Too soon old, too late smart. Honey, you could have benefited more from a welding class. h/t.
31 Replies to “Confessions Of A Regretful Gender Studies Student”
Poor little girl must have missed growing up while playing with her “Math is Hard” Barbies…
in the poor dear’s article she mentions the ‘watts riot of 1992…’
i was close by watts at the time(could see the smoke and hear the rat a tat tat) but i’m sure it was in the 60’s….
am i having an acid flashback ?
was there another riot in watts in 1992 ?
Well Kate, we could ALL benefit from a welding class!
John, the Rodney King trial riots maybe? Watts was probably a nice easy to remember name for students taking useless classes.
john begley
[[[in the poor dear’s article she mentions the ‘watts riot of 1992…’
i was close by watts at the time(could see the smoke and hear the rat a tat tat) but i’m sure it was in the 60’s….
am i having an acid flashback ?
was there another riot in watts in 1992 ?]]]
No acid flashback…..I had ta gin on the for a second or two….Rodney King Riots????
“Can’t we all just get along?”
It is gratifying this chicky is maturing…to a degree….(pun intended).
was it the rodster’s little spot of bovver then?
thenk you!
JB,
Rodney King riots where in 1992. Not just LA but also in Watts. There was also a mini-riot on Yonge St. in TO. Lots of smashed windows and looting. Probably more looting then the recent G20.
i pretty much wasted my university degree as well, although at least i managed to do it without incurring a debt. i’m glad she’s waking up. and i’m glad she is trying to give herself a better education now that her eyes are more open. kudos on the welding classes. i paid my way through uni by working construction over the summer months. having a trade is always useful.
I managed to come out of the post-secondary world as a mining technologist and an electronics technician.
Of course, if I had even hinted at an arts degree, dad would have booted my butt from Cape North to Yarmouth and back again.
Smart dad.
She can always get a job as a prostitute. It’s the only job her education prepared her for and she’ll pay off those student loans in about two years if she’s decent looking.
I see a long car ride to Vegas in her future.
She paid $40 k per year for a journalism education, and she didn’t learn how to write either.
She could have gotten all that “education” and more for a mere $25 dollar/year library card.
“She can always get a job as a prostitute”….actually in her distorted world, she could not.
She would insist on be a sex worker, however she would benefit from being studied by a dozen undergrads in the womyns studies from the local university (also spending $40k/yr of mummy and daddys retirement fund) so the social aspect of studying that she craves would not be lost.
Somebody call Obambi, I think we have found a way to “spread the wealth” and improve employment.
“She paid $40 k per year for a journalism education, and she didn’t learn to write” — neither! Ha. Atleast she realized her mistake and might just make a decent contribution to society.
VDH has said always be suspicious of anything with “studies” in it. It’s a good point.
There is an overall problem – it makes no sense for “everyone to go to college” as some politicians dream of – we need good tradespeople etc.
I loved university. Went for a good long time and actually made money doing it.
As I took actual subjects – albeit fluffy ones like philosophy and poli sci – and eventually a professional degree the experience was a huge benefit.
But not in any instrumental sense. Rather it taught me to think, write and read closely and carefully. Now, would I have been willing to pay 40,000 a year to do that? Er, no.
When I hire people now I am only looking for thinking and writing. I don’t care if they have a degree. Or what that degree might be in. Can they think well, can they write well?
Gender Studies and such tend to see thinking and writing as male, logocentric and sexist. Oddly in ten hires none have been Gender/Black/Wymn’s/Eviviro Studies grads.
Ooops.
“But I could have benefited from more politics, history and literature classes—to learn more about the world in general, rather than one tiny little sliver of the world.”
Welding? Cripes, Co-ed Coat-Hanger Straightening would be more useful than that digested pablum…
Imagine what Michel Angelo would not have produced if he took some time for wymen studies.
“I don’t have time today to work on the Mona Lisa because there is a course on… The relationship of blind orphaned puppies in Siberia and transgendered Ethiopian sumo wrestlers.”
