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>From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and

>From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin? The class clown who snarks “What does this have to do with real life?” is onto something. Yet another attack on the liberal arts that misses the point of education entirely. An education in a variety of fields is about what it means to be a person in a world among other people and the natural environment. It's what makes democracy possible (https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10858.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10858.html). If we reduce education to mere employment training, we might as well revert to medieval feudalism where your entire life is bound to your economic production.

watwut 8y ago
Overwhelming majority of students don't have classes on art, music, history, physics or poetry. Majority of students who sign for advanced-math classes can actually follow them enough (not necessary to A++ but enough to). There are some minimums of these, but that is all there is to it, unless you decide to sign for these or pick art major. I am not saying that everything was practical or useful, but the way article describes the school amounts to building a strawman. Most college students go for various business degrees and those do have classes like business writing and technical writing. It might have bad pedagogy, but the intent to teach those things is there. The other thing is that I think that we should teach history, because what happened in history is closely related to how world functions now. So having rough idea that things happened (which is pretty much what high school history teaches) is something good to have.

watwut 8y ago

Overwhelming majority of students don't have classes on art, music, history, physics or poetry. Majority of students who sign for advanced-math classes can actually follow them enough (not necessary to A++ but enough to). There are some minimums of these, but that is all there is to it, unless you decide to sign for these or pick art major. I am not saying that everything was practical or useful, but the way article describes the school amounts to building a strawman. Most college students go for various business degrees and those do have classes like business writing and technical writing. It might have bad pedagogy, but the intent to teach those things is there. The other thing is that I think that we should teach history, because what happened in history is closely related to how world functions now. So having rough idea that things happened (which is pretty much what high school history teaches) is something good to have.