tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8776899.post185244896364274585..comments2024-03-06T03:15:58.539-05:00Comments on <b>THE NEW REFORM CLUB</b>: Indicting the Educational-Industrial ComplexHunter Bakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961831404331998743noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8776899.post-7284004043342011182015-03-20T17:48:44.088-04:002015-03-20T17:48:44.088-04:00More to Rod Dreher's interest in his recent po...More to Rod Dreher's interest in his recent post ( http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/humanities-fragments-ruins/ ), a vacationing Tom forwards this along: <br /><br /><br />https://theamericanscholar.org/habits-of-mind/#.VQyRwY45PW-<br /><br />To go by this critique, the obsession with the minute and the technical not only determines the course of scholars’ research; worse still, it shapes their teaching. Nowadays specialists can’t teach the survey courses of yesteryear. They haven’t read widely or thought about the big themes of history or literature (which of course was easier back when most ideas that mattered emanated from two continents). Instead they offer seminars focused on tiny questions and single authors and artists. Charismatic in their intellect, these professors seduce the most gifted students into imitating them. The university thus becomes a machine—as the critics endlessly repeat—for producing teachers and students who know more and more about less and less.<br />Students who come through this routine may be wonderful scholars in the sense that they can skillfully carry out the exercises with which professional historians or literary critics earn their livings. But their journey to the PhD locks them into little boxes, even smaller than those that house their teachers. They know nothing about the boxes to their right and left, to say nothing of those in other rows: it’s like some hideous academic parody of the Matrix.<br />Students from the old system were prepared to take the values and history and literature they had discussed along with them into the world, and use them as a way to think about their experiences. Students from the new system are unworldly to the point of absurdity. As William Deresiewicz lamented in a memorable article in this publication, they probably know how to talk in foreign languages with highly educated colleagues around the world, but they can’t carry on a conversation with their plumber—much less take an informed position on national politics, or even on the university governance issues that shape their experience as students and will shape their lives if they become professors.<br /><br />Tim Kowalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02196125161888520769noreply@blogger.com