Well, I studied PolySci and parlayed it into a law degree. I’ve been practicing for 12 years now. However, I didn’t start university until I was 22 (worked for 4 years to save up enough $$ to pay for school – and established a PLAN before heading off). Most of the people I went to undergrad with had no clue why they were there, or why they were in the arts. Most couldn’t read or write, either. What a freakin’ waste.
People should not enroll in a university unless they a.) want to learn a marketable skill, and b.) are hard workers; hard enough workers that they really will learn all the difficult classes, rather than just earn C’s or B’s in them.
Learning a trade is is almost never considered by high school guidance counselors; everyone must get a 4 yr. degree. University degrees are much overrated; learning a trade much underrated, and almost always the better of the 2. Just think – if Obama and all his highly educated morons hadn’t gone to university- they might actually have a clue as to how the world works. Better for them, and for the US.
I actually blame the sciences for this problem. YUP!
It’s those silly statistics courses that are dumbed down for non-science students. It put some kind of imaginary “correlation of everything” idea into their heads and now they think they can regress victim Y against perceived aggressors Y_1, …, Y_n and imply some kind of grievance.
Instead of dumbing down the sciences to the point that they can be perceived to be adapted to anything you want, they should have required some study of logic first and foremost.
“Critical thinking” is the buzz word du jour. An article in the Globe and Mail by John Allemang claims the cause of home grown Jihadis is the decline in liberal arts. He thinks that because most of these Jihadis are well educated in technical fields that somehow if they had taken more arts they would have been more compassionate, more able to think through the issues. Being a techie means you act like a robot and react, I guess.
How ridiculous is this notion that the arts create thinkers and the sciences automatons? I can only ask how hard can it be to think in an environment where you literally can’t be wrong? When I took poetry in University I quickly learned if I “found” one or more of these four themes – Death, Sex, Heaven, or Hell – in a poem I was assured at least a “B” on the paper. After all, what I got out of the poem was indisputable. On the other hand when I did an experiment in cell membrane protein capping the obvious conclusion was that cell membrane proteins were mobile, not fixed. That, and competent laboratory skills, may have gotten me a “B”. The extra bit you had to realize was that the experiment itself injected a variable and we only knew that they were mobile in the presence of the chemicals we used to mark the proteins. We couldn’t know if they were mobile without them as we couldn’t detect the mobility without tagging the proteins.
To me critical thinking is only of use when something real is on the line, when someone can actually prove you wrong. The liberal arts never challenge your conclusions, they only graded how well your subjective conclusions matched other people’s, or the prof’s, subjective conclusions. I learned very quickly what criticism was in the sciences. When a TA can prove you are a moron you work very hard at thinking every problem from multiple angles.
Allemang’s thesis depends on wishful thinking about his own education and a blinkered understanding of what sciences and technology are about. High School chem is not the measure. Too bad the RGSS and her commenters on the article Kate posted fall into the same trap.
Zorgon – It was Leonardo da Vinci, not Michelangelo, who painted the Mona Lisa. That said, I had a successful career with a high school diploma and got a degree in management just before I retired and a masters degree after retirement – just in case I ever had to find another job. A lot of ‘education’ is a waste of time and money designed to give people with worthless degrees a job teaching the only subject they know.
130% of college students at the University of California at Santa Barbara(UCSB) voted for Obama, they had help voting from the Service Employees International Union(SEIU), they did not vote for jobs.
“At least she realized her mistake and might just make a decent contribution to society.” Gobi
I agree..it’s IMO the first (honest) & second (not-infallible ) principles of success…
The third may be that despite the handicap of the first two you are willing to take risk…
Aviator, thanks for the correction.
I read regularly in this blog’s comments about how the only study worth pursuing is that which is directly related to some current line of employment. For a large number of university students, this explains their decision to attend university, and those who come only for that purpose should not be surprised that a philosophy degree or a history degree does not constitute job training. A good degree in a coherent discipline, however, contributes considerably to a person’s intellectual and cultural development and proves invaluable in developing a critical and reflective perspective on reality. The various “studies” programs (women’s, gender, queer, black, cultural, etc., etc.), having no disciplinary perspective but only a political one, tend not to do so.
