[lbo-talk] the view from capital

joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Tue Sep 12 22:00:59 PDT 2006


Carrol Cox wrote:


>Andre Gorz back in the '60s (when he was still a marxist) passes on a
>delightful anecdote. He was visiting one of the elite technological
>schools in France. At one point he raised the question, "What do the
>students learn her that they couldn't learn on the job?" Answer, after
>some thought, calculus. Next questio, "Would they use calculua in the
>jobs they were training for?" No.
>
Actually, I don't quite follow why it's not worth learning something if you're not going to use in your job. Life is bigger than your job, isn't it?


>Learning classical languages probably played a similar role in some 19th
>century occupations.
>
Learning classical languages used to be the price of entry to the middle class. But, for my own part, I would say that learning Latin and Greek were the two most useful things I did in school.

1. Because it made it very easy to learn programming...which I eventually needed to do to beome a tech writer. (Programming languages and classical languages (now) are grammar-based languages. )

2. Because it made me understand how the Western mind thinks about knowledge: that it basically understands reality to be organized like a dead language. I would say that was the greatest insight I got out of graduate school. And if I had not studied the classics, I would have never been able to see this as a fact.

Joanna


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