David Novak Reads Poetry | What Did Dorothy Sayers Say or Not Say about “Educationalists” and Their Errors? @davidnovakreadspoetry | Uploaded April 2024 | Updated October 2024, 2 hours ago.
This impromptu chat responds to an article titled “The Original Error of Educationalists” and subtitled “Universities are not teaching students to be able to think for themselves” by Benedikt Koehler at The Critic, linked here:
thecritic.co.uk/the-original-error-of-educationalists
Koehler responds largely to this previous piece by David Butterfield:
thecritic.co.uk/issues/march-2024/hollowed-out-humanities
The speech by Dorothy Sayers can be found online via Google, possibly reproduced in various places, but I got it here:
classicalchristian.org/the-lost-tools-of-learning-dorothy-sayers
I fail to locate an online source for the essay that I mentioned by M.I. Finley titled “The Heritage of Isocrates” which can be found in his book The Use and Abuse of History — my guess of his essay being housed at Jstor seems a good bet, but the entire book remains worthwhile. See also link below.
J.H. Plumb referenced by Butterfield wrote a book which looks worth tracking down but I haven’t done so.
My own paragraph quoting Butterfield:
“Administrators… have no knowledge of academic nuance and complexity” — the question here, of course, is why? therefore they — “impose” (apparently in some way at student behest) “a narrowly-defined set of parameters [which] is applied to Humanities subjects. Chief among them is ‘employability’, i.e. creating an economically useful individual who will not only get a job at the end of the degree but also be a ‘socially aware’ individual imbued with the attitudes appropriate to ‘the modern workplace’.”
An interesting piece by Paul Cartledge on Finley only tangential to this that I just happened upon: startingtoteachlatindotorg.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cartledge-p-2013-moses-finley-and-jact.pdf
This impromptu chat responds to an article titled “The Original Error of Educationalists” and subtitled “Universities are not teaching students to be able to think for themselves” by Benedikt Koehler at The Critic, linked here:
thecritic.co.uk/the-original-error-of-educationalists
Koehler responds largely to this previous piece by David Butterfield:
thecritic.co.uk/issues/march-2024/hollowed-out-humanities
The speech by Dorothy Sayers can be found online via Google, possibly reproduced in various places, but I got it here:
classicalchristian.org/the-lost-tools-of-learning-dorothy-sayers
I fail to locate an online source for the essay that I mentioned by M.I. Finley titled “The Heritage of Isocrates” which can be found in his book The Use and Abuse of History — my guess of his essay being housed at Jstor seems a good bet, but the entire book remains worthwhile. See also link below.
J.H. Plumb referenced by Butterfield wrote a book which looks worth tracking down but I haven’t done so.
My own paragraph quoting Butterfield:
“Administrators… have no knowledge of academic nuance and complexity” — the question here, of course, is why? therefore they — “impose” (apparently in some way at student behest) “a narrowly-defined set of parameters [which] is applied to Humanities subjects. Chief among them is ‘employability’, i.e. creating an economically useful individual who will not only get a job at the end of the degree but also be a ‘socially aware’ individual imbued with the attitudes appropriate to ‘the modern workplace’.”
An interesting piece by Paul Cartledge on Finley only tangential to this that I just happened upon: startingtoteachlatindotorg.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cartledge-p-2013-moses-finley-and-jact.pdf
