Some students seem to want rigor and the classics in the humanities
As this article relates [hat tip: Powerline]:
…[U]ndergraduates…vote with their feet. If an English department’s chairman tells the dean, “We’ve got to hire someone in this new area of ____,” the dean replies, “But you can’t even get your existing courses half-filled.” If, however, a parent calls and grumbles, “I’m paying lots of money, and my daughter can’t get into any of the English classes she wants,” well, that calls for action.
…But right now, nothing is more crucial than the preferences of 19-year-olds.
And as humanities enrollments have slipped, in some places precipitously, instructors have felt pressure to make their courses more relevant and less rigorous. The typical student searching for a course of study won’t be attracted by syllabi filled with old plays and 400 pages of reading each week. Contemporary and multicultural materials, more media, less reading and fewer writing assignments, and definitely no poetry ”” that’s the prescription for building enrollments.
However, a group of professors at the University of Oklahoma decided to buck that trend and offer a course with a more traditional approach. And there were a surprising number of students who choose to enroll and tackle the offerings of a bunch of dead white guys:
When enrollment opened last semester, the unexpected happened. The course filled up within minutes. Harper had already warned his students, “This is the hardest class you will ever take.” The syllabus was posted online in advance, so that students knew exactly what they were getting into. The course meets a general-education requirement at Oklahoma, but so do many other courses with half the workload. To accommodate the unexpected demand, the class was expanded from 22 to 30 students, the maximum number that the assigned classroom could hold.
Now, 30 students at a state university is not a whole lot. But still, it’s more than was expected, enough to be viable, and probably doesn’t represent the maximum who were interested.
There are other indications that a significant number of students are hungry for such things. One of them is the popularity of Jordan Peterson, and I don’t mean just his self-help books or his politics, but his actual courses and their actual content. Of course, he is an especially riveting lecturer (and very telegenic) and that helps, too. But it does seem as though a goodly number of students would prefer to be challenged and are not shying away from a more traditional type of subject matter in the humanities.
By the way, back when I was in college I probably wouldn’t have numbered among them. I entered the university at a time when what was then known as Western Civ courses were being eliminated, and I was relieved that I never had to take one. That said, I voluntarily took a few courses more or less in that ballpark (for example, one in what was called Old Testament, and one in general political history and theory), and I already had a background in quite a few classical works from high school. In those days, the honors programs in an ordinary New York high school such as mine made its students read a surprising number of heavy-duty works of the Western Civilization variety.
There was a very relevant comment I saw on the Web a couple of years ago which said something like, “We used to teach Greek and Latin in High Schools, and now we teach remedial English in College.”
And, indeed when, out of curiosity, I looked up the kinds of subjects taught in some high schools, say, around 1900 or earlier, they did teach Greek and Latin, and a lot of other subjects that we now teach in college.
Moreover, I ran into people asserting that the content of those “high school” classes back then was much more challenging that the courses on the same general subject are today.
From personal experience of 30 years as a reference librarian dealing with “college graduates” I can say that the old Sam Cooke song is pretty accurate i.e. “Don’t know much about History, Don’t know much about Geography…”
In 1962 I spent a year as my Navy post graduate schooling doing post-graduate studies in math, meteorology, physics, computer programming, and statistics at San Diego State University. Not a school with a huge academic reputation, they were intent on establishing a reputation for difficulty. The professors all demanded high standards and were very quick to drop students whose work didn’t meet their standards. In fact, the school policy seemed to be aimed at eliminating the deadwood from college so they wouldn’t be foisting incompetents on the business world. The hard-nosed attitude and academic rigor was much more pronounced than my alma mater, the University of Colorado. I had to study very hard to keep up in my classes.
I often wonder what it is like there today. Surely the standards cannot have fallen as much as they have in many much more prestigious schools?
In those days, the honors programs in an ordinary New York high school such as mine made its students read a surprising number of heavy-duty works of the Western Civilization variety.
Ditto for my high school.
Having developed a very strong dislike for the junior literary critic model used for teaching composition in high school, I avoided English classes in college- I had only two. The Shakespeare class I took was the only English class past 8th grade that I liked.
I have tried to make up in later years for my avoidance of literature classes in college.
