Part of that is the sort of conflicting goals in education.
Traditionally, university was about producing the Rennissance Man. It was mostly a product for the elite, and it made sense to be teaching them Latin and Shakespeare, so they could have stuffy drawing-room conversations with other elites.
In recent years, education is much more about acquiring a credential to unlock a higher paid job. The people attending are never getting into a drawing-room conversation, so the time spent on Latin and Shakespeare merely increases the cost of the programme, the time to completion, and the risk you end up with a lower GPA that looks questionable on a resume. I can see the recalctriance. I had that recalctriance (on a scholarship with a finite term and GPA requirements, I'm not going to expose myself to cost and risk for the sake of being a more interesting person)
I always figured the way to address this was to provide more open-entry, non-graded courses in the humanities. Normalize taking a week-long evening class instead of binge watching a TV series. Right now, the closest we have tends to be either audit-only programmes at existing universities (complicated and expensive, and the content may be intended more for mainstream students, so you might be missing prerequisite knowledge if you try to jump into a random senior-level course) or Learning Annex sort of stuff which is likely to be of low quality and spotty selection.
Normalize taking a week-long evening class instead of binge watching a TV series.
I would honestly love to do this. I would love it if modern life provided more free time so I'd have the energy to do it. And obviously I wish it was more affordable to do this. And that there were structures to do it outside of being "certified" (aka no testing, it's literally just an avenue to learn about things).
One of the most left wing professors I had was some older guy who was just constantly taking classes and such, even though he was in his late 60's (at least)
Part of that is the sort of conflicting goals in education.
Traditionally, university was about producing the Rennissance Man. It was mostly a product for the elite, and it made sense to be teaching them Latin and Shakespeare, so they could have stuffy drawing-room conversations with other elites.
In recent years, education is much more about acquiring a credential to unlock a higher paid job. The people attending are never getting into a drawing-room conversation, so the time spent on Latin and Shakespeare merely increases the cost of the programme, the time to completion, and the risk you end up with a lower GPA that looks questionable on a resume. I can see the recalctriance. I had that recalctriance (on a scholarship with a finite term and GPA requirements, I'm not going to expose myself to cost and risk for the sake of being a more interesting person)
I always figured the way to address this was to provide more open-entry, non-graded courses in the humanities. Normalize taking a week-long evening class instead of binge watching a TV series. Right now, the closest we have tends to be either audit-only programmes at existing universities (complicated and expensive, and the content may be intended more for mainstream students, so you might be missing prerequisite knowledge if you try to jump into a random senior-level course) or Learning Annex sort of stuff which is likely to be of low quality and spotty selection.
I would honestly love to do this. I would love it if modern life provided more free time so I'd have the energy to do it. And obviously I wish it was more affordable to do this. And that there were structures to do it outside of being "certified" (aka no testing, it's literally just an avenue to learn about things).
One of the most left wing professors I had was some older guy who was just constantly taking classes and such, even though he was in his late 60's (at least)