That isn't what universities are creating though. They're creating people who think one specific way about the world. The problem is that they only teach Marxist ideas about the 20th century, and you have to go elsewhere to get a balanced and realistic view of what actually happened. My humanities classes 20 years ago all glossed over the horrors of Stalin's gulags, the horrors of Mao's great leap forward, and all the death caused by Marxist ideas being put into practice at a wide scale in the 20th century. I had to learn about all these things from my history classes. My humanities classes were all talking about the evils of capitalism while glossing over the 20-100 million dead from starvation and exposure under totalitarian communist regimes. I can't imagine it's gotten any less biased and one sided in the past 20 years.
>I had to learn about all these things from my history classes.
So the education provided you with multiple, different viewpoints, then. If you evaluate specific, individual classes, yes, you'll find a bias depending on the specific, individual faculty. I had faculty ranging from those who extolled the virtues of a strong-man in the white house, to those who wanted a complete anarchy.
I'm willing to bet most university/college educations contain a little bit of everything.
Or, put more simply, wide ranging viewpoints. . . .
Can you summarize the ideology, instead of merely demonizing it? ;)
To you, what is a "Marxist idea" about the 20th century?
And if your teacher really did gloss over the crimes against humanity committed by Stalin / the USSR, Mao / the PRRC, then, well, that person was a poor teacher.
If you want to learn humanities, you can pretty much read any book anytime in your life (in fact most of the teaching in humanities is just assigning books to read). I would say that there the value added of a college over an online reading list is marginal. For STEM, completely different story, it is very hard for someone who hasn’t been trained formally to pick it up later in one’s career.
I don't know what college you went to, but at mine, reading was the homework, and the discussion on the books (even with the professor's inherent biases) in the class with my peers is what developed the profound thoughts and ideas that I still carry with me. Humanities might not contribute to jobs, (I'm STEM) but I don't for a second regret the philosophy classes I took.
I went to a large well ranked public university class in the United States, have both a STEM and non-STEM degree with over 200 credit hours over 4.5 years and I can think of exactly two humanities classes that had real discussions that weren't just being assigned books, largely uncritically accepting their contents and being lectured. Both classes with real dialogue were higher level classes with just over 10 people in them.
One class was about the intersection of art and technology and the other was a philosophy of science class.
There was way more critical thought and dialogue on average in my STEM classes.
If you can read through Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and get everything out of it without help good on you, but I certainly couldn't.
The pragmatic part of humanities is argumentation and writing. You can't get that from just reading.
What you're saying is like "the value of a computer science degree over just reading programming books is marginal." It's ignoring that the most important part of the learning happens in application.
Or, you know ... history?
Or even Shakespeare, for that matter. For some, a course makes reading such material hugely more enlightening.
To you, apparently, one book is as good as another?
Can you elaborate further?
>“How is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to persist?”
That doesn't seem like injecting ethnic studies into math to me.
In fact, I think this is an excellent type of question. Schools should be teaching more critical thinking exactly like this, in every domain. For example, manipulation of scales, axes, statistical bias, and mathematical context are one of the key tools that people like climate change deniers use to spread their propaganda. Mathematics education should be about more than just handraulically banging out a bunch of long division. Interpretation and context are key underpinnings of mathematics.
Math is also manipulated to allow the perception of inequality and oppression to persist. It's not just one side using these propaganda techniques.
Don't you think it's important to teach children to consider how statistics can be cherry picked to support arbitrary agendas?
I'm okay with having classes pointing out propaganda so long as it is even handed in pointing out propaganda irrespective of agenda. If a professor only points out the propaganda of those with whom they disagree, that's a bad class.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/black-lives-matter-oxford...
Sorry I asked.
to be fair, there is a subset of leftist thought that advocates placing lived experiences above statistical arguments. you can see this play out on social media where people are scolded for not being fully convinced by an individual's personal story about {insert macro issue}. the argument here is not that math itself is racist (how could it be?), but that the study and application of it can be. in other words, if statistics is disproportionately studied by an already-dominant subset of society, its application will likely lead to conclusions that more or less support the status quo.
"You get a no-penalty 'incomplete' and can complete the course later" seems vastly more appropriate than saying you learned something that you haven't. I'm sure some people were negatively impacted; they should not suffer a poor grade as a result. Nor should they be granted a better grade than the ability they demonstrated.
I'm not necessarily saying it is, just that the issue covered in the article is only tangentially related to the "math is now racist" strawman. personally, I think no-penalty incomplete would be more fair, although I'm sure someone could find issues with that too.
my guess is "lenient grading" starts to seem more reasonable when you take into account what a lot of schools were already doing in response to covid and remote learning at this time. giving incompletes is a reasonable measure to take when you have a couple students with extenuating circumstances. but what do you do when almost all the students have been impacted by a sudden shift to remote learning? you can't just give the whole class an incomplete and delay everyone by some fraction of a semester.
Why not? If it was medical school and you didn't learn topic XYZ, you'd rightly be held back until you did (or at least I hope you would).
Are we giving grades based on effort/attempt or based on knowledge acquired?
it's not really that simple. grades are just a way to measure how well students have met the course expectations. the expectations may or may not be reasonable in the first place. if there was no curving and year after year, 90% of students fail a course, the material would get adjusted. either fewer topics would be covered, or less difficult problems would be selected from each topic. the syllabus itself is an implicit curve, in a way. when someone designs a data structures course, they design it in a way that a target portion of the students will actually pass the class. they don't just say "well, arrays, linked lists, binary trees, rb-trees, BSPs, splay trees, octtrees, hashmaps, bloom filters, skiplists, and all the different types of heaps are essential topics and everyone who can't master every single one in 16 weeks fails". there's no objective standard for exactly what set of topics needs to be covered and learned in a particular course (or major), you just try to teach as much as is reasonable.
This is because using power tools is most of the time following safety protocols and reading the instruction manual. if you learned how to read well, you shouldn't need someone to teach you this (unless you're using highly specialized tools for niche situations, but that's more of vocational training)
Why would I use a spade vs a single point vs a Forstner drill bit? When would I use a backer board? When would I use conventional cutting vs climb cutting? If I want to achieve tolerance X on face F, what should be my sequence of operations? How can I fixture this work to give me the best results? When is a circular saw vs a table saw vs a jig saw vs a mitre saw appropriate?
I'm agnostic about the value of this: on the one hand, we need informed citizenry who can dissect media and think critically. On the other hand, we need practical skills and we don't need a massively indebted younger generation.
The DIRE push for undergraduate education in many K-12 schools has probably undervalued solid vocational training. What does it say that I'm now into woodworking and making things, but in my entire 22 year education, no one ever showed me how to use a single power tool.