>
> > As university attendance becomes more common, fewer capable young people
> > enter vocational training. Yet our economies still need highly trained
> > craftspeople far more than another batch of arts graduates.
>
> A professor of management decides the arts are useless? Incredible. Does
> this person realize the media, ad spend and entertainment industries make
> up at least 15% of OECD GDP? With professors like this, no wonder British
> capitalism is so decrepit.
Yup, and furthermore, I would advise all Americans with modern languages degrees and no job prospects to head for the shores of Blighty, where we are currently discovering that after about twenty years of "hard headed" types like this we have produced a generation of children that can't speak French or German and that the Economist magazine was perhaps overselling to us the case that "international businesspeople basically all speak English these days". It is a national disgrace.
Otoh, Carrol 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.
this is a bit tangential to Carrol's point, but for god's sake learn basic calculus everybody. It is not as if it is difficult (although as far as I can see, American universities make the most astonishing meal of it, teaching "calculus" and "multivariate calculus" as different courses!), and it is unbelievably frustrating to the rest of us to have to spell out what we mean in any discussion of rates of change with respect to things (I doubt it is any more fun for you lot to have to keep taking things on trust). Not knowing calculus is like not being able to dance; you are going to spend your whole life trying to organise things so that your inability is never exposed and this is no way to go about your life.
dd
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