Space Force Officer Relieved After Denouncing CRT/Marxism

[Flash]

Yes, I understand this and even stated it in my post. Your anecdote notwithstanding, the move away from homework is a broad national trend.

You work in DC. Do you live in VA? All of my friends who live in the state describe a similar circumstance to what you describe... A stark difference to what's being done in the NE.

Yes, and my experience is in line with the folks I know who's kids go to other local VA and MD school districts.

 

[Jim123]

I always thought it was BS that they didn't have a similar policy toward making art majors take a full calculus, physics, and chemistry 100 sequence.

One thing I secretly hope is that if liberal arts and humanities programs required "math and science for dummies" electives, I mean across the board the way undergrad engineering programs require several credit hours of arts courses to make you a more "well-rounded person," then that would have a long term impact on the ambulance chaser industry. Forcing everyone with a B.A. to take science past a single core course back in high school might make it a lot harder to build gullible juries of technical nitwits.

There would be other benefits for society as well. For one thing we'd have more nuclear power generation in this country...

(Not that my arts electives were bad, I got to work with interesting people and I generally enjoyed the subject material.)

 

[Flash]

One thing I secretly hope is that if liberal arts and humanities programs required "math and science for dummies" electives, I mean across the board the way undergrad engineering programs require several credit hours of arts courses to make you a more "well-rounded person," then that would have a long term impact on the ambulance chaser industry.

Many schools require just that, I had to do two years of both science and math for my BA and I know many others have similar requirements. They probably helped me as much as the language requirement post graduation, which wasn't much at all.

Forcing everyone with a B.A. to take science past a single core course back in high school might make it a lot harder to build gullible juries of technical nitwits.

There would be other benefits for society as well. For one thing we'd have more nuclear power generation in this country...

(Not that my arts electives were bad, I got to work with interesting people and I generally enjoyed the subject material.)

HA! NROTC and USNA have just such a requirement for 'harder' sciences and I knew plenty of folks from both who were still technical nitwits. I didn't take those 'hard' sciences (NRTOC 'Advanced Standing', not a scholarship) and work in a very technical heavy job now doing well enough not to get my ass chewed for being a technical nitwit yet. Sometimes folks are nitwits no matter the edumucation.

P.S. Nuke power remains a very hard sell even for many technical types.

 

[Mirage]

College is not to prepare people for the workforce.

It’s to reach you how to think

“The person paying for any person” is generally the person doing it.

I’m not saying a degree in history from Podunk State is a ticket to riches. An engineering degree from that dump is likely more economically valuable

I’m saying that if we reduce college to being a trade school, it’s an overall loss.

We need technicians.

We also need thinkers. And that’s what quality liberal arts graduates provide.

And I say that as a person with an MS and an MA.

College teaches people how to think deeper, among other things, but that is not the underlying reason for their existence. They exists to prepare a smarter and more capable workforce. Colleges don't teach architecture or calculus to teach you how to think, but how to perform certain tasks required for certain career fields.

My college was paid for by the USN. They didn't foot that bill for any reason but they felt it prepared me for the workforce (by, among other things, teaching me how to think for myself). Tell me, how many people do you think would go to college if it didnt offer at least the illusion of a path to a better job? Not many. It may be a nice thought to think everyone is a modern day Socrates who learns just for the sake of learning or expanding their mind, but it's not true.

That said, I agree with your last statement that we need thinkers, of course. But that's not what we're discussing here... We're discussing if there should be an emphasis on STEM. Our society has a surplus of Lib arts degrees and a lack of STEM graduates.

 

[villanelle]

One thing I secretly hope is that if liberal arts and humanities programs required "math and science for dummies" electives, I mean across the board the way undergrad engineering programs require several credit hours of arts courses to make you a more "well-rounded person," then that would have a long term impact on the ambulance chaser industry. Forcing everyone with a B.A. to take science past a single core course back in high school might make it a lot harder to build gullible juries of technical nitwits.

There would be other benefits for society as well. For one thing we'd have more nuclear power generation in this country...

(Not that my arts electives were bad, I got to work with interesting people and I generally enjoyed the subject material.)

English major here. I had to take at least 2 math classes. I took "Math for liberal arts majors", which was quite a joke to me, but plenty of classmates struggled, and I took a Logic course where there was nary a number to be found. (It was all logical proofs.) I also had to take various science classes. I don't recall the exact requirements, but I took chemistry (though it was very basic and certainly easier than my non-AP chemistry in high school), geology, and biology, and perhaps a couple others. I think that is pretty standard for liberal arts and non-stem majors.

I was in college back when ferns ruled the earth so there may have been more, but those are the ones I remember. Also, this was a mediocre CA state school.

But the classes that really taught me critical thinking and deeper skills were those upper division "liberal art" type classes. Just as I suspect the English classes taken by math majors are pretty basic and probably don't prompt much higher-level thinking, so to are the math classes taken by English majors.