Camille Paglia is a liberal lesbian feminist. I mention these personal facts only to show that I appreciate intelligent thought regardless of who it comes from (I am a conservative, straight, male chauvinist pig.) She's also a brilliant scholar and thinker who knows how to get her usually unorthodox point across. This college professor describes her disappointment in President-elect Obama for indulging in the fantasy that computers in the classroom is a universal panacea.
But then I gulped when Obama also pledged educational reform by putting state-of-the-art computers in every classroom. Groan. Computers alone will never solve the educational crisis in this country: They are tools and facilitators, not primary conveyors of knowledge. Packing his team with shiny Harvard retreads, Obama missed a golden opportunity to link his public works project with a national revalorization of the trades. Practical training in hands-on vocational skills is desperately needed in this country, where liberal arts education has become a soggy boondoggle, obscenely expensive and diluted by propaganda and groupthink.It's unfortunate we don't hear more of this from academe. My bet is on more of the same the next four years, only it will cost us more...
http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/12/10/hillary_mumbai/
1 comments:
You don't expect them to argue against their own employment too often.
My symbolic logic professor admitted quite easily that his course is only useful to computer scientists, and people who are interested and shouldn't be mandated to all philosophy students. He's had many people in his class with enough credits and grades to get their degrees, save his course, and he's forced time and time again to hit them with a dose of unjust reality.
I do think that the trades schools aren't bearing, at least one responsibility they should have. They're not turning out people who can decide competently on one political party or another. There should be some sort of civics, or ciritcal thinking course offered at these trades schools. It should be free and for extra credit with no penalty for not taking it.
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