Keith Windschuttle on the
difference between college course work in his day--
At the University of Sydney in 1966, my history course made me read Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, Maitland and Tocqueville. In English literature, our reading list came from Shakespeare, Donne, Marvel, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Austen, Dickens,
Yeats and Beckett. In philosophy it was Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant and Armstrong plus two demanding sub-courses in scientific method and logic - and all of this was just first year.
--and today:
Those students who are today forced to read the gurus of postmodernism, radical feminism, neo-Marxism, cultural studies and literary theory such as Foucault, Derrida, Benjamin, Eagleton, Bhabha and Fish, or who study recently concocted subjects like gender studies, media studies, ethnic studies, peace studies, genocide studies - indeed anything ending with "studies" - are grossly disadvantaged by comparison.
Grossly.
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