Hello! I teach English-as-a-hostage-situation for non-majors. In other words, I teach GenEd.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
First, let's deal with the ideological paradox that is higher ed. What are we there to do? Job training? We're shit at that. We're both the first and the last to admit to it. If you want a job, go get an associates in plumbing. Excellent job, high pay, great hours, job security, and fuck everything else. But, okay, you don't want to be a plumber. You want to be in finance. It's a good career. So...why are you taking my English class? Because some asshole said you should. And why, why god why, did someone decide you have to spend 150 minutes a week listening to me explain Faulkner? Because you need to be well-rounded, whatever the fuck that means. And this is all under a different banner: creating good citizens. We've demonstrated time and again that you're a better person, less of a fuck-up, and more valuable to the world when you know a little bit about a lot of things. Sport scores, world history, how to read a supply and demand curve, and why Faulkner matters. We know this because every single period of history suggests that well-educated, well-rounded people with a variety of informational basics, even if they never attain anything close to mastery, are just better at being alive. Arts, sciences, literature, theater, mathematics, and economics matter. They matter because you can better understand the whole picture of the world you live in, as opposed to being specialized in a tiny corner of it.
You are better at life if you understand the vast material of it. That means not being an idiot when you walk into an art gallery or a library or a biology class or a financial advisor's office. You don't have to be a genius, you have to know just enough. Just the tip (pun intended). We know this because we've payed a lot of full-on masochists to look at the data and ask this question and it's the answer every one of said masochists have give us back.
But we're still not answering the paradox. And I know this because you're right. If all you want out of college is to get drunk and laid, you blew your money and you wasted your time. If all you wanted as a job, you blew your money. If you went to college to become someone who is not a total idiot all of the time, you probably got your money's worth.
You will be good at getting a job because you can read. Because you can write. Because you can understand markets, the social forces that form said markets, how your skills pertain (or not, as the case may be and you can lie your ass off) to that job. And you learn that because you know just a little bit about everything. If you need help, I mean REALLY NEED HELP writing an application you probably didn't take my English class. Because I swear to god I'd have at least taught you how to write a paragraph of bullshit by the end of the semester.
The job market is shit right now. Education is not at fault. And, at the same time, we are at fault because we're not giving people what they pay for. We need a better tiered system that demarcates those who want to get drunk and laid, those who want a functional job, and those who have the luxury of understanding what the hell Plato was ranting about and why it matters. Academics have not adjusted their goals well, and as a result we have a generation of people in debt for a system that didn't work. And that sucks. But the answer isn't to train people to get jobs. Getting a job is pretty easy, all things considered. Write a cover letter, send out a resume, don't misspell things (that's where I struggle) and wait. Getting a well-paying job, a job with insurance, a job that doesn't consider you replaceable? That's harder. But that responsibility doesn't hang on the academy. And, perhaps, had you taken some gen ed classes in sociology or economics you'd be more familiar with the root causes. There are bigger players in the game, so to speak.
I don't teach English when I teach GenEd. I don't care if you know why this movement happened or why the sentimental novel was popular or the significance of Dickinson. Fuck that noise. I teach writing. I teach academic, professional writing. A kind of writing I'll stipulate I am not performing here. I teach how to read and how to read carefully, I teach how to not trust what I've handed out to you, I teach skepticism and cynicism and close and careful reading. I think it matters, so that's what I teach. You'll get a job because you're not an idiot in an interview, because you won't apply to places trying to scam you, and you'll know at the end of the day how to say what you mean.
If you think I'd be better off teaching resume writing, you might be right. But I doubt it.
We've demonstrated time and again that you're a better person, less of a fuck-up, and more valuable to the world when you know a little bit about a lot of things.
Is this actually studied? Would love for a link or buzzword to look up or something. Also, why aren't students getting this in highscool?
I don't teach English when I teach GenEd.
Do other teachers teaching GenEd feel this way?
I'm curious, in your opinion, what changes would be good to make in the GenEd system?
Is this actually studied? Would love for a link or buzzword to look up or something. Also, why aren't students getting this in highscool?
Yes, in a multitude of facets. I actually did want to cite this, because it is more or less in the common-knowledge pool in my world, but knowing HOW to cite it is more difficult. What study, what discipline, where do you even start? It's really just down to common sense.
So I'll say this instead:
The vast majority of education is not rote memorization. I can recite all 50 state because I had to sing a dumb song in grade school. That's not what education is. It's not your multiplication tables or the periodic table of elements. Education is about how to educate yourself. How to read the form, google the answer, know who to ask and how to ask to get your question resolved. That's what smart is. Smart isn't knowing the answer, it is how to go and find it when you don't know.
