Domestic Bliss Report

Motherhood is hard work. If we don't stick together, we'll all fall apart.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Will my kids be too educated for college?

Charlotte Allen has a marvelous piece in the LATimes. My own bachelor's degree, completed circa 1993, had a minimum of fluff. Yeah, there's a little bit (Shakespeare on film, a poetry writing class), but for the most part, my classes were meaningful.
With the course we've chosen for our kids, though, and articles like Allen's I wonder. Will my kids finish high school overeducated for college? Like I don't have enough to worry about!
Ms. Allen's conclusion sums it up quite nicely:

The bigger problem is that too much of American higher education has lost any notion of what its students ought to know about the ideas and people and movements that created the civilization in which they live: Who Plato was or what happened at Appomattox.

Instead of the carefully crafted core programs that once guided students through the basics of literature, philosophy, history and the social sciences, most colleges now offer smorgasbords of unrelated classes for their students to sample in order to fulfill requirements. And the professors stock the smorgasbords with whatever the theorists they idolize tells them is the new new thing.

Why not take a course in "The Phallus"?

You can get the same credit for it as for a course in Greek tragedy.

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