HB / Snape-Draco / social class / (long) liberal arts

[Susan McGee]

No: HPFGUIDX 5201

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, Catlady <catlady at w...> wrote:
> 
> (Speaking of Literature: I was much taken aback by the posts in 
which
> people said that engineers (or any kind of professional) should take
> English classes so they can learn to write because they WILL have to
> write on the job (and also if they want to write a Letter to the 
Editor
> of their newspaper). Because there was never any connection between 
the
> English classes that I was forced to take and the ability to write 
since
> I finished 7th grade (age 12). In the rest of middle school, the 
English
> classes were about finding the 'theme' (actually, the moral) of 
stories
> and after that, the English classes were about searching out 
Freudian
> sexual symbolism in the stories. It was necessary to write essays
> (usually 500 to 1000 words) about the theme or sexual symbolism 
that we
> had discovered, but what the teachers demanded from us was the 
OPPOSITE
> of good writing. "Don't ever use a small word when a big word will 
do.
> Don't use the active voice when you could use the passive voice 
[when
> the passive voice could be used]. Never use the first person." were
> notes that my teachers wrote on my essays before returning them 
with low
> grades.)

Goodness, that is totally true. I am struck by those with
an academic education who canNOT write, who go on and on with
big words that no one can understand, who use the passive voice 
constantly, (with NO agent) who never say *I*, whose writing
is inaccessible to 95% of the population......







> 
> Last year there was this woman who told me that I'm an anti-
intellectual
> lover of ignorance because I said (and still believe) that employers
> should hire people based on their ability, knowledge and skill to 
do the
> job, not on whether they have a college degree. Cooler tempered 
debaters
> suggested that 1) a person who has gotten a college degree has
> demonstrated an ability to endure and obey a lot of useless 
bullshit, an
> ability which many employers value higher than ability to do the 
job,
> and 2) a person who has learned such different subjects as the 
history
> of China, Plato's Socrates's philosophy, and astrophysics, has 
thereby
> learned METHODS OF LEARNING that are applicable to MANY DIFFERENT 
FIELDS
> of learning, such as when they have to crash-learn enough about
> workman's comp or inventory management or income tax law to analyse 
the
> user requirements for a computer system to help the people do that 
kind
> of work. I had to admit the first point, but on the second, I 
continued
> to insist that there are more ways to learn those subjects than 
going to
> college.
> 


Absolutely. Agreed.
> Examined life: who said 'the unexamined life is not worth living"? 
We're
> supposed to learn some History so we can look at our hometown with 
some
> idea of how it used to be and how it turned from that to this. We're
> supposed to learn some Science so we can look at the beautiful 
rainbow
> and know that it wasn't applied with a paintbrush. We're supposed to
> learn to analyze Literature and the other arts so we can see 
parallels
> between the artwork and our own lives. There is room to debate 
whether
> the Examined Life is worth living, but the people who invented 
Liberal
> Arts didn't think so.
> 
> --
>           /\ /\
>            + +     Mews and views
>          >> = <<         from Rita Prince Winston
> 
>                      ("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._
>                      `6_ 6  )   `-.  (     ).`-.__.`)
>                      (_Y_.)'  ._   )  `._ `. ``-..-'
>                     _..`--'_..-_/ /--'_.' ,'
>                    ((('   (((-(((''  ((((