What do you think. Here's the URL. Go ahead and make some flaver, do a graphic. You know, you like to bitch about it all anyway, so here's your chance. What a profflake I am. I'm killing you. I and all the ungrateful fucks who populate the page (all 11 of us) try your patience.
Still, make sure to give me credit! Summer class begins in 9 fucking days.
- Sid
[+]
The Practical Liberal Arts
from HuffPo
"...teaching undergraduates to think in creative ways aligns well with preparing them for specific types of jobs. Critical thinking can be effectively taught in a wide range of practically oriented courses. Learning marketable job skills is often an exercise in exploration."
The rest.
I didn't read it either. I'm too stupid.
ReplyDeleteBut what I did get from it is the continuing idea that college educations are just for jobs. Fuck anything else. I'm so glad I'm not 19.
My wife, not so much...
DeleteNot a bad idea, but won't scale (involves getting $10,000 to play with from a private foundation). Also, the author seems to think that liberal arts students have to practice practical applications of critical-thinking skills *in* college in order to be able to use them in the real world *after* college. Shouldn't intelligent people be able to make the transfer themselves? At least I assume that's what the investment bankers who tried to recruit me, and other members of my (English) Ph.D. cohort, to come play on Wall Street were thinking (and why med and law schools, and various branches of the federal government, are happy to take people from a variety of majors).
ReplyDeleteSo, yeah, another call to dress up the liberal arts in vocational clothing (with the assumption that liberal-arts graduates won't make it over the employment threshold otherwise). While I don't see anything wrong per se with the course he describes, it seems to me that a combination of more traditional liberal-arts classes and some time spent in internships would work just as well (perhaps better, since internships generally take place in the actual working world, not a classroom simulacrum thereof).