[lit-ideas] Re: education
- From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2011 21:37:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, November 4, 2011 11:31 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: education
Andy wrote
A major thing, probably the major thing, that drives most people today is
money, how to get more of everything.
And this is known how?
Andy: (First, Yahoo new and improved is horrible for formatting; I hope this
is readable.) This is known by looking around you. The mortgage crisis wasn't
started because people wanted reasonably sized houses. Forget national
pastime, shopping is the national religion. All I read about is how indebted
the country is, both private (individual) and public (government) debt. It's
important because the consumer is the backbone of the economy, and the consumer
is up to his ears in debt and can't keep the economy floating anymore. It's
the whole Keynesian/Hayek thing, to stimulate or not to stimulate the economy
through more debt, i.e., more money for everyone to spend. Once upon a time
there was one car in the family; now everybody has a car. Once upon a time
there was one television in the family; now every family member has their own
television. We have way more clothes today than in the 70's (I forget the
statistic). Everything is
more. More is in the air, in the water, more food, more clothes, just more.
It takes money to have more.
Liberal arts is not conducive to that. Wall Street was such a big draw until
the crash that there was a visible drain in the sciences, and the slack was
picked up by foreign students.
Again, how did you find this out? Are you counting the 'hard sciences' as part
of the liberal arts? (You should, but the sciences do not exhaust what
constitute the liberal arts.) I really don't follow your reasoning here.
Andy: I didn't reason this, I read it, and not just once. Math and science is
not our strong point, at least at the high school level. Graduate science is
being taken over by foreign students. Their own systems are catching up, and
they're here in great numbers, in the MIT's and other places. In the meantime,
we're not cranking out scientists. If anything, we're still chomping at the
bit to teach creationism instead of evolution. However, Wall Street was a
magnet. That's just a fact.
That 'businesses' don't want liberal arts majors is simply false. If you don't
believe this, perhaps you could let us know why you don't. Generally speaking,
outside the world of technology, a liberal arts major has more skills,
everything else being equal, than e.g. someone majoring in a narrowly
professional field, and what employers want are graduates can learn more than
one way of doing things, rather than those who are trained to do just one thing
in a field in which there's rapid change.
Andy: This might be true, I can't speak from experience. However, businesses
still want MBA's, not liberal arts graduates per se. If someone isn't going on
to get an MBA, they'll major in business, which happens a lot. If an employer
has a choice between an English major and a business major, which one do you
think he'll probably hire for his marketing department? That business as a
major has proliferated speaks for itself.
I'm sorry about this formatting. Yahoo really messed up their site. Probably
some business major thought it was a good idea.
Andy
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