[ghaff]

>I blame the MBA's - the cultureless hoards of middle management that suck the life out of everything that's not quantifiable and can be entered on a spread sheet.

Oh please. You were doing fine up to that point. There's always been a tension between theory and practice.

[alberte]

I'm not sure how this relates to MBA's? Please expand if you would

[ghaff]

The rest of the comment:

"What we do need is critical thinking, and traditionally this was what was taught in an arts degree. In many ways the academics have done this to themselves, by dumbing down degrees and focusing more on 'business' outcomes they've eliminated what was the defining characteristic of a degree and it is now just a set of check boxes, which of course you don't need a uni for."

What I took away was an assertion that degrees are now about checking off practical checkboxes and that this is the fault of MBAs.

My take is that there has always been a tradeoff between broader education and teaching critical thinking with learning specific skills.

[alberte]

yes I see your point. Mine was degrees have been dumbed down and in many was are glorified vocational courses now, the courses have more people, a greater student to teacher ratio, and stray from theoretical considerations to the more immediate. The driver for this is cost and what can be readily identified as a useful function by the bean counters (said MBA's).

Some thing's are easy to quantify and this is what the focus is on. How do you quantify something like critical thinking, what quantifiable value is there in a knowledge of history - how do these things help little Johnny get a job. Well they don't really. I think of the results of learning these things as emergent properties, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Wouldn't it be more interesting to have a population educated in the humanities? wouldn't a democratic society be better served by a population educated with at least a base in the humanities? A society of people that can make rational arguments and evaluate the political arguments of the day would be a lot different from the one we live in now.

These sort of arguments are for a qualitative change - and I don't see how you can quantify them in a spread sheet. The thinking that drives MBA’s currently drives education from what I can see - keep costs down, standard courses, pack as many into a class as you can, and so on.