> >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'd actually had the impression that they were compulsory... from exchange
students talking about the difference between US and Australian systems in
particular.
> > 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.
Yes but I didn't just mean this.
While I don't think any specific canon should be required of students, who will generally take a wide range of things anyway if they're taught/presented in ways that engage with them, I do think really important skills are developed by and significant ideas still shared through the kind of curricula that have now become the humanities and social sciences. So I think there's a problem in students not in fact being sufficiently encouraged to take non-vocational courses.
Here, for example, the same curricula under the heading of a media (rather than an arts) degree is saleable to students because it looks vocational and they can take those courses without the same fear of not living up to expectations to think about their degree in terms of future vocations.
That's only one example. I don't think setting the non-professional courses aside as if they didn't offer crucial skills in how to think and learn is a grave mistake. So while I don't want students compelled to take those courses I think there's nothing wrong with encouraging them to do so.
Catherine
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