Man i just love your blog, keep the cool posts comin.....

I just graduated from University 10 years ago
and this article resonates with me.

Spot on 100%.

I got my real education in history after I graduated from a Business Program.

The Western World is doomed, and
so are Westerners.

The 5th Columnist NWO Globalist control freaks are responsible poisoning every aspect of our society.

In the 50's, even a two year degree was all that was necessary for a white collar job and the middle class. I would be interested in learning what percentage today, with four year degrees, can't even find work. I once met a man with a doctorial flipping hamburgers.

C. Bowen's comment about high schools, as well as colleges, existing largely to mask mass unemployment is quite interesting. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was the usual opinion that a grammar-school education was sufficient for most ordinary citizens. An old comprehensive examination required to pass the eighth grade, I believe in Omaha or some other midwestern city, has been reprinted in a number of recent publications, and it asks questions in English literature and grammar, history, geography, and other subjects that many university undergraduates could not be expected to answer correctly today.

High school was not then thought to be for everyone. Often, attending high school required youngsters from rural or small-town families to go to a city and board with relatives or accommodating strangers at their own or their parents' expense. This deterred those lacking motivation. A commercial course was offered for those intending to seek white-collar employment, and taught such skills as shorthand and bookkeeping. Relatively few took the college preparatory course, which typically included three or even four years of Latin, and the higher mathematics.

The effort to encourage all young people to finish high school dates from no earlier than the middle of the Great Depression. The decline of the high school diploma as signifying command of any sort of valuable knowledge has proceeded on its downward course even as the minimum school-leaving age has risen. It seems reasonable to assume that the warehousing in high schools of adolescents under the age of 18 (now the minimum school-leaving age in most of the U.S.) who have neither the ability nor the inclination to learn practical or abstract skills, has mainly to do with keeping them out of the labor market.

Hucbald, I wish I could hear your string quartets and wind trios in the style of Bach. The demand of music schools for atonal compositions from their degree candidates parallels that of liberal arts departments for opaque jargon such as "deconstructionism" from theirs. Clarity is feared and despised. Anything that might be appreciated and even enjoyed by that rara avis, the educated layman, obviously has to be discouraged, lest such a person should actually be encouraged to compare it with, and judge other academic work that - in the case of state institutions - he is being taxed to subsidize. Can't have that!

****

I went to a music school for my undergraduate BM degree - a jazz oriented one, not a classical conservatory (Berklee College of Music in Boston) - and, the place was predictably filled with flakes who were political morons, but I'm a flake (Most musicians are, truth be told), and was a political moron at the time, so the experience was excellent. Absolutely first rate. I learned a ton.

After a few years as a professional musician, I fell in love with traditional contrapuntal music, and so I decided to return to school for an MM in trad theory and composition. I chose a State university with a small music department, the idea being I already had my agenda set, and I just needed some help facilitating my goals. Problem was, the comp teacher was one of those post-modern atonalist guys and hadn't a thing to offer me: I had studied tons of books on my own by then, and understood trad theory about as well as he did. Fortunately, the organ/piano teacher was a Church organist, and I was able to study with him, sort of/kind of on the sly. I got the MM with not overly much drama.

Going to a big university with a world famous music department in pursuit of a DMA was another story entirely. Since I don't keep the fact that I'm as purist a libertarian as any follower of The Way can be and still be a Christian - and the whole Christianity "thing" seemed problematic to some profs - let's just say I encountered some negative vibes. Then, there was the fact that I was composing string quartets and wind trios and stuff like that... in a style related to Bach's. The horror! I was pretty much ordered to compose atonal garbage or quit.

Bottom line, I learned that university art departments are cesspools of liberal PC group-think, and they continuously inbreed by selecting only new profs who tow the Koolaid-drinking line: No way were they going to award me a doctoral degree for folowing the path God chose for me.

The rest of us went to college to meet people who could help us in this life in a sort of ad hoc eugenics program (I married a classmate and found after many years and employers, a job through the husband of another classmate.)

I believe that the institutionalization of the physical sciences and their associated technologies really began in earnest with the onset of World War I, when Britain and the United States were cut off of their supplies of strategic "high-tech" products of the era, such as synthetic organic chemicals and optical goods, in which Germany dominated the market. Substitutes for these articles were urgently needed, while technologies such as heavier-than-air flying machines and wireless telegraphy, which had previously been the province of tinkerers and hobbyists, suddenly had wartime applications. WWI was the first occasion for large-scale government expenditures on the applied sciences, and these spelt the rise of institutional research, headquartered in the universities, while independent researcher-inventors (who might also be entrepreneurs, as Edison or the Wright brothers were) diminished in their importance.

Private-sector, profit-oriented research also became institutionalized; du Pont and the former Bell Laboratories are particularly notable in this respect. Even so many valuable contributions to pure science have come from such research. The pursuit of profit per se is probably not so inimical to it as is a concentration on short-term results, which has become sadly typical of big business. It is hard to justify activity which may bear fruit in ten years, if at all, when stock analysts and financial managers are obsessed with what will be the next quarter's earnings.