Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes will manufacture professors.
Academia is a rarified culture, especially an Ivy League academic background.
I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.
A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years.
A university is supposed to be a place where all ideas are discussed.
I think that there are some teachers that do a very good job of incorporating culture and history. And there are some teachers who could use a little more help in that area.
Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.
The notion that every well educated person would have a mastery of at least the basic elements of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences is a far cry from the specialized education that most students today receive, particularly in the research universities.
History is Philosophy teaching by example.
Careers in virtually all academic disciplines are fostered by being a superstar who knows more about one subject than anyone else in the world.