Having an M.A. in philosophy won’t make you a better taxi driver, but it will make driving the taxi a more rewarding experience.
The poor dear will probably -need- a welding course so she can get a job to pay off those student loans.
I doubt she’d make a successful prostitute, I mean have you SEEN the women in those Wymyn’s Studies classes? [shudder]
Roseberry said: “Having an M.A. in philosophy won’t make you a better taxi driver, but it will make driving the taxi a more rewarding experience.”
I respectfully disagree, ma’am. Personally, the year I spent learning cabinet making at George Brown College made a much more positive impact on my life than the three years I spent at university getting a BA.
In my experience, having a degree gives most people (including myself) an unearned sense of superiority. They are too good for menial work, they are entitled to something better because they have a degree, and they are wasting their talents merely earning a living. The higher the degree the greater the entitlement and the greater the resentment if they are stuck doing something menial.
M.A. in Philosophy makes for a remarkably cranky cab driver.
I eventually escaped this syndrome by running my own painting company, and by studying cabinet making. Self employment rapidly beats out of you any illusions of superiority you may have. After getting yet more “education” later in life I discovered something else. Working in the medical field rapidly beats out of you any illusions of anybody else’s superiority.
We all have feet of clay. Scholarship for the sake of Truth is really the only reason for going to university, any other purpose is better served by community college. aka welding class.
I actually took a welding course, it was pretty fun. Saved myself a buttload of money welding up my own doodads here at Chez Phantom too.
The kind of “critical thinking” these people are peddling is the kind where what they teach you is accepted unexamined, and whatever anyone else with any sense presents that shows it to be false or inadequate is nitpicked, abused, misrepresented and misunderstood so that you can feel good about clinging to your unexamined beliefs. The arts that John Allemang studies teach mindless conformity and idiot negation.
Phantom writes: “Scholarship for the sake of Truth is really the only reason for going to university…” This is certainly the purpose of the University itself (although most university boards of governors would respond to this statement by wondering what space-ship had just dropped you off), and it is the measure by which one should assess the work of faculty members in universities. You find more of them than you might think, though they represent a shrinking minority. Before I set foot at university, however, I had not encountered anyone who understood, much less was able to communicate to a young person the idea of “scholarship in pursuit of Truth”, certainly not in any public school that I attended or have since experienced.
ebt aptly describes what often passes for “critical thinking” in many universities. A former colleague regularly taught a course in “critical media literacy”, a central part of which involved students “deconstructing” advertisements for bogey-man products like alcohol, tobacco, automobiles, etc. I asked if his students ever deconstructed advertisements for Oxfam or Amnesty International or “fair-trade” coffee; he, too, looked puzzled and and seemed to look around for that space-ship.
Having gone to university and come out with a BA, I can honestly say that there were parts of my education that I will use far more than others.
Majoring in Classical History focusing on the Roman empire, I have used Latin in many ways, I can muddle through Paris and Rome (and have done) and reading about history and the rise and fall of empires, I have drastically reshaped my political opinions, as I’ve seen what does work and what makes people move to France (of all places). I learned how to research obscure topics, and I am quite skilled at finding strange facts for my bosses.
My English minor has taught me to fake eloquence, I can write with ease and with minimal spelling and grammatical errors and I still employ this skill in many ways. For example, the following rant:
My most useless class was without a doubt, Women’s Studies 101, in which I learned that if I have to keep my opinions to myself, lie through my teeth when called upon and keep my mouth shut the rest of the time, I’d best be prepared to spend money on a psychiatrist, cause I’m going to need to bitch to someone, and who better than someone paid to listen and tell me I’m not insane for thinking that men aren’t the source of all my problems. Women’s Studies, like Gender Studies, is a fluff class designed to appeal to the “victims” in society. It’s for egotistical twits who don’t have the balls to admit that they are their own worst enemies and who would rather whinge about men being mean to them than suck it up and go out into the world and take a few risks. All I learned in that class was that I would not sell out my principles for an A, and that during introductions to the class, the most satisfying thing in the world is to say you like men and just watch the hate seep from all the angry feminists who didn’t the class because they “had to in order to graduate”.
