{"id":33152,"date":"2017-08-09T01:00:44","date_gmt":"2017-08-09T05:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33152"},"modified":"2020-07-04T16:54:50","modified_gmt":"2020-07-04T20:54:50","slug":"qotd-university-studies-programs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/08\/09\/qotd-university-studies-programs\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: University “studies” programs"},"content":{"rendered":"

As someone who got partway through grad school, I am only a sort of half-layman when it comes to modern European history. On demand I can present an official document that testifies, by implication, that I have spent a certain amount of time in seminars talking about Himmler\u2019s agronomy education or discussing why totalitarian regimes are always sexually puritanical. Even before it was ruined for me by formal training, I was a history buff. So I can sort of reconstruct the process whereby I know what Auschwitz is. But, by the same token, I am less able to know how anyone else comes by the knowledge.<\/p>\n

It seems some part of our system for producing intellectually responsible grownups has failed […] That failure is probably not to be found in the extensive education in social work. A degree in social work amounts to a degree in helping people: assuming it is not totally idiotic for our institutions of higher learning to be generating such paper, there must be mastery of some technical arcana involved. I do not know that this would involve instruction in the details of the Holocaust. A nursing education doesn\u2019t; an engineering education doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

It is, rather, that \u201csocial justice and peace studies\u201d business that captures my eye. Wouldn\u2019t the matter, the essential grounding of an education in social justice and peace just be \u2026 history? (With particular attention to the topic of concentration camps?) Wouldn\u2019t expertise of this kind require digestion of a mass of information about the flux of war, diplomacy, economies, and ideas? Something Studies items were on the menu already when I began my undergraduate education, and I majored in history partly because, in my innocence, I couldn\u2019t see how you would study anything else about human affairs without that foundation.<\/p>\n

But we all know the secret of Something Studies well enough now: it is a way of avoiding the rigour and complexity of a history education, and going straight to the business of striking political stances. It is History For Left-Wing Dummies. And when you see such a degree on someone\u2019s CV, you can be quite sure you have found one.<\/p>\n

Colby Cosh, “Some part of our system for producing intellectually responsible adults has failed Alex Johnstone”, National Post<\/em><\/a>, 2015-09-24.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As someone who got partway through grad school, I am only a sort of half-layman when it comes to modern European history. On demand I can present an official document that testifies, by implication, that I have spent a certain amount of time in seminars talking about Himmler\u2019s agronomy education or discussing why totalitarian regimes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,62,7,41,230],"tags":[1380,1041,1020,997,764],"class_list":["post-33152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-europe","category-history","category-quotations","category-ww2","tag-criticaltheory","tag-holocaust","tag-progressives","tag-socialjustice","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8CI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33152"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58400,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33152\/revisions\/58400"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}