The problem is largely caused by the fact that most colleges no longer require a ‘core’ curriculum. I had a friend who graduated from Brown University with honors and yet never took a single course in math or science.
When I started college, in the dark ages of the early sixties my first 2 years were almost exclusively composed of core requirements. It wasn’t until my third year that I was able to focus on my major beyond the most basic courses. Graduation in any field required completion of the ‘core’ curriculum.
The ‘core’ curriculum also served as a binding agent for the student body. We had so much in common and from that we got a sense of community and accomplishment.
I’ve always felt that the courses I took outside my major contributed to my interest in the world and greatly enhanced my happiness in life. How sad to have lost that.
If the news that occasionally leaks out is to be believed, our Universities are at the center of the U.S. version of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and training up our very own, very expensive, Red Guards.
These days I would not want to be a student, particularly a student of the Humanities, at any of these supposed institutions of “higher learning,” or a professor who must walk through a political/cultural minefield every day, watching every word he says and every idea he introduces as he teaches.
A major cultural institution that has been a keystone of Western civilization for a thousand years or more seems to be determined to do it’s utmost to discredit itself; to be committing suicide.
Perhaps the much less expensive “distance learning” will fill the void, or perhaps our Universities will come to their senses and throw off the spell of the Left.
It seems more likely that “the horse will sing”
In any case, it seems to me that it is increasingly hard to wade though the blizzard of information, and to be able to discern what is true and what is propaganda; a line of crap, deliberately designed to get us to think or act in the particular way that the purveyor of that particular pile of crap wants us to.
St John’s College at Annapolis and Santa Fe has based its curriculum on the Great Books since 1937. I thought of applying when I was a teen.
St John’s is still going strong so far as I can tell.
Higher education today is best understood as a jobs program, though not primarily for faculty (in every state, its higher education system is the largest state employer). The government pays students to attend, or lends them money to do so at below market rates, even at the private universities.
That is why standards have fallen. Butts in seats keep the government money coming in to the private and public universities. That money cannot pile up in bank vaults, it must be spent: on more and expensive amenities to attract more butts in seats, on more deans and deanlets, on new buildings and new programs.
It cannot go on forever, and will not.
In the days when universities educated the clergy and the sons of gentlemen of leisure it was easy to keep the humanities pure.
Snow on Pine:
Around 1900, high schools were the equivalent of college today, or even more exclusive in terms of what percentage of young people actually got that far with their education. In 1899-1900, 6.8% of high school age teens graduated from high school. The percentages have steadily increased since then, so that in 1963-1964 it was 76.7%. Most of the increase occurred between 1910 and 1940. I’m having some trouble finding the present percentage of high-school-age students who graduate from high school, but I imagine it’s at least 75% and probably quite a bit higher than that, although I’m not sure. Of that group, the majority go on to college, as well.
This means that the pool from which a high school draws is very different now than in 1900, although it’s probably not as different now than in the 1960s or 1970s, except for the fact that there are more students whose first language (or maybe even second language) is not English, and who have not been forced to learn English in the way they used to be forced.
I just applied to UNM for the Summer session. The plan is to take math and compsci because I like those subjects and because I don’t think they will be too watered down as the humanities apparently are.
I’ll be curious to see what campus life feels like.
I see a few commenters mentioning core courses, and I see from my own children’s US college education that they compose at least half of the requirement.
Having grown up in the UK I’ve always found this core requirement strange. In University in the UK all study is in the major or very closely related subjects. I guess this explains why it only takes three years to graduate there and why there is less need for specialized masters degrees.
Snow on Pine Says:
April 2nd, 2018 at 1:56 pm
There was a very relevant comment I saw on the Web a couple of years ago which said something like, “We used to teach Greek and Latin in High Schools, and now we teach remedial English in College.”
* * *
Comments on the original article are supporting Snow’s experience and Neo’s stats.
Yet at the same time I read about how super-competitive the kids are to get into top schools. How educated are they compared to previous generations?
It is often said that fans of conspiracy theories are so enamored of them because they tie everything together in one nice, neat package; believed in wholeheartedly and exclusively they can explain anything and everything.