Poor little girl must have missed growing up while playing with her “Math is Hard” Barbies…
in the poor dear’s article she mentions the ‘watts riot of 1992…’
i was close by watts at the time(could see the smoke and hear the rat a tat tat) but i’m sure it was in the 60’s….
am i having an acid flashback ?
was there another riot in watts in 1992 ?
Well Kate, we could ALL benefit from a welding class!
John, the Rodney King trial riots maybe? Watts was probably a nice easy to remember name for students taking useless classes.
john begley
[[[in the poor dear’s article she mentions the ‘watts riot of 1992…’
i was close by watts at the time(could see the smoke and hear the rat a tat tat) but i’m sure it was in the 60’s….
am i having an acid flashback ?
was there another riot in watts in 1992 ?]]]
No acid flashback…..I had ta gin on the for a second or two….Rodney King Riots????
“Can’t we all just get along?”
It is gratifying this chicky is maturing…to a degree….(pun intended).
was it the rodster’s little spot of bovver then?
thenk you!
JB,
Rodney King riots where in 1992. Not just LA but also in Watts. There was also a mini-riot on Yonge St. in TO. Lots of smashed windows and looting. Probably more looting then the recent G20.
i pretty much wasted my university degree as well, although at least i managed to do it without incurring a debt. i’m glad she’s waking up. and i’m glad she is trying to give herself a better education now that her eyes are more open. kudos on the welding classes. i paid my way through uni by working construction over the summer months. having a trade is always useful.
I managed to come out of the post-secondary world as a mining technologist and an electronics technician.
Of course, if I had even hinted at an arts degree, dad would have booted my butt from Cape North to Yarmouth and back again.
Smart dad.
She can always get a job as a prostitute. It’s the only job her education prepared her for and she’ll pay off those student loans in about two years if she’s decent looking.
I see a long car ride to Vegas in her future.
She paid $40 k per year for a journalism education, and she didn’t learn how to write either.
She could have gotten all that “education” and more for a mere $25 dollar/year library card.
“She can always get a job as a prostitute”….actually in her distorted world, she could not.
She would insist on be a sex worker, however she would benefit from being studied by a dozen undergrads in the womyns studies from the local university (also spending $40k/yr of mummy and daddys retirement fund) so the social aspect of studying that she craves would not be lost.
Somebody call Obambi, I think we have found a way to “spread the wealth” and improve employment.
“She paid $40 k per year for a journalism education, and she didn’t learn to write” — neither! Ha. Atleast she realized her mistake and might just make a decent contribution to society.
VDH has said always be suspicious of anything with “studies” in it. It’s a good point.
There is an overall problem – it makes no sense for “everyone to go to college” as some politicians dream of – we need good tradespeople etc.
I loved university. Went for a good long time and actually made money doing it.
As I took actual subjects – albeit fluffy ones like philosophy and poli sci – and eventually a professional degree the experience was a huge benefit.
But not in any instrumental sense. Rather it taught me to think, write and read closely and carefully. Now, would I have been willing to pay 40,000 a year to do that? Er, no.
When I hire people now I am only looking for thinking and writing. I don’t care if they have a degree. Or what that degree might be in. Can they think well, can they write well?
Gender Studies and such tend to see thinking and writing as male, logocentric and sexist. Oddly in ten hires none have been Gender/Black/Wymn’s/Eviviro Studies grads.
Ooops.
“But I could have benefited from more politics, history and literature classes—to learn more about the world in general, rather than one tiny little sliver of the world.”
Welding? Cripes, Co-ed Coat-Hanger Straightening would be more useful than that digested pablum…
Imagine what Michel Angelo would not have produced if he took some time for wymen studies.
“I don’t have time today to work on the Mona Lisa because there is a course on… The relationship of blind orphaned puppies in Siberia and transgendered Ethiopian sumo wrestlers.”