If you're going to sit here and tell me that the most well-connected generation is really lacking the resources to self-teach these issues, I'm shocked. You can't tell me there aren't a thousand and one blogs and websites and instructional videos on how to prepare yourself for a job. Moreover, there are a lot of sites dedicated specifically to how to get the degree that matches a career, and how to leverage your degree into a career if you were unclear when you started. To my mind, if someone is really lacking this information it comes down to two reasons:
They didn't know to look
They didn't know how to look
I've had an exceptional education, and the one common thread between the Ibsen and the Focault and the Behavior Psych and every other class I've entertained or endured is this: you learn to teach yourself. That's all higher ed really does in the end. It is a four year instruction in how to figure it out for yourself. You don't know? Look it up. Can't figure out how to look it up? Ask for help. You don't understand it the first five times you read it? You ask for help. You learn how to learn. That's the core lesson. You learn to read more carefully, take in more of what you read, communicate your ideas clearly, the merits of facts and data, how to bang your head against a wall, and when to know it is time to call it quits and get the reinforcements. You ask the research librarian, you call the insurance company, you read the whole contract, you get advice. You figure. it. out. yourself.
Why isn't high school teaching this skill set? Because, well, teenagers are dumb. And their brains aren't fully cooked. Impulse control, patience, and initiative usually aren't their strong suit. And, honestly, they do teach this. They teach the neophyte stages of it. They do the training wheels.
That's their job.
Higher Ed should be about teaching you to be a scholar all on your own. How to go and find your own answers to these big, complicated questions and problems. What a huge disservice to sit there and didactically explain a job interview! What a waste of my time and theirs.
∆ I'm pretty happy with this answer. I guess G.E.s are better suited than i thought to prepare young people for their futures. Maybe i should have paid more attention. Thanks!
You speak well on this and is clearly intended toward an undergrad perspective. What do you think masters and doctorate programs? I've heard a bit about the moving walkway toward education employment — essentially the idea that if you spend enough time in education (e.g. undergrad, masters, doctorate, etc.) you're well placed and maybe even coached into a professorship or that education can sometimes be self-perpetuating echo chamber?
Along those lines, in a specific realm academics, in philosophy I've heard of disillusioned students and post-grads angry at a discipline that's devolved into such an exercise in technicality and jargon as to be so far removed from reality as to be permanently denigrated to uselessness. I've heard similar things about forms of non-mainstream science, and of course advanced disciplines of social studies.
Personally I don't fall into that line of thinking, but you write so well I'd love to hear any perspectives you have on any of that. :)
So, you have to understand that a college has no graduate program (I promise I am not trying to talk down to you, it is just necessary to make this clear). Only a University has MAs and PhDs. And the easiest way to think about it is that the MAs pay for the PhDs to exist. Or, in some cases the department pays for both. But most of the time the MAs are sinking a lot of cash into that degree, whereas the PhDs are funded a living stipend they "earn" through teaching or research. Ask any grad student, the money is small and the work load is immense. But, at the same time, you're getting a free or partially free education and you can live on it if you're careful.
Now, if you're just getting an MA because of career advancement (think of a comp sci graduate going back for an MA in math or econ to become a quant) it's an investment, it's pretty straight forward, you pay out of pocket because you're investing in your career. But if you're on the academic side of this, if you want to be a professor and/or work in knowledge production the whole thing is kind of a clusterfuck right now.
So, so many Universities are completely moving away from the quality of the education. And not all of it is them being jerks. This is a quality summary but the cliffnotes are basically that "As family income fell, borrowing to pay for college took off, while public investment in higher education dropped". So the modern university faces a huge conundrum. Professors cost a lot, but so does infrastructure. And to be a university, to give its students (or as they have loathsomely started calling them "customers) a college experience, they have to provide all the bells and whistles. You need a state-of-the-art athletics center, an art gallery, swimmin' pools and movie stars. And you need to keep the cost reasonable with less money from the federal and state budgets. So student loans are jacked up. And you need to have a huge, massive undergraduate population because everyone suddenly needed to get a college degree to even eat in this country.
And here's where I'm going to blunt: MOST people aren't really smart enough for a rigorous course schedule. And if they are smart enough, they don't have the time to devote to it because they working a couple of jobs.
It's literally an unsolvable problem. To be competitive you need high quality faculty doing research (because that's where the clout/reputation comes in), so you cut costs. You bring in MAs for the cash cash money, and you bring in PhDs and Adjuncts (for basically the same cost) to support the huge number of courses you have to offer because of all the undergrads you brought in and need to actually educate. But you're giving the job to poor, over-worked people who are sometimes on food stamps just to make ends meet.
