Totenborg wrote:Valkalan wrote:To say that abolishing the humanities will somehow cause the entrenchment of a political elite is a non-sequitur. Ironically, we see an overwhelming entrenchment of leftists in academia, meaning that your solution for defeating entrenched political elites is to submit to entrenched academic elites.
In any case, the declining quality of education means that educating people in the humanities, or most anything else, will at best have only a negligible effect on how well informed the population is. And of course, you'd be inundating students in debt with poor job prospects, thereby making them more dependent upon political elites.
Technically, learning about the tax code is objectively more valuable than the humanities. Learning how to minimize your own tax burden will probably earn you more than you'll get at Starbucks, which is pretty much all that a degree in the humanities will get you. And if you really care to study the humanities, you can log onto many online resources, such The Great Courses Online, for tiny fraction of the expense of a college education! And you'd have access to a far broader range of subject than a college can ever offer you.
Dealing with local elites will hardly be any better than dealing with the usual "top-down" college elites. And if you really want to take down college elites, just get the state to stop funding college altogether, and eventually people will begin favoring trade schools. College elites will lose their influence, meanwhile students will have actual marketable skills, better job prospects and low debts, lessening their dependence upon political elites.
College is a terrible place for such things to thrive. Safe spaces and other such impediments to free speech interfere with individual expression and critical thinking. A lack of critical thinking reduces democratic engagement to a mere popularity contest. It doesn't take a PhD to see that college is not the ideal home for arts and the humanities.
I'm sure the guy with a swastika stand-in on his flag is really concerned about democracy, individualism, and critical thought.
Good catch, I didn't even see that.