Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

I was one credit shy of a philosophy minor in undergrad. The entire purpose of philosophy is to provide actionable guidelines for how to live life, yet none of my classes actually provided students with this information. Instead, a lecturer would drone on about academicians' opinions on various doctrines, their historical context, and critique each doctrine from a logical perspective without any group discussion or talk of application. Students were then asked to regurgitate the professor's opinions in an essay. It was boring, and eventually I quit.

Imagine if all chemistry classes were just the classroom side of organic chemistry, with people sitting in rooms memorizing syntheses and electron pushing without ever even talking about stepping into a lab. Would anyone be surprised if those students then said they thought chemistry was boring?

I did all that after I dropped out of college and the ugliness of the work world drove me to cultivate my inner garden. I am exponentially smarter now than I ever was in school. I am a firm believer in the sentiment behind the phrase "Never let your schooling get in the way of your education."

The author believes in a fiction that never existed. Professors have always had to fight to earn the attention of students, iPhones weren't the only competitors. What's happened is that reality has gotten so naked that even the absurdly idealistic professors have had to acknowledge it. They were the only ones who ever really believed it. I feel like even parents, for awhile now, pay lip service to the value of schooling without actually believing in it.

Education is not, and never was, what academia seems to think it is.

The humanities are useless, in the sense that they do not fit the current idea of what a University's place in society should be.

Universities used to teach humanities almost to all students, some years even exclusively; not because it was useful in the olden days, but precisely because it was useless. It was a luxury. A university was a place for the upper tiers of society to park their kids until they got their hormones out of their system and were mature enough to assume their new leadership role in society. By studying the humanities, students connected with the past and it elevated their spirits for the future (meaning, they could make lower class people feel stupid for not having read Goethe). Studying latin, greek, literature, ... has largely been irrelevant for centuries, but this did not matter one bit for the students (or their parents paying for it). For them, this was just a time to learn dedication to hard work, sharpen their mind, network, and hopefully not knock-up too many custodian's daughters.

Students who did not follow in their parents situation (factory owners, lawyers, physicians, what have you ...) could end up in Academia, as faculty. It kept them out of trouble, they got paid handsomely, it made for a cute dinner table story when they were rambling about their field trip to Timbuktu. The "set-for-life" (aka tenure, high pay) nature of Academia is the most important give-away that these positions had nothing to do with usefulness, and everything to do with protecting status, about ensuring excess spawn could live comfortable lives and did not embarrass their families. Academia was (is) a different kind of clergy; highly educated, a path to an unencumbered life, but also somewhat irrelevant.

The big shift is not that the humanities have become useless - they've always been. The big shift is that the university has become a vocational school. They have become, what used to be the technical and trade colleges, a replacement for the lifetime learning on the job condensed in a few years for the unwashed masses. In this neo-liberal meritocracy or ours (jk), people are widgets, and they need to be jiggered correctly so they can be slotted in to the correct spot and be useful for society. If you explained 150 years ago to Winthrop that in 2015 farmer Joe would send his kids to Harvard to learn how to operate some new fangled bleepy bloopy thingie (aka programming a computer), he'd think your nuts.

Yes, the infantile mental state of many humanities professors is baffling. I guess they dedicate themselves to their work because they are passionate about the content, yes, reading&thinking is fun! Some may even think they are useful. "I teach my students to think critically"! As if physics professor or your uncle cannot do that. "I teach my students to understand systemic societal problems!" Sure, but your adherence to those shift with the winds of political expedience, your own age and experience, and maybe that movie you once saw. But what they are really doing is that they've taken up the scraps of a role that no longer exists.

IMO, the humanities have a big place in the University - a place for "higher" learning. It elevates us over the day-to-day drab of doing errands and keeping your shoelaces tied, they connect us to some of the most wonderful human achievements of the past. But it is not useful, and has never been so.

Those "things" are probably different for everyone but, for me, I wish I had them from the beginning.