The overwhelming problem in higher education today is that the humanities has all but abandoned teaching the canon of Western civilisation in favour of senseless, vapid, left-wing agitprop that amounts to little more than intellectual masturbation. If the civilised world is ever to right itself, academia must once again embrace the ideas of greatness, wisdom and beauty. How to do this doesn't lend itself to any simple answer, but story of the Great Courses companies shows that when the Canon is placed beside "studies" in a free market, the Canon wins hands down.
It's not perfect, but it shows that the stranglehold of the anti-civilisation types is not unchallengeable.
1 comment:
I placed out of humanities distribution requirements because I had enough high school Spanish and native Russian. Classes in engineering school, either the ones about specific solid-state devices or the ones about computability theory, were pretty much to the point. My soft and squishy education, I pretty much did on my own. Herodotus and Gilgamesh are quotably familiar, and I've read more Icelandic sagas than most of my friends (well, all of them), but my mom despairs at how few of her favorite French Romantic novelists I know. It is good to have a teacher as a guide, one who knows where there is something good, and can point it out to his pupils.
Maybe this is worth checking out. Not so sure about something like Rosetta Stone for languages. Those are difficult to pick up after college, and now that Ironmistress mentions it, Japanese is fun. Like a programming language---here is a noun, here is what it's doing in the sentence, etc.---until it gets into counting things, and relearning vocabulary for levels of politeness, and the... very differently sane way of writing.
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