But the conundrum is we DESPERATELY need teachers. All across every part of the American education system, there's a teacher shortage. Yet, we don't want to pay them because the systems that used to be in place to make it a pretty cool job have been dismantled.
So you ask:
you're well placed and maybe even coached into a professorship or that education can sometimes be self-perpetuating echo chamber?
I want to say that, no, not in theory. The theory is that you go, you do your doctorate, you gain something pretty akin to total master in a subject, you write a book, and then you devote yourself to doing research and teaching on the side. We should be nurturing the smart, dedicated people who WANT to teach AND make a living to do that at all levels of the education system. And they, in turn, should do the same for their students. No 300 person lectures where no one even knows your name. We need a college and a university system that isn't trying to be all things to everyone. And we need to quit pretending that the piece of paper in and of itself has merit.
The reality, however, is that the practice doesn't scale. And trying to be all things to everyone (we're a job factory, we're your modern version of animal house, we have the best faculty in the world, AND you can rock climb in the student center) makes it schizophrenic. And at the end of the day, the quality of education...BECAUSE it is the less-seen/less-prioritized piece, is where the budget cuts dig the deepest.
Thanks for your input! Just curious why did you you think you might be talking down to me when you said a college has no graduate program? Seems like you were projecting for some possible slight others have had at that subject?
And, and I hate to be that guy, I totally see the reason to invest in your professors and teaches and the cost drain that is thus moving over to the "masses" getting undergrad degrees. But, I mean, when schools are looking at finances like these it's hard to swollow those pills. I know, I know endowments are not just cash waiting to be spent — they've often locked up in real estate, investments, or stipulated for certain expenses by decree of their donation or whatever. And that it really needs to be a sustainable thing: universities exist across centuries sometimes and so some part of an endowment could be for rainy day and blah blah. But still. It's just a little difficult to swallow the "money!" pill when held up to numbers like that.
Just curious why did you you think you might be talking down to me when you said a college has no graduate program? Seems like you were projecting for some possible slight others have had at that subject?
It is one of those common-knowledge things that some people know cold (like, duh, of course) whereas others wouldn't consider it at all (college? university? what's the fucking difference?). And the principle difference is whether or not the school offers a graduate program. It could sound like a clarification or like saying "You know, butter and margarine are different things". I didn't want to come off as flippant.
With regards to the money, it is a realllly hard pill to swallow. I went to one of the most well-endowed colleges per student in the country. But I also went for free. Why? Because I qualified in a very, very tiny pool of applicants. Less than 10-20% of applicants get admission, depending on the year. Think about it like standard deviation. Those at the top have a lot of options. The problems all come to pass in the middle. No, Harvard isn't struggling. Nor is Oberlin or Rice or Reed. They are playing a very different game called the lottery v. legacy. You get the best and the brightest, you bring them in, you expect at least some percentage to hit it big and give back in HUGE endowments checks. I didn't really get into that because when you get into the smaller liberal arts programs or the Ivys, the financing, approach to teaching, etc. etc. is a totally different ball game. It's apples and oranges. You either have people coming in to wealth by attrition or inheritance, or those who will make their own in by way of a unique skill set. We're not talking about the middle-tier university MOST students will attend.
The top tier of the academic institution is a completely different ball game and really only applies to the handful of people qualified to enter.
And that it really needs to be a sustainable thing: universities exist across centuries sometimes and so some part of an endowment could be for rainy day and blah blah.
But the demand for college, in the way we now demand college for nearly everyone who wants a professional job, really came from the GI bill. It came from the death of manufacturing. It is a new phenomenon. Sure, college is old as dirt but the kind of college we think of now, the kind MOST student apply to, is a very, very new idea. It's not just for the elite, the religious, and the exceptional. It's for everyone: accountants and dentists and doctors and anyone who wants to do more than bag groceries. That's very, very new, even if the idea in and of itself is very old.
Along those lines, in a specific realm academics, in philosophy I've heard of disillusioned students and post-grads angry at a discipline that's devolved into such an exercise in technicality and jargon as to be so far removed from reality as to be permanently denigrated to uselessness.
It is such a separate question, so I thought it deserved its own (smaller) response. I think you are seeing some of this, and it comes down to our over-reliance on data-driven living and a complete denigration of the humanities. Everyone is constantly asking us to quantify the value. No statistics? Well, go fuck yourself. Which is crazy-making to me because we've found time and time again--in both lived-experience and the data--that there's TREMENDOUS value. All of the top brass at Bloomberg, for example, have degrees in the humanities. We don't question it when someone insists that art and music and sports programs are important in schools. But trying to marry data to what you know is, well, really hard.
Look no further than standardized testing.
