What seperates "golden era" from "midcentury"?

[tonyb]

^^^^^^
It’s also playing a large role in how class lines are drawn. I fear that by expanding on this we might be venturing into forbidden territory, but I trust that the gist of it is clear enough.

I enjoy learning, in settings formal and informal. I once said that if I could afford to I would go to school for the rest of my life. But that’s been 30 or more years ago now, when I was even then considerably older than “college age.” I’ve since become skeptical of much of what the academy imparts. We need people versed in matters best learned in colleges and universities with high standards (no one wants a doctor educated at a diploma mill), but the proliferation of speculative BS emanating from so many academic departments leaves me thinking that they exist mostly to perpetuate themselves.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The investigative journalist John Keats (not the poet, settle down English majors) wrote a book in 1965 called "The Sheepskin Psychosis" that predicted pretty much everything we see today, in that the overemphasis on college credentials in the business world was being used to create a self-perpetuating caste system that had nothing to do with actual abilities or qualifications, and everything to do with "social expectations." Keats saw this happening sixty years ago, and he was frighteningly accurate in what he warned would be the result.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^
A piece in the November issue of The Atlantic titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” is not just another “kids these days” story but rather an examination of how distractions (smartphones? check) and the ubiquity of “information” have left young people lacking the patience and discipline to get through lengthy texts. It’s not that they’re incapable, of course, but they are unpracticed. That’s become somewhat true of me as well. I still read pretty much constantly, but rarely do I read a lengthy tome cover to cover anymore.

My Dear Old Ma studied physics and chemistry and Latin in her public high school. (That’s been more than a few years ago now, it must be acknowledged.) She’s very likely better versed on such matters than most recent graduates of our elite colleges and universities. It sometimes seems as if the aim of higher education — for the students and the academy itself — is to generate the academically credentialed, whatever might be lost toward that end.