Professor Jenny Pickerill, who teaches environmental geography at the University of Sheffield, told the Times Higher Education magazine that students "struggle" with the books she recommends.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/reading-a-book-too-challenging-for-university-students-a3226041.html
The professor claimed her students often complained "the language or concepts are
too hard" and they suggested other, easier alternative things to read instead.
can you fuck off with this worthless thread
Even in the Humanities it's pretty bad. Even in philosophy graduate seminars I've been in.
It's really weird. After five years of becoming a philosophy guy, shouldn't you be able to do more than a bizarre surface analysis of 37% of a short book or article? Every single reading discussion we had went like
>I felt like he made his argument really well, but I didn't like that he _________.
Just a vague-ass statement like "I liked it", and the critiques were always so off-base that you'd wonder if they even read the thing. Like, I've seen third year PhD students summarise the point an article is arguing AGAINST as if it was the argument of the article, because the article briefly synopsised the former argument for like a page.
University is weird. All these rich niggas but no brains
Perhaps they've been ushered into the wrong field of education.
Who would want the "wrong types" to pool into their communities, anyway?
Students genuinely only like to be spoonfed information at this point, my English department has almost completely shifted to new media (electronic lit and comics) and identity in literature courses (mainly disability) because it's easily marketable and no longer makes students work for it. Out of the 100 or so English majors in my class, maybe 3 other people read more than one book for themselves in the course of a month. This is not to sound narcissistic because I go to a small-liberal arts school but I'm the only person who reads a significant amount outside of class.
>>7925743
I know an art history lecturer who had a student complain that they didn't feel able to get information from books and that it wasn't worthwhile. This was an excuse as to why she had either not done or struggled with an essay comparing two.
>>7925765
What college?
>>7925743
It's because the university system is obsolete. Most of the students in the humanities departments of prestigious universities are mediocre plebs who've just been tutored enough to sound like they might understand what they're on about until you talk to them for more than five seconds. This is what charging extortionate tuition fees for degrees that have very little practical use does. Only rich kids whose parents can afford to take the hit to their bank accounts are really capable of being philosophy or English majors at say, Harvard.
>>7925737
Sounds like you're one of her students lmao
>>7925732
>>7925814
Hope this is a troll.
I hope you realize how much you reek of mediocrity.
>>7925743
I am ambivalent whenever I read things like this. On one hand, it's tragic that this is what higher education has come to. On the other hand, it means I have a better shot at my dream of becoming a professor of philosophy, as I am not entirely retarded.
>>7926299
Tell me exactly how you figure that he does that, or stop your lame posturing.
>>7925732
How do you even get accepted into a Univesity if you don't like books?
>>7926323
poc/vagina'd human
>>7926328
Excuse me.
Isn't a Univesity about higher level studies on a selected subject?
It's for people who did outsandingly well in the past.
How would just being black qualify you to enter an institution of higher education?
Or bein female?
>>7926339
Because diversity makes everything better, duh. And of course diversity means having black or brown skin.
>>7925934
>
>>7925732
>University of Sheffield
There's your problem
>>7926339
No, it was maybe in the early 20th century, but it hasn't been like that for a long time.
>>7926350
What did he mean by this
>>7925743
Troll. You've never been in a philosophy graduate program.
>>7926494
What is it about nowdays.
>>7925808
Davidson
>>7926361
It's really unbelievable how people act when they either see someone reading something not for class (because everyone asks you "is that for class" when you're reading anywhere public) and they just get a huge ego-trip "how do you even have time to read! I wish I had time I have no time!".
Then there's the people who will read a book over the course of a semester and make a big show of it, I swear I've seen this could making a conversation with people out of Girl With Curious Hair and places it next to him every time he's in the coffee shop I work at.
>>7926499
To open the packaging of the scissor, you need a scissor. To read a book, one needs to read that book. It's the same as having an entry-level job that requires 2 years of experience.
>>7925924
No, it doesn't? Fuck off.
>>7926510
Getting a degree to get the job.
>>7925743
>you'd wonder if they even read the thing.
Exactly. Trust your instincts
>>7926552
>how do you even have time to read!