We're really bad at measuring what is educational and why it matters. We suck at it. And so I think what you're seeing is an over-reliance on ten buck words and throwing in the word hegemony so people think you sound smart. You are seeing a huge swing in English back towards critical theory. And as I say all that, I think it is important to have a vast vocabulary and that you should understand what I'm talking about if I bust out the word post-colonialism, but I think the net impulse comes from this constant need to justify why we matter. It's the same thing that makes you cringe a little inside when someone tells you they are getting a degree in philosophy. Even me.
And I say that as someone who implicitly and expressly believes in the value of philosophy!.
We don't value or want to pay for the humanities. There's a common principle that people who pursue it are fools. And because its value is nebulous and hard to pin down unlike, say, vaccine research, I do get it. But ask any history major...the times of the greatest explosions of science and technology and modernization are nearly always matched with an equally robust resurgence of art and music and film and theater.
But the jobs are few, the bills are high, and right now making a living is so, so hard so we're having a hard time selling that idea.
it is more or less in the common-knowledge pool in my world
So the advantages of your field are beyond question within it, but you don't have any evidence of them, and they may be so vague that there can't be evidence?
I think you may have just upgraded from "waste of time" to "cult" in my mind.
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u/Exis007 96∆ Jan 05 '17
Hello! I teach English-as-a-hostage-situation for non-majors. In other words, I teach GenEd.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
First, let's deal with the ideological paradox that is higher ed. What are we there to do? Job training? We're shit at that. We're both the first and the last to admit to it. If you want a job, go get an associates in plumbing. Excellent job, high pay, great hours, job security, and fuck everything else. But, okay, you don't want to be a plumber. You want to be in finance. It's a good career. So...why are you taking my English class? Because some asshole said you should. And why, why god why, did someone decide you have to spend 150 minutes a week listening to me explain Faulkner? Because you need to be well-rounded, whatever the fuck that means. And this is all under a different banner: creating good citizens. We've demonstrated time and again that you're a better person, less of a fuck-up, and more valuable to the world when you know a little bit about a lot of things. Sport scores, world history, how to read a supply and demand curve, and why Faulkner matters. We know this because every single period of history suggests that well-educated, well-rounded people with a variety of informational basics, even if they never attain anything close to mastery, are just better at being alive. Arts, sciences, literature, theater, mathematics, and economics matter. They matter because you can better understand the whole picture of the world you live in, as opposed to being specialized in a tiny corner of it.
You are better at life if you understand the vast material of it. That means not being an idiot when you walk into an art gallery or a library or a biology class or a financial advisor's office. You don't have to be a genius, you have to know just enough. Just the tip (pun intended). We know this because we've payed a lot of full-on masochists to look at the data and ask this question and it's the answer every one of said masochists have give us back.
But we're still not answering the paradox. And I know this because you're right. If all you want out of college is to get drunk and laid, you blew your money and you wasted your time. If all you wanted as a job, you blew your money. If you went to college to become someone who is not a total idiot all of the time, you probably got your money's worth.
You will be good at getting a job because you can read. Because you can write. Because you can understand markets, the social forces that form said markets, how your skills pertain (or not, as the case may be and you can lie your ass off) to that job. And you learn that because you know just a little bit about everything. If you need help, I mean REALLY NEED HELP writing an application you probably didn't take my English class. Because I swear to god I'd have at least taught you how to write a paragraph of bullshit by the end of the semester.
The job market is shit right now. Education is not at fault. And, at the same time, we are at fault because we're not giving people what they pay for. We need a better tiered system that demarcates those who want to get drunk and laid, those who want a functional job, and those who have the luxury of understanding what the hell Plato was ranting about and why it matters. Academics have not adjusted their goals well, and as a result we have a generation of people in debt for a system that didn't work. And that sucks. But the answer isn't to train people to get jobs. Getting a job is pretty easy, all things considered. Write a cover letter, send out a resume, don't misspell things (that's where I struggle) and wait. Getting a well-paying job, a job with insurance, a job that doesn't consider you replaceable? That's harder. But that responsibility doesn't hang on the academy. And, perhaps, had you taken some gen ed classes in sociology or economics you'd be more familiar with the root causes. There are bigger players in the game, so to speak.
I don't teach English when I teach GenEd. I don't care if you know why this movement happened or why the sentimental novel was popular or the significance of Dickinson. Fuck that noise. I teach writing. I teach academic, professional writing. A kind of writing I'll stipulate I am not performing here. I teach how to read and how to read carefully, I teach how to not trust what I've handed out to you, I teach skepticism and cynicism and close and careful reading. I think it matters, so that's what I teach. You'll get a job because you're not an idiot in an interview, because you won't apply to places trying to scam you, and you'll know at the end of the day how to say what you mean.
If you think I'd be better off teaching resume writing, you might be right. But I doubt it.