Unfortunately–or fortunately–about a decade ago I stumbled across the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, a pre-WWII Italian Communist Party member and Marxist theoretician.
Gramsci, whose ideas are well known on college campuses, believed that Communists/Leftists could not overcome the West though military means.
Instead, Gramsci believed that the Communists/the Left could overcome the West through a more patient, incremental, (eventually) multi-generational, all-spectrum campaign of propaganda and subversion that attacked, weakened, subverted, destroyed and slowly, eventually, replaced all of the major building blocks, values, and ideals of Western bourgeois societies, and their leadership class, with those of the Left.
New electronic communication media where on the horizon in the late 1930s, and this development inspired Gramsci’s plan, as he saw the potential of such media eventually being able to penetrate every nook and cranny of a society and culture, and of having increasing and vast influence.
Thus, an all media propaganda campaign featuring various “opinion makers,” “thought leaders,”–educators, academics, and experts, celebrities, sports figures, religious leaders, artists–playwrights, novelists, painters, actors, script writers, musicians and song writers–using all forms of media–radio, then TV, movies, dance, the visual arts, music videos, video games, the theater, books, and even music lyrics–as vehicles to attack, subvert, and weaken a whole host of key cultural/social institutions, among them the traditional “Iron Triangle” of Home-School and Church, and the ideas, values, behaviors, world-view, and expectations underpinning them.
The beauty of this was that it didn’t even have to be a centrally directed campaign, run out of the Comintern, or some military HQ in the Kremlin.
Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions/the culture” could function largely on it’s own, through what has been termed a “conspiracy of shared values,” in which those on the Left, imbued with a similar world-view, reading many of the same publications, listening to the same speakers, and exposed to and fervently holding the same political ideas, carry out their subversive activities independently, one incremental step at a time, each in their own sphere of influence.
It is true that unpredictable events and various economic forces have been major factors shaping our history, but such forces can also be “nudged” in one direction or the other, and/or can be taken advantage of (as we have been told, “never let a good crisis go to waste”).
Granted these other major factors at work, It still seems to me that there is quite a bit of evidence for the success of Gramsci’s plan of attack, and it’s influence, which can be seen all around us. Moreover, it furnishes an ideological/a political explanation, for instance, of why universities have eliminated the common core of essential Humanities classes about the origin of key ideas of Western civilization, it’s major thinkers and their ideas, and it’s History that students were formerly forced to take.
Eliminate these classes, this particular knowledge, and you eliminate a central core of knowledge and ideas that used to form a cohesive common bond among all college graduates; that informs them, offers them a set of values, and in some sense directs their course through the world.
That knowledge that everyone had in common was one of the elements that help to create and sustain our social and cultural cohesion; given this common knowledge, in a lot of ways, we were “all on the same page.”
The same goal of disruption of social cohesion is even more successfully served by eliminating, dumbing down, and twisting the traditional teachings in K-12 education, for Balkanizing everyone, and emphasizing ethnic identity, language, and customs i.e. tribalism, as a way to fracture cultural cohesion and weaken our culture/society.
Saul Alinsky advised Leftist agitators to “rub raw the sores of discontent,” and then to go to those now agitated, now more discontented, and tell them that you had the solution to their problems, the ways to eliminate their discontent.
What better way to “rub” than to subvert the Iron Triangle, thus increasing individual dissatisfaction, leading to a disruption of social cohesion, and corresponding increasing levels of violence and alienation.
Look at the ruins of a traditional social/cultural institution, ideal, or concept, expectation or behavior, and you can see how Gramsci’s ideas, successfully carried out, might have lead to it’s weakening, transformation, destruction, or parasitization.
@huxley:Yet at the same time I read about how super-competitive the kids are to get into top schools. How educated are they compared to previous generations?
“Educated” and “competitive to get into top school” are completely different concepts. Education can be had for free or nearly so. Top schools do not teach different subject matter and generally spend much less effort on instruction than lower-ranked schools.
Where you go to college has little effect on the education you receive. It makes every difference in terms of the network of people you will encounter.
Frederick: To be sure education can be had for free or nearly so. I had almost no academic training in what became my career — computer programming.
However, today’s kids trying to get into top schools are getting top grades and top SAT scores and they work damn hard to do so. I’m wondering how that compares with a decent high school education from the past.