Triggered
>>7925732
i do anthropology at a top liberal university and can confirm that you could ace this shit without even knowing what subject you did
>>7925765
>Students genuinely only like to be spoonfed information at this point
To be fair, you spend an awful lot of money to not be spoon-fed information. What's the point of going to school when a Wikipedia article engages you just as much as the teacher? As classrooms expand, there is less teacher engagement, which is pathetic considering the costs involved.
>>7925777
>I know an art history lecturer who had a student complain that they didn't feel able to get information from books and that it wasn't worthwhile.
Books are highly subjective—especially non-fictional ones for research. An author presents information as it is relevant to themselves, and depending on your knowledge base and worldview you could find it useless. There is no way for the author to tailor information specifically for you.
When I read history I find this particularly evident. Some historians try to look at everything from every angle, but in the end it comes off as directionless. It is important to know what you want to know and to be able to discern if an author will be able to provide it (preferably before you have already read it all).
>>7925934
Great book, especially for non-fiction. It teaches the art of strategically reading—getting the crucial information you need in the shortest amount of time possible.
It's just as well - the syllabi for a lot of these courses are shameful.
>>7925732
It's because kids these days are SparkNoting their way through school.
>>7927742
>awful lot of money
I have a full scholarship. 260k education for free.
I have a hard time sitting down to read anything anymore, unless I really like it. I can listen to audiobooks for hours but with normal text I get antsy, I can't concentrate or force myself to keep reading. I go and check the internet or stare at the wall or think about other things.
I can still concentrate when I need to, such as for school, but otherwise I feel my capacity to get into reading is vastly diminished.
>>7925732
To be fair, a lot of academic books are -really- badly written if not intentionally obfuscatory.
>>7929489
Eliminate distraction. Shut off your phone and computer, put them on the other side of the house.
If you think people have only now started to do this, you're full of shit. Professors have always had trouble getting their students to read, in all majors and all schools even ivys.
That said, as higher ed in the western world is increasingly handed over to private interest and more and more people go to university who do not belong there because they want to stay out of poverty, this will just increase. And as education is increasingly commodified, if people don't like the product they're buying the manufacturer will have to change it for them.
That said >>7929491
>>7925743
I have an MA in Philosophy, only did it to put off having to get a real job. Did almost no reading, barely contributed in seminars. Found it pointless and uninteresting. Was able to coast through with respectable grades as that only entailed writing the occassional essay which could be done overnight.
I've read more philosophy since leaving university and getting a job, other subjects too.
It is a bit of a difficult line to straddle. You have to cater to the level of the students you are working with. A geography student at the University of Sheffield is about the definition of average.
At A level they could very realistically get 100% on an exam having only read Guardian articles. I took it at A level several years ago and I was never asked to read... well anything.
Then they get to University and they're expected to read 300 pages books and shitheads like Foucault. It's a steep learning curve and a lot of 19-year-olds at places like Sheffield aren't from good schools or academic backgrounds.
They're used to getting A*s for doing nothing whatsofuckingever. The idea that they'd have to study 30 hours a week and to struggle with material is unheard of. I remember kids on my course whining like children because it was twoo hward. Then they'd go running to Daddy lecturer to sort things out.
I struggled myself but that's the point. Students should be told they're expected to do a full work week. If they haven't studied for 30-40 hours a week then they can't come and complain yet. But a reading list has to be realistic and to engage with student's ability levels.
This is actually a thread I've been waiting to pop up for a long time, especially because it's tangentially related to /lit/, because I'm so passionate about it.
Basically, I'm a stemfag who is interested in literature, philosophy, and the humanities so when I went to college, along with my engineering classes, I tried to take advanced English classes to further my understanding and interest. In my freshman year, I was put into a third year "Philosophy of Literature" class, and it honestly made me question college as a whole.
Keep in mind, I'm 18 years old, this was actually the first real class I ever went to, and I'm surrounded by 20-21 year old English majors (because of AP/IB tests and the honors program I was able to test into a higher class). I walk in, spend about a half hour there until I realize how fucked the class is: it's me, another normal White guy (who actually was a computer science major), a normal-ish girl, and then about 15 other people that are all either female radfems/POC advocates or very effeminate males. It also turns out a majority of them are virtually mentally retarded. They couldn't grasp the simplest concepts, and I honestly lost a lot of my optimistic outlook toward academia seeing these people who I came into the class assuming I would be looking up to as mentors turned out to be dumber than the people I went to high school with.
I feel like this is a recurring theme though - I've gone to schools that are comprised of a minority-majority student body, and I feel like a lot of them have really fucked up perceptions of life and academia and are essentially devoid of any passion. That might be a racist outlook, but it also might be a coincidence that all of these students who are success-oriented only get by with their countless tutors, and only continue life on at the suggestion of those around them.
I'd really appreciate any input on this idea, because I know many of you in here are smarter than I am and will likely have something good to add, whether it's a criticism or a corroboration.
>>7932218
The point of a university is not to crank out degrees for people to get careers in things they know nothing about. The point of a university is to give the students continued education. If the student isn't constantly educating himself outside of university he has no place in academics. Reading a 300 page book shouldn't be past the level of a college student. 600 Pages, maybe, but 300? That is young adult level reading, high school stuff. If you go to college uneducated you can't expect to get anything out of it since college is there to form professionals out of the educated, not the uneducated into the uneducated professionals.
>>7932248
Frankly, 'liberal arts' educations are dead not because literature/philosophy/etc is worthless or because of 'muh SJW boogeyman', but because the people in charge of funding have no idea what a good liberal arts education is and so have butchered the approach by turning it into academia themed social jockeying split across a dozen disciplines that are fucking pointless to specialize in. Take 'Women's Studies,' for instance. It's a fucking stupid degree, but it's not actually a stupid field of study- but it's not something that has any use being studied in a vacuum. Someone who goes into women's studies and then ignores philosophy, history, psychology, lit, etc, is going to become a radfem with nothing but feels and some papers they've cherrypicked for quotes. The same is true for all of these fractured disciplines known as 'the humanities.'
The liberal arts are supposed be a study of humanity, but they've been fractured into overspecialized niches that have created dysfunctional ignoramuses who are economically pressured into screaming that their fraction of humanity is the most important thing ever please don't cut funding for the third time
If you want to find intelligent people in humanities, you need to find people who consume information of their own free will in their own free time, and do so across wide ranges of disciplines. You wouldn't trust a mathematician who only knew trig, and you shouldn't trust an english major who knows nothing outside of fiction books.
>>7932285
Well said anon - thanks.
>>7926319
>Most of the students in the humanities departments of prestigious universities are mediocre plebs who've just been tutored enough to sound like they might understand what they're on about until you talk to them for more than five seconds
We have retards sure, Humanities has subjects where it is hard to gauge talent.
Still,
Talk to the top 1 percent and compare them to the 1 percent at any other university, they're bloody brilliant. most of them are able to cope with both Derrida and Wittgenstein with ease.
Don't get me wrong lesser ranked universities do teach philosophy like ass, I know this and there is a wide concensus about this in most academic circles. The subject is so vague that it is easy for bullshitters not to be able to call out on each others bullshit. This is unlike for example STEM fields where departments even non Ivy can be brilliant because it would not take a genius to know who needs to be dropped, profs that is.
Still, ivy leagues obxridge and some other top universities have the cream of the crop in terms of students.
Bringing up the fact that most of them are rich and well trained does not take away from the fact that they are naturally brilliant or even that they can cope with material very easily (since the latter requires rigorous training).
Not to mention how being rich just adds to their natural talent, or phrasing myself better, rich people are more likely to be more intelligent and have more intelligent offspring than poor people.
There is a reason most revolutionary philosophers have been social elites.
You need talent and training to be remarkable, poor people often have neither and are sometimes dealt a bad card with respect to only the latter.
Even then, they are probably more likely to do well in today's liberal to good society than before when people didn't care for their mediocrity.
So what your post tells me is that you have a misguided idea about how intelligent elite students are and you are still not afraid to make your points with so much confidence. Which means you're either ignorant or trying to aid your confirmation bias in proving that you didn't lose out by having a crap/null education so you can rest easy (probably both).
>>7932258
The length of a book doesn't relate to how difficult it is. When you have a week to write an essay you're not going to read a 600 page book in full when you have another 49 equally relevant materials to reference.
Depends on the degree though. If you're doing a degree in literature you should obviously read the full text for an essay on that text
>>7932305
>Still, ivy leagues obxridge and some other top universities have the cream of the crop in terms of students.
Oh anon, ignorance really is bliss! It will be a rude awakening when you realize that the current state of the United States makes it so that the talented get thrown to the wayside in favor of idiots who, by countless years of preparation and a harem of tutors, manage to excel in their SAT's, ACT's, AP's, IB's, and so on until their résumés are finely-crafted works of art, sadly painted by an uninspired artist.
>>7932285
>SJW boogeyman
The overwhelming presence of SJW rhetoric and ideas among the liberal arts is undeniable. I'm a PoliSci grad student and I've encountered far more of this shit than anyone ever should, especially in the last two years.
University education, humanities, is a waste of money, all that they teach you is cursory, and on top of that only selected bits that a person, I KID YOU NOT, could read in two hours from a book summarizing the history of A- or B-field. It's a joke. You go to uni not for an education but for a degree. Everything is watered down, commercialized, and overly liberalized. Fundamental givens of all the studies are never even addressed, they simply dictate what you must think, or fake. The papers they make you write is laughably inane, I churn out mediocre essays in an hour flat and get 75%, it's a complete farce. The learning I ever did at uni was in my own free time in the library, picking books that you can actually educate yourself from. My fellow peers, ugh, are all ridiculously challenged concerning anything that isn't spoonfed to them, there is no independent association of ideas even, I honestly don't think these people can even analogously apply basic logic or reasoning to anything. The ones who get the distinctions are the ones that work the hardest, not the ones that have knowledge beyond the prescribed or any aptitude for learning. I work hard not because things come slowly to me but because they feed you so much work in order to hide the lack of quality with quantity. It's revolting. I don't complain however, too much, the university lifestyle affords me relatively a lot of free time, which I much desire. But yeah, universities currently certainly do not breed scholars. And have you read papers from actual "academics"?! Haha, ha, ha no. This is abysmal. Academia, at a general level, is fermenting yeast.
>>7925934
>>7932346
Believe me friendo, libarts was dying way before radfem went internet mainstream, and it was economics that was killing it, not identity politics.
Identity politicians are drawn to the humanities because humanity is what they are interested in, but they're like flies drawn to a corpse, not the blade that killed the humanities.
>>7932198
>MA in Philosophy
>getting a job
tell me your secret
>>7932248
You got half if it.
It's not even that only retards and muh feels like liberal arts, rather so much bullshit about morality and virtue signifying had been pumped into these programs that they attract people who want to literally fuss their way through a degree.
If stem courses started accepting an essay that complained how sexist the setup of the class was in lieu of a test, you would see a massive influx in these parasites; I've seen lib courses who do such things, so it's no surprise.
Looking back in very upset with my degree in philosophy.
I don't regret it because I actually ended up with a good job, but I could probably have done physics and read Phil for fun. I used to take analytic courses because they were so small and free of the crying, but, while those courses are hard they are also very useless.
>>7932285
Don't know when you left university but the sjw shit was more than bogeyman teir when I left two years ago.
I had a course that did four classes on heidegger and people were allowed to submit a paper about why they refused to read him at all... Aka because he was a nazi
>>7926339
>How would just being black qualify you to enter an institution of higher education?
If you're the only black person who applies you're guaranteed to get in or the university is racist
>>7932248
A humanities degree has gone from "the thing you do because you're good at it" to "the thing every single young person should do if they can even barely afford it, and which rich people assume is as natural as high school"
STEMlords are just incompetent technicians most of the time. 90% of STEM should be in trade colleges the fuck away from real science and real arts. But humanities people are about 99.99% random idiots who should be learning how to spot-weld or doing some business degree thing, not studying English, Philosophy, History, or Classics.
Go read what the university experience was like a century and a half ago in Europe, and compare it with the state of things now.
Back then, some random 17 year old bourgeois homo would already have 10x the fundamentals and knowledge of a modern PhD student, because his public schooling was rigorous, and wasn't frilly shit for queers. He'd be writing or publishing precociously academic shit by 19, and entering one of the major universities, with a faculty of several hundred or maybe a thousand. He'd enter classes with some of the few luminaries in his discipline, he'd smell Theodor Mommsen's aftershave and bask in Niebuhr's ideas every morning. By 23 he'd be murdering himself to publish a 450-page monograph. By 25, he'd be a fully formed scholar, at the prime of his life, at the peak of his ideas, ready to apply all his manly energies to learning in an environment filled with other, similar people, and with the aforementioned luminaries. There was no dilution. The mental continuum was thick as fuck with big lumps of HEGEL everywhere.
Now you are a 17 year old graduating from a prep high school that made you pretend to read selections of Nietzsche and Jane Austen for several years so your parents could feel like they are High Society for doling out $20,000/yr for it. You know absolutely nothing other than naive self-importance, and then Tumblr tells you that the fundamental metaphysics of reality is whining about brown people on the Internet, and that any philosophy which is whiny as fuck is de facto correct. Then you go to a university which spends more on ~Student Experience~ than academics, with 65,000 other moron students, being taught by 9000 nobody professors, most of whom are more feckless activist than academic. Everything is dumbed down and softened to the point that people who have been "studying" "Literature" for five years still can't tell you even the fuzziest outline of their discipline, their discipline's history, or even literature. PhD students in ELITE SEMINARS resemble a low-quality book club at best.
There's no rigour, nobody has the most basic fundamentals in their own fields, and there are no set paths to take. You have access to zero genius mentors. You are completely ignorant of anything like a Western canon, you literally have no concept of real erudition. Even professors are hyperspecialised monkeys tending walled gardens.
Mass society ate the university.
>>7932305
Berkeleyfag here. I've taken a few philosophy courses, including a course on Hume from Barry Stroud, and I can confirm they are top-notch.
>>7932248
Great post and thread and congrats for pushing your boundaries.
I am kind of an oldfag but have to point out various criticisms of this sort have been kicking around academia for decades (eg Harold Bloom and "muh canon") and probably much, much longer.
If things really are getting worse, I would blame short attention span from social media/devices and a decreased interest/willingness of students (and faculty too) to consider things outside of their own personal comfort zone.
>>7932868
>65,000 students
Buttblasted University of Central Florida undergrad?
>>7932896
For Generation X in the US, Sesame Street was blamed for our short attention spans and the decline of academia.
>>7925732
For all the STEM memers, and people bitching:
Not every university is equal, especially in the US. If you go to a shit school, or even a good school known for SJW focus, you will get heaps of retarded shit.
To high school seniors applying, I beg you to read your professor's prior work, and sit in on a class or two. That way you will know what you are applying for.
STEMlords, bitching about low quality English classes: You can't just take an English major only english course if you are a not a major, so the majority of those stories come from general education level English courses. Gen ed is almost always full of retards from all over the school who will drop out after a year.
I guess the real purpose of this is to say this: Not one of us faggots can speak authoritatively on the state of college education in the US based on your anecdotes. There are too many schools for you to have even visited a meaningful sample, let alone attended courses. There are 3,026 accredited four year schools in the US. Does every single one of them have a worthwhile English program? Fuck no. Does every single one of them have a worthwhile Engineering program. Fuck no.
The problem with English is that everybody expects it to be exactly the same from place to place. There are so many different schools of thought when it comes to literature, and so many different focuses for professors to choose that it is impossible to expect any uniformity.
So what, you had a shit experience. There are others who had good ones. I know I did in my undergrad.
>>7932868
Wow! That was a quality post. How did you become a scholar at just 17 years in today's environment? I'm impressed.
I don't honestly give a fuck about bad teaching or mediocre students. What I is pretending to give a fuck about both things and geting decent grades in the process, while just reading at the side all that i find interesting. The lack of a rigurous education lets me be rigurous, and gives me more time to study on my own.
