Great Courses

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.   

The final straw

Higher education is officially dead.  Time to close the universities, burn them to the ground, find a copy of Aristotle, and start over.

Help!

Former Miss Canada finalist Miss Mary-Lu Zahalan-Kennedy is the first person to win an MA in Beatles Studies from Liverpool Hope University.

I hope she knows how to make a dry cappuccino because this is when reality starts to kick in.

Is graduate school a good idea?

100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School is a blog I recommend for anyone insane enough to consider staying on at university beyond a bachelor's degree.  It's a splash of cold water in the face that I wish I'd received when I was younger and stupider.

I spent nine years of undergraduate and postgraduate work before I got my PhD and I can categorically state that with the exception of one class on logic I would have been better off using my tuition money at a good book shop.  Indeed, I've often argued that university actually held back my education because it cut into my reading time.   If I needed one word to sum up my twenty years in academe, I'd use "disillusionment".  I went in expecting a mind-expanding world of study, argument and hard work pulling back the veils of ignorance and instead I encountered a nightmare of time-wasting, egomania, empire building, totalitarianism, political posturing, featherbedding, corruption, graft, sexual misconduct, intimidation, exploitation, and toadyism.  And that was just among the cafeteria staff.  As for "scholarship", it's a wonder that the shade of Aristotle wasn't howling through the corridors demanding blood  given what utter crap was being passed off as serious work.  The only bright spot was that I spent 14 of those years in field research, so the damage wasn't too bad.

Mind you, I retired from all of this fifteen years ago and from what I've seen, things have got increasingly worse with lives of thousands of graduate students being destroyed as they give years to the locust in exchange for a squandered youth and a blighted adulthood.  Given the cost, the exploitation, the time, and the appalling chances against getting a job, it's a wonder anyone goes for anything beyond a BA these days.

Indeed, I even doubt the value of an undergraduate degree. If things don't improve by the time my daughter is old enough for university, I plan to tell her flat out to forget it unless she plans to go into medicine, engineering or one of the hard sciences.  She currently wants to be a marine biologist, so there's some hope there.  If she plans to go for a liberal arts degree, I will do such things–what they are yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth!  Or at least I'll tell her to bank her tuition instead of handing it over to a ponzi scheme posing as an institution of higher learning.

So you want a PHD in the Humanities

This was pretty much one of my professors' reaction when I said that I was going for my PhD–right down to the doubts about my sanity.  A lifetime later, I have to agree with him.

Cheaper, but no good as a door stop.

Ever since my student days I thought that university textbooks were a scam–especially when it came to topics like maths and logic.  Calculus hasn't changed in centuries, algebra centuries before that, and geometry and logic not at all in millennia, yet new and staggeringly expensive textbooks are cranked out year after year.  With total costs of textbooks for a degree now rivaling that of a small car, it's no wonder that ebooks are now being considered as an affordable option.

What amazes me is that it took until now for the idea to catch on.  I was expecting this back in the early '90s.

Oh, THAT First Commandment!

Dhimmitude in education from the Telegraph:

Two schoolboys were allegedly disciplined after refusing to kneel down and "pray to Allah" during a religious education lesson.

It was claimed that the boys, from a year seven class of 11 and 12-year-olds, were given detention after refusing to take part in a practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped.

It's as if commonsense just picked up her skirts and ran screaming from the room.

Finally!

When I started teaching university nearly thirty years ago, the biggest headache I had was securing adequate copies of the text books I needed–many of which were out of print and only available in dwindling secondhand supplies. As personal computers became available, I always felt that the most logical use for them was to get rid of cumbersome, expensive and ephemeral texts in favour of electronic versions.

And now they've finally done it after only a breathtaking brief third of a century.

At this rate, they'll have gas lighting in no time.

Honesty in Academia

Over at the New Criterion, Alan Charles Kors shares his dream of what he'd like to see slapped on page one of every university catalogue if academia were required to conform to the Trades Descriptions Act:

This University believes that your sons and daughters are the racist, sexist, homophobic, Eurocentric progeny or victims of an oppressive society from which most of them receive unjust privilege. In return for tuition and massive taxpayer subsidy, we shall assign rights on a compensatory basis and undertake by coercion their moral and political enlightenment.

Having done my share of years teaching university, I predict that this will happen on the day the bacon flies onto my breakfast plate unaided.

The Helvetica Scenario

Protect yourself. Learn the facts.

The Point That Isn't a Point

From the BBC:

University heads in the UK have rejected warnings that the European Commission is trying to wrest control of higher education from member states.

Universities UK said there was "no sign of a conspiracy" to take over the process of making degrees more comparable across Europe.

Quite right. There's no conspiracy; they're being blatantly obvious about it.

Look Around You

Remember how god-awful educational films could be?

You will now.

Kipper Ties at Half Mast

Open University broadcasts are to end after thirty years of keeping people riveted with enthralling lectures on parl;kjuif'ap;otsrjfk'ag[;llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll