structurally adjusted schools?

Steven McGraw stmcgraw at vt.edu
Mon Feb 17 15:29:41 PST 2003



>>Yoshie posted a laundry list of rightist positions on higher
>>education, positions that neither she, nor I, nor you have any
>>sympathy with. In that sense, I agree with her too. However I
>>disagree that her list has much to do with making the liberal arts
>>voluntary rather than obligatory within the context of a free 4-year
>>education.
>
>Steve, we don't have "the context of a free 4-year education" in the
>United States today.

Yes, that is self evident. I couldn't have picked a more hypothetical point to argue, but I keep meeting people who reject the abolition of the core on principle, in any context. I hope nobody on LBO thinks we need a mandatory core because, as a prof once told me, "tastes should be educated" and "people must learn to appreciate culture." Whose tastes need educating? Which groups show a lack of appreciation for whose "culture?" The answers to these questions have a largely unrecognized class dimension, especially now that liberal arts departments drape themselves in a fashionable postmodernism that, despite its rhetoric of resistance, never gets beyond "transgressive reading" and "guerilla art."


>If the liberal arts are taken out of degree
>requirements in the context of increasing fees and tuitions, students
>who do not major in liberal arts (and their parents) have only market
>incentives _not_ to take any, even if they are vaguely interested in
>them.

No argument there.



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