um excuse me? when did we all decide that the value of a degree rested on the earnings after graduation? and how can you honestly compare the skills learned in a humanities degree to those of a vocational degree like nursing or even engineering? and what happened to ummmm i dunno learning because learning is fun and good and knowledge for the sake of knowledge? and of course this is going to marginalise people who are already marginalised because why wouldn’t it. (full article)
Congratulations to the UK! They’re joining a number of other nations (the USA and Australia for two) where a right-wing government has effectively outlawed learning about the humanities (you know, things like how politics works, how social institutions work, how people think, how people think they think, how people behave in small groups and large groups, how societies have changed since the past, how societies can be changed, and so on) because that sort of knowledge in the wrong hands (i.e. any hands that aren’t theirs) is too dangerous. The masses don’t need to know these things. The masses can just go on and get a degree that teaches them how to do a single job (like being a nurse, an engineer, a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist) or if you want a generalist degree, you get to go into the school of business, and learn how to be a middle-manager.
If you want a humanities degree, you’ll need to be able to pay for it yourself (here in Australia, the Morrison government put up the cost of a humanities degree to the point where it costs more to do a three year BA than it does to do a five year law degree). Because higher learning (particularly for those people who aren’t part of the upper classes) is supposed to be about the job you get afterwards, and the money you’ll make for your employers, not about selfish personally-centred goals, like you learning something you’re interested in (how dare you be so self-centred! Don’t you know you have an obligation to the people who have money to be a good productive little cog in the corporate machine... and only a cog in the corporate machine?). Only the children of the rich are to be allowed to learn things just because they’re interested in them. Only the children of the rich are to be allowed to get interested in professions like writing, film, design, editing, art, journalism and so on; these jobs have all been set up so that if you want to take them up, you’ll need a trust fund to get through the compulsory unpaid internship / practicum that makes up the majority of your final year of education. That should get rid of these pesky poor people telling us about their experiences, as though those were ever going to be worth hearing about!
(Yes, a lot of the above is written in a tone of scathing sarcasm. I am not in a good mood today, and being reminded of why I had to quit studying doesn’t help in the least).
fidelcostco
