:-)
j
On Saturday, February 15, 2003, at 04:29 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> At 3:41 PM -0500 2/15/03, Steven McGraw wrote:
>> There's quite clearly something wrong with taking someone who wants
>> to build bridges and telling them, ok, you want an engineering degree
>> that employers will take seriously? Here's some engineering and math
>> courses. Oh, and we'll also be forcing you to slog through 2 years'
>> worth of expensive 'cultural' education you have no interest in and
>> will not benefit from.
>
> I'm pretty sure that post-secondary schools can produce as technically
> competent engineers in two or three years without humanities and
> social sciences and with fewer courses in basic sciences as they do
> now in five years. That will be probably efficient, as far as
> economic production is concerned. Post-secondary schools focused on
> technical education alone, however, should not be called colleges and
> universities; they ought to be called vocational schools, in the
> spirit of truth in advertising. Some radical neoliberals might love to
> do get rid of all humanities (except composition) and much of social
> sciences (except perhaps economics, criminology, and the like) at all
> _non-elite_ colleges and universities, as they do not produce any
> products easily converted into mass-production goods and services.
> Students (as well as their parents) who think of themselves as
> consumers of educational services whose end products are grades and
> degrees, not critical knowledge, may also support the abolition of
> general education requirements, though they would probably resist the
> renaming that I would demand in the event of abolition, as "vocational
> schools" do not sound as prestigious as "colleges" and "universities."
> Conservatives of secretly (rather than brazenly) elitist sorts, too,
> would like to return us to the days when working-class kids were
> confined to technical education (if they got any higher education at
> all), entirely cheated out of liberal education reserved for the power
> elite, perhaps by using the populist rhetoric of going "back to the
> basics" and serving the needs and desires of ordinary Americans as
> cheaply as possible (ordinary Americans, they presume, do not or
> should not take interest in history, literature, philosophy, etc.).
>
> Cheapen your education, and you'll cheapen the value of your labor
> power, however -- that's what the bearded curmudgeonly Old Man would
> say.
> --
> Yoshie
>
> * Calendar of Events in Columbus:
> <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>
>