Well, I studied PolySci and parlayed it into a law degree. I’ve been practicing for 12 years now. However, I didn’t start university until I was 22 (worked for 4 years to save up enough $$ to pay for school – and established a PLAN before heading off). Most of the people I went to undergrad with had no clue why they were there, or why they were in the arts. Most couldn’t read or write, either. What a freakin’ waste.
People should not enroll in a university unless they a.) want to learn a marketable skill, and b.) are hard workers; hard enough workers that they really will learn all the difficult classes, rather than just earn C’s or B’s in them.
Learning a trade is is almost never considered by high school guidance counselors; everyone must get a 4 yr. degree. University degrees are much overrated; learning a trade much underrated, and almost always the better of the 2. Just think – if Obama and all his highly educated morons hadn’t gone to university- they might actually have a clue as to how the world works. Better for them, and for the US.
I actually blame the sciences for this problem. YUP!
It’s those silly statistics courses that are dumbed down for non-science students. It put some kind of imaginary “correlation of everything” idea into their heads and now they think they can regress victim Y against perceived aggressors Y_1, …, Y_n and imply some kind of grievance.
Instead of dumbing down the sciences to the point that they can be perceived to be adapted to anything you want, they should have required some study of logic first and foremost.
“Critical thinking” is the buzz word du jour. An article in the Globe and Mail by John Allemang claims the cause of home grown Jihadis is the decline in liberal arts. He thinks that because most of these Jihadis are well educated in technical fields that somehow if they had taken more arts they would have been more compassionate, more able to think through the issues. Being a techie means you act like a robot and react, I guess.
How ridiculous is this notion that the arts create thinkers and the sciences automatons? I can only ask how hard can it be to think in an environment where you literally can’t be wrong? When I took poetry in University I quickly learned if I “found” one or more of these four themes – Death, Sex, Heaven, or Hell – in a poem I was assured at least a “B” on the paper. After all, what I got out of the poem was indisputable. On the other hand when I did an experiment in cell membrane protein capping the obvious conclusion was that cell membrane proteins were mobile, not fixed. That, and competent laboratory skills, may have gotten me a “B”. The extra bit you had to realize was that the experiment itself injected a variable and we only knew that they were mobile in the presence of the chemicals we used to mark the proteins. We couldn’t know if they were mobile without them as we couldn’t detect the mobility without tagging the proteins.
To me critical thinking is only of use when something real is on the line, when someone can actually prove you wrong. The liberal arts never challenge your conclusions, they only graded how well your subjective conclusions matched other people’s, or the prof’s, subjective conclusions. I learned very quickly what criticism was in the sciences. When a TA can prove you are a moron you work very hard at thinking every problem from multiple angles.
Allemang’s thesis depends on wishful thinking about his own education and a blinkered understanding of what sciences and technology are about. High School chem is not the measure. Too bad the RGSS and her commenters on the article Kate posted fall into the same trap.
Zorgon – It was Leonardo da Vinci, not Michelangelo, who painted the Mona Lisa. That said, I had a successful career with a high school diploma and got a degree in management just before I retired and a masters degree after retirement – just in case I ever had to find another job. A lot of ‘education’ is a waste of time and money designed to give people with worthless degrees a job teaching the only subject they know.
130% of college students at the University of California at Santa Barbara(UCSB) voted for Obama, they had help voting from the Service Employees International Union(SEIU), they did not vote for jobs.
“At least she realized her mistake and might just make a decent contribution to society.” Gobi
I agree..it’s IMO the first (honest) & second (not-infallible ) principles of success…
The third may be that despite the handicap of the first two you are willing to take risk…
Aviator, thanks for the correction.
I read regularly in this blog’s comments about how the only study worth pursuing is that which is directly related to some current line of employment. For a large number of university students, this explains their decision to attend university, and those who come only for that purpose should not be surprised that a philosophy degree or a history degree does not constitute job training. A good degree in a coherent discipline, however, contributes considerably to a person’s intellectual and cultural development and proves invaluable in developing a critical and reflective perspective on reality. The various “studies” programs (women’s, gender, queer, black, cultural, etc., etc.), having no disciplinary perspective but only a political one, tend not to do so.