I know it's a waste of money, but I get my degree necessary for jobs, I learn at my own pace about subjects im more interested in, and I -as an added bonus- get to feel superior to others by having a wider more profound array of knowledge.
>>7925732
So what books does she recommend?
I'm curious
>>7932941
I've been to a shitty state school, a prestigious public school, I'm doing my PhD at an Ivy+, and my ex-boyfriend went to an expensive private liberal arts college.
There was no appreciable difference, other than a change in the ratio of dumb rich cunts to dumb poor people.
Nearly every single person at university is a retard. If you had a good experience, I'm sorry, but it means you're a retard who doesn't notice how retarded everything is because you're retarded too.
>>7932957
Oh wow, you must be so intelligent because you're able to dismiss everything as retarded when compared to your clearly superior intelligence!
Or, you're an insufferably pretentious cunt.
>>7932967
Please don't talk to me, retarded man.
>>7932969
Good troll, friend. :^)
6/10 I replied but you gave it away too quickly.
>>7932957
How would you define their retardedness as opposed to your own intelligence?
It seems as if the general stupidity of the university populace is thrown around a lot in here but noone has yet explained why or how are other people more retarded.
Rots of an edgy sense of false superiority to me.
>>7932976
I think it is an extension of a problem I see a lot at colleges. A lot of incoming freshmen come in from a high school where they were highly praised by their teachers, and were clearly more intelligent than many of their peers. Many incoming freshmen get humbled, or even a bit overwhelmed by the school being filled with other star high school pupils close to their own level. The posters who are calling everyone else in the system retards reacted to this not by being humbled, but by building themselves an ivory tower to look down their nose at everyone. It protects their ego.
I've had a couple students like this, and it has gone one of two ways:
1. They get a shit grade on an early paper, and it snaps them out of it.
2. They get a shit grade on an early paper, and they only get angrier and more condescending.
>>7932258
I get what you're saying (the original purpose of the university), but you must understand that most people today would say that the /primary purpose/ of going to college/university /is/ to satisfy (a slightly more sympathetically rephrased version of) the first clause you mentioned, and not the second one.
Your problem, indeed the problem that this thread treats of, is that the modern imperative for HIGHER VOLUMES OF PEOPLE, i.e. LOWER QUALITY STUDENT BODIES, to go to university (or something like it) revolves around money and jobs. Even if you major in English or basket weaving, the completion of the degree is presumed to have intrinsic value in the job market insofar as it is a proof that the holder can complete a long-term, putatively non-mandatory project on their own initiative. Also HR types don't like to take chances on weirdos, so if they can tick the "has a degree" box, then they'll feel better about hiring with this baseline for white collar employment. Now, it is also true that the value of an undergraduate degree has been diluted for multiple reasons, including one that should be obvious to a person who accepts the plausible premise of this thread. But for all the irresponsible price hiking, the SJW-dom, college is still seen as a gold standard. And why? Learning for its own sake? God no, even the internet has diluted that, as people here now regularly point out.
No, the /primary/ reason why people go to college is because this is what society tells them to do if they want to do better than call centers or burger flipping, and not because they always wanted a mastery of Plato and Tocqueville for its own sake. The latter are the outliers today (frequently the children of the rich/groomed future elites who have the time to spend, as has already been suggested), which also makes sense in that higher volume and diversity quotas do dilute the quality of the student.
You could come at this a different, happier way though. You could instead choose to take pleasure in your own cultural elitism and snobbery. Just as only 1% (or whatever) of the early moderns read the classics, so today do only 1% actually read, understand and care about central cultural text X. At least the latter absolute number is considerably larger. The difference is that we now have parallel training programs for armies of lawyers and dental hygienists, populated by people who only wanted to go into these fields in the first place, taking Gen. Phil 1100 as an amusing first-year elective.
"It's great to learn!" is reserved as a platitude for small schoolchildren, and only mouthed. In adult conversations about higher ed, both professional and private, it is usually tacitly assumed throughout that the driver is money and jobs, and not learning for its own sake. Jamal is not told to learn things for their own sake past about age 10 or so, but "as a way out" to "a 'better' (read: financially richer) life. This is what modern normie society really values, dude.