I imagine it depends on what they are tested for these days and I’m out of touch.
I was an English major at UC Berkeley in the mid 60s and I was halfway through my four year stint when th e University decided to go from Semesters (two plus summer study ) to quarters.
The immediate upshot was that every course required for the major went from semester length to quarter length with zero change in the syllabus and lessons from the semester. After all, profs could not be expected to do extra work and retrofit their lesson plans, could they?
The result? Terrible. Try getting through 12-16 18th century English novels in less time than it takes to give a critical scholarly read to say “Moby Dick”.
I did it but I spent a fortune on Fybate Notes.
I took 4 years of Latin in high school (actually 3 years, but I got credit for the 4th when I was the only student of my class-year left standing — and that was the end of Latin forever at that school). I had read Edith Hamilton’s Greek Myths when I was 9 and the stories had firmly stuck in my mind. And so I was interested in
the adventures of Aeneas, whose exploits mimicked those of Odysseus. I also thought that Latin would serve me as a building block for writing well in English.
One of the other students in Latin class, a year older than me, the only black — was Danny Bell. He got a solid B, and contra to what one might imagine, he was not from a rich family, nor did he grow up in a white neighborhood. He was on the football team (as a halfback), goodlooking and reasonably popular among other black students at Washington High (which was 20% black). Why he chose to take Latin I don’t know.
As I may have commented here in the past, I was very struck by the teaching of my graduate school professor of Chinese History, and Chinese Communist Ideology, who pointed out that, according to the Chinese Communist Party, every aspect of education was a political act.
In the sense that, in teaching you had only a limited amount of time to cover a subject and, thus, had to make a series of decisions about what and how to teach, what to include and what not to, what to emphasize and what to de-emphasize or even ignore, and this shaped your approach–what you taught–and that influenced your students and eventually had political consequences–how your students thought, what they thought, and what they thought about, what they considered important, how they viewed the world and themselves, their values, and the decisions they made.
In our case, here in the U.S., what we have seen happen is the Left’s incremental subversion and takeover of our educational system (and not even a hostile takeover, because I never saw any indication of even a little spirited resistance to the Left’s takeover) and their gradual substitution of their world view, their set of priorities, and curriculum choices.
The world-view and knowledge they want to present supplanting what had been traditional here in America, apparently in an attempt to produce a very propagandized, much more pliable Communist “New Man,” one both ignorant of and hostile to traditional American values.
It was not a coincidence that unrepentant urban terrorist Bill Ayres got a quickie degree in Education, and proceeded to spend decades writing many of the most popular and influential textbooks, suggested reading lists, and model curriculums used by teaching colleges all over the U.S.
I’m guessing that he thought that getting into the teaching racket would be much more effective in advancing his Leftist ideology than bomb throwing could ever be.
Full credit to the University of Oklahoma. The Sooners now have a university as good as its football team.
I graduated with a major in English from Columbia in ’64 and when I watch Jordan Peterson lecture on YouTube I can’t say I had anyone as good, but more importantly, as relevant to how I might live my life. I was exposed to great English literature and gleaned a lot about how to live my life from those books – probably most from Joyce’s Ulysses which taught me that the possibility of leading an heroic life as open anew to every generation, and Neumann’s Origin and History of Consciousness that gave me a road map from which to understand both my individual development and the collective development of human consciousness and the particular form of it we call Western Culture. There is a long video of Peterson conversing with Camille Paglia in which they touch directly on the state of contemporary higher education and mention in passing that Neumann’s work is itself an effective inoculation against the unholy combination of French Postmodernism and Marxism that currently infests the Humanities education.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-hIVnmUdXM
“…inoculation…”
Seems like essential reading, especially today. Thanks for the tip.
Rereading “1984” every couple of years might also serve as a kind of booster shot of sorts.
Lorenz Gude – Thanks for the tip, and the link.
@huxley:today’s kids trying to get into top schools are getting top grades and top SAT scores and they work damn hard to do so.
Grades measure conformity, not education, and have been inflating all around the country over the last 40 years: primary and secondary education also need to keep butts in seats to preserve funding.
