Sunday, March 30, 2008

The self-hating woman

Janet at SCSU Scholars has no time for feminists; they're just a waste of space on college campuses:

A few years ago, one of the Twin Cities major papers (I forget which one) ran a front page article questioning the value of a college education. Seems a young lady had just graduated from one of our local private institutions (say $120,000 investment) with a degree in women's studies but couldn't find a job.

DUH - what does one learn in a women's studies curriculum? Do they learn about: Chinese foot binding; east African gender mutilation; the Hindu practice of making widows throw themselves on the burning funeral pyres of their husbands (until the Brits forced the end of this absurd practice); polygamy in the Middle East; "temporary" mandated marriages; etc. No, the female instructors of Women's Studies curricula focus on white men, period.

Janet, there are lots of undergraduate majors that don't prepare one well for the job market. That's why God created graduate school! Janet sounds like the principal of Mechanics Arts High School, not the college lecturer that she apparently is. [involuntary shudder from Spot]

Laying aside the fact that Janet is a little wide of the mark in describing women's studies, what is the measure of the value of an education? We may conclude without contradiction that Janet believes education is solely to train the next generation of troglodytes or Deltas. But education is not merely an industrial process that prepares children for a life of toil. Parents hope their offspring will be employable, of course. But there are countless writers, artists, composers, and musicians with parents who wanted them to be dentists. And the world is richer for it.

Other than cheerleading for the decaying American economic system, it is hard to see what anyone could be getting out of Janet's class.

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