>>7932976
I was just bitching with my earlier posts but if you want a critique with actual teeth to it, it's 1) no one cares, 2) no one has any fundamentals, 3) because no one has fundamentals, they have no idea that fundamentals exist, or that they are the vital first step in laying down a terrain capable of sustaining real thought, and 4) professors either teach "down," or they are too retarded to teach at all.
#1: No one cares. If you are one of the few people who actually care, you will instantly notice you are different, and you will instantly be noticed by your jaundiced professors, who have effectively been teaching apathetic high school brats for the last three decades.
Partly this can't be blamed on the students, because 90% of them are only there for mandatory credits or to dabble, thanks to the broken-ass education system still paying lip-service to the old idea of "broad humanistic education for everyone, even tradespeople! That'll put some Bildung in them!" Hey, it doesn't actually fucking work in this prole hell, so stop forcing me to take classes with bored Asian math majors.
But even the ones who care don't care. This is because they don't have..
#2. Fundamentals. I am not saying we need to go back to beating kids until they memorize their Latin, but it's better than talking to a person whose parents dropped $100k on his high school education that is literally identical to a fucking John Green video. Go watch ten John Green videos. That's what America's elite are paying for in private schooling. It's just rich faggots jerking themselves off.
I should not have stories about PhD students in Philosophy at a fairly elite university who think the Iliad was written in Latin. I should not be in a PhD seminar where it takes the entire year just to get the 59 poetry-analysing dilettante-4-lyfe lackadaisical idiot girls to grasp fundamentals the syllabus assumed would be preliminary to the first session.
#3 They don't even know what they don't know. That's the real fucked thing. The idiots I just described think they are the Elite Scholars at the Forefront of Human Knowledge. They're fucking rich hobbyists.
#4. Instead of screaming about this, professors accommodate it. Or, as is increasingly the case, the professor of today is the PhD student of two years ago, and has no idea that not being able to give even a basic outline of your discipline or its history IS FUCKING WEIRD.
It's nonstop proles, 24/7. People taking 300 Level classes on "Nietzsche" and thinking they know "Nietzsche" because they got a Youtube video level summary of two of his ideas. I want to hang myself every single day.
Give a fuck, and read fundamentals like a Victorian, and you are instantly Harvard material. Instantly rise above the buzzing white noise of "I like poetry :^)" idiots and hyper-hyper-specialists who think they're philosophers because they learned one tiny little pigeonhole's jargon lexicon by rote, haphazardly, over a decade.
>>7932976
>How would you define their retardedness as opposed to your own intelligence?
They literally have a low IQ (retard-tier IQ all of them. Seriously.) because of shitty inferior genetics. They all have ADHD. They cannot multiply a 1-digit and a 2-digit number in their head. No one actually wants to learn stuff. No one puts ANY effort into ANYTHING they are being taught. LITERALLY.
>>7933030
This 100%. It's the bourgeoisification and massification of academia. We are forcing and stuffing a billion post-capitalist orgyporgians into a system originally conceived to educate elites in an intimate setting. We're taking technicised drones and technicising the university in order to house them comfortably.
Thinking should be ascetic. Intellectuals should be monks.
If you don't want to give up the noble dream that even the working-man should be literate and cultured, that there shouldn't be a gulf of education or enlightenment between classes, that's great, but don't do it by vaporising the intellectual class.
I absolutely guarantee you the West is severing its own head by diluting and smothering its intellectuals. Exceptional people used to be rocketed to the top through selection processes, and they were plucked up and appreciated by the state and society. Now everyone's special.
>>7925743
>Even in the humanities
kek
>>7932333
im a Pisces, but I'm pretty sure you're an "under appreciated genius"
Funny aspect to this article, reading the headline gives you about two thirds of all the information contained. It would be nice if they actually listed a selection of examples.
Where they expected to read the collected works of Proust, plus commentary, in three weeks time?
A three hundred page book is something I imagine to be a pulp novel by an overambitious hack that needs to be cut back by about a third, or a decent genera trash ride by a writer crafting something special.
I could tool around the U of S's site for a reading syllabus or two, but the article doesn't even link so ... meh.