And the SAT has been renormed to lump all the highest-scoring students together and spread out scores among the average students, as well as the subject matter being changed several times since 1994.
I don’t doubt that today’s students work hard. But what they work hard at is not educating themselves, but at checking off the boxes required for passing to the next stage.
Frederick: Could be, but I don’t find much hard information in your comment. The SAT claims are interesting (though unsourced), however don’t address my concerns about what the top students are learning.
Since the competition for the top schools has increased substantially in just the past ten years that might be a countervailing force sufficient to overcome the overall sagging of high school education.
http://media.thecrimson.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/photos/2015/04/01/040135_1305694.jpg
One can learn from ticking off boxes. At my parochial schools we got plenty of drilling to juice our test scores so the schools would look good.
Seems to me it depends on what is taught. From what I can tell that is going downhill. Dr. Gelernter of Yale said:
My students today are much less obnoxious. Much more likable than I and my friends used to be, but they are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. You tell yourself stories; it’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the 20th century — just sees a fog. A blank. Has the vaguest idea of who Winston Churchill was or why he mattered. And maybe has no image of Teddy Roosevelt, let’s say, at all. I mean, these are people who — We have failed.
http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/david-gelernter-transcript/
I was flabbergasted. Are things truly this bad? Gelernter teaches computer science so maybe his students are so oriented to the hard sciences they may have missed Beethoven.
Then again I don’t recall being “taught” Beethoven. He was just part of the world — the Huntley and Brinkley Report, Disney’s Fantasia, Bugs Bunny, the Nine Symphonies for sale at $9.99 in magazine ads, even a Joni Mitchell song etc.
In an interview Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer, reminisced about the 1960s, about how booked you had to be on Marx, Freud, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, “Moby Dick,” and so on to hold your head up in a Berkeley cafe.
Those were different times.
People have a hard time questioning their scientific authorities or Dear Leaders like political Congresscritters and others with more gravitas plus prestige.
The SAT claims are interesting (though unsourced), however don’t address my concerns about what the top students are learning.
They are learning how to regurgitate enforced indoctrination. Sure, some of the info is correct or accurate, but sooner or later people will realize that indoctrinated youths are not a good idea. Even if that generation is correct about policy and metaphysics and epistemology and ethics and politics… doesn’t mean the next graduation class is going to buy into the same moderate stances.
Without the youths being taught to Question Authority, people are just going to end up dead like Socrates: he died mostly because people didn’t want him teaching the youths how to question the authorities and elders.
I was flabbergasted. Are things truly this bad? Gelernter teaches computer science so maybe his students are so oriented to the hard sciences they may have missed Beethoven.
Ignorance is actually a good thing compared to the indoctrinated religious fanatics who believe something is true because their professors and peers claim it to be true. Global Warming became a Gaia cult hoax when the consensus opinion of scientists became “we have to toe the party line or lose our grants”. If the disagreement faction had been given the due respect of academic integrity and intellectual respect, things might have gone another way. But humans are spineless and also taught to obey their authorities. When they come across people questioning certain things, they trigger and go ballistic.
For Hussein, criticism became racism. And for Trum, his supporters and potential supporters are so afraid of the Left that they get triggered over his name becoming a nickname. Now it is an attack or assault or insult for them that they need safe spaces for. Kind of sad for people who think they are better than Leftists and Social Justice Whores. It’s only going to get worst. In Malmo, it started with “you are making insults”, and political correctness proceeded progressively from there vis a vis Islam.
Snow on Pine Says:
April 2nd, 2018 at 11:12 pm
One of Mao’s best decisions for totalitarian control was to switch from traditional Chinese to simplified Chinese writing. This meant that everything China’s culture had produced over the years, was no longer readable by the Mao generation. Thus the youths worshiped Chairman Mao as their grand daddy and father god figure. Kind of hard to figure out what Mao did if everything that had the clues became unreadable.
Now it has gotten slightly better because Simplified Chinese can be converted to Traditional and vice a versa, but the damage has been done. The Chinese know next to nothing about the martial arts traditions, the political and lineages passed down in China’s long history. Only Taiwan managed to save a lot of relics and history, because they left the mainland after losing the civil war.