Having an M.A. in philosophy won’t make you a better taxi driver, but it will make driving the taxi a more rewarding experience.
The poor dear will probably -need- a welding course so she can get a job to pay off those student loans.
I doubt she’d make a successful prostitute, I mean have you SEEN the women in those Wymyn’s Studies classes? [shudder]
Roseberry said: “Having an M.A. in philosophy won’t make you a better taxi driver, but it will make driving the taxi a more rewarding experience.”
I respectfully disagree, ma’am. Personally, the year I spent learning cabinet making at George Brown College made a much more positive impact on my life than the three years I spent at university getting a BA.
In my experience, having a degree gives most people (including myself) an unearned sense of superiority. They are too good for menial work, they are entitled to something better because they have a degree, and they are wasting their talents merely earning a living. The higher the degree the greater the entitlement and the greater the resentment if they are stuck doing something menial.
M.A. in Philosophy makes for a remarkably cranky cab driver.
I eventually escaped this syndrome by running my own painting company, and by studying cabinet making. Self employment rapidly beats out of you any illusions of superiority you may have. After getting yet more “education” later in life I discovered something else. Working in the medical field rapidly beats out of you any illusions of anybody else’s superiority.
We all have feet of clay. Scholarship for the sake of Truth is really the only reason for going to university, any other purpose is better served by community college. aka welding class.
I actually took a welding course, it was pretty fun. Saved myself a buttload of money welding up my own doodads here at Chez Phantom too.
The kind of “critical thinking” these people are peddling is the kind where what they teach you is accepted unexamined, and whatever anyone else with any sense presents that shows it to be false or inadequate is nitpicked, abused, misrepresented and misunderstood so that you can feel good about clinging to your unexamined beliefs. The arts that John Allemang studies teach mindless conformity and idiot negation.
Phantom writes: “Scholarship for the sake of Truth is really the only reason for going to university…” This is certainly the purpose of the University itself (although most university boards of governors would respond to this statement by wondering what space-ship had just dropped you off), and it is the measure by which one should assess the work of faculty members in universities. You find more of them than you might think, though they represent a shrinking minority. Before I set foot at university, however, I had not encountered anyone who understood, much less was able to communicate to a young person the idea of “scholarship in pursuit of Truth”, certainly not in any public school that I attended or have since experienced.
ebt aptly describes what often passes for “critical thinking” in many universities. A former colleague regularly taught a course in “critical media literacy”, a central part of which involved students “deconstructing” advertisements for bogey-man products like alcohol, tobacco, automobiles, etc. I asked if his students ever deconstructed advertisements for Oxfam or Amnesty International or “fair-trade” coffee; he, too, looked puzzled and and seemed to look around for that space-ship.
Having gone to university and come out with a BA, I can honestly say that there were parts of my education that I will use far more than others.
Majoring in Classical History focusing on the Roman empire, I have used Latin in many ways, I can muddle through Paris and Rome (and have done) and reading about history and the rise and fall of empires, I have drastically reshaped my political opinions, as I’ve seen what does work and what makes people move to France (of all places). I learned how to research obscure topics, and I am quite skilled at finding strange facts for my bosses.
My English minor has taught me to fake eloquence, I can write with ease and with minimal spelling and grammatical errors and I still employ this skill in many ways. For example, the following rant:
My most useless class was without a doubt, Women’s Studies 101, in which I learned that if I have to keep my opinions to myself, lie through my teeth when called upon and keep my mouth shut the rest of the time, I’d best be prepared to spend money on a psychiatrist, cause I’m going to need to bitch to someone, and who better than someone paid to listen and tell me I’m not insane for thinking that men aren’t the source of all my problems. Women’s Studies, like Gender Studies, is a fluff class designed to appeal to the “victims” in society. It’s for egotistical twits who don’t have the balls to admit that they are their own worst enemies and who would rather whinge about men being mean to them than suck it up and go out into the world and take a few risks. All I learned in that class was that I would not sell out my principles for an A, and that during introductions to the class, the most satisfying thing in the world is to say you like men and just watch the hate seep from all the angry feminists who didn’t the class because they “had to in order to graduate”.