by Saz » Sat Mar 19, 2016 6:08 pm
So you think spending $50,000 a year, for four years, is worth " learning to appreciate ideas and works of art that sometimes require effort to get rewards from, etc." That's insane. All the development in thinking skills happens half a decade before kids get to college. The idiots in 8th grade are by and large still idiots today. "Critical thinking skills" is not something that you teach to a 19 year old for $50,000. This idea that idiots walk into wash u state or Villanova, drop $50,000 grand, participate in a half-baked discussion with a grad student and 3-300 equally lost students and come out critical thinkers is just a fallacy. If you weren't thinking critically at 18 years of age, then another 4, and a bunch of money, won't get you there either. If you are a critical thinker...well then you don't need to spend $50,000 a year to read penguin classics and regurgitate the spark notes. Philly is absolutely right, the internet had made 99% of what you learn in university obsolete or redundant. Whatever you want to do or whatever you want to learn, there is someone on the internet who knows ten times more than your TA and the rest of your dumb classmates. They probably have a mild form of autism and would be delighted to talk to you, to engage in learned discussion, for free. If you have to spend $50,000 and enroll in an institution to have enlightening and valuable discussions then I truly pity you. This is exactly the type of conformist nonsense bullshit you learn in a liberal arts major. Going on and on about how you think critically and yet never examining why something that is free on the internet costs as much as a house. You think fixing a car is a comparatively simple and linear task and yet, despite your critical thinking training, have failed to notice that school, all of it, is a simple and linear task where you write/do/say what the teacher (master) wants you to. There is no critical thinking, there is mimicry and standardisation. Get a burned out 79 Skoda in your garage and see how simple and linear a task repairing a car is. Because the honest truth is it requires significantly more critical thinking skills than anything you ever will have to do in an undergraduate liberal arts course.
DON'T BE A TOUGH GUY. DON'T BE A FOOL! I WILL CALL YOU LATER.