allow them to be swallowed up by the terrain as they fight a seemingly endless war.

Perhaps I'm biased because I teach history, but here's a fact to consider: Unless a cadet at the Air Force Academy (where I once taught) decides to major in the subject, he or she is never required to take a U.S. history course. Cadets are, however, required to take a mind-boggling array of required courses in various engineering and scientific disciplines as well as calculus. Or civilians, chew on this: At the Pennsylvania College of Technology, where I currently teach, of the roughly 6,600 students currently enrolled, only 30 took a course this semester on U.S. history since the Civil War, and only three were programmatically required to do so.

We don't have to worry about our college graduates forgetting the lessons of history—not when they never learned them to begin with.MORE

Do you know how fucking scary that last part is?

Comments

[miaryann.livejournal.com]

If you view education in purely instrumental terms as a way to a higher-paying job—if it's merely a mechanism for mass customization within a marketplace of ephemeral consumer goods—you've effectively given a free pass to the prevailing machinery of power and those who run it.

YES YES YES.

[la-vie-noire.livejournal.com]

Not from US, but pretty great article. Higher level education is exactly the same here. I wonder why./sarcasm

[leneypoo.livejournal.com]

Even in US History Classes, it's not like many actually get to World War I not to even talk about World War II. I passed an AP US History Exam (and I got college credit for it) knowing only the barest of trivia about the 20th century.

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

yeah, for us we never got to vietname war and all the modern empire stuff. people have no context for understand what's going on now.

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

*Vietnam

[omnivorously.livejournal.com]

regarding your subject: I think I'll find the same thing true for me. I wish I'd stayed out of college until I really knew what I wanted from it. I've learned what I don't want, what I find disgusting about academia - but it was expensive, and I might have been learning what I do like, where I do want to be.