K-12 should put a spoon and fork in your hand. If you’re still hungry, college should set the buffet out for you.
My high school was basically a concentration-campus to keep us undesirables off the streets during daylight hours. And since it was a tourist town, we were sub-undesirables. When I arrived at college it was like the Liberation of Paris (or maybe Dachau, since it might be dangerous to digest at my desired impulse).
We had a thread recently about Manifest Destiny, a nasty money-grub at the expense of native nations; many perfectly capable of assimilating into the US. But one small redemption was that the founders of the Midwest looked at the elite East Coast universities, based on the British model, and realized that for as vast a country as the US was looking to be, that was impractical and possibly dangerous. All those wonderful little liberal arts colleges in Ohio were the result of that. As well as all that followed along the frontier, until the great universities on the West Coast.
I myself came in at the tail end of The Wisconsin Idea: instead of the model of a small aristocratic elite of gentlemen as in Britain, it was influenced by the German universities from the Enlightenment. Middle class American kids should be exposed to the thousands of years of human experience from history and literature, and have their own personalities enriched through the arts; so that they could fully contribute. They’d still go on to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc; but they would help guide society, not just be cogs in it.
Like a lot of things, that started to go downhill with Vietnam. California college kids offended Ronald Reagan, so he punished them. Later in the 70’s, American cars weren’t as good as German and Japanese cars. “Music Appreciation?! That’s literally fiddling while Rome burns!” That’s when STEM became of paramount importance. And “What do dead white males have to teach me?” became somehow a valid question. Instead of ignoring the dead white males, a few people kept up on them, and added non-white, non-males to the buffet. But by and large college became a vocational school for tech and admin.
Maybe a good thing. Who can argue that we were a better nation back when Americans who could read Catulus in the original Latin outnumbered Americans who were millionaires? But still, if more of us had learned about .Alcibiades maybe enough of us would have recognized Trump for what he is.
I have had the experience of driving people in my car; educated, professional people, who, when the radio comes alive along with the ignition, and Classical music - something pleasant and supposedly accessible to everyone, like Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade. But my passenger will bristle with offense taken, because I must be trying to make myself superior to them. That’s the only reason I’d listen to that stuff.
