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https://clivethompson.medium.com/in-defense-of-studying-basket-weaving-at-college-a862792f3a85>
"Last week, Nathan Heller published a long reported piece in the
New Yorker
that explored the dramatic decline in students studying the humanities at
college.
The reasons for the decline are manifold, but one big driver is the economy:
College in the US is brutally expensive, so students (and their parents)
understandably want assurance that the degree will help in building a
well-paying career path. The humanities seem, to many of these folks, to be
worryingly nontechnical.
Or worse: Frivolous! As one student put it …
“My parents, who were low-income and immigrants, instilled in me the very
great importance of finding a concentration that would get me a job — ‘You
don’t go to Harvard for basket weaving’ was one of the things they would
say,” she told me.
Basket weaving!
It’s an age-old joke. Whenever people are casting about for an example of a
particularly useless subject matter, “basket weaving” is Exhibit A. Google News
is clotted with examples just from the last few weeks: Recently, Kimberly
Guilfoyle criticized “people [who] want to have some bizarre basket weaving
degree, and they want all of us to subsidize their laziness and their inability
to even try to contribute to society”. When an Australian politician was
recently criticizing what he regarded as waste in educational spending, he
sniped about public dollars “that subsidised everything from energy healing to
basket weaving”. A business school director joked about “advanced basket
weaving” as if it were an actual major; online commenters snark about it, too.
Yet here’s the thing: As jokes go, it’s totally off-base.
That’s because basket weaving would be a completely
awesome subject to study
at college. It would open the doors to an absolute treasure-trove of
intellectually rich subjects — spanning science, design, history, economics,
culture, and more. Far from being a fey, pointless exercise, a course on basket
weaving would help students grasp how wonderfully entangled are all these
intellectual domains, which are too often taught as if they had no relation to
one another.
So: let’s ponder the
Five Amazing Reasons To Study Basket Weaving …"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
