Imho, “cultural grouping” is a nonsense term or weasel word. It’s used when you can not or will not be more specific as to what kind of grouping you are talking about. Bronies, Trekkies, and other TV show fans are all “cultural groupings” because they share an appreciation for a specific item of pop “culture”. Religions are all cultural groupings, because they share certain ideas or practices. People who drive BMW’s are a cultural grouping, because they share an appreciation for a finely balanced driving experience. Veterans are a cultural group, because they have shared experiences.
I, however, support bacteria. It’s the only culture many people have.
Well, what intelligent decision did you make based on your knowledge of the differences between Sunni and Shia? What did you do at all, with the knowledge?
Or, what decisions that you have made with a woeful lack of understanding of said decisions hurt you?
It’s about the same as the above cited knowledge of Prot. v.Cath. conflicts. Anybody made any difference w/that knowledge? Even N. Ireland barely gives a crap.
I’m guessing Nemo was able to quickly identify jingoistic jackasses making blanket statements about a religion in order to gain support for their agendas.
I’ll need some cites for this stuff about it 'always being building good citizens"…etc Other, that is, than using the phrase for being a way to get money for land grant colleges.
Also, please tell me of at least two people who went to university/college for the purposes that you use, (Rich people going to college do not count, because they do it to further their own interests/connections/etc), so, I’ll accept 2 people whom you know.
I meant that in a historical sense. Education in Ancient Greece (and later Rome) was 100% about building good citizens (and good soldiers, but the two were closely intertwined). Modern state education was conceived from the get go as a continuation of this - which is why the State decides the curriculum, and why said curriculum includes philosophy, history, literature… all things that are pretty frakking useless in finding a job, but necessary in building a brain.
As for your follow-up : whether students going to school/college, or even their parents sending them to school/college actually understand or realize this fact is *thoroughly *immaterial.
of course it will. It already does in good schools. You need to learn, as I did in my private prep school, about the whole 5 acts thing (5 daily prayers , pilgrimage, jihad etc.), the sunni Shiite thing, etc.
Also wouldn’t hurt if they’d explain Sikhism to the kids so they don’t confuse them with the muslims.
Also Jainism so they get the whole thing with certain strains of Indian vegetarianism.
None of that would have to make any implications about moral statements about islam. You could still eventually conclude that it’s a horrific cultural meme/virus that has been and is still massively damaging the world; maybe grow up with foreigner parents and family, get to know them thoroughly and conclude that all the Old World, near-eastern and eastern cultures are a bunch of jackassey, egocentric, money-hungry assholes who never really want to leave the boat and join American culture.
if education is really about building good citizens, then maybe schools should teach about law, real estate (which is partly law), civics, and economics? Maybe they could focus less on teaching calculus, which the few kids who do become engineers won’t even actually be using on a daily basis anyway?
pfff… god damned how the modern school system is largely a holdover from 60+ years ago. Even in private schools (which I went to). The curriculum as a whole is so damned stupid and useless.
Where do I find me a homeschooling wife to make and raise some kids with?
Education is about building good people, and through them, good societies. I thoroughly reject this sort of trade-school approach to education, where apparently the only things worth learning are job and survival skills, and how to get a loan at a bank. Learning about the arts helps us appreciate them, learning about science helps us understand the world around us, learning about history helps us understand our shared past, even if don’t go on to become artists, scientists, or historians. They are all important, to some extent commensurate with our skills and interests, but nevertheless all important. You mention calculus as an example of something obscure and ostensibly useless for most. I may rarely use it directly, but learning it left me with a lifelong appreciation for its fundamental concepts and the power of math and logical thinking.
Dude, that’s exactly what the hell I was talking about. I wasn’t being sarcastic, if that’s what you thought.
They need to learn law because at some point in your life it becomes relevant, from your civil rights with cops to lawsuits that will eventually happen. They also need to learn about real estate just in case they buy some. They need to learn economics because they vote. Ditto civics. And accounting too, since that’s the language of business and it’s so awkward at first that you can’t just pick it up with experience. Oh and god forbid they actually teach a foreign language in a way that the kids would learn. You can’t learn from a chalkboard, that’s not how language works. How about Berlitz style classes?
Also wouldn’t hurt if they could teach some morals and life lessons. Like a religious school might. But since all of our tax money goes to centralized public schools (a situation that is NOT necessary to having a public school system. Ever heard of vouchers? Sweden uses them), they have to teach everything culturally and morally neutrally.
Now, that would be fine, except our public schools are failing at what little task they have left, and it turns out that the entire economy can’t be run on office jobs. Somebody somewhere might actually need to use their hands and have specific knowledge of specific things, go figure. Colleges now cost a fillion pershmillion kajillion dollars, for no reason, and the economy already has very few jobs, so people are now being FORCED to focus on trades and training and real skills.
