[PVaQlNaP]

Asher - just for reference, how have you been educated? I'm interested for two reasons - because I'm in the field, and I want to know how your experience was.



As for the article - I agree almost totally with it. Since the elite universities and institutes started becoming "vocational training for the elite", they have lost their sheen and purpose.

Once upon a time, an education in the arts/humanities was really, really hard. Sometimes even harder than in the sciences, because you had to juggle not only the rigorous parts of your curriculum (the analytic parts of philosophy, to take an example), but also the subjective ones. Your output had to be not only correct but also elegant.

And this wasn't meant to be vocational training, it was meant for people who were either already rich or were willing to live a humble life to pursue what they loved, because they wanted either the power (this isn't really the right word, but I can't find another) or the perspective (or both) that this education could give them. Taxpayer money should never have been allocated for this.

I remember reading in a book about Islamic education that nowadays, the elite Madarsas' (Qum, Al-Azhar, Deoband, and the like) primary product is people who are capable only of teaching in Madarsas. It seems this is what is happening to the humanities/arts in our system now. It's sad, really, that they've gone so much out of touch with the mainstream of public life. Maybe this is why the quality of popular culture has dropped so much in the last half a century?

Maybe the error lay in reducing the difficulty of the arts/humanities courses. It probably let the riff-raff along with the really good people. And all it takes is one bad apple......