Quote:
Originally Posted by lisarea
The short answer would be, "Because this isn't a Vo-Tech school."
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That's already much better than my "Because this is college and you have to have my class to graduate, so buck up, buddy." Yours actually implies there's more to it than "we do this just to harrass you, it's true."
Quote:
The whole idea behind a liberal arts education is to teach people how to process and generalize information, not just how to perform some specific job function.
For all the reasons you listed and others, studying literature or, for that matter, art or history or any of a number of other liberal arts subjects, helps you hone your thought processes and introduces you to concepts and experiences you'd otherwise not be exposed to. It lets you take advantage of wisdom without having to earn it the old fashioned way. It helps you put your own experience into proper perspective. It improves your appreciation for nuance and makes you better at interpreting and predicting events.
It makes you a better, more diplomatic decision maker and a more capable leader. It helps you to articulate and explain your positions. It helps you better generalize information so that you can adapt to new technologies, new job responsibilities, and other things that get tossed your way in the future.
You get a liberal arts education not to learn how to perform some specific job-related task, but to help you learn how to think, how to adapt, and how to understand and apply new information as it comes along, so you can perform job-related tasks that haven't even been invented yet.
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I'm so stealing...erm, plaiger...ah, appropriating your rant.
Thank you bunches.
I may need to subdivide it into several answers. Or not.
pesci,
Yeah, I noticed. And I agree. Sorta. See, part of the advantage of literature courses is that they force you to
read stuff you wouldn't otherwise pick up unless you're livius. And there are advantages to just
reading.
But as usual, your point is sound and well taken.
(Upon review of your post, I feel obliged to comment that my class is designed to provoke thought about the readings and little more. I began with the "teach them all about symbolism and plotting and characterization and POV and...zzzzzz" approach. I tossed it around the third or fourth class day, having realized that as this is a basic literature course, my goal should be to get the students
personally engaged in the literature I assign. I just want proof that they're thinking about what they read. My goal is to get them to dive at least a little below the surface, because they'll remember the pretty fishes they find there in two years when they have their one inch gold trophy and go off to change the Air Force from the bottom up and find it can't be done and yes...they need more than good grades in aeronautical engineering to be a good officer. In short, I want to make them readers. I want to show them at least one poem that speaks to them in a way that prose cannot. If they come into my classroom with that door closed and leave with it cracked even a little, I have accomplished what I set out to do.)
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