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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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 Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 11:21 am Post subject: |
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| daskalos wrote: |
You could only claim to be educated if you could place Confucius, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan and Henry the Navigator in a chronological list - I can't tell you how many college-educated people I know who can't do this, even when I list the personages in chronological order, as I have done here.
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Well I consider myself pretty well-educated but a) I had never heard of Henry the Navigator until this posting b) sadly would not have known where to have put Confucius in that timeline (although I would have guessed first or after Alexander the Great). |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 12:27 pm Post subject: |
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| daskalos wrote: |
| You could only call yourself educated if you spoke another language. |
So what language(s) do you speak? And how well? |
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daskalos
Joined: 19 May 2006
Location: The Road to Ithaca
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| Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 2:56 pm Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
| daskalos wrote: |
| You could only call yourself educated if you spoke another language. |
So what language(s) do you speak? And how well? |
Greek, not fluently but well enough so that I don't have to speak any English when I am in Greece. (Upper Intermediate, I suppose.) |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 4:01 pm Post subject: |
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| daskalos wrote: |
OP, I agree completely. You are not, however, required to agree in any way with what follows.
When I am dictator of the world, anyone who wants to have what s/he can call a post-secondary education must first get a Liberal Arts Degree. After that, should you wish to specialize in law or one of the sciences, feel free. |
My dad wanted my sister to do an Arts degree before she went on to do her Engineering degree. He would have funded it too - because while he was delighted she had set her sights on Engineering, he feared she wouldn't be properly educated. When I studied Maths as an undergraduate, and was party to conversations with my classmates, I began to see exactly what he was getting at. In your dictatorship I would suggest rounding up maths, engineering and IT graduates at gunpoint, and piling them into trains to be sent off for a few years in a re-education camp (and hopefully throw in a few classes on social skills while they're at it).
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| In my fantasy dictatorship, you could only call yourself educated if you could write a reasonably grammatical sentence, paragraph, paper. You could only call yourself educated if you spoke another language. |
Quite right. (Kuros, je parle fran�ais couramment, and a few other languages well enough to haggle over groceries).
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You could only claim to be educated if you could place Confucius, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan and Henry the Navigator in a chronological list - I can't tell you how many college-educated people I know who can't do this, even when I list the personages in chronological order, as I have done here.
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Almost passed your test. But who the bloody hell is this Henry the Navigator chap?
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| (Also interesting to note that very often, when some generation or another bemoans the state of ensuing generations, those statements have taken place during a civilization in decline. Philosophers in the Golden Age of Greece sang this refrain, and they were right.) |
 er...  |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 4:25 pm Post subject: |
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| daskalos wrote: |
| You could only call yourself educated if you spoke another language. |
In my fantasy dictatorship, there will be only one language. Clearly the future must be decided through a Highlander style battle to the last via katanas bestowed upon us by ancient Egyptian mentor figures. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2009 6:12 am Post subject: |
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Almost passed your test. But who the bloody hell is this Henry the Navigator chap?
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Residents of the Eastern Hemisphere tend not to know him since his achievements aren't about 'them'. Rather typical. |
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Privateer
Joined: 31 Aug 2005
Location: Easy Street.
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| Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2009 9:42 am Post subject: |
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| bucheon bum wrote: |
| Kuros wrote: |
I think this wonderfully written article is relevant:
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
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I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work.
My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must. Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses. For many of my students, this is difficult. Some of the young guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading �Araby� or �Barn Burning,� their boredom quickly becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms; they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me?
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Adult education, nontraditional education, education for returning students�whatever you want to call it�is a substantial profit center for many colleges. Like factory owners, school administrators are delighted with this idea of mounting a second shift of learning in their classrooms, in the evenings, when the full-time students are busy with such regular extracurricular pursuits of higher education as reading Facebook and playing beer pong. If colleges could find a way to mount a third, graveyard shift, as Henry Ford�s Willow Run did at the height of the Second World War, I believe that they would.
There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college�but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don�t think that�s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath�s �Daddy�? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don�t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can�t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors� prison.
America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone�s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.
Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it�try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn�t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.
For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.
I am the man who has to lower the hammer.
We may look mild-mannered, we adjunct instructors, but we are academic button men. I roam the halls of academe like a modern Coriolanus bearing sword and grade book, �a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries.� |
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Good article, thanks for posting that. |
Suddenly I'm starting to feel really good about the students in my writing class. They at least have the excuse of it not being their first language for their escritorial faults. |
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loggerhead007
Joined: 22 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2009 5:06 pm Post subject: |
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Maybe. But at least they don't blow.
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