The story quotes University of Connecticut president Susan Herbst, who worries that an overemphasis on job training will rob students of what is truly higher in higher education.
Teaching people Anthropology or other less marketable majors is not mutually exclusive to teaching skills that will allow people to be successful in any field. Educators should stop digging in their heels trying to stop reforms. It is almost if they go out of their way not to teach things that will be useful outside of school.
“Hey hey, ho ho.
Western Civ has got to go.”
After all, what did the West ever give to us? Aside from the aqueducts, sanitation, roads, agriculture, electricity, automobiles, airplanes, radio, television, modern medicine, computers, the Internets, and the freedom to write ignorant tirades against all these things without being publicly executed in some ghastly way…aside from that, what has the West given us?
The moral relativism of post-modern humanities departments have led to their own self-immolation; we simply have to replace the “hum” with the paisley painted “van” and now we truly have a story worthy of one of Tom Wolfe’s greatest book titles: “The Bonfire of the Vanities”.
If the Humanities were such a fail, why does the Military want its officers, and especially its fast-track officers to have advanced degrees in those subjects?
It is like the scene in Patton where actor George C Scott looks out over a North African battlefield (in Libya but pre modern Libya) and starts talking about Carthage and Rome and starts with “I was there!” to the consternation of this other flag officers.
I don’t think the modern Army wants its generals to start believing in reincarnation, but I believe it wants its officers to be well read and well grounded in a broad spectrum of Humanitites disciplines in order to be effective leaders, to be Scholar-Warriors if you will, and I am thinking the they are encouraging in degrees beyond, say, Physics or Electrical Engineering.
As to the Moral Relativism and all of the PC stuff at the U, I am also thinking that the Army and other branches of the Military have enough confidence in their own system of imbuing their people with the Soldierly Ethos that they are not too worried about all that; I even think they want their officers and especially generals to have been exposed to all of that so as to get some read on the civilian culture and society that they are serving, kinda like Diane Fosse or Jane Goodall doing field work.
The service academies and command colleges (e.g. USAF Air University) have always emphasized history and other humanities subjects such as languages. These are important in understanding military operations in foreign countries. Here’s a link to the Air War College curriculum (professional military education for senior officers). Much of that would fall into the humanities arena.
The problem isn’t with the humanities per se but in how they’re being taught at most universities today. What passes as humanities courses these days is little more than intellectual masturbation. If the humanities have become useless in the real world, it’s the fault of the academics who made it so.
If the Humanities were such a fail, why does the Military want its officers, and especially its fast-track officers to have advanced degrees in those subjects?
Um, what are their alternatives to the pedigree? It’s all well and good for the esteemed members of this forum to be arm-chair scholars of history and culture, but it’s not like the “military” can just prescribe that sort of hobby in any meaningful way.
Teaching people Anthropology or other less marketable majors is not mutually exclusive to teaching skills that will allow people to be successful in any field. Educators should stop digging in their heels trying to stop reforms. It is almost if they go out of their way not to teach things that will be useful outside of school.
“Hey hey, ho ho.
Western Civ has got to go.”
After all, what did the West ever give to us? Aside from the aqueducts, sanitation, roads, agriculture, electricity, automobiles, airplanes, radio, television, modern medicine, computers, the Internets, and the freedom to write ignorant tirades against all these things without being publicly executed in some ghastly way…aside from that, what has the West given us?
The moral relativism of post-modern humanities departments have led to their own self-immolation; we simply have to replace the “hum” with the paisley painted “van” and now we truly have a story worthy of one of Tom Wolfe’s greatest book titles: “The Bonfire of the Vanities”.
If the Humanities were such a fail, why does the Military want its officers, and especially its fast-track officers to have advanced degrees in those subjects?
It is like the scene in Patton where actor George C Scott looks out over a North African battlefield (in Libya but pre modern Libya) and starts talking about Carthage and Rome and starts with “I was there!” to the consternation of this other flag officers.
I don’t think the modern Army wants its generals to start believing in reincarnation, but I believe it wants its officers to be well read and well grounded in a broad spectrum of Humanitites disciplines in order to be effective leaders, to be Scholar-Warriors if you will, and I am thinking the they are encouraging in degrees beyond, say, Physics or Electrical Engineering.
As to the Moral Relativism and all of the PC stuff at the U, I am also thinking that the Army and other branches of the Military have enough confidence in their own system of imbuing their people with the Soldierly Ethos that they are not too worried about all that; I even think they want their officers and especially generals to have been exposed to all of that so as to get some read on the civilian culture and society that they are serving, kinda like Diane Fosse or Jane Goodall doing field work.
The service academies and command colleges (e.g. USAF Air University) have always emphasized history and other humanities subjects such as languages. These are important in understanding military operations in foreign countries. Here’s a link to the Air War College curriculum (professional military education for senior officers). Much of that would fall into the humanities arena.
The problem isn’t with the humanities per se but in how they’re being taught at most universities today. What passes as humanities courses these days is little more than intellectual masturbation. If the humanities have become useless in the real world, it’s the fault of the academics who made it so.
Um, what are their alternatives to the pedigree? It’s all well and good for the esteemed members of this forum to be arm-chair scholars of history and culture, but it’s not like the “military” can just prescribe that sort of hobby in any meaningful way.