Gen ed problems and future outlook

[Wahoo Redux]

I'm still missing the relevance to current educational practices or why Western culture preservation (really only parts of Western Europe and really only some cultural knowledge) is the key metric here.

Ooooookay Polly.  I figured you'd know what I was talking about, that's why I referenced it.  Frankly I am a little surprised I have to explain it.

I will turn it into an analogy.

I am a monk.  I work in the scriptorium of a monastery, although some might call it an Ivory Tower.

I am happy if the rest of the world is invested in summoners, clerks, reeves, cooks, squires, franklins, pardoners, prioresses, wives from Bath, knights and all the other assorted professions that make society run.

What I do is just as important, but in a different sort of key from these folks.  I, in my little way, keep culture alive and add to the knowledge of the world.  I do not know exactly how my knowledge will be important to the future, but I know it will be.  Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were badly recorded and much battered manuscripts, as were the great Greek epics, so they were hardly prized possession worth a great deal of capitol in their times.  Somebody kept them alive, however, probably never conceiving of their vast importance.  Personally, sadly, I doubt I have any great contribution such as these, but I am part of the order that keeps the great masterworks alive.

Since somebody brought up "monks," and someone else pointed out that society would not run very well if everybody was a monk, I thought I would just point out that monks are the people who saved much of our knowledge while the great wars were being waged and the great cathedrals were being built.

To put it most simply: we owe a lot to the monks of the world, let's not disparage them because of misinformation about job placement.

[Wahoo Redux]

English might survive since we in US especially speak it, write it and value it, but it will probably consolidate with the other languages at many schools (that is, consolidate with the languages that survive). 

Already happened where we are.

[polly_mer]

So, you want to be a monk?  OK, but we have far more people who want to be monks than slots and many of the current slots are going away.

The point of this thread has nothing to do with the value of monks.

The point of this thread is to sound the alarm that the monasteries along certain rivers are flooding, get out, generic monks, save yourselves!

Get off the beach, the tsunami is coming!

Get to the cellar, the tornado is coming!

Get off of the mountain because the lightning will start the forest fire and then all is lost!

Harping on the value of the monk is exactly the mindset against which we're warning as gen eds/majors are cut, the faculty teaching them are cut, and jobs are going away, even though people dearly want those jobs.

[Wahoo Redux]

So, you want to be a monk?  OK, but we have far more people who want to be monks than slots and many of the current slots are going away.

The point of this thread has nothing to do with the value of monks.

The point of this thread is to sound the alarm that the monasteries along certain rivers are flooding, get out, generic monks, save yourselves!

Get off the beach, the tsunami is coming!

Get to the cellar, the tornado is coming!

Get off of the mountain because the lightning will start the forest fire and then all is lost!

Harping on the value of the monk is exactly the mindset against which we're warning as gen eds/majors are cut, the faculty teaching them are cut, and jobs are going away, even though people dearly want those jobs.

You always go there, don't you?

No, the point of this thread has a lot to do with the value of "monks" (which I didn't bring up anyway).

Actually, what you just posted is exactly my point.  We are about to lose the monks, gatekeepers of future knowledge because we misinform each other about their relative value.  A world full of franklins is a very sterile place.

[mleok]

It is worth noting that part of the reason why European and Asian universities are able to condense their programs into three years is that specialization in their secondary education system happens in the last two years of high school. When I took the GCE O levels at 16, I took 10 subjects, including English, English Literature, Mandarin, Mathematics, Additional Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, and Confucian Ethics, and at the GCE A levels at 18, I took 4 subjects, Mathematics, Further Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science. What I took in the A levels then limited the subjects that I could read at university.

[polly_mer]

From the first post,

The humanities aren't doomed as human knowledge, but many, many current humanities faculty jobs are doomed and the job loss for teaching/service jobs is accelerating.

I am focused on getting out the message about gen ed because so much discussion focused on convincing the general.public of the value of the humanities and a liberal arts education.  Getting a job teaching students who have chosen a liberal arts education is a better use of one's effort.  Getting a professional career other than being gen ed faculty is a better use of one effort.  The jobs in humanities gen ed are being lost and propping them up temporarily only provides time to get another job.  There is no foreseeable future next decade that those jobs aren't lost in droves.

We aren't losing all the monks, if that's our continued analogy.  The faculty who really are preserving and creating human knowledge are in secure places and those slots have been slowly growing.

We're losing the slots for people who teach about the value of monks and insist that's the same as being a monk.

[Wahoo Redux]

The analogy has been strained well past where it was meant to go.  In fact, it was not meant to be an analogy but a correspondence.  Whatever.

We are losing monks in a lot of places----biology, foreign languages, philosophy----which is very bad.  We all understand that students are voting with their feet and the babies of boomers are not having their own babies.  It's just bad when knowledge is commodified out of the Tower where it should flourish.