Does anyone else notice what undergraduate are struggling with these days?
I don't want parrot around the consecrated opinions of Harold Bloom a lot, but he said to the likes of how we are becoming more of a technocratic society rather than a humane one, as people read less and less books or even stop reading overall. Yes people are still learning mathematics and engineering and creating new and innovative things to bring up profits and make the world materialistically suitable for our needs, yet we're not growing as a benevolent species as our society matures. If the public education system is hampering everyone's learning when it comes to literature (where it's largely concentrating on Shakespeare and little else, badly at that) then you're just snowballing all these detriments and putting everyone at the same low common denominator. It's quite difficult to teach yourself how to read and read well at that, and only a small percentage happen to excel at that, as time has proven.
There have been some narrative attributed to this point of how a large percentage of the population since the dawn of script has been illiterate so we're not really declining or degenerating, yet that explanation doesn't lift my spirits up.
>>7933139
>human perfectibility
When will this meme die?
I'm a student from earlier in the post and I just want to confirm or share a few ideas from my personal experience with a liberal arts degree in the humanities:
So at my Top 10 American Liberal Arts school I've seen what has messed up and degraded our literature program:
It seems as if a lot of people here are in consensus that it's the SJWness of programs that have ruined the degree, which I agree to an extent, as most classes at my school are focused around race, gender/sexuality, disability, all of which are not bad fields of studies in and of themselves. What's happened is a vicious cycle that students find it easier to bring in oppressed peoples into conversation with any text than looking at any sort of narritology, form, contextual, or more in depth topics in literature. What happens then is that English departments start to be transformed because it's no longer about reading Don Quixote before next week's class, but a single Langston Hughes poem instead. Identity studies have become an important part of education, as they should be to an extent, but have pervaded departments because it makes the program more marketable, which is what my English Department Chair has said the program has shifted to beyond his control.
While the SJW-centric programs have certainly played a role, it's more that English departments have found themselves fighting a battle with the real root of the liberal arts death, the massive influx of Pre-Med students. I go to a liberal arts school that's an impressive school, but not impressive in its science departments, 70% of my incoming class was pre-med. And why? Liberal Arts schools shouldn't be investing department spending and structuring in order to rival state school's science departments, what's really destroyed the English program here is that all of the Pre-Med kids who come here and don't make the cut eventually find themselves trying to decide between different spheres of things that they aren't particularly interested (English and the humanities) which makes those departments have to figure out what makes them the most marketable, which in most cases is just catering to students' already conceived notions of identity subjects, as they'd be most likely to take classes they might have something to say in or feel reinforced from low-level classes that usually stress these readings as a core focus.
What liberal arts schools really need to do to revitalize the strengths of their programs is to quit tailoring themselves to fit the rising amount of prospective Med School students, quit using the 'dead white men' blaming tactic and actually create interesting mandatory humanities programs that aren't marketed to prospective students who are going to give pre-med a shot, fail out and become desperate, but appeal to people who see themselves as having a passion in the humanities. That humanities-core can then expand into any field of study in upperclassmen years.
If you guys want to get really mad, read Reddit's response to the same article.
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4f16re/university_students_are_struggling_to_read_entire/
> But gee guys reading books sure is hard!
Fucking what.
is this the
>tfw no qt /lit/ indian gf
thread?
>>7933069
A good many posts offer up this example, but I'll link only this because it's my impetus to write about a point I think a good many of you are missing - one I've put forward time and time again.
High School does little preparation for college. It's so diluted by parents who want to create an equal field rather than deal with the challenges of parenting (ie. helping this children develop skills to succeed or come to terms with their own potential) that there's nothing to be learned outside of math and science because the Department of Education continuously insists that these are the only fields of merit. The obvious problem with this is that not everyone is mentally suited to these fields - or other fields. And yet here we are, insisting everyone is smart and special. This, coupled to economic pressure - created, I might add, by persons with no idea what skills the majority of persons in the working world actually need - has made college a requirement for employment. With the cart of parental negligence coupled to the horse of unrealistic economic expectation, we get a vehicle destined to send academia into an abyss of utter mediocrity, because it has chosen to feed it.
