Re: Door Slamming/Question

[Steve Krause <skrause@bgnet.bgsu.edu>]

I should of course be doing my prelim homework, but I can't resist 
responding to a couple of points brought up on this thread.  Like many 
others, I wonder about the extent to which a particular major pays off 
and develops into a particular job.  I worked for a couple years in a 
marketing department of a state agency in Virginia (it had to do with 
student loans) and there were only two out of ten people who actually had 
marketing degrees.  The rest of us had degrees in psych, communications, 
poli-sci, or me, the English guy.  Experience counts, and having the 
"seal of approval" or a college degree counts, but I think the value of 
particular degrees in particular areas is a bit over-rated.

Jim said (I think it was Jim...) that part of our project in the modern 
university was career training, preparing people for the marketplace.  
Well, yes and no.  I'm not an expert in this, but from what I've been able 
to gather from the reading I've done is that land-grant universities 
was created to give some agricultural and engineering training to the 
"bumpkins" out in the boonies of Indiana and such (ie, it was meant as 
"trade training"), but these schools were also intended to be premoters and 
safegaurds of literacy and democracy, the theory being that an educated 
populous was crucial for a successful democracy.  In short, saying that 
school is for career training is short-sighted and (IMO) an 
oversimplification of our roles as teachers and scholars.  I mean, if we 
really are _only_ in the business of preparing productive members of the 
capitalistic post-industrial complex, then we should stop teaching 
literature altogether.  Reading a good book is clearly a lesiure study, 
certainly not something that could teach us about how to succeed in 
business.  Or maybe it could... ;)

Last but not least, I'm worried about the parents out there.  I don't 
have children and am perhaps speaking out of place, but I think parents 
have to support their college-bound children in their pursuits the best 
that they can.  I've had a number of students who have confided in me how 
depressed they were in school because they were being forced by their 
parents to major in something "practical" like business.  Some very good 
friends of mine have suffered a lot of psychological and emotional damage 
because they were forced by their parents to abandon any study of what they 
loved in favor of something that could get them a job.  So maybe it's 
hard to watch your child major in something you think is useless, but it 
seems to me that it would be even harder to watch your child become 
bitter and surly and depressed because they were forced to study 
something they hated.

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Steve Krause * Department of English * Bowling Green State University * 
Bowling Green, OH * 43401 * (419) 353-5104 * skrause@bgnet.bgsu.edu
* Now also available on WWW at http://www.bgsu.edu/~skrause/Steve.html *
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