Meanwhile, $125M in aid to the Ukraine will

A) simply evaporate into the aether of our interventionist foreign policy with nothing to show for it (most likely),
B) get a lot of people killed who we have nothing against (quite possible), or
C) start World War III, at which point none of our pedagogy will matter.

But by all means, let's close our colleges.

[mleok]

Well, I think the current ideal is that students are given a series of choices within a rubric, and they then decide what knowledge they find most engaging and this will introduce them to the vast array of human knowledge.

We have come to a point in which people are challenging this ideal.

There's the ideal, and then there's reality. The reality is that most students try to stray as little as possible from their comfort zone, and they are left with a haphazard and sparse sampling of the vast array of human knowledge. Their lives are rarely enriched sufficiently to justify the financial and opportunity costs associated with having to stay in college an additional year to satisfy these general education requirements.

[mleok]

There's a difference between saying that it is important for the preservation of our cultural heritage that humanities scholars continue to exist, and saying that everyone needs to study a hodge podge of humanities courses. The European universities are hardly intellectual slouches by any stretch of the imagination, and are perfectly adequate to the task of preserving our collective intellectual heritage, but they do not subscribe to the liberal arts education model, and the notion of general education requirements is entirely foreign to them.

[Wahoo Redux]

Well, I think the current ideal is that students are given a series of choices within a rubric, and they then decide what knowledge they find most engaging and this will introduce them to the vast array of human knowledge.

We have come to a point in which people are challenging this ideal.

There's the ideal, and then there's reality. The reality is that most students try to stray as little as possible from their comfort zone, and they are left with a haphazard and sparse sampling of the vast array of human knowledge. Their lives are rarely enriched sufficiently to justify the financial and opportunity costs associated with having to stay in college an additional year to satisfy these general education requirements.

Yes.  All this has been said numerous times.

I was just directly answering Marshy's question. 

As I said, this ideal is being challenged, and perhaps it should be.  I tend to think that being educated means that students are broadened intellectually, challenged with things outside their comfort zones so they are better stock brokers and middle management, hopefully better citizens and better informed people, but maybe that isn't important.

At the root is money.  We deny or justify based on money, which is perfectly reasonable.  I think education suffers, however.

[mleok]

Well, I think the current ideal is that students are given a series of choices within a rubric, and they then decide what knowledge they find most engaging and this will introduce them to the vast array of human knowledge.

We have come to a point in which people are challenging this ideal.

There's the ideal, and then there's reality. The reality is that most students try to stray as little as possible from their comfort zone, and they are left with a haphazard and sparse sampling of the vast array of human knowledge. Their lives are rarely enriched sufficiently to justify the financial and opportunity costs associated with having to stay in college an additional year to satisfy these general education requirements.

Yes.  All this has been said numerous times.

I was just directly answering Marshy's question. 

As I said, this ideal is being challenged, and perhaps it should be.  I tend to think that being educated means that students are broadened intellectually, challenged with things outside their comfort zones so they are better stock brokers and middle management, hopefully better citizens and better informed people, but maybe that isn't important.

At the root is money.  We deny or justify based on money, which is perfectly reasonable.  I think education suffers, however.

I don't have a fundamental issue against broadening students intellectually, I'm saying our current distribution requirements often fail to achieve that, and that other countries seem to have no problem having a well-educated population without a liberal arts tradition in their universities.

[Wahoo Redux]

There's a difference between saying that it is important for the preservation of our cultural heritage that humanities scholars continue to exist, and saying that everyone needs to study a hodge podge of humanities courses. The European universities are hardly intellectual slouches by any stretch of the imagination, and are perfectly adequate to the task of preserving our collective intellectual heritage, but they do not subscribe to the liberal arts education model, and the notion of general education requirements is entirely foreign to them.

Okay.  I'm game.

How do we actually, literally----not theoretically----do that now in America?

I looked it up once and there are 240 colleges in all of Great Britain.  There are something like 100 universities in France.  There are 426 in Germany.  They do not have a massive defense budget which takes over half their tax money or massive debt payments.

How do we retool our secondary education, particularly given our inequities in our inner-city and isolated rural areas?

I'm honestly asking.  Enough people have lauded the European educational system that I am willing to believe it is a better system, but it also sounds like magical thinking to me.  5% of our national budget goes to education.  What can we do?

[Mobius]

They also don't let anyone with a heartbeat into a university and certainly doesn't spend the money on retention that U.S. universities do.

These countries have seemed to accept higher levels of unemployed, people who are permanent members of the welfare system despite ability to work, and accept that some young people don't have much of a future.

[Wahoo Redux]

They also don't let anyone with a heartbeat into a university and certainly doesn't spend the money on retention that U.S. universities do.

Again, is that something that would fly in America?  We all pay for our universities.

[Mobius]

They also don't let anyone with a heartbeat into a university and certainly doesn't spend the money on retention that U.S. universities do.

Again, is that something that would fly in America?  We all pay for our universities.

And Europeans don't? Civilization depends on teaching humanities to students who spend class texting and never do the reading?