What is most ironic is that the Chinese oligarchy of communist party officials now want to make money off of Wushu. China’s WuShu is pretty pathetic since Mao killed and exiled and chased out most of the old martial arts families, generals, military families, and warrior philosophers. Some of the teachers went to Vietnam, Japan, Hong Kong, America, and Europe. So the West now has more “martial arts” hidden techniques and training methods than the Chinese did, apart from the Taoists, Buddhists, and Chen village guys.
but I don’t find much hard information in your comment.
Primary sources are better than secondary and tertiary sources.
The experiences and observations of people who experienced the target period of education is considered part of primary sources. Hard or soft is irrelevant: just a personal opinion or preference.
Saul Alinsky advised Leftist agitators to “rub raw the sores of discontent,” and then to go to those now agitated, now more discontented, and tell them that you had the solution to their problems, the ways to eliminate their discontent.
It is classic red vs blue and divide and then conquer. Hussein comes to power promising to save the Left from the traitors and evil conservatives in the US. Trum comes to power promising to save us from the Leftist alliance, HRC, Clintons, Bushes, and so on.
Shrugs. Same con game, different face.
Around 1900, high schools were the equivalent of college today, or even more exclusive in terms of what percentage of young people actually got that far with their education. -Neo
It would explain why Japanese high schools often are more like US colleges, when I saw the primary sources and testimonies.
The top international students are learning that if they aren’t a minority, it doesn’t matter too much what their test scores are. The quotas have already been allocated (for the US). A lot of slots also get taken up by fake red Indians like Watchahontas.
On another note, I say a purported screenshot of Hogg’s Reddit account which went on a rant about how his test scores doesn’t get him into college.
It’s not just that a pretty thorough job has been done of dumbing down many K through graduate school curriculums, especially those in the Humanities–traditional curriculums and subjects quite often replaced by Leftist indoctrination, and twaddle, or that whole subjects, historical figures, and areas of knowledge have just been disappeared or transmogrified–but that what used to be the accompanying key moral and ethical education that was derived from Christianity has also been stripped away.
We’re not just talking about the Ten Commandments, we’re talking about a whole bunch of expectations, behaviors, attitudes, and cultural norms that were derived from them, and from Christianity in general–Protestant work ethic things like honesty, the value of hard work, trying to do a good job, showing up on time, treating those you work for and customers with respect.
Based on the things I’ve encountered, I’d say that along with a sharp decline in knowledge there has also been a sharp decline in the whole panoply of attitudes and behaviors that can be summed up as the Protestant work ethic.
P.S.–It hasn’t helped either that there has also apparently been a sharp decline in the number of people who can do basic arithmetic.
I guess we always assume that others have read what we have read and studied what we have studied.
In my high school, you took English, and you took it for 4 years. And it was, at least for the last 3, English literature. Math and gym also 4 years mandatory. Science 4 years mandatory. Foreign languages mandatory, civics, American and world history, all mandatory at the C. Prep level.
It was only in the last year that we got to read some of the fun stuff in English, (as opposed to taking turns reading Chaucer aloud) … Animal Farm, Brave New World.
Was not all fun though, even as seniors. We we were as you might expect subjected to those famous teen years coming-of-age crap, novels; The Chosen Catcher in The Separate Peace.
They probably pass those out in 10th grade now. They were of course, all about snots and jerks and annoying types you would rather punch out than waste time talking to or understanding/empathizing with. That was the big problem with most “literature” as I saw it. What was sold as its greatest, if subliminally delivered, aim and virtue, i.e., the promotion of empathy, seemed to me to be its most annoying characteristic.
I tried, with partial success, to avoid literature classes in the university. Was extremely offended at the notion that these cossetted dweeb literature professors took themselves seriously as men of ideas; or worse, as the moral and political peers of guys who could throw a football, or do calculus; rather than humbly acknowledging themselves and their status as Ivory Tower Pond Scum. At that point, I agreed with Plato as to what should be done with the product of these snide, trembling-with-indignation, round shouldered emotionalists who called themselves “poets”. [Beowulf, the Old English corpus, and the Iliad excepted.]
I have a tendency to think now, that studying philosophy for any protracted period of time, tends to reinforce that attitude: i.e., a lack of appreciation for, or even hostility toward, the character and personality traits (perhaps judged stereotypically and unfairly) of writers.
