http://www.startribune.com/local/143419966.html
Get a liberal arts degree and be on the front line of the Occupy movement!
Get a liberal arts degree and be on the front line of the Occupy movement!
Whatever, I graduated in 2001 with an MFA and I have had an excellent career. I am rich and successful. You're either a winner or a loser. No degree will change that.
Stuff you learn getting a liberal arts education is certainly valuable, but do you need a four-year college for that? I can't stop thinking about Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting saying to another character that in a few years he would realize he "just dropped 150 grand on a f*ckin' education you coulda gotten for a buck fifty in late chahges at the public library".
The MonBRO Doctrine wrote:
Stuff you learn getting a liberal arts education is certainly valuable, but do you need a four-year college for that? I can't stop thinking about Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting saying to another character that in a few years he would realize he "just dropped 150 grand on a f*ckin' education you coulda gotten for a buck fifty in late chahges at the public library".
Yeah, but I will have a degree, and you'll be serving my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.
asdpl wrote:
The MonBRO Doctrine wrote:Stuff you learn getting a liberal arts education is certainly valuable, but do you need a four-year college for that? I can't stop thinking about Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting saying to another character that in a few years he would realize he "just dropped 150 grand on a f*ckin' education you coulda gotten for a buck fifty in late chahges at the public library".
Yeah, but I will have a degree, and you'll be serving my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.
Maybe, but at least I won't be unoriginal.
Being unoriginal > serving fries
asdfsdaf wrote:
Being unoriginal > serving fries
Hey, if you still have a problem I'd be happy to step outside and work it out.
it's not your fault
Sure, if the whole value of an education can be reduced to getting a job, then perhaps a liberal arts degree is useless. But if education means anything beyond landing you in a job, and if you are interested at all in developing the characteristics of a quality life, then a liberal arts education still has value.
For example:
1) thoughtfulness, reasonableness
2) appreciation of the arts
3) knowledge of history
4) virtues of citizenship
5) understanding of the scientific method
We are supposedly living in the greatest country in the world at the peak of its powers, and yet the highest standard we are willing to set for education is that it get us a job (not even a career, much less the idea of quality, meaningful labor.)
Talk about setting the bar low!
Education Education experience.
When you go to a liberal arts college, you will associate with people from a particular background. You learn the way they speak, what matters to them etc. That is what you get at a liberal arts school.
You can get the same education for cheaper at Drunk Tank U., but you will not have the same polish. It sounds terrible, but it is the truth. If you are on the other side of the world and you meet an English major from Amherst and one from U. Mass Amherst, you will be able to tell the difference immediately. There are other reasons for this - family income etc.
liberal arts colleges and Ivy League universities are "finishing schools" for the majority of those who attend.
I take it the majority of posters so far on this thread have not had a liberal arts education.
Lyndon LaRouche wrote:
Education Education experience.
When you go to a liberal arts college, you will associate with people from a particular background. You learn the way they speak, what matters to them etc. That is what you get at a liberal arts school.
You can get the same education for cheaper at Drunk Tank U., but you will not have the same polish. It sounds terrible, but it is the truth. If you are on the other side of the world and you meet an English major from Amherst and one from U. Mass Amherst, you will be able to tell the difference immediately. There are other reasons for this - family income etc.
liberal arts colleges and Ivy League universities are "finishing schools" for the majority of those who attend.
You write this as if people were furniture, needing polishing and finishing. What we are talking about here is not putting the sheen on an object, but we are talking about setting up the habits of a lifetime. That's the function of education.
A liberal arts education is an education into the art of free living. The idea behind it is that people need to learn how to be free. Otherwise, they will think that they are free, even though they are chained every day to a desk job that they hate.
There are very powerful interests behind devaluing this ancient idea of a free education. Why? Because a free education does not do a good job of perpetuating the current system of corporate-drone slavery. Liberal arts campuses are some of the few places where thoughts that run counter to the current condition on behalf of human dignity still remain.
If you think that stuff is not important, then maybe you ought to consider that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King had a Ph.D. in philosophy.
After work, you bet!
Trapperfeld wrote:
Whatever, I graduated in 2001 with an MFA and I have had an excellent career. I am rich and successful. You're either a winner or a loser. No degree will change that.
This is a poor argument. If a person's 'winner' or 'loser' status goes unchanged with or without a degree, does that mean that your degree did nothing for you? After all, you are (apparently) a born winner.
AK-54 wrote:
I take it the majority of posters so far on this thread have not had a liberal arts education.
^Very true. Liberal arts degree=/=liberal arts college.
First of all, you can go to a liberal arts college and take almost nothing but math and science courses. I went to a liberal arts college and most of my friends became engineers. I think only one of my close friends majored in the humanities.
Second, if you go to a liberal arts college, you are guaranteed to learn three things: how to write, how to think critically, and how to learn. Learning how to learn is more important than you think. Liberal arts colleges instill an insatiable thirst for knowledge in its students.
People who go to college to memorize a bunch of facts out of a textbook have been made obsolete by computers. Many of those who major in math, science, technology, and engineering will soon be made obsolete by the technologies they helped create. But those who are able to think critically and those who are able to create ideas can never be replaced.
There are a trillion things the world needs yet doesn't have simply because it hasn't created them already. Those who are willing to challenge what is feasible are going to be the ones who will succeed in the future, not the ones who accept the traditional academic catechism as a template for their personal and professional lives.
Lyndon LaRouche wrote:
Education Education experience.
When you go to a liberal arts college, you will associate with people from a particular background. You learn the way they speak, what matters to them etc. That is what you get at a liberal arts school.
You can get the same education for cheaper at Drunk Tank U., but you will not have the same polish. It sounds terrible, but it is the truth. If you are on the other side of the world and you meet an English major from Amherst and one from U. Mass Amherst, you will be able to tell the difference immediately. There are other reasons for this - family income etc.
liberal arts colleges and Ivy League universities are "finishing schools" for the majority of those who attend.
I'll bet you're a hit at cotillion.
Most people who attend liberal arts colleges emerge less educated than they were when they entered. They get brainwashed by Marxist professors, "learn" things that aren't true and graduate with negative knowledge, actually knowing less than nothing because everything they think they know is wrong.
I can it in many of the posters on this site. There are many leftist posters out here who reasonably intelligent and were probably normal as a teenagers, but then went to college and lost their minds taking liberal arts courses. Unable to make sense of the insipid nonsense their economics professors spouted, but determined to fit in and conform to the school's intellectual trends, they simply took everything they heard on their professors' authority and assumed that everything they were "learning" had been scientifically proven and wasto be accepted regardless of how little sense it made. Now they run around mindlessly babbling things that defy basic common sense, evading the most obvious logical connections as the country burns, but don't feel the need to even make an effort to be reasonable because they are secure in the knowledge that their views are consistent with majority's and therefore (in their minds) beyond scrutiny.
too bad no one got your quotes from the movie and thought they were just comebacks, I enjoyed them anyway.
I don't know, a lot of them seem to be doing alright...
http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/top-us-colleges-graduate-salary-statistics.asp
monBRO for president wrote:
too bad no one got your quotes from the movie and thought they were just comebacks, I enjoyed them anyway.
Thank you. I was about to ask if anyone liked apples, but I figured there was no point!