Les Enfants Terribles

Over the past few months, I have become increasingly pleased by Wente' writing. Is she a liberal who is rfinally recognizing reality?

Soft sciences are for soft minds. And B.A. should stand for Bugger All.
Don't feel ANY sympathy for ANY of these entitled brats.
You want to be part of 'building' a better future? Learn to swing a hammer. Learning you can actually use.

Quebec's rioting students and the Occupy people are the useful idiots of those who want to destroy hundreds of years of liberal democracy and replace it with a Soviet style world government.

Ken (Kulak) hits the nail on the head. It is more than just "entitlement generation", for it has been and continues to be well organised and funded by the hard Left whose goal is the destruction of Western liberal democracy. The fact there are some useful idiots among them changes nothing.

These brain dead foul smelling troglodytes have taken up entirely to much meia play - it's like having the nation's political narrative hyjacked by the nation's lowest common denominator.

Agreed re Occupy. Levant and Lilly have been very good this week on similar ground, Lilly featured "If I wanted America to fail", very well done:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ-4gnNz0vc

"I will be working in sustainable food systems and food justice."

Charles hit on a really significant point when he asked "Why is it that you don't hear these interviews on mainstream media? Because it's impossible to portray these people as having any moral architecture if you actually talk to them, so you can just kind of talk about them and make things up."

It's so true. So much media coverage makes the case -- a false case -- on behalf of the protesters by claiming that the protests are about noble things like "inequality" and "injustice". They go out of their way to hide the actual motivations and the characters of the "protesters" because they know that if they didn't people would see what a motley collection of losers and spoiled brats these idiots are.

Thank god for Sun News.

"I will be working in sustainable food systems and food justice."

somehow I don't think that is farming, it's telling people how to farm, without ever having to actually farm

Mr. Cam, that might be like the Soviet state appointed regional directors of planning and operations for the kolkhozes and sovkhozes farms.

Jan wrote "Soft sciences are for soft minds. And B.A. should stand for Bugger All."

I must disagree with this statement. There is ample evidence that too many people are pursuing degrees, that the standard of scholarship has declined precipitously and that many of these people are probably better served in the economy by learning a trade. If one is of average intelligence, there really is little point in studying at a university. Most of the concepts that are learned there can, at best, be only memorized and parroted unless one is a more academically inclined individual.

There is also a strong case to be made that academia has been overtaken by people who have a distinctly left-wing agenda that is constantly pushed on their students.

This doesn't diminish the need for decent scholarship in fields like History, Political Science and Philosophy. What needs to be asked is how many of these people are employable in those fields.

It is also important to point out that there are many communication and reasoning skills that are the product of a BA. I know a large number of people who started their adult lives with an arts or soft sciences education. Most of them are now gainfully employed. Most of them have also continued on after their BA to gain some form of professional training and experience and do not work in the fields of their study.

The big lie is that we are all special and gifted and that the key to everyone's success is a university degree. There is only so much room in a productive society for historians and philosophers. Most of these kids will need to take these tools and apply them to a productive profession that probably has little to do with their original course of study. Many of these students really shouldn't be there in the first place.

"Many of these students really shouldn't be there in the first place."

And yet universities still admit "students" who can't construct a sentence or even do subtraction in their heads (i.e. making change for a dollar).

Infants, certainment. Terrible, not so much.

RaughKee:

I agree that there is nothing inherently wrong with studying (say) English or Philosophy. A lot of the current criticism of these fields of scholarship is a (largely justifiable) political reaction to a time-bound complex of issues, precisely as you define them: 1) Increasingly, there are too many people pursuing post-secondary education, many of them attracted by the prospect of getting a student loan and continuing their extended adolescence, rather than being interested in, or having an aptitude for, their chosen field of study; they're only "studying" these subjects, in effect, because they can get a loan in lieu of working. 2) Too many students think a degree in English or Philosophy or History (for example) entitles them to a high-paying job after they graduate, albeit the claim is often a disingenuous one made when their student loans come due after graduation, and encouraged by the agitating left. 3) Cultural Marxists have irredeemably politicized (polluted, corrupted, softened, co-opted) the curricula in said fields by essentially treating the west's cultural legacy as an extended crime scene.

These are recent (post-60s?) problems, though; there's nothing inherently useless, let alone Marxist, about studying Beowulf, Chaucer, Bede, or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, or learning about Alfred the Great. Such scholarship (knowledge) is in fact part of the bedrock of western culture, and shouldn't be conflated with either the current Marxist academic cesspit of the "arts" faculties or the post-60s entitlement culture.

"Sustainable food systems and food justice"? Can I get fries with that?

EBD:

You make some very good points. The whole University system needs a serious rethink and a chainsaw. Some entire fields of study have sprung up which in any but the most skewed perspective are nothing more than grievance engines and/or subversive thought factories. Postmodern feminist deconstructional discourse? Seriously? People are paid handsomely to do this; paid by our tax dollars and naive student's loan money.

I laugh every time I see one of those "Occupiers" go on about how they have a small fortune in student loans and their MA in Eastern Slobobian Folk Dancing isn't bringing in the six-figure salary that they initially foresaw.

A healthy democracy does need a reasonable portion of its population to have a decent background in the arts and humanities. Those subjects help us look at where we have come from and help guide us to where we may wish to go in the future.

I do find that some commentators on SDA tend towards an anti-intellectual populism that in my mind is short-sighted and dangerous. There is a lot of fluff and crap taught at today's universities and the level of scholarship is, in my mind, diminishing. This does not devalue the entire institution. We do however need to question what is happening with our money, why these subjects are important and how much of a university's budget should be devoted to them. Especially since these institutions are 80-85% subsidised.

We also have to stand up to these entitled idiots who think that they deserve a free ride to study whatever they wish and prolong their childhoods well into what would normally be a productive adult life. Higher education is an investment in yourself, if you aren't willing to take that risk and evaluate the costs versus the benefits of your schooling, why should I the taxpayer?

There were quite a few students in my grad program in Quebec who wanted fees to be raised: we wanted consumer's leverage, or whatever the term is. I would have been happy to pay double the fees for improved services: research proposals and papers necessary for advancing in the programme often sat mouldering on the PI's desk for 3-4 months; feedback was often shoddy or downright incoherent; students were frequently used for unpaid scut-work... these were extremely common problems in many departments. Better to fork over the 15 grand a year and be assured of a really top-notch education delivered in a reasonable time-frame.

Undergraduate science classes at Concordia, on the other hand, were very good for the most part, and, generally-speaking, the students really appreciated that we were getting excellent quality for our money.