I have a tendency to think now, that studying philosophy for any protracted period of time, tends to reinforce that attitude: i.e., a lack of appreciation for, or even hostility toward, the character and personality traits (perhaps judged stereotypically and unfairly) of writers.
DNW: Most of the math/science/philosopher people I’ve known — Plato notwithstanding — appreciate the arts and literature. Sometimes quite a lot.
I’ve met some impressive professors in those areas too. You might want to get out more.
Admittedly today the arts and lit are at a low point. My friends aren’t reading J.M. Coetzee (Nobel Prize for Literature 2003) like they were reading James Joyce.
DNW:
Well, you may be younger than I am, because we never got to read ANY of the “fun stuff” in school.
The funnest novels I ever read in school were Ethan Frome and Moby Dick.
Barrel of laughs, right? But they were very good.
On the other hand, I very much enjoyed Catcher in the Rye, which I read on my own.
huxley:
DNW: Most of the math/science/philosopher people I’ve known – Plato notwithstanding – appreciate the arts and literature. Sometimes quite a lot.
Appreciating the arts and literature, and appreciating how they are taught in the academy, are two distinct issues. Call it Shakespeare versus Professor Critical Theory Gender Whatever. Though I should point out that my dislike of English/literature teaching predated Critical Theory what have you. When I was a student, my objection was teaching composition via literary criticism.
Literature is too valuable to have it corrupted by teachers and professors.
Gringo sez “Literature is too valuable to have it corrupted by teachers and professors.”
Which is why Gramsci’s approach has been so successful.
Gramsci is hardly new to many of us here, ‘Snow on Pine’.
Mussolini had him shot. We owe him thanks for that, though it was too late.
Gringo: DNW was making a global statement about the arts and lit going back to Plato, as well as his experiences in academia before the studies profs emerged.
I thought he was unfair.
Was I? Please reread what I actually said about whom.
There’s a natural tendency in all of us to react to propositions which we find uncongenial as if they constitute broader judgments than they actually do.
Well I certainly left no doubts about the moral contempt I felt for ” the character and personality traits ” of literature professors and writers by and large, even as I admitted that I ” (perhaps judged stereotypically and unfairly) ” concerning them.
There are exceptions of course. For every 30 of the Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal kind who deserve a smack in the chops with a rawhide mallet (I said “deserve”), there may be one Walker Percy, or William Golding.
And for every 100 or 200 professors of literature like I had, there may be, I would guess, one John Gardner (Grendel, October Light).
Yeah. Barrel of laughs.
I never read Ethan Frome, and though it rang a bell, I had to look up the synopsis.
Not thinking to even look at the author, I thought to myself, “Geez, that sounds like a short story out of that anthology or book my dad had used high school … one tale after another of forlorn hopelessness, the brief illusion of escape, and ironic doom.”
Then I saw the name. “Edith Wharton” Well …. noooo woooonderrrrr. Ha.
Screw ’em. “Rigged Tales by and for Depressives and Nihilists”” is what they should be called.
No, not all of them. “The Third Ingredient” by O Henry was fine. But lots of tales equivalent to the one about a flinty miser playing finders keepers in town with a timid country neighbor’s dropped buck; only to find out – when said miser returned to his country home – that the meek neighbor had partly come to town on behalf of the miser’s own wife; in order to use the dollar to buy medicine for the miser’s own sickly kid. Too late. Cough, hack, plop, and Hazen Kinch’s cherished little MiniMe back home bites the dust because Daddy is malicious.
Now I think I’ll go read some 19th Century Russian literature for uplift …
DNW: I read your post and I read it close a la the “close reading” I learned from professors you despise.
I stand by what I said.
My catholic school education didn’t include any fun stuff either, not even “Brave New World,” much less “Catcher in the Rye.”
Geez. We had to read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.” I bailed on that one and settled with the Cliff Notes.
A philosopher BA cum JD friend tells me our Catholic high school education is equivalent to two years of college these days.
Maybe. I didn’t much enjoy Catholic school but I did know we got an edju-ma-cation.
