'Themselves' i ought to have said, 'scuse me.
>but about being exposed to the
>wider range of options and lines of thought more often available to more
>privileged students in a range of ways. I think this is important, but no
more
>than a quite different point.
>
I agree that we all need access to such things, but why insist on forced exposure to a set of traditions and works selected by people who have no objective basis for their tastes in literature, music, philosophy?
>I don't agree with either protecting traditional curricula by making them
>compulsory or compelling students to study a curriculum for the sake of
>reinforcing a set of social values through a selected canon of humanities.
Agreed. The abortive cultivation of 'upper class' tastes in particular produces vague feelings of shame, inferiority and an uncritical respect for the grand canons of literature, philosophy etc, though the student understands the canon poorly at best...this is quite intentional I think, once you decode the euphemisms and recognize the faculty's hostility toward the tastes and preferences of the students.
>However, less "functional", "profitable", disciplines, fields and forms do
need
>to be available to students.
We agree on this as well.
>
>We don't have a compulsory "liberal arts education" in Australia after
>highschool.
We don't here either, not technically, but we do create powerful economic incentives to suffer through those freshman lit classes.
> I'm glad about that. But I do think that humanities and social
>science fields deserve special support, endorsement, and protection when
it's
>much harder for them to sustain themselves by business deals with
non-academic
>organisations... and even when they can they often shouldn't.
>
>Catherine
Absolutely. As I srote a few days ago, the present situation requires something like a united front against privatization and increasing dependence on corporate 'donors' who come sniffing around the corpse of the public university system.