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Education for its own sake has always been a minority passion. Remember, universities started as trade schools for the clergy and then added trade schools for l

Education for its own sake has always been a minority passion. Remember, universities started as trade schools for the clergy and then added trade schools for lawyers and physicians centuries before anything else. Conflating real education with job training and certification of intelligence and conscientiousness does not lower the value of education but it does make training and certification easier to sell by adding some of the lustre and prestige of scholarship to trade. This is to education’s benefit. Without it there would be many fewer people studying fields with no jobs or very few like the Studies, Psychology or Physics. There will always be those whose parents can afford to spend a lot of money on a finishing school. Everyone else will need to get a job and there’s not going to be much support for subsidizing that from those whose children aren’t going to attend.

keiferski 7y ago
Flaws in this line of reasoning: 1. Providing a well-rounded education is somehow impossibly expensive, whether with modern communication technologies like the Internet or paper books. Surely the solution is to make this education cheaper, not to simply get rid of it? 2. Ignoring the fact that a democracy doesn't work if citizens aren't educated. Quoting The Great Books of the Western World: This answer...assumes that we can leave all intellectual activity, and all political responsibility, to somebody else and live our lives as vegetable beneficiaries of the moral and intellectual virtue of other men. The trouble with this assumption is that, whereas it was once possible, and even compulsory, for the bulk of mankind, such indulgence now, on the part of anybody, endangers the whole community. It is now necessary for everybody to try to live, as Ortega says, "at the height of his times." The democratic enterprise is imperiled if any one of us says, "I do not have to try to think for myself, or make the most of myself, or become a citizen of "the world republic of learning."
- chrisweekly 7y ago
  Well said!
- aestetix 7y ago
  Sounds like you're a Johnny :)
  - keiferski 7y ago
    Nope, just a fan of their program, although I'd like to do the Eastern Classics MA someday.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Education for its own sake needn’t be expensive but trying to force it on the unwilling doesn’t work and makes things worse for those who actually want it by mixing in people who don’t actually care into their classes. If twelve years of primary and secondary school can’t awaken intellectual interests for more years in college won’t either. We know it doesn’t work for literature because most people don’t read for pleasure and those who do mostly don’t read literature. That is the easiest one besides possibly music, where again the academically favoured version is wildly less popular than what is generally consumed. Forcing education on people does amazingly little to change their tastes. If democracy doesn’t work if citizens aren't educated how did it work before universal primary or secondary education? The US, UK and France among others had a wide franchise long before a high school education was normative. And education doesn’t even make informed citizens. Only 40% of the US population can name all three branches of government. Most people are ignorant of civics in all countries. You can’t make people retain information they neither use not care about but you can make their childhoods worse by wasting their time. Forcing a simulacrum of education on the unwilling or unenthusiastic has low, low returns in knowledge.
Merrill 7y ago
At least in colonial and the early United States the colleges were originally heavily oriented to training the clergy. Medical training came later, and lawyers for some time were trained by being apprenticed to practicing lawyers, e.g. Abraham Lincoln. Post Civil War, the four-year liberal arts education took on the role of finishing school for the children of the upper middle class. Vocational training was unnecessary, since they were expected to return, suitable spouse in tow, to the family business. The education, to the extent that it mattered, was to provide them with background for their role as leaders in society. Students preparing for science, engineering, and the other grubbier majors were looked down upon, particularly the students from the lower classes on scholarship.

keiferski 7y ago

Flaws in this line of reasoning: 1. Providing a well-rounded education is somehow impossibly expensive, whether with modern communication technologies like the Internet or paper books. Surely the solution is to make this education cheaper, not to simply get rid of it? 2. Ignoring the fact that a democracy doesn't work if citizens aren't educated. Quoting The Great Books of the Western World: This answer...assumes that we can leave all intellectual activity, and all political responsibility, to somebody else and live our lives as vegetable beneficiaries of the moral and intellectual virtue of other men. The trouble with this assumption is that, whereas it was once possible, and even compulsory, for the bulk of mankind, such indulgence now, on the part of anybody, endangers the whole community. It is now necessary for everybody to try to live, as Ortega says, "at the height of his times." The democratic enterprise is imperiled if any one of us says, "I do not have to try to think for myself, or make the most of myself, or become a citizen of "the world republic of learning."

chrisweekly 7y ago
Well said!
aestetix 7y ago
Sounds like you're a Johnny :)
- keiferski 7y ago
  Nope, just a fan of their program, although I'd like to do the Eastern Classics MA someday.
barry-cotter 7y ago
Education for its own sake needn’t be expensive but trying to force it on the unwilling doesn’t work and makes things worse for those who actually want it by mixing in people who don’t actually care into their classes. If twelve years of primary and secondary school can’t awaken intellectual interests for more years in college won’t either. We know it doesn’t work for literature because most people don’t read for pleasure and those who do mostly don’t read literature. That is the easiest one besides possibly music, where again the academically favoured version is wildly less popular than what is generally consumed. Forcing education on people does amazingly little to change their tastes. If democracy doesn’t work if citizens aren't educated how did it work before universal primary or secondary education? The US, UK and France among others had a wide franchise long before a high school education was normative. And education doesn’t even make informed citizens. Only 40% of the US population can name all three branches of government. Most people are ignorant of civics in all countries. You can’t make people retain information they neither use not care about but you can make their childhoods worse by wasting their time. Forcing a simulacrum of education on the unwilling or unenthusiastic has low, low returns in knowledge.

Merrill 7y ago

At least in colonial and the early United States the colleges were originally heavily oriented to training the clergy. Medical training came later, and lawyers for some time were trained by being apprenticed to practicing lawyers, e.g. Abraham Lincoln. Post Civil War, the four-year liberal arts education took on the role of finishing school for the children of the upper middle class. Vocational training was unnecessary, since they were expected to return, suitable spouse in tow, to the family business. The education, to the extent that it mattered, was to provide them with background for their role as leaders in society. Students preparing for science, engineering, and the other grubbier majors were looked down upon, particularly the students from the lower classes on scholarship.