In other words, the liberals forced this on us by fucking us all over by taking their public school/socialist vision to the extreme.
Look, we get it, a modern country needs a school system, but that doesn’t mean it has to be exactly this one way. There’s plenty of room for lots of different kinds of policies and systems. Every tiny little “maybe” where possibly, maybe, there’s a tiny chance that some kid somewhere will get left behind in a different system because his parents don’t care is not an excuse to do the same thing, only harder, over and over again, harder and harder. You guys fucked us all by taking your vision to its extreme.
[QUOTE=EdwinAmi]
Now, that would be fine, except our public schools are failing at what little task they have left, and it turns out that the entire economy can’t be run on office jobs. Somebody somewhere might actually need to use their hands and have specific knowledge of specific things, go figure. Colleges now cost a fillion pershmillion kajillion dollars, for no reason, and the economy already has very few jobs, so people are now being FORCED to focus on trades and training and real skills.
In other words, the liberals forced this on us by fucking us all over by taking their public school/socialist vision to the extreme.
[/QUOTE]
As I understand it, the problem with public education in the US isn’t that it’s a centralized, “soshulist” system. It’s that right wingers keep hamstringing it right in the budget in order to prove it don’t work.
My country (France) has a heavily centralized public school system. It also has a public university system.
I’m currently enrolled in the very public, also very best history faculty in all of France. 13th best in the entire world according to Wiki, which is nothing to sneeze at. Beyond history & geography, I’m also busy learning Chinese there (and would be learning fluent English if I wasn’t already, yanno, a professional E/F translator).
Know how much I paid for enrolment ? 78 euros. Plus 45 euros for the Chinese textbook because fucking Amazon.
I didn’t think you were being sarcastic, I thought you were expressing a view of education that was narrow-minded and shallow, the kind of educational system that would turn out narrow-minded and shallow people and a sad dystopian society devoid of arts and sciences, and in which cultural and technological progress has ground to a halt.
As for the alleged “extreme socialism” of the public school system, that strikes me as completely incoherent and not deserving of a comment.
lol. One of us is busted, and it ain’t me!
BTW, a Humanities professor indicated the probability that Universities came out of the Guild system of the Mid Ages/Renaissance. Something like it being a quality control thing. I don’t see good citizens coming from that. I see jobs.
Also, the good citizens stuff needn’t be the reason for colleges. It is the reason that colleges give to legislators who are more than happy to funnel other people’s money to colleges that promise competence. And careers.
I could go on, but, you will have to look it all up yourself.
I’m 59 and certain that I was taught about major world religions more than once in the public schools of Cherry Hill, NJ. Whether there was something on “the difference between Sunni and Shia,” I don’t recall.
Assuming I was taught the difference, and got the answer right on the exam, I’m sure that I would have long ago forgotten it except for reading the newspaper, a few magazines, and, on rare occasion, relevant books.
I rarely watch TV, but if I watched television news, I’d also know that way.
Schools can help provide a framework for understanding world affairs, but then it up to each of us to take it from there. If people decline to do that, or just want to follow opinion media that pushes their own POV, there’s no way to stop it.
Whether someone knows, in 2014, the the difference between Sunni and Shia has nothing to do with what they were taught many years ago. I’m not saying that makes social studies worthless. I do think that the overall geographical and historical framework one gets in school, and can fit news events into, is more important than any particular fact.
If a professor actually said such a thing, I suspect you misunderstood what he was saying. You seem to be claiming that universities started out as trade schools. This is silly. No medieval/Renaissance university turned out stonemasons, butchers, carpenters, or other skilled tradesmen. Matching the separate concepts of quality control and guilds, one might view universities as places where an effort was made to rely on skilled people to provide education in a formal and repeatable manner. However, the subjects being taught were still those associated with philosophy and theology, including the ethics/morality of civic duty taken from works such as Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics, the various essays of Augustine, Duns Scotus, Anselm, and, later, Aquinas. In addition to those disciplines, topics included Law, Music, Mathematics, Art, Languages, and Natural Philosophy (that preceded Science). Accounting and finance or Agriculture, not so much. Even engineering was a somewhat later addition as that discipline was a trade. University graduates either went on to become teachers, themselves, tutors to the wealthy, or went put to find patrons to support them as the made their own explorations of Philosophy, Theology, Mathematics, or Natural Philosophy.
Each of the disciplines taught reinforced the vconcepts, current in those era,of citizenship. It was hoped that one could earn a living once one graduated, but that was hardly the focus of the schools.
The closest one might have come to learning a career in those times might have been in Medicine, but even there, many (most?) physicians and surgeons continued to be trained as apprentices into the nineteenth century.