On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 12:15:41 -0700, Kevin Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > They simply make the useless courses "mandatory" so that teachers with tenure > can teach useless subjects that are no longer relevant rather than being > expected/required to stay current, which happens to their students in the > real world. > (My contribution to taking this even further off-topic and rant-ish)
On a whole, I liked your rant and agree with it (especially the part about parents paying to get rid of their kids, very amusing), except this one little bit. I heard this same argument alot when I was at DeVry. "Why do we need to take modern history? We're going to be computer programmers." Well, ok, the possibilities are slim of you ever having a heavy discussion with anyone about the Yalta Conference and its effects on post-WWII Europe, but if the topic ever came up (like it just did), do you want to look like have a clue what's being discussed, or do you want to stand there with a blank look on your face? Learning the skills to do one particular job, whether it be flipping burgers or programming computers, is good, but there's a big difference between being skilled and being educated. I'm not saying one necessarily needs to get that education from school (read a book, watch Discovery Channel, whatever), but I really hate seeing our society turn into a mass of burger-flipper-education-level drones. (There's a rant to be had right there about "the man" and how he keeps you down by not educating you, but I'll leave that to someone else to run with.) I just like to know the people I'm hanging with or working with have a broad life experience so we can have a conversation about something other than work, and I personally think broad-based post secondary educations are a good way to give people that experience. Ian _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
