There are many college students who know, certainly by the time they get their bachelor's degree...

There are many college students who know, certainly by the time they get their bachelor's degree, that they spent four years taking courses and finishing with them by passing examinations. The mastery attained in that process is not of subject matter, but of the teacher's personality. If the student remembers enough of what was told to him in lectures and textbooks, and if he has a line on the teacher's pet prejudices, he can pass the course easily enough. but he is also passing up an education.

Just as the best doctors are those who can somehow retain the patient's confidence not by hiding but by confessing their limitations, so the best teachers are those who make the fewest pretensions. If the students are on all fours with a difficult problem, the
teacher who shows that he is only crawling also, helps them much more than the pedagogue who appears to fly in maginficient circles far above their heads.Perhaps, if we teachers were more honest about our own reading disabilities, less loath to reveal how hard it is for us to read and how often we fumble, we might get the students interest in the game of learning instead of the game of passing.

all courses should be pass/fail
all jobs should be allotted by tests of relevant skills

Although knowledge is involved in every skill, having a skill is having something more than knowledge. The person who has skill not only knows something but can do something which the person lacking it cannot do at all or as well.

To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same and different, and so forth.

If you remember what an author says, you have learned something from reading him. If what he says is true, you have even learned something about the world. But whether it is a fact about the book or the world, you have gained nothing but information if you have exercised only your memory. You have not been enlightened. That happens only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

Being well read too often means the quantity, too seldom the quality, of reading. It was not only the pessimistic and misanthropic Schopenhauer who inveighed against too much reading, because he found that, for the most part, men read passively and glutted themselves with toxic overdoses of unassimilated information.

Bacon and Hobbes made the same point. Hobbes said: "If I read as many books as most men"—he meant
"misread"—"I should be as dull-witted as they." Bacon distinguished between "books to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be digested."

>banalities every adult understands wrapped in nice verbiage
Woah... So this is the power of American intelligentsia.

Maybe for humanities majors, but what kind of retard goes to university for humanities these days? As an engineer undergrad literally every single one of my "examinations" was quantifiable and there was no bias at all with the exception of senior design

Most of the students were taking the course for credit, not merit. Since the examination did not measure understanding but information, they probably regarded my explanations as a waste of their time—sheer exhibitionism on my part. Why they continued to come to class, I do not know. If they had spent as much time reading the textbook as the sport page, and with the same diligence for details of information, they could have passed the examination without being bored by me.

When men are incompetent in reading and writing, their inadequacy seems to express itself in their being hypercritical about everybody else's writing.

>what kind of retard goes to university for humanities these days
People who want to study something interesting and important instead of being trained to fulfill the role of a glorified CAD monkey.

>"yer dumb" wrapped in arrogant pretentiosness
Woah... So this is the power of Veeky Forums intelligentsia.

The public is paying for the education; it must be satisfied with what it is getting. The only way that one can account for the failure of the public to rise up in arms is that it doesn't care or that it really doesn't understand what's wrong. I cannot believe the first. It must be the second. An educational system and the culture in which it exists tend to perpetuate each other.
There is a vicious circle here too. Perhaps it can be broken by adult education, by making the adult population aware of what is wrong with the schools they went through and to which they are now sending their children. One of the first thing to do is to make them appropriate what a liberal education could be in terms of skill reading and writing, and the profit in books to be read.

But if you cannot get away at all from the author's words, it shows that only words have passed from him to you, not thought or knowledge. You know his words, not his mind. He was trying to communicate knowledge, and all you received were words.

>pretty words and pseudo sciences are more important than engineering
so this is the power of the humanities.
Remind me which field invented the combustion engine, electricity, computer, etc?

>engineers invented electricity
Woah... So this is the power of American education.

And you may remember an occasion where someone said to a speaker, in one breath or at most two, "I don't know what you mean, but I think you're wrong."
I have gradually learned that there is no point in answering critics of this sort. The only polite thing to do is to ask them to state your position for you, the position they claim to be challenging. If they cannot do it satisfactorily, it they cannot repeat what you have said in their own words, you know that they do not understand, and you are entirely justified in ignoring their criticisms. They are irrelevant, as all criticism must be which is not solidly based on understanding. When you find the rare person who shows that he understands what you are saying as well as you do, then you can delight in his agreement or be seriously disturbed by his dissent.

>"you just didn't get it" in response to critique of expressed ideas
Woah... So this is the power of brainlets.

...

College teaches you how to play people, if you are so autistic that you missed this lesson regardless of your degree it was wastdd on you.

Not all of us studied menstrual sciences, Samantha.

Since you have not been able to show that the author is uninformed, misinformed, or illogical on relevant matters, you simply cannot disagree. You must agree. You cannot say, as so many students and others do, "I find nothing wrong with your premises, and no errors in reasoning, but I don't agree with your conclusions." All you can possibly mean by saying something like that is that you do not like the conclusions. You are not disagreeing. You are expressing your emotions or prejudices.

Film studies thank you very much :)

>critique implies core disagreement
Woah... So this is the power of community college freshmen.

I'm out of quotes. Good night.

Thanks for playing. Night.