Huxley,
Try rereading, not “close reading”; and let the text speak for itself.
If all else fails, you may have to resort to quoting.
I speak personally of, “a lack of appreciation for, or even hostility toward, the character and personality traits (perhaps judged stereotypically and unfairly) of writers.”
You assert that I, to abstract one proposition,
” was making a global statement about the arts and lit going back to Plato, …”
See? It’s not so hard to get it straight.
Snow on Pine Says:
April 3rd, 2018 at 1:38 pm
P.S.—It hasn’t helped either that there has also apparently been a sharp decline in the number of people who can do basic arithmetic.
* * *
There is a great book, called “Innumeracy,” which is an analog to illiteracy only about numerical concepts.
The basic arithmetic thing is part of that, the lowest rung of the ladder. I’m always having to tell cashiers how to do change, if their register doesn’t compute it for them.
PS to Snow: great set of comments today; they could be made into a good blog post.
Frederick Says:
April 2nd, 2018 at 7:14 pm
Where you go to college has little effect on the education you receive. It makes every difference in terms of the network of people you will encounter.
* * *
Indeed.
Students in the Ivies especially are looking to become part of a “brand” that will pay off later.
I went to Williams College in 1982-86, at a time when “Women’s/Black Studies” departments were just starting to take hold. I mostly avoided the English department, but since I had been a high school drama geek I took a class in Shakespeare, which was plenty rigorous even though we watched a couple of movies in class.
I have no doubt that, like me, there are still plenty of students who, when they sign up for a course in “English Literature”, actually want to study English literature (even if it’s difficult and challenging), not be indoctrinated in “Transgressive Genderqueer Narratives in Colonial Literary Discourse” or what have you.
(And as a History major, I was required to take History 301 Western Civilization, which was taught by a very old-school professor emeritus who didn’t hold with any newfangled nonsense. I loved that class.)
AesopFan–
My favorite demonstrations of innumeracy came from the local Giant.
First, the college-age worker behind the deli counter who was flummoxed when I asked her to cut me 2/3ds of a pound of ham, and had to turn to the older woman working with her and shout, “how much is 2/3rds?”
Finally, the time when we wanted to buy some chicken that was on sale, and had a coupon that entitled us to a further discount.
Figuring our discount–a simple one that both my wife and myself had correctly figured out in our heads in a second or two–required first the cashier, then another additional cashier, then, finally, the manager–all three busily working their calculators to take 10 or more minutes to give us a 70% total discount instead of the 30% discount we were entitled to.
We took it.
miklos, says:
So was I. Or so I thought, until I actually read some of it. Not in Latin, and not even in English.
Maybe I missed something but I found reading it [Virgil’s Aeneid- Fitzgerald’s I think] so unrewarding that I could not do more than force myself to skim through it as a kind of duty in order to have some idea of what it was like.
In contrast to the Iliad, I at least, found it difficult to cut through [or bracket] the mythological grease in order to better enjoy it: by doing a kind of parallel reading which mentally edits out and/or psychologizes the Greek gods. It doesn’t always work; as when someone, Paris for example, is plucked from certain doom on the battlefield and transported back to safety, but I could more or less manage it with the Iliad.
Aeneas the possibly historical Trojan survivor of the fall of Troy, is intriguing. At least as much as Hereward the Wake, King Arthur or other possibly semi-historical, great upheaval, survivors.
It probably did, as you do.
And now my nomination for Neo’s annual “Gosh Awfulist Rotten Bad Classics Award”
For its failed promise of much desired insight.
For its stilted eye-glazing delivery which even passing centuries and intervening translations cannot lessen
For its being a crushing all-around disappointment despite its expansion on the Trojan War story.
I nominate: “The War at Troy: What Homer Didn’t Tell.
by Quintus of Smyrna”
Snow on Pine Says:
April 4th, 2018 at 8:07 am
“We took it.”
LOL – in that case, they gave it to you!
I ran into a similar thing recently when the clerk couldn’t figure out that a 90% discount (love after-holiday sales) was just a matter of moving the decimal point left one digit.
I still shudder when I remember how, in high school, we had to read “Tess of the Durbervilles,” with “Silas Marner” coming in at second place on my list of books I couldn’t stand.